12 frogs read think get curious

Signal / Noise 2005 [s2n]

I spent Friday at the Signal/Noise conference at Harvard. It was my intention to blog it in real time, but the crimson pinheads locked down their wireless network, so I couldn’t get online. [David Weinberger is a Berkman fellow, so he could log on, and he was blogging it.]

In a nutshell, the focus of the conference was creativity and copyright problems. It was a thought-provoking day, asking questions about what art is, how artists should benefit from their efforts and the efforts of other artists, and how the public should benefit from and reward artistic efforts.

There were five things I learned about at the conference that I wanted to pass along:

The democratization of computer animation?
Machinima is an “emergent art form” that is created with video games — playing, capturing the results, editing takes, possibly editing in other audio. Lots of examples and explanations can be found at machinima.com and machinima.org. You may have already seen an episode of Red vs Blue and not known what it was. This stuff started off as Quake movies, but there is quite a range of material out there now, as Fake Science is very different from a shoot-em-up.

A sample you can’t even hear is still a copyright violation.
3 Notes and Runnin was a project of Down Battle’s, to protest the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that NWA — in sampling a two second long three note guitar riff — violated copyright. Go hear the sample, see if you can detect it in the “infringing” song, and then listen to the thirty-second clips created from the orginal sample.

One-stop shopping for IP information online.
The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse wants to help people understand First Amendment and intellectual property issues online. They’ve got a searchable database of cease & desist letters (if you get one, you can add it) and many explanations written in English for non-lawyers on topics such as derivative works, fan fiction, and John Doe Anonymity. They even issue “weather reports”.

Musicians are real people, too.
The Future of Music Coalition is interested in musician’s rights, not monopolistic record company profits. A cool think tank headed up by Jenny Toomey, the site is a great resource if your interest in the future of music goes deeper than iTunes vs file-sharing debates. Statistics indicate there are a lot of interested parties given that 33 million Americans identify themselves as artists, and some 10 million make some money from artistic performances, according to Toomey.

Video mashups
Yochai Benkler played examples of video mashups, starting with a feel-good clip from the Grey album followed by the deeply disturbing The Mashin of the Christ by Negativland. I found the video mashups more compelling than the machinima, though I suppose that could be attributed to the examples used. It is easy to see how slicing, dicing, remixing, and providing alternative audio tracks and/or superimposed text creates a new thing, and can be a powerful vehicle for social and political commentary. This kind of creative expression depends upon limited audiences, though, because these kinds of things will only be seen as long as they stay under the radar and out of court.

After the conference I sat outside at an Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square that happens to be in a Harvard-owned building. It was sunny and warm, and here the Harvard wifi would let anyone log in using “visitor.” You want coffee and sun and internet, fine. You want to blog at a conference about the internet in a law school building, you need a Harvard ID to register your machine. Crimson pinheads.