Friday, November 09, 2007

Friday Downstreams (Emerging with the Guards Absent)


Hitodama by Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788)from Hyakki Yakō (lit. "Night Parade of One Hundred Demons")


The above image comes from my researching the very large field of Pokémon Studies with my son. One of the characters is based on the Hitodama, a Japanese night spirit of the dead. I myself have just come from the Oil 21 workshop which I enjoyed enormously. Spending days in the company of digital artists who are political and cultural activists is a great thing. So, now to the media for the week. I am posting here several sites that exist in the grey zone between what is legal and what it not. I do this in the spirit of research and the inquiring mind. You use it at your own disgression, which is what it means to be an adult anyway....enjoy:

Download Finished
Download Finished transforms and re-publishes films from P2P networks and online archives. Found footage becomes the rough material for the transformation machine, which translates the underlying data structure of the films onto the surface of the screen. The original images dissolve into pixels, thus making the hidden data structure visible. Through DOWNLOAD FINISHED, file sharers become authors by re-interpreting their most beloved films.
Download Finished is just one of the delights given to the world by Sven Konig. The rest of his genius, including the brilliant ScRambLed hackz is HERE.


Steal This Film II
I have it on disc. It is being premiered tonight in Stockholm. Part One is also available from the link and Part two should be up there in the next few days:

Steal This Film is a film series documenting the movement against intellectual property and was a talking point in the British Documentary Festival. Part One, produced in Sweden and released in 2006, takes account of the prominent players in the Swedish piracy culture: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån, and the Pirate Party. This film includes a critical analysis of an alleged regulatory capture performed by the Hollywood film industry to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO. Alleged aims included the application of pressure to Swedish police into conducting a search and seizure against Swedish law for the purpose of disrupting The Pirate Bay's BitTorrent tracker.



The Last Ripper
TheLastRipper can save Last.fm streams to mp3's, while downloading album cover, appending ID3v2 tags and organizing you music after Artist/Album/Track. TheLastRipper will also help you generate playlists from the data available from you Last.fm account.

DJ Danger Mouse, The Grey Album (2004)
One of the more talked about artifacts of the Oil 21 sessions. DJ Danger Mouse remixed the vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' White Album and called his creation The Grey Album. He sent about 3,000 promo copies out, and was soon served with a cease-and-desist notice from EMI, who owns the rights to the White Album master.You can get it here. The grey Video as also worth checking out.



Doom9
The hacks, the cracks, everything you need to understand and use DVD.

Karagaga
You have to be invited to this one...but what a treasure house if you love art film.
From its inception, KaraGarga was designed as a source for non-mainstream and off-beat movies. We try to distance ourselves from the pervasive and easily available Hollywood (and Bollywood) mainstream and show people that a huge and exciting world of cinema exists beyond that. Therefore we do not allow any mainstream movies on the tracker.

Mac the Ripper
MacTheRipper is a free DVD ripper (extractor) for Mac OS X. It can extract commercial DVD movies to your hard drive, minus all the copy protections and region controls put in place by DVD publishers. You can then use various tools to burn the movie back to DVD-R for use in DVD players, or convert the movie to different formats for playback with a variety of devices. MacTheRipper is intended to backup DVDs you have legally purchased for personal use. Any copyright-infringing activity you choose to perpetrate using this application is illegal, immoral, and beyond our control.

Florian Cramer my site
Unless stated otherwise, my writings can be freely used
under the terms of
- the GNU Free Documentation License, with no invariant
sections, no front-cover texts, and no back-cover texts;
- the GNU General Public License

Copy Me
kopimi (copyme), symbol showing that you want to be copied. use kopimi in your own fancy. kopimi may be put on homepages or blogs, in books, in software, as sound logos in music or whatever.

1. copy one of these kopimi symbols, or make up your own
2. put it on a homepage
3. link the logotype to: www.kopimi.com/kopimi

Vox Vulgaris - The Shape of Medieval Music to Come (2003)
Medieval music from Rasmus Felischer's (piratbyrå) band.

Happy Birthday to John by Jonas Mekas (b. 1922)
16 mm film, 24 min

October 9, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono's art, designed by the Father of Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art (curated by David Ross, presently director of the Whitney Museum). Same day an unusual group of John's and Yoko's friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg and many others gathered to celebrate John's birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event.
We hear a series of improvised songs, sung by John, Ringo, Yoko Ono, and their friends,--not a clean studio recording, but as a birthday singing, free and happy. This is the only recording of that event.
There are other images that are included in the film that develops like a "music video": the John & Yoko party at Klein's /their agent/ June 12, 1971; August 1972 at the Madison Square Garden; the Central Park Vigil on the day John was shot; and some other rare footage that I have taken on different occasions of John and Yoko.
The soundtrack, besides the unique recording of the Birthday Party singing, contains John's comments on his own film-making, his "home movies" he did on 8mm. The most catchy song, sung in an improvised manner, in the film, is the Attica Blues. The drummer for the last part of the film is Dalius Naujolaitis.

Concrete by Sara Sackner
Ruth and Marvin Sackner share their love of words and images with an intimate tour of their Miami Beach home/museum -- the worlds largest private collection of concrete/visual poetry from such twentieth century art movements as Italian Futurism, Russian and Eastern European Avant Garde, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, Ultra, Tabu-Dada, Lettrisme, and Ultra-Lettrisme. Over sixty-thousand objects from around the word speak volumes about a compulsive and joyful life of collecting art, poetry, and artist books.
With art by Guillaume Apollinaire, Allen Ginsberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Matta, Bob Cobbing, Tom Phillips, Katharina Eckhart, Gertrude Stein, Ben Vautier and many, many more... and with music by Terry Riley, Arnold Dreyblatt and more
Ruth and Marvin Sackner founded the Archive in Miami Beach, Florida in 1979. Its initial mission was to establish a collection of books, critical texts, periodicals, ephemera, prints, drawings, collages, paintings, sculptures, objects, manuscripts, and correspondence dealing with precedent and contemporary, internationally produced, concrete and visual poetry. The antecedent material had at its starting point, Stephane Mallarme 's poem, "Un Coup de Des" (Cosmopolis, 1897).

Postsingular A Novel by Rudy Rucker
Postsingular takes on the question of what will happen after the Singularity—what will happen after computers become as smart as humans and nanotechnology takes on the power of magic?

Luis Buñuel - French documentary
Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française
37 min 25 sec French with English Subtitles
'Cinéastes de notre temps' (April 4, 1964). Focuses on Luis Buñuel, surrealist filmmaker, his exile and his early career.


Good Copy Bad Copy
Documentary about copyright and culture, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lawrence Lessig, and many others with various perspectives on copyright.

sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith (2007) a film by Simon Morris
"If every word spoken in New York City daily were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, each day there would be a blizzard."
The words of Kenneth Goldsmith, described by Juliana Spahr as 'the world's leading conceptual poet', and by himself as 'the most boring writer that has ever lived'. His ideas are being brought to the screen by artist and director Simon Morris in a film to premiere at the British Library in London on Friday 26th October. Christian Bök, one of Canada's leading poets and the winner of the 2002 Griffin poetry prize, said: "Goldsmith is our James Joyce for the 21st century."
'sucking on words' introduces 8000 of those daily words - a flurry of excitement as the climates of conflict and admiration come together around Goldsmith's pioneering conceptual poetics. Shot on location in Manhattan in February this year, 'sucking on words' features interviews with the leading critics and poets Bruce Andrews, Barbara Cole, and Robert Fitterman.

William Gibson Rolling Stone Interview, November 7 2007.
What are the major challenges we face?

Let's go for global warming, peak oil and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous computing?
Totally ubiquitous computing. One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.


Have a joyable week.

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