Images and text source: ZDnet

February 25th, 2007

In my  last post, I took a look at the recent proliferation of Web widgets, which are modular content and services that are making it easier for anyone to help themselves to the vast pool of high value functionality and information that resides on the Web today.  Companies are actively “widgetizing” their online offerings so that it can actively be repurposed into other sites and online products.  And as we discussed in the last post, it’s believed that letting users innovate with your online offerings by letting embedding them in their own Web sites, blogs, and applications can greatly broaden distribution and reach, leverage rapid viral propagation over the Internet, and fully exploit the raw creativity that theoretically lies in great quantities on the edge of our networks.

DIY on the Web is looking to be a major trend; Newsweek recently speculated that 2007 will be the Year of the Widget.

Looked at this way, letting thousands and even millions of users build Web sites and apps out of your Web parts and then monetizing it with advertising, usage fees, or subscriptions sounds great in the abstract.  But one of the big outstanding questions is if widgitizing is mostly useful for gaining fast user adoption and market share, and not for building the fundamentals of a viable, long-term business online.  While this last question is still very much an open one, part of the answer will come from the way that the consumption side of DIY develops.  The question is this: Are environments emerging that will enable rich and sophisticated DIY scenarios that are usable by most people?

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Images and text source: ZDnet

February 19th, 2007

One of the hallmarks of a good Web 2.0 site is one that hands over non-essential control to users, letting them contribute content, participate socially, and even fundamentally shape the site itself.  The premise is that users will do a surprising amount of the hard work necessary to make the site successful, right down to creating the very information the site offers to its other users and even inviting their friends and family members to use it.  Web 2.0 newcomers MySpace and YouTube have shown how this can be done on a mass scale surprisingly quickly, and of course older generation successes like eBay and craigslist have been doing this for years.

There’s little question that the Web is increasingly turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves lined with thousands of useful, off-the-shelf parts of every description and utility.As part of this, users are getting increasingly accustomed to the ease of which they can customize their own corners of the Internet, whether it’s a blog, profile page, Web site or even Web application.  While skinning and customizable layouts have been with us on the Web for a long time, increasingly users want to share — or particularly important to this discussion — even repurpose the content and services they find on the Web in locations and forms of their choosing.

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Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 150-158.

Text source: http://www.jstor.org/view/00931896/ap040085/04a00070/0

(Need to be affiliated with an academic research institution to access)

Image and text source: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7is1/desi.htm

Jouvert, Volume 7, Issue 1 (Autumn 2002)

College of Staten Island/CUNY, Staten Island NY

Copyright © 2002 by Ashley Dawson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

1. On a sweltering August afternoon in 1996, New York City’s Summerstage concert series brought the South Asian dance music known as bhangra to Central Park. South Asian families from all over the tri-state area sunned themselves, jostled for room, and danced in a jam-packed sandy space under sun-dappled plane trees. New York turntablist DJ Rekha added some hometown flavor, spinning bhangra remixes to much applause before the Safri Boys, one of Britain’s hottest bhangra bands, took the stage. Although bhangra remix had been transforming South Asian youth culture in the US at least since the release of UK musician Bally Sagoo’s pathbreaking “Star Crazy” album in 1991, the concert in Central Park was a particular milestone. Here, visible to a broad public, was a display of the compelling cultural forms through which South Asians of the diaspora were articulating new, composite identities. The multiple regional contrasts and tensions that define identity within the subcontinent were harmonized in this diasporic context. The result was a powerful sense of cultural unity and pride. Desi (Hindi for “homeboy” or “homegirl”) culture had definitely arrived. [1]

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Can I Get An Amen?, 2004
recording on acetate, turntable, PA system, paper documents
dimensions variable
total run time 17 minutes, 46 seconds

Image and project source: nkhstudio.com

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Image source: http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/

Text source: http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/
humanitieschair/cannibal.html 
1. In your study of rap in Pragmatist aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) you explicitly use the concept of cannibalism to describe rap’s aesthetic of appropriation, its sampling of prerecorded music and other sounds. You even refer to the early rappers, on page 203, as “musical cannibals of the urban jungle.” What has been the reaction to this characterization of rap?
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Image source: http://www.some-assembly-required.net/
Text source: http://creativecommons.org/weblog

December 7th, 2005

Note from source: This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and others about the history and future of Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is a young organization. And while we’ve been more successful than I ever imagined we’d be, we’ve also made mistakes. Some of these mistakes we’ve corrected. Some I hope to persuade us to correct. But throughout the three years since our launch, we have worked hard to build a solid and sustainable infrastructure of freedoms for creators.

Along the way, we have picked up some critics. I don’t have the space here to address every criticism. In this email, I’ll talk about just two — one directed at our NonCommercial license option, and the other at two of CC’s non-core licenses. But I’ll continue this discussion next year in a new forum that we’ll launch just for this purpose. Mark Shuttleworth is my model here, and I will be a part of that discussion whenever I can.

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King Tubby

Image source: reggae.com
Text source: Zone 0

Mix, mix again, remix: copyleft, cut ‘n’ paste, digital jumble, cross-fade, dub, tweak the knob, drop the needle, spin, merge, morph, bootleg, pirate, plagiarize, enrich, sample, break down, reassemble, multiply input source, merge output, decompose, recompose, erase borders, remix again. These are among many of the possible actions involved in what can be broadly labeled “remix culture” – an umbrella term which covers a wide array of creative stances and initiatives, such as: plunderphonics, detritus.net, recombinant culture, open source, compostmodernism, mash-ups, cut-ups, bastard pop, covers, mixology, peer to peer, creative commons, “surf, sample, manipulate”, and uploadphonix. (more…)

Image source: a minima PDF, feature on Marta Menezes’s DNA altered Butterflies. Available at newmediaFIX

This text was written to be part of a curatorial participation by a minima:: magazine in the exhibition NOW 2006, which took place at the CCCB.

Read Spanish Version

For a minima’s participation in Now, I have chosen four texts invested in the crossover of art, science and technology. The texts are “Nature?” by Marta de Menezes, “Observation, Interference and Evolutionary Relationships. (An overview of the Phumox project) – Phumox? What’s that?” by Andy Gracie, “Convergent Realities: art, technology consciousness from the planetary perspective” by Roy Ascott, “Artport” and “Not Just Art—from Media Art to Artware” by Christiane Paul. The first two texts, written by artists/researchers, could be read as honest attempts to cross over art, science and technology; the last two texts, written by theorists, can be read as reflections on such practices. The four texts are sensitive to contextualization and critical commentary, which are expected of art practice today, as well as the urge to do research for the sake of understanding the world and develop technology to do it, which is expected of science and technology.

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Image source: a minima PDF, feature on Marta Menezes’s DNA altered Butterflies. Available at newmediaFIX

Este texto fue escrito para la participación curatorial de la revista a minima:: en la exhibición NOW 2006, la cual se llevó a cabo en el CCCB durante Noviembre del 2006,.
Lea la versión en inglés

Para la participación de a minima en Now, he escogido cuatro textos que se enfocan en el cruce cultural entre arte, ciencia y tecnología. Los textos son “Nature?” por Marta de Menezes, “Observation, Interference and Evolutionary Relationships. (An overview of the Phumox project) – Phumox? What’s that?” por Andy Gracie, “Convergent Realities: art, technology consciousness from the planetary perspective” por Roy Ascott, “Artport” y “Not Just Art—from Media Art to Artware” por Christiane Paul. Los primeros dos textos, escritos por artistas/investigadores activos en el arte, podrian ser considerados atentos en cruzar entre el arte, ciencia y tecnología; mientras que los dos últimos, escritos por teóricos, podrian ser reflecciones sobre tales practicas. Los cuatro textos son sensitivos a la contextualización y comentario crítico, los cuales son esperados de la practica del arte hoy, junto con el impulso de desarrollar investigaciones por la necesidad de comprender el mundo y desarrollar la tecnología para hacerlo, lo cual es esperado de la ciencia y la tecnología.

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