GRIT #02 concept notes

Proposed for book launch presentation at The MAK (Museum fuer Angewandte Kunst / Museum for Applied Arts), Vienna, 21 October 2008. Commissioned by KunstRadio.

GRIT #02 – Illusions of Homogeneity / Illusionen von Homogenität

Performance for solo voice, oral microphone, hard curve saturation and open licensed visuals.

Homogeneity means “being similar throughout”. What homogeneity brings to societies is an illusion. Sameness is celebrated. Difference is discarded. It is a monoculture, a folly. Sameness will be our undoing.

• Reference: wikipedia.org (Homogeneity)
• GRIT #01 – open licensed photo, video and sound collage by Andrew Garton

Licht Drift Online

The last performance of the Terminal Quartet took place in Brisbane, at the State Library of Queensland, 24 June. A recording of that performance, featuring Lawrence English, Andrew Kettle, Julian Knowles and myself, is now available online:

Licht Drift MP3 Download

• http://secession-records.org/tq/

Licht Drift Podcast

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/secession

Notes Towards a Live Machinima

Steve Law with Border Song

Notes towards the Border Song exhibition held at RMIT University, June 2008, by John Power and Andrew Garton.

Andrew and I have worked together – and with others – in a range of collaborations since 1998. The first collaboration was called Auslander (Foreigner), an online opera written by Andrew. It is worth mentioning here because the theme of statelessness is one that has stayed with us and which informs the work you hear and see in this exhibition.

Most of these collaborations have been towards live audio visual performance, where Andrew makes sound and I make video; the results of this making often sparks other ideas and so it has proceeded. There was an improvisational element from the beginning and this continues. We were curious, excited and sceptical in equal parts at whether or not the sounds and images formed a meaningful relation in live AV performance. The more we improvise together, the more confident we feel that we can leave any conclusions up to you.

This work here is not improvised, but the sound and image are on asynchronous loops, so you may invent Audio Visual events as you look and listen, as they will not repeat.

Andrew got to work with Steve Law in 2004 on some songs; John created video elements to each of these songs. We read Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker. We performed the images and sounds live around Melbourne and Andrew called it Son of Science. Others joined us. The sound and images have kept evolving and this exhibition takes you through the current state of the collaborative space. What you see and hear in this exhibition are audio visual notes toward a future linear Machinima and live Son of Science performance that will echo inside each other. As happens in much collaboration, conversations and responses are more around themes than plots; more around sound and image than platforms (although we do find our computers very handy).

Stapleton’s 1937 Star Maker was a protest against the rise of Fascism, albeit wrapped inside an epic science fiction where the futuristic characters become preoccupied with building artificial worlds.

This work is a response to the theme of Statelessness.

John Power
May 2008

The real-time space was authored, and is running in, Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament 2004 Engine.

Licht Drift

Notes for a new structured improvisation in the Drift Theory series for the Terminal Quartet.

Licht Drift is the eighth collaborative composition in the Drift Theory series. Drift Theory is a structured improvisation, each performance entirely unique, each performance influencing the next, exerting notions of drift as it may occur in creative, social and psychological development, both of the performers and the piece itself.

Licht Drift, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic operatic cycle, Licht, is based on four movements, each movement draws references from sacred music, sounds and text the world over.

All four movements, conceived independently by each performer, and in isolation from each other, must ensure that principles of drift influence the overall direction and outcomes of, for example, any cultural, political and astronomical contexts explored.

Drift is used to define a system having a distribution of events, objects, associations and intentions of individual velocities.

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The theme(s) of the piece would be based on music as a communal, cultural process that seeks to transmit that which separates and that which brings us together…

In effect, I’m talking about creating an electro acoustic work that expresses separation, longing and unification – a contemporary work that draws on the sacred, that communicates to audiences through the relentless pace of commerce, its unyielding drain on finite resources and the homogenisation that results from its opportunistic outreach.

For more details about Licht Drift, go to the Secession wiki.

Ozzie Commons

The Building an Australian Commons conference will be held on Tuesday 24th June 2008 from 8.30am – 5pm at the State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane, and is hosted by Creative Commons Australia with the support of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the State Library of Queensland. I will be performing at the ccSalon with the Terminal Quartet and present on a roundtable discussion exploring the possibilities for music under Creative Commons in Australia.

VIDEO SLAM 02: Remix Forum!

Thursday evening, 22 May, saw the culmination of the second OPEN CHANNEL VIDEO SLAM for Arts Law Week 2008. Some where in the vicinity of 70 – 80 people took themselves to the Horse Bazaar to view the four short videos our sixteen participants had made and to hear our panel’s assessment of them.

Setting up the venue took the best part of the day, particularly as another Arts Law Week forum on social networking was to be held there that afternoon. By the time they were done we had about two hours to have the stage set up, the tech in place, cameras and the wireless Video Unit running, the VJ rig installed… and our VIDEO SLAM teams had to have their shorts completed no later than 6pm!

Come 6:30 I was copying each of the completed videos onto my laptop and readying them for screening later in the evening. Everyone came in on time, one team finishing at 3 in fact!

The Remix Forum

At 8pm I opened the Remix Forum and we got under way. I explained that VIDEO SLAM is both a rights management and production workshop… and that in particular we’re working with Creative Commons licenses to ask the question, can we make films using legitimate samples and is there enough content out there that’s correctly licensed to help us make this happen?

The Remix Forum would look at both the legitimate and illegitimate use of appropriation in the arts.

The video artist Emile Zile was our first guest up with an entertaining overview of his arts practice. As Emile himself says, his work disregards copyright entirely. To give you an idea of what Emile had shared with us, here’s a selection of his videos.

Shiralee Saul followed with a brief talk on copyright issues associated with curatorial responsibilities. This was supported by a delightful presentation based on materials she had available in the only medium many artists worked with at the time, – the 35mm slide. Luckily, Shiralee had been able to scan a selection of works that day, works from a project that was to provide visuals that would be available within the public domain… a project from the late 70s / early 1980s, well before Creative Commons or any open rights management tools as we know them today.

With the VIDEO SLAM shorts next up, our legal team, Shaun Miller and Elliot Bledsoe took to the stage. The theme and the process was then revealed.

Theme and process

Of our four VIDEO SLAM teams two were to produce 2 minute videos using entirely legitimate content. The remaining two teams could use what ever they liked from where ever they liked. Both teams had to ensure, at the very least, that they didn’t breach and Australian defamation law. Their theme subject matter was the Melbourne Lord Mayor, John So.

Teams #1 and #2 created the free reign videos john so arbitary and So Hard. Teams #3 and #4 came up with My Bro and The John S(h)o(w). They had to ensure their videos were entirely compliant with copyright law and in doing so had to log every sound, every photo and every video they found on the web onto a networked, Google spreadsheet.

Each sample was then individually checked to ensure no copyright breaches were made and that the correct mix of Creative Commons licenses were employed. Thanks to Elliot for his sterling efforts on that spreadsheet! A project like this really can’t work without someone of his expertise on hand.

The verdict

It was curious! Shaun Miller was pretty much convinced that Teams #3 and #4’s were clearly in breach of copyright, but gave Teams #1 and #2 the all clear, stating that they fell neatly into Australia’s new parody exception to the Australian Copyright Act (1 January 2007).

The audience’s verdict for all four videos was clearly heard… All four had received hearty and enthusiastic applause! All four teams deserved it… not only had they achieved the task of producing these videos in under 20 hours, they’d all created entertaining works that are, to the best of our knowledge, and that of our legal panel, entirely compliant with Creative Commons licenses, and Australian Copyright and defamation law.

As an Arts Law Week Project, I believe it was another outstanding success with a fair compliment of lessons learnt and tangible outcomes…

Acknowledgements

Thanks to OPEN CHANNEL and a particularly vast, open armed and bellowing shower of graciousness to everyone at Horse Bazaar for their unyielding support. We couldn’t have pulled it off with their venue, their expertise, equipment and facilities.

Thanks also to Jonty Burton for a stunning live re-appropriated remix of the Forum.

Thanks to the Victoria Law Foundation and Arts Victoria for funding support of Arts Law Week.

VIDEO SLAMMIN!

It’s another Arts Law Week, the 3rd I’ve worked on now and the first with apc.au under contract to OPEN CHANNEL to deliver VIDEO SLAM 02.

It’s a smaller team of slammers and we have fewer resources, but we’re a tight unit, making it all the more wholesome given a couple of familiar faces from last years VIDEO SLAM.

Horse Bazaar are once again pulling more than their fair share of bullock trains and milkcarts! Can’t wait to see the famed wireless Video Unit in action.

This years SLAM will culminate in a Remix Forum… an actual Arts Law Week forum dealing with appropriation in the arts which itself will be re-appropriated as we screen the results of our two day workshop. Bring it on!!!

On Sacred Rights

Have some thoughts on the Terminal Quartet performance commissioned for the Growing the Australian Commons Conference, some of which I’d like to incorporate acoustic instruments that are appropriated in real time, in that what each participant contributes is not only a theme as such, but a process for integration of the acoustic qualities of the instruments at hand… and the instruments would be of a traditional nature, tuned to accommodate a pre-defined markam (or marquam). These are essentially Turkish scales used for improvisation that display unique intervalic characteristics.

So, that’s roughly the theory side of things. In practical terms, everything the quartet performs, from the individual movements created by each performer to the final work would be CC licensed for re-use and catalogued online within freesound, etc. Each participant would also be encouraged to utilise CC licensed samples and soundscapes…

The theme(s) of the piece would be based on creativity, specifically music as a communal, cultural process that seeks to transmit that which separates and that which brings us together… in affect, I’m are talking about creating an electro acoustic work that expresses separation, longing and unification – a contemporary work that draws on the sacred that communicates to audiences through the relentless pace of commerce and homogenisation, the excessive drain on finite resources to sustain modernity and every other mind numbing global crisis.

We may call the piece, Licht Drift and dedicate the work to Stockhausen.

Camp life sux

Arrived in Nairobi very early. No sleep. Got to hotel, set myself up and headed out to meet two young Sudanese men, both former refugees from the camp in Kakuma, Kenya.

The most important outcome of this meeting is the realisation that we may not be able to run Home Lands, in its present form, in Kakuma at all. The situation there is much more dire than what we had been told. Getting a camera in for what we had planned for sounds near on impossible, but getting someone in to document what goes on there on a more deeper level is essential.

I believe there can be ways and means to get footage shot in the camp and out safely, but it will take a site visit to confirm this is possible. There are accessible terminals near the UN compound but apparently use of them is entirely vetted. In short, telling stories from the camp about life in the camp, and doing so on video and getting that stuff out via the net is going to be complex. Publishing incident reports via SMS will be much less so…

More from my meeting on the apc.au blog.

Document Freedom Day

Melbourne, Australia, 26 March 2008: apc.au celebrates Document Freedom Day releasing 10 years of articles under Creative Commons

apc.au (formally c2o / Toy Satellite) releases 10 years of essays, lectures, reports and articles dealing with information communication technologies for cultural development (ICT4CD). The full list can be found at in both open and portable document formats. All the papers are available for sharing and re-publication under a Creative Commons Australia license.

A global initiative celebrated by roughly 200 teams from more than 60 countries, “Document Freedom Day” is aimed at increasing awareness of the value of open document standards. apc.au, an open standards advocate, is proud to support “Document Freedom Day 2008.”

Open standards allow any conforming application to work with the data they encode, preventing vendor lock-in and providing an open playing ground for competition. Open standards are public domain and do not require legal forms or commercial agreements to use them, allowing anyone to produce an application that meets the standard. Open document standards help drive competition and bring freedom of choice to the creators and consumers of information. By using open document standards we can ensure that our information is accessible as required, now and in the future, regardless of the applications in use.

“Many have experienced the pain of trying to convert from one proprietary format to another when exchanging documents (eg: from MS Word to Lotus),” says Grant McHerron, apc.au Technical Director. “Formatting is lost or broken and re-work is often required. This extends even to different versions of the same product, as those using Office 2000 are unable to read information created by MS Word 2007. Storing information in open document standards facilitates the flow of information and prevents its loss when older applications become obsolete.”

In addition to the value of open standards for storing information, apc.au is also a champion of open licensing. Andrew Garton, apc.au’s Managing Director, says “The author may choose to reserve some or all rights through open licenses, providing consumers with immediate access to how content may be used, re-used and / or attributed without having to communicate with neither the author nor any 3rd party. Open licenses puts rights management directly into the hands of authors of any form and medium.”

With support from the Free Software Foundation, Google, IBM, Red Hat Linux, Sun Microsystems and many other organisations, Document Freedom Day is a volunteer, grass roots effort to ensure people and organisations realise the importance of open document standards.

apc.au is a digital media communications organisation founded in 1997. We produce computer mediated collaborative “events” for public space, providing production, performance, research and design expertise drawn from the information technology and cultural development sectors.

For more information contact Grant McHerron on 0422 914 949, or go to:

http://wiki.apc.org.au/
http://wiki.apc.org.au/index.php?title=Document_Freedom_Day_2008