internet

the human network

I've just been reading articles on the human network blog by Mark Pesce. all have been interesting, particularly the Unevenly Distributed : Production Models for the 21st Century where he talks about the death of television and film industries in their current distribution method. also mentioned were the examples of Ronda Byrne's online / streaming version of The Secret and the success it has brought her. as well as the "League of Peers" movie Steal this Film - Part 1 which is a documentary about file sharing and the troubles faced by Sweden's leading BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

another article I read last month (when I couldn't post to the site), was the Kevin Kelley article "1,000 True Fans" from his Technium blog.


A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

clojure - a lisp scripting language for JVM

just read about this on the toplap list :
Clojure was developed by architect / programmer Rich Hickey who has worked on projects such as scheduling, automation, election displays, fingerprinting, audio analysis, machine listening.

"Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection."

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Wikiversity

Wikiversity is an online education resource : " Wikiversity is a community for the creation of learning activities and development of free learning materials. Students and teachers are invited to join the project as collaborators in teaching, learning, and research. Wikiversity strives to be an open and vibrant community where you can explore and learn about your personal interests. Wikiversity hosts and develops free learning materials for all age groups. Please participate and help build collaborative learning projects and communities; at Wikiversity we learn by doing, we learn by editing. "

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FracturedSpaces - looking for demos / artists for cd release

FracturedSpaces would like it to be known that it is looking to release its first CD within the next four months, To that end I am looking for quality established bands/artists with a recording already finished, and who have no label as yet, to submit demos/samples with a view to possible release. I am
looking for works within the following genres only please, at least initially:

Drone
Drone doom metal
Dark ambient
Experimental
Noise
Industrial/Death Industrial

For fuller details please email:
simonjay704 AT hotmail.com

I look forward to hearing from potential collaborators!

Regards

Simon Marshall-Jones|FracturedSpacesRecords

DREAMLAND RECORDINGS
www.dreamlandrecordings.com

STRING THEORY guitar compilation available now. AUD $16.00

All other releases AUD $11.00 Postage Paid. Pay Pal available.

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THURSDAY CLUBS @ Goldsmiths - experimental cinema + more (UK)

** NEW THURSDAY CLUBS: CHANGES and UPDATES **

Supported by the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS and the Goldsmiths GRADUATE
SCHOOL

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor,
right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME

** PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DATE FOR ELENA COLOGNI'S CLUB SESSION HAS BEEN
CHANGED FROM THE 28th of FEBRUARY TO THE 6th of MARCH **

--

*28 FEBRUARY with RAYMOND HARMON
:
Painting in Light: Experimental Film and the Advent of Improvisational
Cinema*

The traditional model for cinematic expression is as a controlled
environment moving forward in a linear direction. From its inception the
art of filmmaking has been dominated by a single form of chronological
development. Each film exists as a series of frames that are static at the
start of the film.

Improvisation, a language largely defined within the practice of music, is

Nam June Paik - Ryuichi Sakamoto video

a video by Nam June Paik (RIP) - this would be fairly easy to do using isadora these days. though a different story if you consider how he made it!

Nam June Paik - Ryuichi Sakamoto; Replica, for keyboard Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkjxG_k0VDo

http://www.spoems.com/tag_paik.html has a collection of his video works

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Videodefunct

Videodefunct is an experimental research project that focuses on inventing a hybrid vlog. A number of work-in-progress prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. A key objective is to design an interactive interface that explores the presentation of online video from a poetic perspective. Videodefunct is being developed by the collective of Keith Deverell, Seth Keen and David Wolf in the School of Applied Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

info from the Videodefunct About page @ http://www.videodefunct.net/

Seth Keen from Videovortex explained the system on the videoblogging group mail list

Thanks Jay for the post on the videodefunct project.

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field recordings and sound walks

a collection of audio recordings, field recordings and sound walks I've done over the years. most of these are on minidiscs or files not uploaded yet, so this is a work in progress as it's probably about time I sorted them out and uploaded some. not sure if they're of interest to anyone else, but they help recall memories for me.

The Digital Artists Handbook

The Digital Artists Handbook is an up to date, reliable and accessible source of information that introduces you to different tools, resources and ways of working related to digital art. The goal of the Handbook is to be a signpost, a source of practical information and content that bridges the gap between new users and the platforms and resources that are available, but not always very accessible. The Handbook will be slowly filled with articles written by invited artists and specialists, talking about their tools and ways of working. Some articles are introductions to tools, others are descriptions of methodologies, concepts and technologies. When discussing software, the focus of this Handbook is on Free/Libre Open Source Software. The Handbook aims to give artists information about the available tools but also about the practicalities related to Free Software and Open Content, such as collaborative development and licenses. All this to facilitate exchange between artists, to take away some of the fears when it comes to open content licenses, sharing code, and to give a perspective on various ways of working and collaborating. -- info via the DAH index page

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South Coast - Brighton (UK) hip hop documentary by Will Jewell

Watch the video

I saw "South Coast" a documentary about Brighton (UK)'s hip hop community by Will Jewell last saturday night at the Jerusalem Cinematheque as part of the British Film Festival. I thought the film was a great balance of original roots of hip hop, respecting the US origins, whilst highlighting the original crews from the local Brighton community and featuring some of the up & coming artists also. a great snap shot into Brighton hip hop. it feels similar to Australian hip hop in some ways.

I wrote some names during the film so I could find out about them later. (hard to read my writing so hopefully I have these right!)

- poets vs MC night / battle

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explorative research links

TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
VISIT TECHGNOSIS AT: http://techgnosis.info
SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

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SXSW 2007 Interactve Conference - Tim Farriss from fourhourworkweek.com

Expand - Collapse

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What is Scion City? - interactive Second Life machinima video series

What is Scion City is a futuristic interactive machinima video movie series made in Second Life. the website has 6 episodes and links to different formats, an FAQ and a submit link where viewers can upload more episodes or related material (photos, documents, movies, etc) discovered about the series and Scion City. visit http://whatisscioncity.com/ for more details and to watch the films.

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Etsy - an online store for handmade products

Etsy.com is a community driven online store that people making handmade goods can sell their products - their motto is "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade". there's a zine called Storque, and you can read about some of the success stories highlighting successful Etsy storeholders. some storeholders have been able to give up their day jobs to sell their works fulltime via Etsy, whilst others are part-time sellers.

Customers can browse by colours and find something to buy that matches that colour. or they can search one of the 105000 stores for one in their local area should they wish to buy local. there are a couple of Time Machines where customers can browse recently and past listed random items, ordered by posting time. Etsy also supports the buy handmade challenge for the holiday season.

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The History of Guerilla Knitting session by Rose White at Chaos Communication Congress

"Guerrilla knitting" has a couple of meanings in the knitting community - to some, it merely means knitting in public, while to others, it means creating public art by knitted means.

Rose White from yarnivore spoke at The History of Guerilla Knitting session at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in 2007 in Berlin on day 3 - 29/12/2007. a torrent video can be downloaded of the session. (open the video in VLC if you don't have another video player that can play the .mkv video file). The Chaos Communication Congress is organised by the Chaos Computer Club, Europe's largest hacker group, founded in 1981.

Rose gave a brief history of knitting, and some of the myths held over the years about the foundations and age of knitting. She compares knitting with computer hacking referring to proprietary knowledge, pattern making, knitting guilds. Also about the commercialisation and control of patterns prior to 1960s and subsequently by Knitting pattern books and yarn companies who controlled the market

Elizabeth Zimmermann who in the 1960s generated generic pattern books which broke out of the usual mold of patterns requiring a yarn makers yarn to make the pattern correctly. Effectively she made knitting open source again! She had a TV show in the USA which brought her style of knitting to the public, and she ran knitting camps to teach others.

Rose also mentioned KnitML, the knitting XML code specification which is being introduced to standardise knitting patterns and terminology.

"The KnitML Project's main goal is to develop and promote adoption of a standard content model for knitting patterns. By developing a community-supported specification (KnitML) and providing basic rendering and transformation tools, the KnitML Project aims to make KnitML easy to use and valuable to the knitter."

Questions were raised also about knitting (patterns) and Creative Commons licencing. many patterns are not available to be used as they are still covered by US copyright so are still unavailable to the public.

Rose talks about giving back the creative power to the knitter - to allow them to modify the patterns, or not make the project exactly as per the pattern. even changing the colours used in an accompanying photo of a finished pattern is a stretch for some knitters!

Rose says, "over the past 30 years or so, there have been different individuals who have contributed to this geekier, more hands on approach to knitting - wresting it out of the control of commercial enterprises. this leads us to guerilla knitting in the end."

Barbara Walker - Rose referred to her as "a knitting engineer". "she wrote 4 books of stitch patterns, where she knitted swatches, and dissected them and included written instructions on how to knit them - stitch by stitch. and she also developed a charting system, so that next to the swatch there would be a grid showing you how to do it in pictures, so that, you didn't even have to speak her language to do it. so that many of these knitting patterns were available, not just to English speakers, but to anyone who could pick them up and look at them. so this enormous dissemination of knowledge occurred when she started doing that."

Debbie New - who creates "labyrinth knitting" and wrote a book called Unexpected Knitting, which includes experimental knitting patterns including her swirl, sculptural, free-form, swatchless, labyrinth, cellular automaton, virtual and ouroborus knitting techniques.

also featured was Dave Cole and his knitted lead teddy bears and giant outdoor knitting using cranes and telephone poles as knitting needles to knit the American Flag at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

the Simply Crafted website also lists some of these knitting pioneers as well as some freeform fibre (knitting & crocheting) artists such as Prudence Mapstone

also mentioned was the new Ravelry site - a social networking site for crafters, knitters and fibre artists, where they can "Organize projects, stash, needles, and more" & "Show off your work. Share your ideas and techniques." & "discover. Find new designs & yarns. Make friends. Try new things." the site is only open in beta stages at the moment. aso of today, they send out 500 - 800 invitations daily and there are currently 6,193 people waiting for their invites, so the site is in demand!

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