Re: <nettime> [CODE] [Free Art Licence] about Florian Cramer's point of vue & my speech.

[Antoine Moreau <antoine@artlibre.org>]

Le 24/04/01 à 10:44 +0200, Anne Nigten écrivait peut-être:
     (At 10:44 +0200 on 24/04/01, Anne Nigten may be wrote):
>
>Antoine, if I understand your point about the concept of Free art
>licenses well, you're referring to stable media / art mainly,
>(static or dynamic media /art which has a final or a predefined
>form).

Dear Anne, there is no final or predefined forms for us. The FAL is useful
when you want to work some materials (numeric or not) and let it open
for others to continue by their own. By exemple
http://www.filh.org/Copyleft/CorpsLibre/index.htm (clic on "Le début
du projet en maquette") which was done during the first copyleft
party we did one mounth ago)
This artist (photograph) is also a programer. This art work is a body
in progress made by parts of bodies that people send or that he
shots. There is no final or predefined form. What we see now is just
a moment of the piece. And I can catch it for myself and doing
something else.

>  This reminds me a lot on the publications of Joost Smiers, who made
>several strong points in his plea to leave copyrights out of the
>arts and cultural practice.

I remember Joost's view when we meet each others at copycult
http://www.constantvzw.com/copy.cult in Bruxelles.
But I am not radicaly against "author's right" (different from
copyright, it is a french exception). IMHO we must consider the
author by giving him another place, another statut. No big stars but
plenty of moving little stars.


>There's more similarity among these theories / concepts, both leave
>me puzzled at the point where it becomes interesting (for me): how
>does this all relate to current movements and attempts in the
>interdisciplinary code based art practice? What happens to the
>income of the artists when copy rights are left out?

Yes I agree. It is the reason why it is usefull to see what kind of
value, what kind of econmy is behind the art practice. I am sure,
that there is a "win-win" business with art and
financial economy. the question is that for the moment art is
considered like time lost and digital works of art doesn't exist
because there is no "original" (we can make copies as we want).
So, I think we don't need copy rights but author's left! ;-)

>So far at the V2 lab we've been working with existing licenses,
>mainly GPL and for an upcoming project we're looking at GNU copyleft.

GPL is copyleft.

>  The choice of the most suitable licenses depends a lot on the
>project and the intentions of the artist, our preference for
>existing licences is an attempt to stay open for collaboration with
>the outside world. For sure these licenses are not written for art
>or scientific purposes per se, but turned out to be useful anyway.
>It would be good to know why people come up with alternatives. Do
>you all plan at all to make a match or connection to the software
>based licenses at all, or do you think that the world of artists and
>software designers should really be kept apart?

Some free licences are written for specific topics.
By exemple the The Design Scientific License by Michael Stutz
http://dsl.org/ for art and science.
or the The Free Music License by Tony Hardie-Bick
http://www.ethymonics.co.uk for music
and... a  HyperNietzsche licence
http://www.puf.com/hypernietzsche/47687eenc2.htm
in
http://www.puf.com/hypernietzsche/index.html for intellectual
research.

You can't resolve every questions by a one and only licence. The GPL
is the model for free creation. For us with Copyleft Attitude it was
useful to write the Free Art Licence in order to make bridges between digital
art, "classique" contemporary art, free programmers, and the public.
There is no licences struggle with the GPL based licences. With the
FAL we are very close to GPL and very precise for art and what we can
call "art" today in regard with digital economy. There is more problems
between GNU project and BSD or others Open Source practices.

>
>About the other similarity: what happens with the income of the
>artist when copyrights are left? There was somebody who suggested
>something from a different angle, according to his theory about free
>software Richard Stallman presented his idea of free contribution.
>At the Wizards of OS in 1999 Richard presented these ideas, and due
>to his very emotional way of lecturing I didn't get to discuss these
>ideas up there neither did I during CODE. I have the impression that
>these days ( almost ) nobody will ever pay for art / cultural
>content on line.
>  Besides this, there is a hippie flavor to the idea, which really
>reminds me to street musicians with a hat  collecting money.


hum hum... You are right... Art is nowdays something sacred (Van Gogh
myth, Star sytem, pathetic stories of artists lives, etc) and it is
sacrificed on the altar of the financial Temple. This is the ordinary
show. No money unless for financials creations. But, like money goes
to money, art goes to art. I really think it will be a kind of art, a
kind of performance, if money could go to art. Somebodies
can do that to be an artist. Philippe Thomas experiment this ten
years ago. The collector was the artist because he
signed the art work. He made it, he bough it. The (real?) artist,
Philippe Thomas made this possible.

>  After several talks and discussions with artists about this idea,
>it turns out not to be meeting the profile of contemporary
>artists/researchers/programmers etc. For sure this is in no way a
>statement from the art world or well worked out survey, but an
>indication from our environment. So this made me think about other
>possibilities of income for artists using open source and / or
>copyleft. The services based model which is being used by companies
>to earn form open source (like Red hat as the most clear example) is
>not really suitable for art practices it looks like.

Who really knows? If, when we are creating we discover the unknown,
we could create the good conditions for art (digital and not)
practice. And then discovering something we couldn't imagine before.
It is a matter of vision. I think that the GNU/Linux storie is
relevant for another art history. Renaissance was the discovery of
Antique Greece, our contemporary Renaissance is the discovery of a
strange animal named Gnou ;-) (seriously the discovery of this new
new world, the internet and its culture, products, political
practice, economical way)


À (At) 14:28 -0400 24/04/01, nettime's_realtime_compression_lib
écrivait (wrote) :
>Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 11:20:18 +0200
>To: Florian Cramer <paragram@gmx.net>, nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
>From: Anne Nigten <anne@v2.nl>
>Subject: Re: <nettime> Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK,
>   April 5-6, 2001)
[...]
>   I might be wrong, but it seems to me that
>  >this situation is without parallel in the history of art. Music written
>  >in traditional score notation, for example, is formatted according to an
>  >open standard available as free knowledge, and according to
>  >international copyright law, at least all music by composers who died
>  >before 1931 is in the public domain.

In France music or text or pictures are in domaine public 70 years
after the author died.

>In the case of visual art, one
>  >could argue that (as Duchamp and Warhol demonstrate) museums with their
>  >mere spaces control the definition and format of art, but at least there
>  >is and has been art, from Dada, Fluxus to Conceptual and Net Art, which
>  >evaded or subverted this control.
>  >

I won't say that. Duchamp didn't say that museum area makes the art
objects but it was the public who made it ("ce sont les spectateurs qui
font le tableau" MD). Because the museum space is a public space: it
is ours. It must be so. If not, it could be controled by an owner who
could make Culture a private business. No more public for creating
art, no more artists to point what could be a possible art.
This is why Mallarme is very important for us when he said that
nothing happens but the place. With the internet I think we are in
this place where what is being art is the place and the place we take
with some forms. Forms doesn't necessarily mean aesthetics but ethicals forms.

>Antoine, it would be good to have your opinion about the statement above of
>florian

I tried (sorry for my language. You know what? I am working to
improve it every days!)
-- 

Antoine Moreau
	      Copyleft_Attitude
	<http://www.artlibre.org>

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