Communique from Oil 21

Today I am taking in the Oil 21 workshop Beyond Intellectual Property: From File Sharing to Distributed Archive at Umeå Art Academy. Some very interesting things are being discussed. The 'leaders' of the workshop are Sebastian Lutgert, and Jan Gerber from Berlin. They created in the first six months of this year the Oxdb film data base and search engine. As an excercise in intergrated visualization of information the Oxdb is a nice piece of work. It pulls in information from online torrent downloads of films. The Oxdb does not offer any sort fo downloads but rather it shows what is in circualtion at any time from what people are downloding. The films are then arranged in stll time lines with director, location, production, and more displayed. There are short samples from the films but no more than 30 seconds. As a research archive the Oxdb has a huge potentail for use.
We are now watching the Danish documentry Good Copy Bad Copy (2007) It is of course online and free for all.