Rhea Myers

Blog

  • 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.

  • Surplus Labour

    Volunteer Open Content/Open Source is a way of ironising surplus labour (Marx).

  • Open Art: Containers

    “Containers” is now available for download at the Open Content section of my site. The download includes preparatory work as extras.
    Click here to go there.

    It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

  • Open Art: Playing The Mall

    “Playing The Mall” 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.

  • Open Art: San Jose

    “San Jose” is the first work available for download at the Open Content section of my site. The download includes discarded work as extras.
    Click here to go there.

    It’s in SVG format and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

  • Require Attribution, Allow Commercial, Share

    I will be licensing most of my art back catalogue and new work under a Creative Commons license. For obvious reasons I will not license work that is derived from found images. I will also not license work that is not easily edited or sampled, or commissioned work if requested not to. I will provide graphic units, palettes and preparatory work as well as finished work where possible (I’ve been watching a lot of Disney DVDs recently as well as always having enjoyed sketchbooks).

    I’m doing this to solve problems of production and distribution that I have always faced with my work, and because I believe that it is culturally worthwhile, indeed that it is the only way for art of any cultural value to go.

    The License I’m considering is “Require Attribution, Allow Commercial, Share And Share Alike”. Coincidentally I believe this to be the closest to the GPL.

    “Require Attribution” because this adds value for me in terms of publicity, contact and feedback.

    “Allow Commercial” because this allows other people to get direct value from the work as well. By not precluding any use of the work, commercial or otherwise, this may encourage use of the work, encourage distribution (adding value by Require Attribution), and encourage derived work (ensuring that the value grows).

    “Share And Share Alike” because this is what I would like from other people’s work. I’d love to be able to download, photograph, sketch or copy people’s work, take the idea and run with it (“plussing” to use a Disney term) without the yawn-inducing politics of appropriation. As more and more people start plussing thanks to open art, more and more work will be created that builds on the work of others, growing value rather than extracting it by stunting or duplicating forgotten art from a generation ago.

  • Minara

    What?
    Minara is “Emacs for graphics”, a programmable vector graphics program editor written using libArt, libSDL and librep. Read that again slowly. 🙂 This is that “tinker under the hood, write your own tools” environment you’ve always heard about.

    Minara is a program that can render graphics descriptions, and allows the user to modify those descriptions using scripts in the *same* language. The descriptions and the modifications are all written in a very simple data format / programming language which interfaces with the graphics and UI engine. This enables artists, researchers, reprographics operators, brand designers and many other groups to create generative, dynamic, generic and/or shareable artwork in a format that can easily be converted to standards such as EPS, SVG or Flash.

    Why?
    Most graphics formats are already programming languages or contain programmable elements (PostScript, SVG, Flash). The only major non-programmable graphics format is PDF, which was intentionally designed as a static subset of PostScript. Most graphics programs are scriptable. Editors such as Illustrator and iDraw have scripting languages. But these are in a different language from the graphics description language, and with varying access to the underlying data structures. There’s nothing that is code all the way down or that can be freely extended or modified by user scripting.

    An environment that allows the user to write graphics code, generative code, analysis code and processing code all in the same language using the same tools within an illustration program with open code, open APIs and no barriers between content and process will enable greater creativity (and productivity).

    A common data format that allows dynamic, generic or richly described content and that doesn’t suck will allow archive-quality (“bitfast”) graphics to be exchanged in open content projects and corporate workflows.

    Who and When?
    Me to start with, then anyone else who’s interested. At some point in the future.

  • Opening Art

    Digging through my archives I found an unfinished license drafted for an abandoned project from 2001 which I present here for your amusement. It’s inspired by the BSD and OGL licenses. IANAL so don’t try to actually use it – you wouldn’t try to use heart transplant instructions written by an artist would you? 🙂

    The Open Artwork License V1.0 (Draft)

    ——————————–

    The following text is Copyright © 2001 Open Arts.

    Copyright © <years> by <copyright holders>

    The moral right of the author(s) has been asserted.

    The author(s) represent that the Artwork is their original creation and/or that they have sufficient rights to grant the rights conveyed by this license.

    You are hereby granted a free, perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide license to display, reproduce, distribute, incorporate into larger works, create derivative works from, and/or sell copies of the Artwork, and to permit persons to whom the Artwork is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

    The above copyright and moral rights notices and this permission notice shall be displayed and distributed with all copies or substantial portions of the Artwork.
    The Artwork, or elements of the Artwork, covered by the license shall be clearly identified.

    If any provision of this license is held to be unenforcable, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforcable.

    Open Artworks may publish updated versions of this license. You may use any version of this license with any Artwork originally distributed under any version of this license.

    You may not market or advertise the artwork using the name of any copyright holder unless you have written permission from the copyright holder to do so.

    IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE ARTWORK.