FREE CULTURE & THE CULTURE OF "FREE"

A 4th Quarter Project – 2nd Year Graphic Design Department, Willem de Kooning Academy, 2013

possible topics

• remix culture – rip mix burn
http://www.everythingisaremix.info/
• copy(paste)culture
http://www.tedxamsterdam.com/2011/close-up-on-culture-copy-paste-culture/
• creative commons/copyleft
• "amateur" culture vs "professional"
(democratization of tools and media > effects the role of the professional designer)
• open source tools and platforms (F/LOSS)
• template culture
• free content : archives – video, image, texts / data / essays, academic articles, news, literature,
• …

possible outcomes

• wiki containing documentation of process and outcomes various assignments, and including reflections on free culture and the culture of free (edited and maintained by Text)
• mapping of free culture tools, platforms and resources for the graphic designer – possibly in relation to the non-free culture designer tools (Design Research)
• x-amount of versions of visual identity for event, manifested in various media and channels : print, digital, audio-visual, spatial (Graphic Design, Typography)
• designing a value currency for "free" applying only free culture tools in the design process – and yes I get the irony of using a currency for "free" (Crosslab)
• remixes
• …

stuff to watch

Copy (right and left)
http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net/
http://www.ted.com/talks/lessig_nyed.html?quote=736

A Fair(y) Use Tale:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

http://oliverlaric.com/vvversions.htm
http://oliverlaric.com/versions2012.htm

Oliver Laric’s ongoing Versions (2009-2012) reflects the conditions of our digital world: how original and copy, thing and thought, event and document, are collapsed in a flattened information space where everything is a click away from everything else. Laric’s sculptural and online-based practice—including the website VVork—addresses how information networks afford new logical, epistemic, and affective patterns of experience and understanding. Described by the artist as "a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a song, a novel, a recipe, a play, a dance routine, a feature film and merchandise," Versions confronts the mutability and variation of images.

Laric’s work evinces how images and objects are continually modified to represent something new, from Roman copies of Greek sculptures, to doctored and augmented images, remixes, and gifs. The differing versions of Versions themselves address this ongoing history of iconoclasm and copyright. Laric’s exploration of the nature of images and objects in digital space reveals the internet as not merely a space of representation, but of direct experience, as the real world is increasingly mediated by screens, and knowledge is replaced by searching.

remix
http://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix.html
http://ripremix.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/video/2012/07/31/opinion/100000001695225/allergy-to-originality.html