creating flickering shadows in a cave

August 5th, 2011 • 2 comments tech
Tags: a moveable feast, art, blather, camtasia, creation, creativity, hemingway, jing, koha, libr559m, module 4, opac, prosentient, quantity, screencast, self-reflection, social media, tags, youtube

I find I have a block when it comes to thinking about the social-ness of creativity. I tend way more towards the “huddle in the dark and make things up and don’t show anyone until it’s ready” model of art making. Blogging and tweeting and the like doesn’t feel like it’s creation at all: it’s all just blather you do to keep from really working. (I blame reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast at a formative age.)

I realize I’m using terms like art to talk about 90-second library videos here, and that that’s kind of weird. I’m not going to apologize for it though.

So creating something like this little screencast about tagging in Koha using Jing feels more like my idea of creativity. I sat here on my bed in my room, downloaded the software, wrote a short script, pressed record and then uploaded it to the site. It felt like no one was involved and it was easy to pop up onto the web. It’s not encouraging you to tweet about it while you’re doing it, just the finished product. I like how it creates an unintelligible but relatively short URL to promote Tweeting and the like, but that’s as social as this process got.

Part of that is because Jing wants you to Go Pro so you can create mp4 files and presumably then you’d be able to upload your video to YouTube or something where people actually are, watching video. And it wasn’t the pure solitary artist experience either. For that I’d need the ability to actually edit the video, to sit here laboriously sweating over each frame (which I’ve used Camtasia for in the past and it lends itself well to that, but I wanted to try something new and simple for this little activity). This is social because it’s not prompting a lot of agonized self-reflection, just the “do something and get it out there” mentality.

I’m not sure that creates greatness but quantity has its own quality, I suppose.

scavenger hunt for inforg 2.0 terms

July 17th, 2011 • library, tech
Tags: 2.0, art, cliche, comics, computers, education, incrementation, libr559m, module 2, neurologist, ning, nsw, puns, scavenger hunt, social media, state library, version numbers, webcomics, wired

When I looked up Education 2.0 the bookmarkable stuff I found was a defunct Ning site (and an active one for Art Education) references to the Khan Academy and some interesting articles from Wired in 2007 when they were doing an Education 2.0 spotlight, plus a Neurologist talking about an Education 2.0 that hasn’t been achieved because computers are still an afterthought. They all had to do with interaction and participation through digital media, so that’s good and consistent, I guess. I liked the fact that two Ning groups were noticeable since I think of them as one of the interesting upstart social media companies that seems to have melted away into corporate blandness. (I may be completely misreading the current state of Ning. If so, and you care, I’m sorry.)

Another use of 2.0 I looked briefly at was a subject dear to my heart, comics. Specifically webcomics. There was a book in 2008 called Webcomics 2.0 and reviews even then mentioned the confusing nature of the title, since the book might be seen as a sequel. I thought that was kind of interesting since this was a book made about internet people and you’d think the audience would be up on the buzzwords.

As far as libraries go, I found an interesting non-bloggish blogspot site from 2008 run on by the State Library of NSW, billed as a Learning 2.0 course. While they use the 2.0 thing consistently with the rest of the webiverse there (though Australians I’ve met tend to say “web two” instead of “web two point oh” which still weirds me out), what I really liked is how they called their 2010 sequel course New South Wales public library learning 2.1. The idea that you don’t jump straight from 2.0 to 3.0 and that bit of consistency with how computer people do version numbers, which is where we got the whole 2.0 thing from anyway, made me very happy.

I feel like libraries and other information organizations just use the 2.0 because they like to keep up with trends from five years before. Individuals within organizations might be pushing for things earlier, but by the time stuff gets approved it’s become cliché. I guess the good thing about only using the terms once they’re cliché is that “everyone knows” by now that people saying 2.0 mean something to do with computers. It doesn’t mean much but it’s something to start with, I guess. (And if people don’t try to make godawful puns with it.)

copyright session @ media democracy day vancouver

November 6th, 2010 • library
Tags: al jazeera, android, apple, art, blizzard, c-32, cataloguing, cbc, copyright, copyright criminals, creative commons, documentary, funding, geof glass, hart snider, hockey night in canada, ios, law, lawyer, litigation, martha rans, mashup, media, media democracy day, movies, music, pacific cinematheque, passion, rip a remix manifesto, school, sfu, starcraft ii, tony burman, vancouver, vancouver public library, video, zed

Tony Burman from Al Jazeera English was talking at Media Democracy Day down at the Vancouver Public Library this afternoon, but after his keynote address (see my very scrappy notes) I skipped out on listening to a panel discuss the spread of Fox News style media up north and went to a panel on Copyright. After the copyright session I also went to Engaging the Resistant: Achieving Change Through Documentary and Journalism put on by Pacific Cinematheque, but it wasn’t at all what I wanted out of a session so I won’t be talking any more about it (they seemed like a neat group, just ran a session I didn’t really enjoy).

But yes, the copyright session was really interesting, and library related. There was Geof Glass – a communications PhD from SFU who specializes in the online commons, Hart Snider – a video remix artist and Martha Rans – a copyright lawyer who works with artist collectives and Creative Commons Canada.

Glass spoke about the asymmetric access to culture we have when information is owned by monopolistic companies. He talked about StarCraft II player-designed maps which now get transferred to the ownership of Blizzard, which gets to benefit monetarily from what its users are making. He talked about selling the Hockey Night in Canada theme song for millions of dollars and how it wasn’t worth that much money until people had invested parts of themselves in it. His big thing was about participation in culture and how important it is to do and not just witness.

Snider talked about the path he’s taken as a video artist and how illegal his sampling work is. He talked about how bill C-32 says that you can’t damage the integrity of what you’re sampling, but “artists have the right to say what they want.” He sort of struck me as a bit out of touch, or selfish in his concern about only what he was allowed to do, instead of caring about the wider society (or just getting on with doing his own thing). The best story was how the CBC’s lawyers had to spend 8 months trying to figure out how to show one of his videos on Zed. They eventually did by changing the show from an Entertainment show to a News show for one night. Because News shows don’t have to worry about copyright in the same way, as they’re commenting on the things that are happening.

Martha Rans talked about how as a culture we need to value artists, and that our energy would best be spent fighting cuts to the arts from government. She talked about what a lousy law C-32 was in its vagueness and it just screaming for litigation to get things sorted. That gives a big hammer to corporations, yes, but it doesn’t really deal with artists getting enough money for food and rent. She called out the media for its fearmongering about the bill by talking piracy and not separating artists and publishing corporations. She also said that Copyright Criminals was a much better documentary on copyright and culture than Rip! A Remix Manifesto because it didn’t ignore the fact that it was only through the traditional system of copyright and royalty payments that african-american artists could legally fight their way to getting paid instead of being ripped off blind by white artists and corporations. Really interesting stuff.

The easiest way to be able to do what you want to do as an artist and not worry about the law, she said (after prefacing it with saying this was not legal advice), was to not own a home or have anything for anyone to sue you for. I like that as a strategy. She also talked about how librarians have to speak up and fight for arts groups as we’re the people in charge of preserving all this culture and our silence on these issues is terrible. She told us that since our institutions are risk averse, academics need to develop backbones and stand up to commercial interests themselves.

There were a few interesting questions from the audience and a lot of anecdotes about how artists really are at the bottom of the list of who gets paid by the big publishing corporations. One guy asking about why Glass was so down on the Apple iOS store, since didn’t the Android Market provide a competitive market for people who didn’t want to play in authorized Appleland didn’t really get his question answered, which was kind of crappy. The moderator wasn’t very good at handling the crowd, but whatever.

I’m realizing that copyright is something I’m interested in. That’s what this first semester of school has been good for, giving me an idea which of these topics I actually care about and which leave me cold. Copyright gets me fired up. Bizarrely enough, cataloguing does too. Who knew?

book review: the curtain

October 10th, 2010 • books
Tags: agelast, art, confrontation, europe, history, jokes, kafka, milan kundera, nonfiction, novel, pretentious, review, sacrilege, school, the curtain, writing

Reading Milan Kundera essays about topics like Art and The Novel and such always makes me want to be a better writer than I am. To be a bit pretentious because that’s a way of faking yourself out into thinking that maybe you’re doing something worth a damn.

To write without having that ambition is cynicism: a mediocre plumber may be useful to people, but a mediocre novelist who consciously produces books that are ephemeral, commonplace, conventional – thus, not useful, thus burdensome, thus noxious – is contemptible.

The Curtain is a short book-length essay about art and history and how history has no taste.

The more attentively, fixedly, one observes a reality, the better one sees that it does not correspond to people’s idea of it; under Kafka’s long gaze it is gradually revealed as empty of reason, thus non-reasonable, thus implausible.

And part of what I love about a book like this, even though it’s so European and also so snobby is seeing bits of me reflected in there, like someday I might not make something that’s a piece of shit.

For if agelasts tend to see sacrilege in every joke, it’s because every joke is a sacrilege. There is an irreconcilable incompatibility between the comical and the sacred, and we can only ask where the sacred begins and ends. Is it confined just to the Temple? Or does its domain reach further, does it also annex what are known as the great secular values: maternity, love, patriotism, human dignity?

An important book for me to read. I feel more at odds with this whole idea of being at school learning to do something that’s almost the opposite of art, but being at odds with something is good. Keeps me from being complacent.