“Inbetween Cities” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.
Click here to go there.
It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Blog
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Open Art: Blobs
“Blobs” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
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Open Content: Back Catalogue All Done
All of my public back-catalogue is now available as Open Content, with the exception of “Surgical Strike” which will remain closed and “The Cybernetic Artwork Nobody Wrote” which will be cleaned up and released under the GNU GPL.“Blobs” includes the graphical elements used to construct the images, so it’s particularly good for sampling.
“1968” will be Open Content when it’s finished, as will “Arrows”, my next project. “Got To Start Somewhere” and my other software projects including Minara will be under the GPL.
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Playing The Mall (1994)
“walking through a shopping centre is like being in a computer game. different levels to get to, rewards to be had.
it’s a very visual space. metal, glass, mirrors, windows, signs. glistening and reflecting each other, and reflecting you as you look at them.
you’re playing the mall” -
Open Art: Smileys
“Smileys” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
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Open Art: Titled
“Titled” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site.
Click here to go there.It’s in PNG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
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Playing The Mall
I liked the idea that glistening, reflecting, revealing and frustrating optical spaces could be laid bare by base descriptive language standing in for light, colour and texture. I also liked the idea that words could be made spatial. Some people wish that the images looked less stark, or that the language could more poetic. But that wouldn’t work. The images had to be this way to communicate how I felt about manipulative architectural spaces. They double as a parody of lit-crit textuality.
Visually the images draw on Dr. Ahmed Moustafa’s art and the simple photocopied flyers that advertise bands playing in small venues. Conceptually they draw on Dean Motter’s “Mister X” and whoever used the term “postmodern hyperspace” to describe the non-linear space of the mall. The source images came from sketches of The Bentall Centre, Kingston-on-Thames, photographs of Canary Wharf, London, and video footage of a multi-storey car park in Canterbury.
I made these works in 1994. The 386 PCs running Corel Draw let me have a tea break each time I edited a single piece of text, and the more complex images took a couple of weeks each to make. The images were laser printed A4 at 300DPI and digitally photocopied up to A0. They project well, too. You need to see them big to get the full impact. -
Shared Space
Creative Commons are trying to protect shared creative space from enclosure. Open space allows value creation, closed space is value extraction.
http://www.bollier.org/reclaim.htm
http://creativecommons.org/
I’m not convinced that commons are the best metaphor for the *constructed* wealth of shared human knowledge. Better imagery is available. One of “No Logo”‘s theses is that public space is being fenced off by brands under the guise of sponsorship. Since it reduces the value of the sponsored space and regulates its use, sponsorship is value extraction and is enclosure.
http://www.nologo.org/
This shared theme of protecting shared space against enclosure and insuring value creation rather than asset-stripping is important. Open Source/Open Content seeks to address it by changing individuals’ mode of production but the historically romanticised model of commons is inaccurate. Anti-globalisation’s image of recent civic space such as the town square is still romantic but is more accurate. Anti-globalisation’s weakness is that it seeks to change other people’s mode of production without any real understanding of how this will impact its own ground conditions.
Open Content can learn from Anti-Globalisation’s imagery and critiques of enclosure. Anti-globalisation can learn from Open Content’s self-practice and legal strategies. Hopefully it will be a fruitful exchange. -
Manifesto Of The Day
Start a weblog. Place a downloadable image on it in a common format (SVG, PNG, Gimp, PhotoShop) placed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Let people modify and re-upload the image using the comments mechanism (censor uploads that don’t preview, offer help if people get this wrong). Collaborative art.
After a while upload a new image as a new topic and begin the process again. Use elements from the previous work or make a call for new images. Encourage an accompanying discourse (or at least discussion). Take the work somewhere. Make shared objectives.
Art & Language’s 1970s Indexes provide a good historical counter-example to the whimsy of Exquisite Corpses and Mail Art for collaborative artwork. The net can be studio and gallery simultaneously. Work can be done this way. More, it should be done this way. This is culturally urgent. The relations of production, distribution and consumption as well as the creation and extraction of value must be changed.