I have the honor of being the featured presenter at one of the longest (if not the longest running) curated experimental media events in the world, Electromediascope, put on by my mentor, Patrick Clancy and his wife Gwen Widmer. I studied with Pat as an undergrad newbie at Kansas City Art Institute in his radical Photo/New Media department which allowed me to break out of walls of my previous involvements in commercial media production, and escape the hell of film/video production I had started on at UT-Austin. Well, not that these things are about schools whatsoever, making art at Kansas City Art Institute helped to form my early ideas. Pat is the original person who nudged me towards getting involved in Open Source and I remember the first time we tried to figure out how to install FreeBSD — I spent way too long on trying to get X windows to work!

We worked on so many other things together like the Cybersite new media research project which was to be part of the Wizard of Oz theme park that never took off and then countless other things like Pat’s Writing Machine project. Pat and Gwen continually show me how good friends and artists live. And, Pat, is really great teacher and really cares for his students own paths in life.

Here is a synopsis of what I will be talking about this friday, Sept. 19 at 7 PM at the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City:

September 19: Visiting artist Jon Phillips will analyze the state of remix culture and mashups and questions whether they are sustainable cultural software that has the potential to run continuously and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.

I just found this which is what I originally wrote to explain what I am talking about Friday if it helps make things more vague

“The myth of sole authorship is perpetuated throughout contemporary culture. With the mass popularization of remix culture through You Tube videos, inexpensive media production software, and cheap broadband, anyone can chop audio samples, blend multiple sources of video, globally broadcast mixes, and more easily access and create works collaboratively. But what is so broad about the band, and who or what is in the band? And, if no content in these broad pipes is new, is there some proximity of originality between works to that some may be considered more original than others? How does this play out in the global and art economies? While not rehashing obvious connections to the previous art histories of collage, appropriation and new remix, this program will actively analyze the state of the remix culture and mashups and question whether they are sustainable cultural software that has the potential to run continuously, evolve, and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art. Videos will be shown from the vast Internet archive collection, You Tube, and other sources from around the world. Also, the implications of copyright law and piracy on the state of art as commodity and a critical look at future sustainable models of intellectual property that are being rapidly constructed around content industries will be explored, including my Fabricatorz.com.”

NOTE, it sounds like you must get tickets even though the event is FREE. I bet you can still walk in, but anyway: Reserve your tickets for September 19

Here is another excerpt from another press outlet:

KANSAS CITY.- Electromediascope, the popular experimental film, video and new-media series at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, focuses on the Internet for its fall series Opening Networks. The effects of Internet technologies and usage on artistic expression, art economics and art authorship will be examined. Three programs in September will feature two visiting artists and several film presentations.

Artists Mark Daggett and Jon Phillips will introduce their own work and address other digital media projects. Daggett works with software design and social software. His presentation will show how networks and social software are reshaping attributes of community. Phillips works with the open source code movement and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization devoted to creating an alternative to existing copyright laws by providing free tools that let authors, scientists, artists and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms of use they want it to carry.

Films and works of art streamed from the Internet will be featured on the final program.

Here is some links posted from Nelson-Atkins press:

• http://www.nelson-atkins.org/calendar/EventDetail.cfm?id=9430
• http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/Exhibitions.cfm?id=65
• http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/30176/
• https://www.artskc.org/ArtsTakepart/Calendar.asp?IdS=00113F-41958C0&Id=3778
• http://presentmagazine.com/calendar_print.php?calentryid=4357&calid=683
• http://arttattler.com/archiveopeningnetworks.html
• http://identi.ca/notice/490868 (hahaha)
• http://www.kcai.edu/newsevents/artnotes/

And, here is a google search for electromediacope if you are curious about this program.

Originally from Electromediascope Friday at Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City

Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore

view presentation (tags: freeculture opencontent singapore casestudies)

And, from Scribd:

Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore – Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore

I’ve been here with my new media art homies of yester and today at ISEA 2008 in Singapore. I had the pleasure as well to speak at the CC Singapore launch yesterday and whipped up my feeder slide deck for this coming week’s conference in Sapporo on Commons Research, CC Metrics and CC Case Studies. It is going to be a lot of fun. I just have to remember to sleep a bunch today on my flights from Singapore to Sapporo, Japan.

I will then be heading to the BETA location in Guangzhou again for most of August. More news on that shortly and what I will be doing with most of my time.

Time to sort through my thoughts on this flight…the need for downtime will never come! Just get used to it Jon!

Originally from Creative Commons Case Studies, Metrics Project, and CC Integration Tools at ISEA 2008 Singapore

I’m stoked about the latest OpenMoko release and looking forward to getting my hands on the latest freerunner released last week. Over on the CC blog, Tim “thwang-roflcon” Hwang, blogged about the effects of releasing the OpenMoko case plans under CC BY-SA license. Enjoy!

Great news coming out recently that our good friends over at the awesome open source mobile phone project OpenMoko have been seeing rapid success with releasing their CAD design files for the FreeRunner phone under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Their open design approach has spurred adoption, becoming the basis for the Dash Express car navigation device, and a popular platform for other projects such as the Debian-based WEphone. It’s gaining a lot of traction, and it looks like we’ll be able to look forward to even more successes on the open design front in the near future. Might have to pick one up for myself…

This follows in the line of similar recent adoption successes seen by other businesses taking the strategy of making their CAD files open to the public like the award-winning OpenBook project that makes designs for their laptop available for anyone to use. We’re hoping that these examples set the stage for companies to take up the business opportunities available in CCing their product schematics.

Originally from More on OpenMoko CAD Designs

Geez, how did I not blog this yet! We released the CC Metrics Project this week to open up the data so that anyone can help figure out how many CC licensed pieces of media are out in the world. CC has put a new number at 130 million, but I personally, as in a personal capacity, think this number is very very low! If Flickr has 70 Million CC licensed photos, then combine the rest of the cc licensed objects in the web, is the lower bound really only 130 million items?

Please help CC figure out a more accurate number please! There are tools, scrubbed apache logs, and more to help sort things out. If you don’t have time to help with this project, then please write a story about this project, shoot me an email for an interview, or help by blogging more about this project.

CC BizDev Intern Tim “thwang” Hwang, Mr FabBitches himself, aka Lucas Barton (The Power Glove, its so badddd), wrote on the CC blog about this:

Tim Hwang, Business Development Intern here. Along with Jon Phillips and many others, we’ve been hard at work behind the scenes and excited to announce today that we’ve officially launched the Creative Commons Metrics Project!

Recently, there’s been a growing academic interest in understanding how CC adoption is changing the creative landscape worldwide. Metrics is a wiki-project designed to bring together existing efforts and encourage collaboration on this emerging field of research.

You can read more details about the project on our Press Releases page, and can visit the project directly to browse what we’ve gathered so far (and contribute!).

(image: Giorgos Cheliotis’ chart of global CC adoption and permissiveness — learn more about his amazing work at the Participatory Media Lab)

Here is the blog post draft I never released from the CC blog since I went on vacation to Yosemite with my parents on a fake vacation last 6 days:

We are on a roll with releases! Last week we successfully launched the Case Studies project which “explores and adds noteworthy global Creative Commons stories” (translation: an open wiki-based way for anyone to add and edit case studies about Creative Commons integration). This week, we are releasing the Metrics project.

Often, businesses, press, and people ask us CC folk, “How many CC licensed objects are there out there there?” Our response in the past varied in some accounts and then the solution struck us: release privacy scrubbed apache logs free of copyright, any tools we have used to scrape the web or find linkbacks from Google and Yahoo, and encourage people who are smarter than us (researchers and scholars around the world), to do research on this data to help everyone accurately understand how Creative Commons licensing is spreading globally.

Work on this project has been inspired by the great work by Giorgos Cheliotos and the Participatory Media Lab in Singapore.

A chart showing latest CC license usage we can stand by comfortably

So, if you look at the project website, you see information useful for getting, processing and visualizing CC license usage globally.

Ok, so I trailed off on finishing that post. If this interests you please do join CC communication channels and help CC make better estimates and research about usage that will help all.

Originally from 130 Million CC Licensed Media out ther – CC Metrics Project Released

That’s right, the same Blender’s 2nd Open Source Movie, the Peach Project, aka, Big Buck Bunny, that I previoulsy spoke before the premiere of in Amsterdam, is out and in hi-def, as Alex blogged:

Big Buck Bunny, the latest open movie, modeled, rendered, and composited entirely with Blender, by the same team as Elephants Dream. Licensed CC BY 3.0.

Great stuff, especially in high-def, easily rivaling Pixar and classic WB Merry Melodies.

Even better, since the entire film is Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensed, the film is usable in so many contexts as long as attribution is given to the project (I’m assuming to http://bigbuckbunny.org, but that is something to seek clarification from Ton and the Blender crew, fellas?). And, now, all the source files which were used to make the final video, are available as well to allow for translation, remix, education, re-purposing, you-call-it! This is brilliant and further answers the question I had ages ago about what Hollywood could do for education and training by releasing a film like the Matrix and its source files (all the files used to render the film). Well, Big Buck Bunny is cooler and better than the Matrix, and as Barry Threw, Kid Kam and I decided at dinner last night, the first Matrix’s (Matrices?) effects look old now and come on, the film is cheesy! (The part in Matrices 3 when Neo gets his eyes burned has to be one of the all-time cheesiest scenes EVER!)

Come to the water friends, companies, and .orgs and release your source files under a Creative Commons license and get more points for doing under liberal license like CC Attribution 3.0 or CC Public Domain dedication like we do over at Open Clip Art Library.

If you want help coming to the water, contact me

Originally from Open Source Movie Big Buck Bunny Source Files Available

Mike blogged about the ccHost 4.5 release for all you to update your sites to for stability right before the massively updated 5.0 arrives on the scene. If you have forgotten, ccHost is the engine behind Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library (which both need developers). More info below:

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.

Also, Asheesh packaged up liblicense 0.7 which is useful for all wanting to add licensing to your application. I want to get liblicense into a couple of applications like Eye of Gnome and something else fun. Any ideas open source developers? There are resources to help work on this at Creative Commons if you are interested in something fun:

I just released liblicense 0.7.0 on SourceForge. It fixes the Python bindings. They’ve been broken since the 0.6 release, it seems. Some functionality in them probably worked between 0.6 and 0.7, but (read on for more)…

LL_LICENSE and other constants were “extern const char” arrays before. Now they’re just lousy old #defines. This way, even though the strings might appear more than once in memory, it’s very simple for the IO modules like exempi.so to refer to those constants.

Before, due to dynamic linker loading order issues, if liblicense.so were added to a process’s memory memory map at runtime, if liblicense then tried to dlopen() its modules, the modules wouldn’t be able to find those constants. What a drag! That broke the Python bindings’ ability to use the modules.

Now, I guess that’s still true, but the modules don’t need actual symbols from liblicense anymore.

I noticed this issue in the process of creating and testing RPMs for Fedora. I had to bump the SONAME because this removes symbols from the library.

You can grab it on SourceForge, and perhaps soon in Fedora Rawhide.

Originally from ccHost 4.5 Out and Liblicense 0.7 Too!

I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 – 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world

Originally from Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met