Avsnitt

  • In this episode we speak to Brewster Kahle, the Founder and Chief Librarian of the Internet Archive on the occasion of Public Domain Day. We also speak to Amanda Levendowski, Founding Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic on the concept of fair use, its history and application for artists.

    Full episode notes, transcription, links and bios can be found on the episode notes page.

    Episode notes

    This episode is licensed under CC BY 4.0

  • Kat Walsh from Creative Commons joins us to talk about the history of Creative Commons as a 'hack on copyright.' Marc Weidenbaum speaks on the history of the Disquiet Junto, a long-running online distributed community creating new music in response to a weekly online composition challenge.

    Episode notes, credits and transcript

    In this season of the podcast we’re working in collaboration with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. In addition to our usual crop of artists and programmers we’re adding in legal scholars to help us unpack some of the thorny issues for those working in art and code as they unleash their work into the world.

    In this episode we dive into the world of Creative Commons, which is now over 20 years old. It is both an organization as well as a collection of copyright licenses used by artists, musicians, writers, directors and creators worldwide to communicate to the world how they want their work shared and potentially to be used as a source to build upon.

    We also speak to Marc Weidenbaum, founder and steward of the Disquiet Junto, an online “community of practice.” Each week Marc sends out an email newsletter with a creative prompt, consisting of a title, and instructions. These instructions may read like a Fluxus event score, a recipe in sound, a concept or technical description. Those who choose to participate create a single piece of music, then post it online, to be shared, listened to and potentially discussed by the online community. Marc has been leading Disquiet Junto since 2012, and from the beginning has encouraged participants to share their work with Creative Commons licenses. In fact the creative re-use of Creative Commons licensed sound and music has often been an integral part of Disquiet Junto creative prompts.

    Guests

    Kat Walsh is the General Counsel at Creative Commons. She has a nearly 20-year history in the free and open culture movements, including many years on the boards of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation, and has previously worked in library policy, technology startups, and online community management. As General Counsel, she oversees the legal support for all aspects of CC’s activities, provides strategic input, leads the stewardship of CC’s legal tools, and advises the organization on new programmatic initiatives.

    image description: a black and white image of Marc looking to the right. He has dark hair and a close cropped beard, wearing a high collared knit sweater and black frame glasses.

    Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects that explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity.

    Links

    Creative Commons Licenses and Tools

    Creative Commons talks with Marc Weidenbaum

    Email announcement list for the Disquiet Junto

    Marc’s website Disquiet, on the intersection of sound, art and technology

    Credits

    Our audio production is by Max Ludlow. Design by Caleb Stone.

    Our music on today’s episode is all taken from Creative Commons licensed music created as part of the Disquiet Junto.

    all at fives, sixes and sevens by wasabicube, CC BY NC SA. three euclidean rhythms, CC BY NC SA, by Lee Evans/Hippies Wearing Muzzles, both from disquiet0567 Three Meters.

    Ways, CC BY NC SA, by the artist analoc for disquiet0482 Exactly That Gap.

    Little Green Aura, CC BY NC SA, by he_nu_ri and lako by Ohm Research, for disquiet0566 Outdoor Furniture Music

    four voice folly by caustic_gates, CC BY NC SA, part of disquiet0565 Musical Folly

    much too young to…, CC BY, by NolanVerde for disquiet0066 Communing with Nofi, a posthumous collaboration with the artist Jeffrey Melton, aka Nofi, who passed in 2013.

    This episode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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  • This episode kicks off our season working with the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy. We talk about copyright and its limits; licenses and ethical open source; and the infamous monkey selfie legal case.

    This episode features conversations with Michael Weinberg, the Executive Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU School of Law. We also speak with computer scientist, game designer and media artist Ramsey Nasser on the Anti-Capitalist Software License. Finally, we join some of the organizers from the ml5.js programming library, which aims to make “machine learning approachable for a broad audience of artists, creative coders, and students.”

    Episode notes and transcript

  • This episode features our special live podcast recording event we held February 2023 in New York City. Four of the artists from this season engage in a roundtable discussion on their art practice, teaching, pedagogy and more.

    Episode notes, transcript and links

    This season we’ve partnered with the New Media Caucus, an international non-profit formed to promote the development and understanding of new media art. This season of the podcast is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts grants for arts projects.

  • A Father's Lullaby is the name of an expansive ongoing research and storytelling project established by the new media artist Rashin Fahandej. Working with the formerly incarcerated, as well as her undergraduate students, the project highlights the role of fathers in raising children, and creates a space for paradigm shifting and social equity through a process of community co-creation.

    Program notes, transcript and credit

    This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists. You can find out more by visiting www.newmediacaucus.org. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

  • Speculative Design is an area of artistic and creative exploration and future-casting. Practitioners dream future possibilities to address societal challenges through design and create experimental projects in new territories. New media artist Sue Huang creates artworks addressing collective experience. Her projects probe ecological intimacies and explore the fluid borders between humans and A.I.

    Episode notes, credits and transcript

    Speculative Design is an area of artistic and creative exploration and future-casting. Practitioners dream future possibilities to address societal challenges through design and create experimental projects in new territories. New media artist Sue Huang creates artworks addressing collective experience. Her projects probe ecological intimacies and explore the fluid borders between humans and A.I.

    This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists. You can find out more by visiting www.newmediacaucus.org. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

  • Shawné Michaelain Holloway is a new media artist with a "noisy, experimental practice." Her performances and practice make use of constraints, pain and pleasure, speaking to issues of power, both in private, intimate space as well as in the public sphere.

    Full episode notes, transcript and credits

    Her projects often feature animal training, algorithmic scores or controls, and a reference to or use of robotics - speaking to the time we live in now, anxiety and pleasure, as we embrace, and are repulsed by the latest technologies.

    This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists. You can find out more by visiting www.newmediacaucus.org. This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

  • KT Duffy likes to say they conjure entities into existence via code-based processes and digital fabrication. They consider themselves a 'duct tape programmer' and have a background in DIY community, which is evident in their many collaborations and their fondness for projects using 1990s green slime.

    Episode notes, transcript and credits

    This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists. You can find out more by visiting newmediacaucus.org.

    This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit arts.gov

    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/artistsandhackers/

    Mastodon: https://post.lurk.org/home

    Website: https://artistsandhackers.org

  • Chelsea Thompto is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersections of art, trans studies, and technology. We talk about the Transcode Manifesto, digital preservation, and how software is not like sculpture.

    Episode notes, transcript and credits

    This season of the podcast is produced with the New Media Caucus for New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists. You can find out more by visiting newmediacaucus.org.

    This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit arts.gov

  • We’ve teamed up with the New Media Caucus, an international non-profit association that supports the development and understanding of new media art. They work with artists, designers, practitioners, historians, theorists, educators, students, and scholars - so a perfect partnership with our show.

    New Rules: Conversations with New Media ArtistsFriday, February 17, 2023 7:30pm - 9pm FREE RSVP

    The event we’re hosting is called New Rules: Conversations with New Media Artists, and it’s happening in New York City on Friday February 17th from 7:30pm - 9pm. I’ll be speaking live and recording a special episode with the New Media Artists KT Duffy, Rashin Fahandej, Sue Huang, and Chelsea Thompto about their work as new media artists.

    The event is free and open to the public, and it will be followed by an informal dinner. You can RSVP to attend on our website, via a link from our Instagram artistsandhackers, through our newsletter if you’re one of our email newsletter subscribers, or from the New Media Caucus website. We’re asking you to please RSVP by Saturday the 11th (extended, please RSVP by the 14th) and we’ll send you the exact location just over the river into Queens, and it’s being held in an accessible art space. We hope to see you there.

    New Rules is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for Arts.

    Thanks

    Notes

  • Chris Klimas is the original creator of Twine, a popular open source expanded toolset for creating branching narratives and interactive experimental stories and game. He talks about its creation, community and where it's going next.

    episodes notes

    Art Tools are our series of mini episodes with the creators of innovative and experimental software and hardware tools for creative expression.

    Twine is a tool for creating branching narratives or what some people call "Choose Your Own Adventure"-style games. Originally created in 2009, Twine allows creators to make interactive stories, poems, text games or experimental prose. Twine is free and open source software that runs in a web browser or downloaded as an application, and while most Twine projects are text-only, some feature sound and images. At this point, there are tens of thousands of games, artworks and projects made with Twine, and these works are presented on websites, shared on the game distribution platform Itch.io or even shown in museums like the Whitney Museum of American Art.

    Over its 13 years of existence Twine’s been extended in many different directions, with themes and example code. And it’s really easy to get started. Where other interactive fiction software is created solely with text and code, Twine features a visual design tool that feels as easy as creating an email. We talked to Twine’s creator Chris Klimas to find out more about its history and current development and community.

  • In this Art Tools episode we interview Thea Flowers of Winterbloom, an open source music hardware company producing hackable music modules and kits for synthesizers. And we try out the Big Honking Button.

    Episode notes

    Art Tools are our series of mini episodes with the creators of innovative and experimental software and hardware tools for creative expression.

    Our guest today is Thea Flowers of Winterbloom. Winterbloom produces new, open source modular synth hardware modules for making music. These are devices that can do things like make far-out space synth sounds, act as a mixer, or an audio sampler. The world of synthesizers has a huge number of companies. Thea’s Winterbloom stands out for its beautiful designs, but perhaps even more notably, its commitment to creating beginner-friendly tutorials and using a hackable CircuitPython codebase, a friendly language for easily writing software for hardware projects.

    In research for this episode we purchased a Big Honking Button, one of the first modules produced by Winterbloom. It is available as a kit of parts or complete. You plug it into a Eurorack modular synthesizer to make sounds with it. Eurorack is the name for an ecosystem of cross-compatible music hardware produced by hundreds of manufacturers, from large companies like Moog and Behringer to much smaller companies. Winterbloom’s unique open source hackable stance means that it publishes code and instructions on how to modify their hardware in order to tweak the music hardware to your own particular needs.

    By default the Big Honking Button features a large arcade button that emits a punishing goose honk each time you press the button. We started by changing this sound. Following Winterbloom’s instructions we plugged our Big Honking Button into a laptop, where it showed up as if it was an external drive. The first step we took was replacing the honk sound file with a bell sound we had. Immediately the module restarted, and when we pressed the Big Honking Button our new sound could be heard. Next we added in more sound samples. We opened the code.py file, and using example code from Winterbloom’s website we modified the code to play a different sound sample depending on receiving different input voltage such as using a slider or a dial. At first, our module didn’t seem to work the way we had expected. We asked some questions on the Winterbloom discord, where friendly folks chatted with us and Thea pointed us in the right direction. We needed to update our Big Honking Button’s libraries to the current release in order to use the latest code features. This was simple, basically copying files over and restarting, and in short order our modified code and sound samples on the Big Honking Button were producing both cacophonous and blissed-out drones to our delight.

    This experience of in essence changing the very nature of how the hardware works felt really incredible and unique. Doubly so as we started to jam with our customized music hardware. The fact that it’s possible to do this in the simplified Python-based CircuitPython, using easy-to-follow example code made this a straightforward and gratifying experience, and would be accessible even to those with a minimum of programming experience, especially with the helpful online community.

  • The final in a trio of episodes we’re doing on artists working with bots and conversational agents. We speak to Emily Martinez of QueerAI on their work in bots and their collaborative AI chatbot experiment trained on erotic literature, feminist and queer theory, and an ethics of embodiment. We also talk with Jessica Garson, a Senior Developer Advocate at Twitter.

    Episode notes

    Note: This episode acknowledges the existence of sex and includes intimate text written via machine learning.

  • Art Tools is our new segment on experimental digital tools of creation. We speak with Olivia Jack on her browser-based visual live coding synthesizer called hydra.

    Episode notes

    Today we’re kicking off a new segment called Art Tools, a series of mini episodes with the creators of innovative and experimental software for making art, music and other creative expression.

    In our very first episode Critical Code we spoke with the artist Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo, who created her own library and language La Habra for making live visual artwork with code. Today we’re speaking with the artist and programmer Olivia Jack on her browser-based visual livecoding software Hydra.

    Hydra is a web-based video synthesizer. Olivia describes live coding as writing code in real time to make visuals and/or music as part of a performance. Originally begun as a series of explorations in the browser, Hydra is now used by a large community of live coding performers who perform in clubs and other venues, as well as in online streamed performances throughout the pandemic. There are many resources for getting started with Hydra, and a number of spin-off projects including PIXELJAM, also by Olivia, which allows multiple performers to do live coding together. There are also periodic online meetups where live coders worldwide meet up to talk and show off their works created with Hydra.

    In this episode Olivia speaks on her background, the experiments that led to the creation of Hydra, and the choices she’s made in its design that has led to adoption by a large community of live coders creating visual works in the browser with Hydra.

  • Ryan Kuo is an artist and writer creating projects that are diagrammatic and evoke a person or people arguing. In this episode I speak with Ryan and his collaborator Tommy Martinez about Faith, an 'easily triggered' AI voice assistant.

    Episode notes

  • Stephanie Dinkins is a transmedia artist creating platforms for dialog about race, gender, aging, and our future histories. In this episode we speak about her conversations with the advanced AI Bina48 and her work building conversational agents based on oral history.

    Show notes

  • Since 2007 artist Wok The Rock has run Yes No Wave, a Javanese net audio record label that makes music available for free legal download. Yes No Wave albums are released under a creative commons license allowing free non-commercial use and the freedom to remix the music.

    Episode page

  • The Iyapo Repository is a digital resource library built to preserve the digital histories and legacy of people of African descent. Our guest is Ayodamola Tanimowo Okunseinde (Ayo), co-creator along with Salome Asega.

    Episode page

  • In this episode we talk about the phenomenon of the offline internet in Cuba known as El Paquete Semanal or The Weekly Package. Our guests are Cuban artist Nestor Siré and American artist Julia Weist who research, intervene and make art about El Paquete.

    Episode notes

  • In this episode we're digging deep into the past of a radical history of personal computers, community networks and the rise of people's technology. Our guest is engineer Lee Felsenstein, who relates a story of activism and engineering.

    Episode information