http://www.remixreading.org/

I have two examples of this that feature work in the style of Jackson Pollock. From the point of view of an artistic producer, at art school I was set a project to make a painting that combined two existing images. I chose a Pollock painting and a Futurist cyclist. The library had a book on the Futurists that had the preparatory sketches for the painting of the cyclist, showing how the forms of the finished painting had been abstracted from a fairly literal sketch of a man on a bicycle. This allowed me to understand and reproduce the compositional structure of the piece far more effectively than just copying the finished result would have.

From the point of view of an artistic consumer, Art & Language did some wonderful paintings of and titled “A Portrait of Lenin In The Style Of Jackson Pollock” around 1980. They made sketches of the images before painting them, and these are very useful if you can’t quite “get” the images when you first see them. Those sketches are often reproduced in exhibition catalogues and are available online.

Having access to the source material for even traditional media like painting can be very valuable for both consumers and producers. For consumers, it’s like being able to read the source code to figure out what’s going on in the binary. For producers, it enables remaking, reworking or build on the original work as surely as being able to hack and make the sources to a binary.

In my own work this can best be illustrated by the case of some images I made about ten years ago using Adobe Dimensions (a *vector* 3D package). I couldn’t have done the work any other way at that time, I can’t convert the work to another editable format now, so what do I do? I can release the all-but-unreadable editable format, or I can render the work as a 2D vector image which is editable as far as it goes, but does not have the full editability of the 3D version. I’m about to make some more of this work in Illustrator CS, again using its unique capabilities. As I said before, if one takes FSF-style Freedom as a guiding principle, I shouldn’t even be using Illustrator. But as an artist, I need various facilities it has until Inkscape catches up, facilities Inkscape can’t even render (full-strength masking for example), and I want to provide editable files containing those features.

In the absence of a guiding principle of FSF-Freedom, this is a dilemma. A producer will want the fully editable format, they will probably have the software. A consumer will want the accessible format. I provide various formats, but even with scripts to derive various formats for me from the original, this takes effort, and with (say) a movie, the space requirements would become a consideration.

I’m not arguing against editability or accessibility, far from it, they are vital. But I do want to illustrate that this may mean something (or some things) different for Creative Commons than for Free Software.

Loca
Opsound
Positron

Positron have got a CC-remix competition here. This is good because you get the “sources” for the track to play with, which is more what Free Music should be about.

“Mountain Stroll”

© 2004 Ber Kessels, Rhea Myers.
Licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-2.0 license.
Derived from “London (For Evie)”.

http://www.remixreading.org/

One of the themes post-“Free Culture” (the book) that speakers on copyright always come back to is remixing and its historical precedents. The canto is a fascinating example, classical poems made form lines of other poems. Another more problematic example is Shakespeare. Shakey’s re-presentation of themes are more cover versions than remixes. If a remix is a reworking of a performance, a cover version is a reworking of a score. The idea of a score is central to Goodman’s aesthetic theory, and to traditional music copyright, but that’s not why it’s important here. The freedom to re-create a work rather than just to use a particular realisation of it one of the key freedoms of the GPL, and one of the reasons why providing source code is a requirement of it. The source code for a program is its score, and vice versa. The cover version should not be forgotten in the current lionisation of sampling any more than it should be used to obscure the common theme of reworking that it shares with sampling.

One of the things that has struck me about the most successful Open licenses is that they come from a personal desire to be able to continue working with and producing materials in a particular area. So the GPL came from Richard Stallman, a programmer, wanting to be able to continue reading and writing program code. The OGL came from Ryan Dancey wanting to be able to continue playing and writing role-playing games.

And the Creative Commons licenses came from- well, that’s slightly different, and I believe this explains some of the problems with the Creative Commons licenses. The Creative Commons licenses came from Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer, wanting Eric Eldred, a publisher, to be able to republish old materials. Whether this is wanting to be able to produce materials in any sort of primary way isn’t important, what’s important is that the CC licenses were not produced by Lessig for he himself to use on his primary work (the CC licensing of his book “Free Culture” doesn’t affect this argument). What would a Free Law license look like? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t look like the CC licenses. What would a free culture license look like? For me, more like the GPL: providing source so a work can be remade is pivotal to the success of the GPL for programs, and should not be underestimated for music, art, film and literature. Likewise the precise scope of the GPL’s effects, even CC-SA is more LGPL-like than GPL-like.

This is not to say that the CC licenses are not usable, or even that they are anything less than excellent. But the few flaws I personally regard them as having make more sense considered in the context of their creation.

Listen online: http://www.locarecords.com/downloads.html

It’s good stuff.

Read about them in Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,61282,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Buy! Buy! I have… 😉

Read all about it:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/sample.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/beastie.html

Get the tracks legally online via bittorrent and get sampling (unless you’re a Beasties or Public Enemy fan. Ironwhat?):

http://www.legaltorrents.com/index.php?fuse=71