Icommons.org

In this, the first posting in a series called 10 of the Best, iCommons is taking a look at creators who are using open licensing and content to spread and encourage creativity.

This week, we decided to look at netlabels all over the world. We specifically decided not to look at remixing sites, which we think, are different creatures, with different goals. Besides, we’re saving the remixing sites for another article.

Some stuff, of course, is freer than other stuff. Different labels use open content differently, so you may come across licences that allow free access and usage of content, other sites use slightly more restrictive Attribution-Non-Commercial-No-Derivatives licences, which prevent remixing.

Canada
Panospria
Originally a collective of experimental musicians, founded in 2004, Panospria now features (more…)

I am often bothered when people confuse the social meaning of ’sharing’ with the individual meaning of it. Some say that sharing is daring because it is a social virtue. They may be true, but may fail to pay attention to the personal aspect of ’sharing’. Why do people share things? Some might share because it is more fun, some might share because they believe it is for social goodness, and some might share because they want more people to see what they have done. No matter what motivation individuals might have for sharing, it seems obvious that ’sharing’ is related to the issue of how people are motivated and eventually how they are rewarded. As we all know, sometimes it involves economic issues, and can get (more…)

There are a number of trailblazing authors that challenge the publishing industry’s control by managing the roles of printing, marketing and distribution of their own works, discovering new inroads into printing and marketing, and using the internet as a weapon of mass dissemination. These individuals are attempting, word by word, to improvise their way towards a new status quo in the publishing industry. These authors are not content with a business model that requires them to relinquish the rights to their work, or one that encourages them to agree to diminished control and limited financial compensation.

Three short stories follow of self-publishing trailblazers who are attempting to alter this traditional publishing model: (more…)

Wroclaw, a city in the South-West of Poland, is with every passing week becoming more saturated with Creative Commons music. Every Saturday in October and November, in a club called Fuzon, two local independent acts play at a “Creative Commons Party”.

The parties are an initiative of young researchers running a project called (r)ewolucja - (r)evolution (www.r-ewolucja.pl), who earlier organised one of the first conferences in Poland about the relationship between intellectual property law and culture. The parties are organised with the cooperation of Creative Commons Poland, cultural animation association “IQ” and a range of students’ local media: academic radio “Luz”, magazine “OK.NO” and web portal “e-Lama”. Malgorzata Burnecka from (r)ewolucja.pl explained more about the reason for starting these parties: (more…)

What is the role of museums and art centres in today’s networked information society where the open-source economy and free culture are building a new reality for communication? How can artists and the public be included in this situation? And what are the real challenges of experimental art fields when opening up the black box of so-called “art pieces”?

The DIVVY/dual project, run by the international NPO, Gadago (host of the Art & Design event calendar, a TokyoArtBeat) is a long-term initiative to openly discuss the answers to these questions. The project started with a series of events consisting of an exhibition and a public symposium in Tokyo.

One of the highlights of the exhibition was Type-Trace, a software piece by artist Takumi Endo and engineer Shinya Matsuyama, showcased in a contemporary art gallery in the Ginza area of Tokyo. The piece is an interactive application that records all the keyboard strokes you make, similar to Spyware. The application plays back the writing along a timeline just like a movie; the main feature is that it reflects the delay time between each keystroke into various visual representations of the output text. For this version, the more time the writer spends before typing a word, the bigger the font size become. Using this visual translation, the viewer can visually understand the process of each person’s writing experience. All the text inputs are licenced under a Creative Commons licence, and will be used for a text mash-up function that will be included in the alpha release of the software (with GPL) on the project website shortly. This is aimed at developing not only the individual piece as an end product, but also to propose a new aesthetics and custom which pays more attention to the process of production than the end result.

As a parallel event, a public discussion was held on 24 September at the NTT InterCommunication Centre, a new media art centre open since 1997 in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The author organized the event under the rather defiant title ‘Is Open Source art possible?’, and guests from various backgrounds attended.

First, Kiyoshi Kusumi, the former editor-in-chief of Japan’s distinguished contemporary art review, “BT magazine”, who is now a freelance art strategist; explained that the birth of non-proprietary art activities could be found in the Fluxus movement of the 60’s in New York. Indeed, many artists who participated in the movement were freely sharing ideas and arranged massive collaborative performance works: most of all, the scores of these performance pieces were sold openly so that anyone could interpret and adapt the works of these acclaimed artists. In this case, these ’scores’ can be considered the ’source’ of artistic actions.

Noboru Tsubaki, an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist who has recently been mediating the art scene and the global issues with his “United Nations application” initiative, introduced his Radikal Dialogue Project where participants can submit their designs for the Israeli/Palestinian separation wall blocks. He explained why he decided to open up the creative process to the public by adopting a Creative Commons licence for the project website; insisting on the importance of open participation in order to build a base for rising political awareness and enable strong artistic expressions. Tsubaki also stressed the role of the artist as amplifier of noise and irrationality in order to constantly present alternatives to de-facto media.

Hiroo Yamagata is an advocate of hacker culture, an MIT alumni, and translator of all Lessig’s books into Japanese. Yamagata raised the critical question of whether the simple proliferation of “free content” could really improve people’s creativity. He quoted Claude Levi-Strauss who once wrote that creative process needs a certain obstacle as an object of resistance and that making all resources available would eventually kill the creativity of a society. However, by responding to each of the project presented by the other discussants, he also pointed out that the nature of art forms is shifting from ‘installation’ as an individual output to a ‘platform’ as a base for sharable creative process, which could nevertheless justify the employment of open-source type projects in today’s artistic domain.

Following the arguments of Yochai Benkler, we may say that the plasticity of our network must be augmented by our own commitment in order to build a critical, self-defining culture. And, the role of art should be, vis-Ã -vis of the broader culture in general, a platform of recursive questioning and redefining of the social realities we are facing every day, in order not to fall into any ideological blindness. As Gilles Deleuze said, philosophers create concepts and artists forge percepts, both in the effort to propagate questions, and not answers.

For more information and feedback on the event, see the reviews in PingMag and Japan Times.

Photograph: Open Source art with the Divvy/Dual project, by Gen Kanai (Mozilla Japan), CC BY-ND 2.0

Storytelling is as old as humankind. The oldest stories, predating even oral history, were about great hunting feats. In his study of myths, Joseph Campbell describes the tales of animals killed and the afterworld to where their spirits departed, as ‘a cacophonous chorus’. Later, our ancestors would paint on cave walls, still using narratives to celebrate rituals and ceremonies. Stories recorded important events, expressed commonly held values and were used to pass on wisdom from elders to community members. Ultimately, storytelling was a way to record and make sense of the human experience.

Fast-forward a few thousand years to 1994 in the United States of America. A man is sitting on a log, next to a campfire under a full moon, telling stories to a (more…)

October 2006 was an important month in South Africa. We like to celebrate things here at the tip of Africa, and what better occasion to celebrate than the 75th birthday of one of our most famous leaders, Archbishop Desmond Tutu?

The Arch, as he’s fondly known, was a major figure in South Africa’s liberation struggle, and is a well-respected statesman and religious leader all over the world. Oh, and he won a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s a mover.

And all movers are online. Which is why a new project, launched earlier this month, is so exciting.

The Desmond Tutu Digital Archive project is a complete archive of all of the Arch’s personal papers and recordings, which will, ultimately, be available, free of change, online for students, journalists, theologians and others. The fully interactive archive will be accessible to people of all cultures, all ages and all (more…)

Magnatune is an online record label, launched in 2004. With the motto ‘We are not evil’, Magnatune distributes music albums online under Creative Commons licence, and even allows people to listen to the full album before the purchase. Pricing ranges from $5 to $18 per album, and music buyers are encouraged to give away 3 music copies to anyone they know. The amount received from each track is split 50/50 with the musician. And two and half year later, Magnatune is going strong. But what are Magnatune’s challenges and how will it develop in the future?

In my quest to find out the answer to this question, I met with John Buckman, CEO and founder of Magnatune for dinner at a Zen-styled restaurant in the Akasaka area, in the heart of Tokyo. He was visiting Tokyo for the New Context conference organised by (more…)

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Access to ICTs is one of the most important areas of development in countries like South Africa. ‘It’s vital for education’�’ we’re told. ‘It will empower people’�’ is another common refrain. But what that actually translates into, in a tangible way, is often left unsaid.

The Digital Hero Book Project is exactly that ‘ a tangible example of how ICT in African schools and communities can be used in conjunction with community projects to directly benefit the people involved.

Hero Books are not a new concept. Hero Booking is a process whereby a child or adult becomes the author, illustrator and editor of their own hero book. Hero Books are a form of memory work, a process of setting up a safe space for an individual to tell a story. This process of story telling can take place under a tree or in a community centre, or it can be made tangible by making a map, drawing pictures or writing the story down in a book, like a Hero Book. Memory work is important in helping people take control of their stories, empowering them (more…)

This was the headline of an article in Swiss magazine, Blick after yesterday’s ‘Day Against DRM’ and the launch of the website drm.info. FSFE led a small, but determined group of anti-DRM activists to the Dataquest store in downtown Zürich (chosen because it is the closest thing to an Apple store in Switzerland) where leaflets were distributed to people passing by on their way to or from lunch.

Georg Greve, FSFE President, has written a great article on the site about ‘Why you should care‘ about DRM. These include the fact that DRM compromises your security and your privacy and undermines legitimate access to information by libraries and other groups.

“DRM technologies are based on the principle that a third party has more influence over your devices than you, and that their interests will override yours when they come in conflict. That is even true where your interest is perfectly legitimate and legal, and possibly also for your own data,” explains Georg.

Libraries are also concerned about the (more…)