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On 20th January a-n published an article/interview/writeup with myself, Hannah Pierce and Owne G Parry. The article focuses on the Common Property exibition and more broadly asks for our thoughts on the state of Copyright. One excerpts from Hannah Pierce discussing the motivation behind the exhibition:

“I remember going through art school and never at any point having any conversations around copyright or what it meant to be working with somebody else’s image. I was really interested by this lack of knowledge that we have; I thought that a really good way to work that out would be through a show.”

And one from me discussing the four video pieces:

His second installation, featuring four video pieces, is inspired by four songs that have been at the centre of copyright lawsuits. “I thought, how can I share this song and get away with it. How else can I share this song with the world?”

[…]

The copyright conundrum this throws up goes to the heart of the debate around creative ownership in the digital age. “It’s still the same song, the data is still the same data, it’s just being reinterpreted,” says Roberts. “So, is that an infringement of copyright?”

Head over to a-n to read the whole article.

On 15th February there will be a tour of the Common Property exhibition at Jerwood Space. To end the tour I’ll be doing a Sonification Studies performance tailored to the exhibition.

An Exhibition Tour of Jerwood Encounters: Common Property led by curator of the exhibition, Hannah Pierce, and Jerwood Visual Arts’ Writer in Residence, Tom Overton.

As a finale to the tour Antonio Roberts, exhibiting artist in Common Property, will perform Sonification Studies. Using Pixel Player (a piece of software created and released by the artist) Roberts will, in real time, translate a selection of images into audio and glitched visuals.

Pixel Player is an update of Pixel Waves, also created and released by Antonio Roberts. It was developed after a visit to The Cyborg Foundation in Barcelona in 2013, and allows the sonification of images based on the colour/RGB values of individual pixels.

Sonification Studies has previous been performed as part of the exhibition, glitChicago, Chicago, 2014..

This event is free but booking is required via Eventbrite

Common Property held its opening event at Jerwood Space on 14th.

Jerwood Encounters: Common Property seeks to demonstrate how artists engage with and relate to copyright through the work of six emerging and mid-career artists, including three new commissions. The exhibition and accompanying events programme seeks to generate new conversations about how copyright is currently impacting the way visual artists make and distribute their work, and demonstrates how artists are challenging the limitations of copyright through their practice.

The exhibition features new commissions by myself, Owen G Parry and Hannah Knox alongside existing works by Edwin Burdis, Rob Myers and SUPERFLEX.

I’m really impressed by curator Hannah Pierce’s selection of artists and artworks that each deal with the broad topic of Copyright in very different ways.

For this exhibition I developed two new works, Transformative Use and a collection of four works, I Disappear, Blurred Lines, My Sweet Lord and Ice Ice Baby.

Photos in this post by Hydar Dewachi.

Transformative Use

This work builds upon the Dead Copyright piece made for the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media and targets one corporation.

I Disappear, Blurred Lines, My Sweet Lord, Ice Ice Baby

These four pieces use the sonification techniques developed in 2013 to create audiovisual data remixes of songs that are well known due to being involved in course cases about copyright.

Already there has been a writing and events surrounding the exhibition. a-n published an interview with myself, Owen G Parry and Hannah Pierce, and on 21st January a panel discussion took place at London Art Fair about Copyright and Intellectual Property. The panel consisted of myself, Hannah Pierce and Shane Burke and was chaired by Shonagh Manson. Future events include a fan club event by Owen G Parry on 29th January and a tour of the exhibition on February 15th that will conclude with a Sonification Studies performance by me.

Thanks

My thanks go out to Hannah Pierce for selecting me for inclusion in this exhibition and to the whole of the Jerwood Visual Arts team for their help installing the works. The exhibition continues at Jerwood Space until 21st February.

I’m happy to announce the launch of archiveremix.com. The site presents a small selection of artefacts from the archives from the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections with the intention of them being starting points for new remixes.

There has been much movement towards encouraging galleries, libraries, archives and museums to open up their archives for use by the public. Quite often this is hampered by a variety of factors including cost, copryright and just having the resources to manage such a task. One approach to this, which served as a big inspiration for this project, came from Oliver Laric. In 2012 he started a project to make 3D scans of sculptural works from the Usher Gallery and The Collection in Lincoln. The resulting remix works that were made from these scans came in various forms including 3D models, videos, gifs.

Taking inspiration from this I set about making use of the archives from University of Birmingham in a creative way. Over the last year I have been releasing remix works on the Archive Remix tumblr site and at the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media. Although they, in some cases, lack narrative, in making these remixes I wanted to show the opportunities to be had from allowing artists to remix works. Of course, this is not a new practice at all with artists doing this in collages, in music and every other creative practice.

The selection made available obviously only represents a small amount of what is available. This was a conscious decision as I did not want to overwhelm artists with too much of a collection.

A number of remixes have already been made by artists that I invited to participate in the Remix Party on 20th January.

The party featured remixes by Dan Hett, Lorna Mills, Ashley James Brown, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Michaël Borras A.K.A. Systaime, Benjamin Berg, Michael Lightborne, Morehshin Allahyari, Daniel Salisbury, Carla Gannis, Faith Holland, Nick Briz, Daniel Temkin, Adam Ferriss, Víctor Arce, Chema Padilla, Kate Spence, Jessica Evans, Emily Haasch. The approaches to working with this archive were very varied indeed. It featured still images, animated gifs, remixes based on compression, videos, and in the case of Nick Briz, an interactive website!

It is my hope that the archiveremix.com site, my exhibition(s) and the work made by the artists joins the case being put forth by websites such as OpenGLAM and encourages more institutions to free their archives.

Remix this

If you feel inspired by any of the works please download them and make a remix of your own! These can then be uploaded back onto the website.

This project couldn’t have been made possible without the support of the University of Birmingham’s Research and Cultural Collections and the amazing web design skills of Sebastian Lenton (you should hire him).

Over time new works from the archives of Research and Cultural Collections will be added, so check back often!