Blog

On 29th February I’ll be leading the workshop at Maker Monday at Birmingham Open Media.

Glitch Art describes the process of misusing and reappropriating hardware and software to make visual art. In this part theory, part practice workshop we will consider ways in commonly used programs can be misused to interpret various data in different ways.

For the practical part of the workshop you’ll need a laptop/computer (Mac/Windows/Linux) with the following software installed:

• GIMP
• Audacity
• a good text editor such as Notepad++, TextEdit or Scite

Tickets for the event are free, so get in on it now! There’ll be pizza as well :-)

Elephant Magazine published a a review of the Common Property exhibition by Robert Shore on their blog on 10th February.

Roberts mentions the ‘Amen Break’, a six-second drum loop taken from a 1960s recording by the funk and soul group The Winstons which, according to whosampled.com, has been sampled 1,862 times since—without a single royalty or clearance payment being made to the original musicians for its use. ‘It’s basically been in every hip-hop song since the Eighties,’ says Roberts, who is pleased that a recent crowdfunding campaign raised £24,000 for the Winstons’ frontman Richard Spencer. At the same time he’s clear that artists and musicians should be allowed to work more freely with copyright-protected sources where the uses are, to repeat the term mentioned above and employed in the courts (just in case you find yourself summoned), ’transformative’. ‘It’s not plagiarism,’ he says. ‘It’s cutting and pasting. Culture is made in that way. People take it and morph it into something new. If you had to pay for everything, it would be impossible.’

Read the full feature on their website.

Following the opening of the Common Property exhibition at Jerwood Visual Arts I was interviewed by Filippo Lorenzin about the exhibition and my views on copyright in general. On 8th February this interview was published on the Furtherfield website.

I think Copyright as a whole is in a terrible state. As Cory Doctorow suggests in the exhibition programme (which is in itself an excerpt from his book “Information Doesn’t want to be Free”) Copyright as we know it isn’t written for artists or any individual. Its verbose terms and complexities cannot be understood and are probably not even read by most of us. They are written for other lawyers. If, in order to go about our creative business, we are expected to read and understand the terms and conditions and law - it is estimated that it would take 76 days to read all of the Ts and Cs of websites we use - what time do we have to be creative?

Read the full interview on the Furtherfield website.

On 21st January I went to London Art Fair to take part in a discussion about Copyright and Intellectual Property and the Common Property exhibition at Jerwood Space. If you weren’t there, or you were and wanted to refresh your memory, the audio is now online.

The discussion featured myself, Hannah Pierce, Curator of Common Property, Shane Burke, current PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London, and Shonagh Manson, Director of Jerwood Charitable Foundation. The exhibition runs from 15th January - 21st February,

On 6th February I’ll be part of the TRANSFORMERS screening happening at the College Art Association Conference in Washington DC.

Computer programming is an often invisible force that affects many aspects of our contemporary lives. From how we gather our news, maintain our libraries, or navigate our built environment, code shapes the interfaces and information they connect to. Artists who work with these languages as material can critically excavate code and its effects. The works included in this screening include animation and video that are produced through the use and manipulation of code and/or data.

The selected works will be screened during CAA on Saturday, February 6th from 9:00am- 10:30am in the Media Lounge and is simultaneously available online through the New Media Caucus Vimeo Channel.

The screening is organised by Darren Douglas Floyd, Artist/Filmmaker, Mat Rappaport, Artist, Columbia College Chicago, and A. Bill Miller, Artist, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. My contribution is a shorter live performanec of the Sonification Studies performance I did at glitChicago in 2014. I’ll update this post with the new video once the event is over. Video below: