International Day Against DRM

Today is the 3rd of October, the International Day Against DRM. This the first global day for people to rise up and say no to anti-copying technology that treats you like a criminal.

Digital Rights Management technology does not stop media piracy. You get DRM by buying your movies, music, games and books through authorized channels. Most of the stuff you download from P2P networks or buy at open market in Valletta has already had the DRM cracked off of it.

To celebrate No DRM Day I recommend the following (partly borrowed from Boing-Boing):

DefectiveByDesign's list of anti-DRM actions
200 suggestions for activities you can participate in today and all year round to fight DRM.

DRMFree.org
a search-engine for DRM-free music for sale on the Internet, a single index of dozens of sites that sell or give away music without crippleware.

DRM.info
a site aimed at explaining DRM to the uninitiated -- what DRM is, why you should care, and what you can do about it. Tell your friends!

Who Killed TiVoToGo?
a murder-mystery from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that explains how even restricted services that let you get more out of your property are being axed by regulators and the entertainment industry (here's how to fight back).

Kembrew McLeod's guest-edited issue of the journal Cultural Studies
contains uproarious scholarly works on the copyfight.

Anti-DRM banners for your site from Militant Geek.

Here are 10 things you can really do to help eliminate DRM (from the 200 things on DefectiveByDesign list mentioned above):

• Email your friends and family, use our prepared text.

• Add this text to your email signature for the day.
• Post on a forum or message board that you subscribe to.
• Download and print this sign and hang one at your desk, the office water cooler, or in an elevator.
• Download and print this leaflet and give it to coworkers or others you see today, maybe even distribute them on your lunch hour or during your commute.
• Sign the Bono petition. We are getting ready to get his answer.
• Google bomb DRM by adding this link to your website or any web page you can edit.
• Digg the day of action
• Watch these videos on YouTube send them to friends and rate them.
• Photograph your actions and post them to Flickr tagged with "dayagainst drm defectivebydesign".

Live in Valletta

On Saturday 4 and Sunday 5 August we're live at the MITP Theatre courtyard in Valletta. A live webcam is available here during the performances, which start at 9pm on both nights.

Between San Gwann and Valletta

Following two nights at Naasha's Events Lounge in San Gwann, the Objects Found or Lost? project moves on to the Summer University of Performing Arts in Valletta for two more nights.

On the second day at Naasha we experimented with having another blog dedicated for live posts during the performances. Here it is.

And so it begins

Ode to Law

Yehuda Berlinger, who is a internet professional and game designer from Jerusalem, Israel, has rewritten 17USC -- the American Copyright Act -- as a long poem.

The U.S. Copyright code, in verse

So, what's cookin'?

del.icio.us/tonisant

del.icio.us/cristofalix

del.icio.us/lucillecalmel

Now that's Performance Art!!

Enterainment for the Curious Mind

Digital Objects & the Management of Information

Oxford Internet Institute - Digital Objects and the Management of Information

Live event at 13:30 - 17:30 on Tuesday 20 June 2006

Webcast at http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/

Take Any 3 Objects

This is one of the more thought provoking passages in Baykam's book...it appears on page 272:

Please name any three objects. Anything. Here, I am writing spontaneosly. Telephones, little rocks, and sand, ... or an arm chair. I can put 15 telephones hanging with transparent ropes from the ceiling, I can put sand on the floor, an arm chair in the middle and surrond the arm chair with little rocks. Or name any other things: 10 glasses, five filled with water, five empty, flowers on the ceiling and kitschy lamps making shadows of the glasses! Anything, you name it! There will always be a critic ready to philosophize about "the work" in 60 pages!

FOUND OBJECT TS0003 [video]:
The Cut-Ups - William S. Burroughs

Monkeys' Right To Paint

I've started looking into "new" material that can feed into our project.

One way to go forward is to go backwards. So I want to take the next few days to look at some historical contexts for found objects in art. There's plenty of literature about this, of course. I don't want to be too discriminate at this stage, so I've selected some books to start my archaeological dig.

The first is by Turkish artist Bedri Baykam. It's called Monkeys' Right to Paint and the Post-Duchamp Crisis. I deliberately avoided going to the obvious academic publications by art historians published in the UK or USA. Still I'm surprised to see that some things are still inevitable. From Duchamp we must get to Fluxus through Dada, collage, Warhol, and Beuys, among others.

The idea of ready-mades is entrenched in happenings.

Baykam points out that there are five generations of ready-made-makers. Are we the sixth (or seventh) generation? And who belongs to which generation?

Do I believe that art is dead? Is it useful to think this way at all?

I particularly like this quotation attributed to Salvador Dali: "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot."

Here's Baykam: "The text is the major weapon that keeps the Western capitalist art market from collapsing. Had the text not existed, the financial crisis of the contemporary art scene would have been much more dramatic."

Kunst = Kapital.

FOUND OBJECT TS0001 [audio]:
"JA JA JA JA JA, NEE NEE NEE NEE NEE" - Joseph Beuys (1968)

FOUND OBJECT TS0002 [audio]:
In Memoriam George Maciunas - Nam June Paik + Beuys (1978)