Moonshake and Hit the Ground Running

I am writting this at Arlanda Airport near Stockholm...I've been back in Sweden about 2 hours (enough time for a sauna and a sandwich) and it feels great returning to the cool and active north. The first thing that hit me was the next Moonshake festival:

MOONSHAKE IN WONDERLAND
4 December 2004, 18-01
Konsthögskolan,
Ö Strandgatan 32, Umeå
18 år/80 kr. Endast förköp!
Biljetter kommer att säljas på
Burmans musik och Garageland Records, samt på Konsthögskolan
och i Hörsalsrundan (Samhällsvetarhuset)

This is going to be wild as it is to be held at the Umeå University Arts School and the headlining band (of five or six to play) is none other than Finnish psych improv sensation Avarus.....I am jumping up and down with the excitment. Email me if anyone needs details, a place to stay in umeå or help with tickets....

music sunshine and furniture

It has been a while. These last two weeks have been filled with packing and shifting furniture and thousands of books, spending time with friends and playing music. Australia is entering into summer and the weather here is brilliant at the moment. Tomorrow I return to the wintery north but am really looking foward to seeing my family again. Twenty six hours in the air and I'll be home again.

Diwali and the reason of memory

I have fifteen minutes before they close the "courtesy internet" here at Hong Kong airport. Things seem to be changing here in HK since the handback to China: connections slower, security tighter, pages not available for view. But i've only been here 30 mins so who knows really.
When I few into London it was a beautiful clear night and the carpet lights of the huge metropolis were sprinkled everywhere with the constant sparkle of fireworks.. Green red orange blue. It was an amazing sight. Having been so immersed in the literature of the 16-18th centuries these last few months I immediately thought of Guy Fawkes night and filled my head with images of the catholic plot and then these unfolded to the vast literary history of the city.
HOWEVER when I asked one of the flight attendants what the fireworks were for he answered: "It Diwali" the Hindu New Year's celabration......how the world is changing.

Howardism

No blogging recently and none for the next two days. I am about to board a plane for the long flight to fly to Australia and although I have several hours in Hong Kong airport where they had (last time I was there) free internet, Ill see if anything interesting happens in the many hours in between here and there. Very much depends on whom I sit next to I suppose.
Since Thursday I have been in the sphere of Howard Rheingold and it has been most enjoyable. Actually the last few days in and around HUMlab have been great with visitors from Holland, Germany and Finland for Blogwalk and then a seminar and a workshop from Howard.
Apart from my high interest in Howard's work in his watching the techno-flock and what these smart mobs will do next with the ever diversifying and more powerful tools available, and his studies on the dynamics of collective action and cooperation, he is also a really interesting cultural figure in himself.
His stories about his own experiences with cultural figures that I have admired and read about since I was a teenager were great. As I continue working in cyberculture I am becoming more and more drawn to the idea of a visit to San Francisco...
Long Live Howardism!!!!

Mask

Whilst in Paris this summer we were walking around the backstreets near Place De Clichy when we came across a playground filled with children. Our son rushed in and began communicating through play with the French and Arabic speaking children. We sat in the sunshine, looking at the half demolished buildings which were near the playground. Beside one of these in the street was a huge pile of stuff...clothes, kitchen utensils, books, ornaments, furniture, boxes and jars filled with things. Going through the stuff was a small solidly built man dressed in a combination of postal, military and civilian clothes, with a large hand drawn wagon next to him.
I approached, as in my past I have had experience with the gathering of things left over or 'gleaning' as it was once called. We struck up a converstaion. He spoke good English, had been in Australia and had a police badge from the Victorian Police Service to prove it. Whilst in Australia he had also lived as a gleaner, leaving the country after 12 months with 70 kilos of gather objects to resell in Paris where he lived. His name was Titus, he believed the young of today where too materially minded and that why there was so much stuff lying around as the "yups" as he called them just threw stuff away when they wanted something new....like children.
Titus invited me to take several prize items he had in his wagon, a chinese robe, some sandlewood powder, a Balinese mask and this:




It is native American I believe, possible from Canada. On the back is written $47 J.E. It is 20.5cm wide and 26.5cm long. if anyone knows anything about this sort of thing let me know please.

Thanks to Titus, wherever he may be.......

Digital Copyright, Ownership and Identity

Digital Copyright, Ownership and Identity

Today I welcome to HUMlab those attending the first Forum HUMlab on Digital Copyright, Ownership and Identity. Perhaps we could have just given this forum the single title of Digital Copyright and still have had more than enough to discuss. However following my reading of some of the source material, in particular Lessig’s three texts, I understand this to be a complex and far reaching field of knowledge with implications far outside the realm of cyberspace. These are international phenomena with the centre of much digital law being the United States but legal cases being tried in almost every continent where digital technology is manifest, often based upon international legislation as originating in the United States. As a direct result of these new technologies of mediation and text reproduction the concept of Fair Use has been challenged, reinterpreted and remains today, according to many, unclear and prone to subjective interpretation. Perhaps one of the strongest illustrations of how the expansion of the digital domain has changed notions of copyright, ownership and identity is in the web log or Blog of the President of the United States which is a copyright protected document, the first time the public works of a serving American President have been subject to such (Lessig 2003).
From the issue of Fair Use it is only a short step to the domain of the Creative Commons. This is an ancient term applied to a postmodern concept, a blend if you will:

“The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others, through a variety of licensing and contract schemes, which may include dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems which current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.
The project provides several free licenses that copyright holders can use when they release their works on the web. They also provide RDF/XML metadata that describes the license and the work to make it easier to automatically process and locate licensed works. They also provide a 'Founder's Copyright' [1] (http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/) contract, intended to re-create the effects of the original U.S. Copyright created by the founders of the U.S. Constitution.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons

For more information of copyright see the digital commons resource the Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law

Further Key terms:
Rivalrous/ non-rivalrous resources.
The four fair use factors:
What is the character of the use?
What is the nature of the work to be used?
How much of the work will you use?
What effect would this use have on the market for the original or for permissions if the use were widespread.
From http://www.utsystem.edu/ogc/intellectualproperty/copypol2.htm

Improvised Bohemian Sound Experience

I will be travelling to the town of my birth next week and whilst there I shall be participating in the longest running artistic collaboration of my life. Since 1987-88 myself and a group of dear and likeminded friends have been 'jamming' with whatever we found which could serve as instruments. This has been going on for so long that although we meet quite irregulary we still fall back into intuitive patterns of co operative playing. There exists several hundred tapes from these meetings, made in studios, homes, halls, even over distance through mailing of CD's and multi-track recoding.

Unreal estate

My childhood home is up for sale. In the agency photo (click on above image) you can see (to the right of the shop front) the verandah room (with it's own door...most handy for the errant sixteen year old) I lived and dreamt in from the age of twelve until my leaving home a few weeks short of my eighteenth birthday. My father has lived in the rambling old place since 1982 but now he is moving due to ill health, into the nearby larger city of Toowoomba. Next week I will be travelling to Australia - and early summer sunshine :)to help for a couple of weeks with the packing and moving.
If anyone is interested in purchasing a country retreat with possible commercial or even a commune or cult possibilites situated on the rolling eucalyptus hills of the eastern Darling Downs, two hours west of Brisbane, three hours from some of the best surfing beaches in the world.....click on the image (taken from the rear of the house).

All Hail the Chief

It looks like we have a winner.

Tristram Shandy.Com

Having returned to the paper texts after a few heady days amongst the magical world of Art and Technology I have started reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman by Lawrence Stern. To my great surprise (having just emerged from the tortuous morality of Moll Flanders and The Pilgrim's Progress)I find that Tristram Shandy is a satirical hypertext with stream of consciousness prose running into appropirated textual form (letters, diary, a dedication 'for sale')followed by direct address and metatextual reference.....Great stuff!
It has already been translated over to cybertext form HERE with a large amount of extra study and critical material also on site.

Virtual Reality Oganisations and Sites

A player wearing a modelled interactive head of cult leader David Koresh plays the C-Level modified game Waco Resurection during the game installation piece.

This is a great list of links for information, images, videos and projects in regard to what is commonly called "Virtual Reality" however I am beginning to prefer the term "Augmented Reality" (AR) as these days it is hard distinguish between the virtual and the real without even turning on the computer.