news & olds on the infosupernet!
Lightwave is a bright and shiney new festival ran by the Science Gallery to herald their launch this year. The Science Gallery is an initiative of Trinity College Dublin promoting the area where art meets science.
There is a great selection of exhibits on show including Beau Lotto’s ‘Bee Matrix’, Karl D. D. Willis’ ‘Light Tracer’, Benjamin Gaulon’s ‘De Pong Game’, Elke Harras’ ‘Light Drops’ and many more.
Continue reading ‘Lightwave’
Here one that I saved for later a few months back and only got back around to it recently. Total Recut is a website set up by a fellow Irishman to bring about a community of video remixers, mashup artists and the like. It is a great project with a lot of potential. There are a fantastic selection of recuts accessible from the site so far and a few I have not seen before. Also on the site are links to source material, applications and other info about the scene. I hope the site grows to be a great community of like minded folks who wish to engage people with their new creations with old media. Mashups are fast becoming the biggest buzz on the web and there is so much more material to explore. Continue reading ‘Total Recut - Remixed Media’
This is hilarious! Dear Rockers is a website which encourages you to send some love, in the form of hard currency to music artists who you like but might not have obtained all of their music legally. The site contains copies of some great letters sent to the likes of Axl Rose, Maroon 5, Sufjan Stevens and Billy Joel to name just a few. At first is seems like a pisstake but it’s apparently not. It’s a novel little idea which at the least highlights some of the holes in the recordings industry’s case on the war on piracy. Compare for example iTunes to Napster’s services on price alone. Should digital cost the same per track on average as a CD? There are no production costs. This article on Ars Technica shed more light on this debate especially in the comments that follow.
Anyway, back to Dear Rockers. Here’s what it is all about… Continue reading ‘Dear Rockers’
Mashthenet is a new night running in Dublin brought to you by The Streamlounge & IT:IS:ON, whereby the internet is remixed live for your eyes on the big screen (and some small screens). The first one was held last Thursday night (26/07/07) in the Hop-House on Parnell St. The event was put on by Eoghan Kidney and myself as a reaction to the YouTube Saloon, which Eoghan had organised as part of this years Darklight Symposium. So we got together to make this a regular fixture, put it in a bar environment and ask people to come along and present their favourite videos, mash them up, remix them and generally have some fun with them. Audience interaction is encouraged and welcomed and requests are based on the flow of the themes from the videos. You get the idea.
Well the night was a great laugh and went down very well. We had guest sets from Sophie Merry and Simon Doyle who both showed us some fantastic videos. We didn’t have as many screen going as we would have liked, but it all worked quite well. As it was the first night it was good to give it a test run to see how we can set it up better for the next time.
Unfortunatley I didn’t get any video footage at this one, but if you want to get and idea of what it was like, have a look at the YouTube Saloon at Darklight from the Bubble podcast.
Big thanks to Lee, Joe, Kim and all the staff at the Hop House and to Sophie, Simon and everyone who came down for the night. The next one should be sometime at the end of August. Stay tuned.
I watched this very good film last night about copyright and it’s future throughout the world. It’s called “Good Copy, Bad Copy” and is made in Denmark.
It pretty much sums up my feeling on copyright, in that the laws need to be changed. The internet has changed everything in regards to how we receive our information, on how we are entertained and on how we do business. I am not against copyright. I feel that artists should be fairly paid for their work and copyright has historically been the way in which this is done. However things have changed and people are now been classed as criminals in the eyes of the law. The tools to get all the free music and films and tv shows we want, quickly easily and if we want, for free , exist inside the internet. But it is against the law not to pay for it. But, the laws are different all around the world and yet the internet exists all around the world. What’s wrong in one country is not necessarily wrong in another country. The teenage generation of today have already come of age at a time where they take the internet for granted. They have experienced first hand that all the information you could possibly want is available at the touch of your fingertips. It’s what you want,
when you want it. They see the traditional broadcast means that is television as static and stagnant. Those of us who are used to the internet would not like to see any censorship or regionalisation of it. We would not and should not accept any government or commercial censoring of the internet. Especially not now that we know what it can do.
So we should not weaken the technology or restrict it. We should let it evolve and adapt the law to suit it. A very good suggestion which is mentioned in this documentary is that we should be a fee to our ISPs which pays for our downloading of anything. That way it makes it as easy to pay for what we want as it is to get what we want. We can download all the music or video we want when we want and then decide what we like and what we don’t like. We could rate what we like as an obligation and that way the fees that are collected by ISP can be divided out fairly between those who’s work we liked! Think about it. This really could work.
Anyway, I suggest you watch this film and pass it around. It is free and distribution freely as this is something that needs to be shared. Today I have heard about a move by the industry here in Ireland against 23 filesharers. Have a look at the story here It is something which should be handled very carefully. We should not accept people being made examples of, just to satisfy the need for the media industries to show they have the power. But they don’t have control. DRM was not and is not the answer. The law needs to be looked at before more innocent people get in trouble for downloading. It needs to be rewritten to cater for our advancement into the information age.
Go get the film here. It’s available to view online or you can download the torrent.
