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I’m happy to announce the second iteration of No Copyright Infringement Intended  will be taking place at Vivid Projects, Birmingham, from 1st - 23rd September.

No Copyright Infringement Intended is a group exhibition exploring the relationship between copyright and culture in the digital age, investigating how the concept of ownership and authorship is evolving and coming into conflict with outdated copyright and intellectual property laws.

Since the 1990s the internet has provided the opportunity for mass copying, redistribution and remixing of content – profoundly changing the way culture is produced and shared and sparking legal battles and debates that still rage on. Today, the increasing availability of technologies like 3D scanning and 3D printing have extended the ability to digitally copy and reproduce to the physical realm.

For many people now, mass sharing, copying and remixing seems like a natural form of self expression. Rather than embracing this change and using it to their advantage, rights holders and lawyers often resort to reinforcing outdated laws – penalising those who copy – and placing barriers on technology’s ability to share information and content freely.

Meanwhile, among artists there is widespread misunderstanding of copyright and how it affects their work. The phrase “No Copyright Infringement Intended” is often used as an attempt to avoid repercussions of copyright infringement. The phrase has no legal standing, but its widespread usage shows a lack of awareness of existing laws and the consequences of breaking them.

Featuring 10 national and international artists working across a range of creative practices, the exhibition highlights the ongoing tension between production and copyright, considers the new artistic, social and political possibilities created through this tension and suggests new ways forward for artists, rights holders and the wider creative community.

The exhibition features work by Nick Briz, Emilie Gervais, Nicolas Maigret, Christopher Meerdo, Jan Nikolai Nelles & Nora Al-Badri, Duncan Poulton, Fernando Sosa, Andrea Wallace & Ronan Deazley.

Like the first iteration of the exhibition, there will be a number of related events including:

• Memes (For Luc Tuymans), 12th September
• Copyright As Frame And Prison, 14th September
• Curator’s Tour, 16th September
• #accordingToTheInternet, 21st September

This September I’ll be flying out to Warsaw, Poland to take part in CopyCamp 2017. The Internet of Copyrighted Things.

Is your life affected by copyright? No doubts if you are into culture, as you are certainly aware that you have to adjust to it when building upon others’ work or when planning to make a living from creativity. You must have heard about copyright also if you are a teacher, a scientist, or a programmer, as copyright-protected works are used in education, research, and technology.

But were you aware that using a mixture of copyrights, other exclusive rights such patents or database rights, and technology (the so-called DRM) virtually all information goods may be appropriated? In the age of “Internet of Things” this means that more and more things you own contain a computer program or data subject to someone else’s exclusive control. Obviously, this has a profound impact on every aspect of everyone’s life.

The primary goal of CopyCamp 2017 is to broaden the scope of the debate about exclusive rights. We want to talk about culture, science, and education, but we also want to discuss how exclusive rights are used in, for example, health and food. We will listen to stories touching on real-life issues in the following thematic tracks:

• business models, heritage digitization, remix
• health, food, security, and exclusive rights
• text and data mining, machine learning, online education
• IoT: autonomous cars, smart homes, wearables
• hacking government data, public procurement, public aid in culture

I’ll be delivering a presentation about copyright and digital culture, focusing largely on the No Copyright Infringement Intended exhibition that took place at Phoenix in Leicester and will be making it’s way to Vivid Projects in September. I’ll be talking alongside a great many copyright experts, artists, hackers and more including Mitch Altman and Nick Briz.

Did I mention it’s all free?

Many thanks to Near Now for providing financial support for me to be able to attend CopyCamp.

I’ll be performing at a number of Algoraves this Summer, and rather than make posts for each one here’s a list of ones happening between June - August:

Supersonic Festival, 16th June

Supersonic Festival is back in Birmingham after a one-year break and I’m curating and performing at it’s first Algorave. Alongside Mothwasp the Algorave will feature a collaboration between Heavy Lifting and Blood Sport with me on visuals, BITLIP, and Miri Kat.

BUMP, 23rd June

BUMP is a one-day design conference taking place in Kortrijk, Belgium. The lineup features speakers including Moon Ribas and Alex McLean amongst many others. Myself, Yaxu, and Algobabez will be providing algorithmic beats and visuals at the afterparty at De Kreun Rooftop.

bluedot festival, 9th July

After an amazing first appearance at bluedot in 2016, Algorave will be back at bluedot festival in Greater Manchester on 9th July. The lineup includes myself on visuals, with Coral Manton, Calum Gunn, Anny, Belisha Beacon, Canute, and Miri Kat.

Green Man festival, 19th August

Algorave will be making its first appearance at Einstein’s Garden at Green Man festival in Abergavenny, Wales. Lineup includes Qirky, Joanne, littlelifeform, Yaxu, and Chez.io.

If you wanna keep up with what I’m doing be sure to check out my events page or follow my Tweets.

On 5th May Blood Sport released their latest LP, Live at Cafe Oto which, as the name suggests, is a live recording of a 40 minute set they did as part of their residency at Cafe Oto.

To coincide with its release Blood Sport asked me to create a one-take video. The video below shows track two from the LP, Melts Into.

I first met Blood Sport whilst doing visuals for them + Heavy Lifting at the AlgoMech closing party. The visuals for that night, and my visuals in general, tend to be quite visuals noisy and heavily saturated with colour and pattern.

A post shared by Antonio Roberts (@hellocatfood) on Nov 21, 2016 at 8:09am PST

Under the guidance of Bloodsport I wanted to have each track of piece have its own unique identity. When working in programs like Blender or video editing software it can be quite easy to precisely time changes in visuals to music. If any mistakes, even minute ones, are made they can be rectified before rendering.

In a live setting having this amount of control becomes a lot more difficult and there’s no way to rectify mistakes at a later date. I can plan to cue certain effects but it’s still a constant case of responding to the music. In some ways the precise cueing and triggering of effects could be preprogrammed and automated, but this removes the live element of the live performance.

For this video I turned to my tool of choice, Pure Data. It’s a dataflow language, similar to vvvv, Max MSP, and Quartz Composer, that can be used for both music and visuals. I like it as the flow of data is visualised for you and it lends itself very well to live performances.

Within Pure Data I set up various elements, like the spinning cubes, the tunnel, feedback in the background etc and would trigger and manipulate them at certain times.

As you can see the from screenshot of there’s a lot of controls and so I rely a lot on random number generators. This keeps things really interesting but can result in unpredictable results. Sometimes some of the over saturation and movement of objects is me scrambling to reset values but sometimes I like these accidents and so let it carry on.

I avoided using prerecorded video and made all of my own source textures and 3d models myself in Blender, Krita, Imagemagick and GIMP.

The choice to work with still images instead of gifs or videos was inspired by some recent work I’ve seen from artists like Carrie Gates and Sam Mattacott. I liked how even with just one source image they can create a sense of movement.

For future work I’m going to be moving away from pure Pure Data slightly by incorporating OpenGL shaders which I think will give me a lot more flexibility.

The full 40 minute video will be made available at a later date. In the meantime you should buy their LP. They will be performing alongside Heavy Lifting at Supersonic Festival on June 16th.

On 5th May Blood Sport released their latest LP, Live at Cafe Oto which, as the name suggests, is a live recording of a 40 minute set they did as part of their residency at Cafe Oto.

To coincide with its release Blood Sport asked me to create a one-take video. The video below shows track two from the LP, Melts Into.

The full 40 minute video will be made available at a later date. In the meantime you should buy their LP. They will be performing alongside Heavy Lifting at Supersonic Festival on June 16th.