M, B & J in Korea

For the last couple of days I've been trying to keep up with the elections in the US, ever hoping that a rout of the Republicans will bring a semblance of balance to the instability created by the big Bush brouhaha. Came across this nice sticker in the German Spiegel magazine.
M.

If you've been thinking or reading about digital culture in the current or future context at all, you've hit upon the contentious issue of intellectual copyright at some point. The ability to instantaneously make and distribute copies of bits changes most meta-aspects of media, such as how we recieve, percieve, share and interact with the music, movies, websites and other media. that we use in our lives.

The Free Software Foundation and the Open source movements, often coming from a computer practitioneers perspective, have often been years ahead of people unrelated to the field when it came to recognizing wider issues with copyright and the groups and have sought to generate healthy debate.

Now there are countless open source efforts going on in myriad directions, some veering outside the realm of computers. There have even been a few open source filmmaking attempts at well. The lastest of which that I've come accross, a 10min, full-frame CG short called "Elephants Dream", looks really good and can be found here:

Computer media art is getting up there in years and has been continueously accruing a now venerable history of its artistry. Most of the crazy computer-mediated ideas people have come up with in the past unfortunately don't get attention beyond afficinado circles. There's some really good, really funny stuff out there and one place to troll for thought provocations is Rhizome.org's Art Database.
Enjoy,
Misha

Here are some projects I found and liked.

1. "Spamrecycling" by Jung von Matt/Neckar for [client] EnBW [Energie Baden-Wuertemberg].

_{This is a datavisualization engine that create beautiful pictures from your otherwise unattractive Inbox spam. You can email your spam to here and recycle it artistically yourself.}








2. In "Google will eat itself", a collective of artists are buying Google shares with money made through a system of $-generating google ads on invisible (!) web banners on invisible (!) web sites.

_{The artists calculated that, by the going rate, they should be the sole owners within somewhere around, ohh, 200,000 years, I believe. [Note: they going strong with 44 shares through this method now]}





3. Log on to "Eternal Sunset" to collapse time & space and catch the romance of the sun going down 24/7.

_{Theartists have worked with webcam operators around the world to allow you be more independent from your natural surroundings. Yeah.}