Hear, hear. On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 4:48 PM, Rob Myers <[email protected]> wrote: > The part of my review of "White Heat Cold Logic" that seems to have > caught people's attention is: > > "for preservation, criticism and artistic progress (and I do mean > progress) it is vital that as much code as possible is found and > published under a Free Software licence (the GPL). Students of art > computing can learn a lot from the history of their medium despite the > rate at which the hardware and software used to create it may change, > and code is an important part of that." > > http://www.furtherfield.org/features/reviews/white-heat-cold-logic > > I have very specific reasons for saying this, informed by personal > experience. > > When I was an art student at Kingston Polytechnic, I was given an > assignment to make a new artwork by combining two previous artworks: a > Jackson Pollock drip painting and a Boccioni cyclist. I could not "read" > the Boccioni cyclist: the forms did not make sense to me, and so I was > worried I would not be able to competently complete the assignment. As > luck would have it there was a book of Boccioni's drawings in the > college library that included the preparatory sketches for the painting. > Studying them allowed me to understand the finished painting and to > re-render it in an action painting style. > > When I was a child, a book on computers that I bought from my school > book club had a picture of Harold Cohen with a drawing by his program > AARON. The art of AARON has fascinated me to this day, but despite my > proficiency as a programmer and as an artist my ability to "read" > AARON's drawings and to build on Cohen's work artistically is limited by > the fact that I do not have access to their "preparatory work", their > source code. > > I have been told repeatedly that access to source code is less important > than understanding the concepts behind the work or experiencing the work > itself. But the concepts are expressed through the code, and the work > itself is a product of it. I can see a critical case being made for the > idea that "computer art" fails to the extent that the code rather than > the resultant artwork is of interest. But as an artist and critic I want > to understand as much of the work and its history as possible. > > So my call for source code to be recovered (for historical work) and > released (for contemporary work) under a licence that allows everyone to > copy and modify it comes from my personal experience of understanding > and remaking an artwork thanks to access to its preparatory materials on > the one hand and the frustration of not having access to such materials > on the other. And I think that awareness of and access to source code > for prior art (in both senses of the term) will enable artists who use > computers to stop re-inventing the wheel. > > So if you are making software art please make the source code publicly > available under the GPL3+, and if you are making software-based net art > please make it available under the AGPL3+ . > > - Rob. > _______________________________________________ > NetBehaviour mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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