I remember some 3 or 4 year ago when there was a general fear of internet been transformed in a expression of ‘conservative business and commerce’, the main stream values, that ‘kind of television’ that assume the crowds are a swallower of bad quality. This pressure still exists, see the secret lobbys from the media industry around the ACTA.
Even in accessing the issue of pirate downloads, this new economy has positive things to do compensating the negative of ACTA and old media industries:
Biracy is an indie film project launched at the beginning of last month with the goal to convert download pirates into investors, creators, and distributors by using a persuasive crowdfunding /crowdsourcing hybrid business model. It’s quite innovative in that the filmmakers have allocated 32% of membership income towards an upfront referral reward system, meaning that members can potentially earn money before the film has even been made.

It so exciting this glimpse peer to peer economies gives on a future where media monopolies and other big money industry owners don’t have the power to dictate what I want where they wont be able to keep on pushing me values, images and products I don’t care about.

The initiatives may sound to many like microfinancing, or possibilities to raises limited amount of money. This is not true. As an example, The Age of Stupid. a documentary project on global warming has raised over $1.2 million via crowd funding, and also used crowd sourcing to distribute and exhibit it around the world.
http://www.mymilliondollarmovie.com/ My Million Dollar Movie. This project is still in funding stage, but it is notable that it has so far raised $942,520 towards the goal.

More and more people are believing and investing in crowdfinancing. Trampoline Systems, the London-based social analytics business, is using an unconventional approach to finance its growth. Instead of raising money from venture capital firms Trampoline is “crowdfunding” the business, raising small stakes from a large group of investors.

Introducing Trampoline Systems from Trampoline Systems on Vimeo.

Because this whole concept really gets my heart and mind, here a compilation of links about crowd financing.

• http://www.rockethub.com/projects
• Fundable is a service allowing for the creation and management of fundable “group action” pages where pledges can be accepted. If a campaign does not reach its goal within a set time (14 or 25 days), then all pledges are negated and no money distributed.
  Kickstarter is a New York start-up that helps other projects raise small amounts of finance through crowdfunding.
• Create A Fund allows both individuals and organizations to collect money online. The site tightly integrates with services like PayPal and Facebook to ensure a cohesive donor experience from start-to-finish. Fund creators get customizable ‘Donation Pages’ where donors can keep tabs on a fund’s progress, leave comments and invite others.

Crowd funding in the film industry

• Artemis Eternal – Upcoming sci-fi short film being produced independently by Jessica Mae Stover. The user is invited, via the web, to donate (from $1 to $100) and join “The Wingmen” (whose members hail from students to homemakers to NASA employees and filmmakers) and help to crowdfund the project.
• A Swarm of Angels is a project to utilize a swarm of subscribers (Angels) to help fund, make, contribute, and distribute a feature film using the internet and digital technologies. It aims to recruit earlier development community members with the right expertise into paid project members, film crew, and production staff. I wrote about this project sometime ago (in portuguese)
• “The Cosmonaut” is a feature film in which members of the public are invited from to become a “producer” with a minimum investment of €2. The project is licensed under Creative Commons’ Attribution-Sharealike so anybody can edit, remix, copy and freely distribute all the film materials which the creators have committed to publish in unedited HD.
• http://www.indiegogo.com/is an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to finance independent films. The platform provides filmmakers with tools for project funding, recruiting, and promotion; while enabling the audience to discover and connect directly with filmmakers and the causes they support. Since launching at the Sundance Festival in 2008 several projects have been financed through the platform.

Other industries

• Spot.Us is non-profit pioneering community-funded journalism. Journalists pitch stories on the website which are then selected and financed through crowdfunding.

• Blender Foundation is a beautifull story of an Amsterdam-based venture that develops widely-used 3D animation software. Having started life as a commercial venture Blender raised €100,000 through a crowdfunding process and switched to an open source model.

• Cameesa is the first site breaking into ‘Crowdfunding Fashion,’ where it encourages participation in the clothing creation process. Members decide which designs to print on T-shirts by supporting them financially. Once a design is 100% funded, the members who supported the design get a special edition of the t-shirt and earn a revenue share each time that design is purchased.

Crowd funding in the music industry

• SellaBand is a service for musicians and bands to promote their work in an effort to gain “believers” who will help to fund the production and distribution of an album. Believers must raise $50,000 in order to graduate the artists into contractual agreements. Believers can earn money back from ad revenue used in tandem with giving away the music for free online at sellaband’s site.
• Bandstocks provides a financial model for artists seeking an alternative to major labels. Funds for production and promotion are raised through “band stocks” purchased by fans in £10 units. Investors receive a copy of the album plus royalties from sales. Patrick Wolf is the most prominent artist to use the platform to date, raising £100,000 to release his album “The Bachelor” after leaving his contract with Polydor.
• ArtistShare is a service for musicians to fund their projects outside the normal recording industry. It utilises micropayments to allow the general public to directly finance, and in some cases gain access to extra material from an artist. In 2004 Maria Schneider became the first artist to win a Grammy with an album distributed exclusively over the Internet. Distributed through ArtistShare she received four nominations for her album Concert in the Garden and won Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.

non profit

• First Giving is a service that allows fundraisers to create online person-to-person fundraising pages for any US non-profit. The funds are directly transferred to the non-profit which differentiates firstgiving from other services.
• PledgeBank while not exclusively for funding has often been used to crowdfund for projects and charities.

In May 2004 the Kurtzes were preparing to present Free Range Grain, a project examining GM agriculture, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), when Hope Kurtz died of heart failure. Emergency personnel who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call deemed the couple’s art suspicious, and called the FBI. The art materials consisted of several petri dishes containing three harmless bacteria cultures, and a mobile lab to test food labeled “organic” for the presence of genetically modified ingredients. As Kurtz explained, these materials had been safely displayed in museums and galleries throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public.

Finally vindicated after four years of struggle, Kurtz, asked for a statement, responded stoically: “I don’t have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?”

The story of Kurtz is told in the film Strange Culture by filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson. The film was simultaneously screened and webcast to the Second Life game on January 22, 2007. It focuses on Kurtz’ art, character, and interaction with law enforcement

O Tejo from Abilio Vieira on Vimeo.

http://nos.nl/artikel/123099-ontvrienden-woord-van-het-jaar.html

Durou dois anos e o ‘ Livro em Rede’ http://networkedbook.org/ está aí, aberto a comentários, revisões e traduções. O público pode tambem submeter um capítulo, que, depois de consideração, pode ser adicionado ao livro. “Networked” , o ‘livro em rede’, parte do princípio de que a história e a crítica de arte interativa tem que ser, ela mesma, interativa e participatória.
Em 2008, Turbulence.org e parceiros — NewMediaFix, Telic Arts Exchange, e Freewaves – convidaram contribuições de todo o planeta para os capítulos desse livro. Foram convidadas contribuições que repensavam como a arte em rede pode ser categorisada, analisada e legitimisada e quais seriam as suas normas de autoridade, autenticidade e legitimação.

English
In 2007, Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington (Co-Directors, New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. | Turbulence.org) proposed Networked to Eduardo Navas (NewMediaFIX). Along with Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange) and Anne Bray (Freewaves), they developed an application to the National Endowment for the Arts, which funded the project in 2008.

An international Call for Proposals was issued. It defined the project’s Goals and Objectives and invited contributions that critically and creatively rethink how networked art is categorized, analyzed, legitimized — and by whom — as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve. A committee of nine reviewed the submissions: four authors were commissioned to develop chapters that are now open for commentary, revision, and translation. A fifth — one of the runners-up — was invited to contribute. Networked is open to additional chapters. See Guidelines.

Networked proposes that a history or critique of interactive and/or participatory art must itself be interactive and/or participatory; that the technologies used to create a work suggest new forms a “text” might take.

We invite you to participate. You can comment on an entire chapter, but the CommentPress plugin also allows you to comment on individual paragraphs. You are also welcome to translate the chapters into other languages.

O comite internacional / The international commitee:

Steve Dietz (Northern Lights, MN)
Martha Gabriel (net artist, Brazil)
Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures, The Netherlands)
Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute for Technology, MA)
Anne Bray (LA Freewaves, LA)
Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange, LA)
Jo-Anne Green (NRPA, MA)
Eduardo Navas (newmediaFIX)
Helen Thorington (NRPA, NY)

Os artigos são em inglês ( mas voce pode traduzi-los):
THE IMMEDIATED NOW: NETWORK CULTURE AND THE POETICS OF REALITY
Kazys Varnelis
http://varnelis.networkedbook.org

LIFETRACING: THE TRACES OF A NETWORKED LIFE
Anne Helmond
http://helmond.networkedbook.org

STORAGE IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORKED ART
Jason Freeman
http://freeman.networkedbook.org

DATA UNDERMINING: THE WORK OF NETWORKED ART IN AN AGE OF IMPERCEPTIBILITY
Anna Munster
http://munster.networkedbook.org

ART IN THE AGE OF DATAFLOW: NARRATIVE, AUTHORSHIP, AND INDETERMINACY
Patrick Lichty
http://lichty.networkedbook.org

English
http://networkedbook.org/

A exposição ‘ Brasil Contemporâneo’ em Rotterdam é uma surpresa gostosa. Em 3 museus, a cidade faz uma mostra da arte contemporânea do Brasil. Com o ‘clássico celebridade’ o Helio Oiticica puxando o carro. Ele é maravilhoso e desde uma exposição da obra dele nos idos de 80, a cidade e a Holanda se apaixonaram por ele e assim Oiticica virou símbolo da arte brasileira por aqui. A mostra traz também Rivane Neuenschwander, Iran do Esperito Santo, Ernesto Neto, Lucia Koch, Ricardo Bassbaum e Renate Lucas.

http://www.brazilcontemporary.nl/en/

Hoje eu vou ao museu de arquitetura de Rotterdam, passear por São Paulo. Quem diria, sair de casa de bicicleta e pagar entrada para ir ao Vale do Anhangabau, Avenida Paulista, Marginal do Pinheiros e a Estrada de Itapacerica!

A oficina se aprofunda nos ambientes de programação Puredata (plataforma linux ou windows) e software sonoro de interação em tempo real. Nesse ambiente, são fabricados dispositivos fornecidos com dados recolhidos pelo microfone e sensores (input) para a produção de obras multimídia em áudio (output).

A ênfase do workshop está no aproveitamento de ferramentas de baixo custo bem como dispositivos obsoletos que podem ser utilizados como interfaces interativas.

mais informação no site do MIS- SP

Release (por Alexandre Fenerich)

A série de dois concertos NOISESCAPES (paisagens de ruídos) trata dos desvios sonoros entre um passo e um gesto, entre os percursos cotidianos nas ruas, ou mesmo num som desapercebido em um filme ou uma canção que, seja ecoando e permanecendo ao fundo ou acionando,percutindo ou cortando nossos gestos, preenchem o tecido da realidade sem nem que nos déssemos conta… Como uma lupa nestes pequenos meandros sonoros, os artistas aqui envolvidos tomaram de empréstimo trechos de filmes e de músicas, ruídos da paisagem urbana ou os mais diversos objetos do cotidiano para realizarem uma música de fragmentos para olhos e ouvidos e vídeos de personagens em suspensão ou em devaneio, em situação de escuta…

No primeiro dia apresentaremos uma série de obras influenciadas pelo cinema em imagens narrativas, vozes ou música, na forma de apropriações ou recriações de filmes presentes na memória. No segundo dia apresentaremos dois vídeos de Alexandre Fenerich e Rebeca Rasel em percursos desatentos pela cidade. Apresentaremos também o duo N-1, com sua música/performance de pequenos objetos do cotidiano e suas mínimas sonoridades.

“O ranger dos passos ou a carta entregue ao meio dia soariam imperceptíveis se não houvesse um corte-close ou travelling que os induzisse. Temos uma cena e, a cada momento, é comum que os objetos percam sua voz na mente do espectador cada vez mais atento à narrativa.

Na película ou no vídeo, haverá sempre uma paisagem que se estende para além das ondas ou da multidão sob o concreto: eis a ‘paisagem sonora’, que, tal como o silêncio, inscreve pequenos mundos que estalam, sussurram e igualmente desaparecem. Talvez por hábito enxerguemos apenas a canção, mas a voz, a pausa e o ruído igualmente transbordam em cada poro da tela. Mas por que não os acolhemos?” (Rebeca Rasel)

PROGRAMAÇÃO:

Dia 03 – quarta-feira

Alexandre Fenerich e Rebeca Rasel (apresentando os vídeos Desvio e Greyscale)
Duo N-1
Giuliano Obici e Alexandre Fenerich)

Ingressos a 10 reais | Meia entrada para estudantes
Início do espetáculo às 20h.

http://giulianobici.com
http://n-1.art.br
http://giulianobici.blogspot.com

Em setembro de 2008 passei quase 40 dias em Cuba. A minha primeira noite foi na casa de Liz & Jac que conheci através do projeto desislaciones, de rosa. Foi nessa casa que tive os primeiros contatos com a realidade de Cuba. No dia seguinte à minha chegada, ao passear com Jac no Malecón, um guarda nos pára pedindo identificação. A noite já não podia mais dormir em sua casa pois havia perigo de aparecer alguma força policial atrás deles e de mim, já que receber visita na casa de um cubano é ilegal, mesmo um parente. Foi nesse incidente inicial que percebi a bolha em que estava, a paradoxal Cuba, terra de revolução e de vigilância, de utopismos e controle social, de comunismo e ilegalidade, de analfabetismo proibido, casa para todos, cultura de ponta e crise alimentar.

Durante a convivência com Liz & Jac também fiquei sabendo da censura à trabalhos e conversamos sobre a dificuldade de uma colaboração sobre arte e tecnologia em um contexto tecnológico praticamente inexistente – onde peças são caríssimas e impossívels de achar (se você não pede a alguém que venha de fora sujeitando-se a pagar as altíssimas taxas alfandegárias e tendo como risco a perda do mesmo). Justamente por esta razão, não instalamos linux na mimosinha que tinham em casa, não havia memória suficiente. A internet é proibida nas casas pessoais e apenas 3 ou 4 espaços públicos em toda cidade de Havana dispõem do caríssimo acesso (por volta de 7 dolares a hora por uma conexão lentíssima). Todos os meios de comunicação são estatais e pertencem ao Partido Comunista, jornais culturais alternativos duram no máximo 2 anos (como uma experiência de suplemento artístico que Jac e Liz fizeram) e a comunicação por computadores se resume a uma grande Intranet de e-mails compartilhados por professores, educadores, médicos etc, que dividem algumas informações previamente escolhidas pelo “grande servidor”.