It is hard to follow such experts and pioneers of the practice of
archiving and preserving difficult art works, but I want to add a note
regarding free culture, artist run projects, and thinking of the
living present as an archive.
I have been working on a project called One For The Commons (URL
coming soon) with Fred Benenson of Creative Commons, and Patrick
Davison, with advisory support from Jon Ippolito, Richard Rinehart,
Eyebeam, Rhizome.org and CUNY. The central premise is that there is
very little Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed work
_to_be_archived_ from the second half of the 20th century, and that we
have to *free* this work. If you tried to make a Creative Commons or
GFDL text book on art since 1940 you couldn't; it wouldn't have images
in it.
Here is the short version of HOWTO add work to the One For The Commons
archive
http://i4tc.blip.tv/file/2132717/
In writing the recent book Digital Foundations: An Introduction to
Media Design with the Adobe Creative Suite (co-authored with xtine
burrough), xtine and I had great difficulty getting image rights for
the works we wanted to include. Image rights agencies quoted us a
price around $20,000, and would have to be relicensed for use in other
languages. Obviously this was many times our entire advance. And that
is money that never really reaches the artists, but rather the whole
pie is cut down by all of the paperwork, administrative wrangling, and
legal prosecution that results from this kind of attitude.
There are a number of resources for Public Domain & Creative Commons
images, art and design on the internet, but they either lack image
quality, aesthetic quality, or historical importance. There are a
number of works on the Wikimedia Commons from before 1923 which are a
great resource (though most are low resolution.), and some
contemporary works which are Creative Commons licensed, but the vast
majority of all visual artworks are (by legal default) copyright. You
can see the results of our extensive research here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalfoundations/
In particular there is a huge hole between 1950, when the government
stopped producing high quality design work & propaganda, and 2000,
when people started to think about sharing and the so called "global
village," and the Creative Commons licensing was created. Many of
these artists are still alive. They can still make decisions about
their work and their estate.
This is a problem because something has to give. Either the books are
reproduced without images, people disregard copyright alltogether (and
end up nervous about legal issues,) a lot of money and human energy is
wasted filing paperwork (and books cost too much), work is left in
obscurity, and/or lesser works are chosen.
*A partial solution*
One For the Commons is asking living artists, who can still make
decisions about their works to declare at least one of their images PD
or CC-BY-SA. At least one image, though more would be outstanding. For
commercial use, which means that it can be used in art history
textbooks, posters, magazines. At at least 3000px on the largest
dimension, so it can actually be used in print; if the original image
is a digital file of a lower dimension, such as a website screenshot,
it should be at the original dimension
*Why do it?*
1. We are going to make a book every year: "457 for the Commons",
and for artists who put enough work into the archive, we are going to
make monographs. We have commitments from several awesome artists,
and expect this to be one of the biggest draws. We are pursuing
several promising channels for publication, from DAP to lulu.com
2. As Tim O'Reilly has pointed out , "Obscurity is a far greater
threat to authors and creative artists than piracy".
3. For younger, emerging artists by making their work more
available it is more likely to be written about.
4. This will insure that the highest quality image with the
correct image caption will be used (far too often low res images with
incorrect captions are used).
5. Older politically motivated artists are often effectively
hoarding cultural capital, which is against their own (formely)
anarcho-marxist beliefs (aka the guilt trip).
*Notability*
One of the most difficult problems to solve will be editing. Right now
there are too few truly notable works that are CC/PD licensed. And
most of them have come out of Eyebeam,
The route that might work best is to use a system already in place:
Wikipedia's notability guidelines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
). The images themselves can be hosted on Wikimedia Commons, and only
images by artists who have met the notability of wikipedia's peer
editing process will be included in the One For The Commons archive.
*100 light bulbs are brighter than a star*
Fred Benenson of Creative Commons has pointed out that working with
big name creators is difficult, and reaps less rewards than working
with emerging creators. A few years back Creative Commons produced a
CD of stars including the Beastie Boys, and Chuck D. One track per
artist. It was a huge effort, lots of red tape and lawyers, and caused
them to think twice about that approach. Since then they have been
working more towards volume with younger artists. So, getting CC
licensing into Flickr's interface is way way way way more powerful
than getting Chuck D to release a track CC, no matter how awesome
Chuck D is.
So, we are looking for younger artists. Artists like myself and my
peers. Artists who are regularly featured on blogs, in magazines, and
in books, but who are tired of getting their captions labelled
incorrectly, and having the editor choose the wrong image.
So I put this out there on CRUMB as another example, one that is
artist driven, and very grass roots. I want to spread the word in
advance of our launch, and welcome (notable) artists on the list to
follow the instructions in the HOWTO (http://i4tc.blip.tv/file/
2132717/), and generally get the party started.
Yours,
Michael
----
Michael Mandiberg
Senior Fellow // Eyebeam
Asst Professor // CSI/CUNY
http://Mandiberg.com
http://twitter.com/mandiberg
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