abstractmachine

Ok, so now I’m really pissed. So I’ve bought the damn upgrade, simply because I have so many old projects languishing on this dying platform. I’ve also been getting email from people because some of these projects are online, and no longer work; and instead of saying, “Macromedia, er Adobe, couldn’t move its sorry ass for over two years to get this software working on your platform,” the alert instead says, “please contact the author,” which in its tone suggests that somehow I’m the one who can’t manage my own projects. Okay, okay, so that’s the way software works, fine. So I get the upgrade, figuring I’ll finally fix these problems.

Five minutes later, this brand-spanking new software has crashed. Hmmm. That sucks. Okay, try again. The damn thing crashes again. Hmmm. Well, apparently, it has something to do with font support; okay, avoid that, try again. “Your application has unexpectedly quit,” and so on for days. Try simple stuff, complicated stuff = crash. Cannot open any significant project from pre-Director 11. I give up. Report bugs. Move on to something else.

So I gave it a few weeks, figuring Adobe would solve the problems that are always hanging around as software goes out the door. I even try copying individual media and scripts by hand, avoiding their “updater” which has now just crashed for the gazillionth time. No luck. Or the thing appears to work for a few seconds, then crashes at some random moment. Try another machine, try a clean install, rinse, lather, repeat…

Finally, I go back to their website. Try the forums, no help there. Try another bug report, probably won’t answer just like a few weeks ago. Try technical support…what!? I have to f@#&§! pay forty dollars just to get help making a supported feature actually work!?

The notion that professional software is somehow more efficient, or (gasp) simply professional, is in the end just a hoax. The illusion that actually having paid for the software will somehow give you some service when it breaks? Yeah, right. To compare real-world experiences: last week I had a bug in OpenFrameworks; I just opened up the code, fixed it, and moved on. I lost maybe a few minutes. Where do I turn when I have a bug in Director? Their website is like a fortress. Oh, sorry, I meant so say a crypt…

Also known as: Perceptive Pixel’s multi-touch marvel is no match against Tim Russert’s felt-tip pen. My favorite part is actually all the noise Russert makes as he drags out his chart ;-)

I’m not much for petitions. A pure formality, at best. I’m far more impressed by more creative forms of communication. But given the speed at which events are unfolding, all I’ve found to do concerning the actual crisis in Pakistan is to sign this petition my colleague Jean Biagini suggested to me yeasterday: End the Emergency. For I’ve just learned via Jean that the former director of the National College of Arts in Lahore has been arrested in connection with the crackdown on so-called extremists. While I, like many in the west probably, can easily imagine there is indeed some fire behind all that smoke, it is clear that arresting artists and intellectuals has nothing to do with fighting terrorism and everything to do with consolidating power. I don’t pretend to understand very much about the complexity of internal politics in Pakistan, but I do understand that distinction.

The NCA is a wonderful place, and ever since my workshop there in 2000, I’ve been wanting to return. Perhaps I should work on getting that goal back onto my radar.

Ok people, you can stop sending me emails about Microsoft Surface. I’ve seen it already. And as I mentioned in this interview and this one the experimentation phase of interactive surfaces is over. Everyone knows that Microsoft is the pretty much the last cog in the technology wheel. When they’ve figured it out, well that means that just about everyone else has already figured it out some time ago.

I love that historical timeline on the surface web page. NO REALLY EVERYONE, LOOK, WE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE THE IPHONE. NO, HEY, WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING? IT’S TRUE! The funny thing about Microsoft is that they are still actually sincere after all these years. They just don’t get the joke. They really do think that they have invented all these technologies, only they just weren’t savvy enough to make people realize it. For example, to them, OS X’s interface is actually a rip-off of ideas they were already working on in Vista and not the other way around. Back in my little bubble world, we digital artists are always suffering from the same illness — it’s in fact our favorite sport (oh, I was doing that years ago) — but it’s even funnier to see one of the richest companies in the world fretting over their public image: gosh, if people only knew!

But kidding aside, this is a really good thing. I said in the above interviews that when Jeff Han’s solution was shown, it was officially over for surface innovation. I called them Hypertables, Hypersurfaces and Object Oriented Objects, MIT people called them Things That Think amongst other terms (and ages before me), and then before all that there was Bill Buxton and Myron Kruger. So none of this is new. But what we needed was a starting block, a sort of ok, fiddling’s over, time to use this stuff. Jeff solved the fundamental visual-gestural language, and all we had to do from there was to start using it.

I also should mention here what got cut out of the Fast Company interview, in response to the question « are hypertables the replacement for the keyboard/mouse combination? » My answer to that was « look at the Wii ». You cannot seperate the iPhone introduction from the introduction of the Wii controller. Both are looking to phsyicalize algorithms, make algorithms maleable physically, and as far as that goes, the field is still wide open. Keyboards and mice are still workable, so they probablly won’t die, no, beacause people will be writing things for a long time to come. Neither the Wii, nor the iPhone, to Surface, will help you write your blog. Maybe your video blog, but not your text blog.

Or maybe a million little things will complement the keyboard and mouse, or maybe just a half-dozen solutions will turn out to be modular enough to solve most of the things we will want to do. Or maybe Cronenberg is right, and it’ll be your body itself. But in my opinion 1) phyiscal objects are good for abstract thinking, and 2) no single object will be fully modular enough for all uses. There will not be one single system, although touch will indeed solve quite a few of the old ones. But whatever the case, the interfacing will require interfacing algorithmically. And when it comes to interacing algorithmically, nothing beats the Rubik’s Cube.

So now are finally seeing real-world hypersurfaces that we can work with. Personally I was expecting Apple to solve the commercialization problem first, and maybe they will. With that $5000+ tag, Surface still feels like vaporware. But I don’t think Microsoft will have any problems shipping at the end of the year as they predict. Trust me, this is very easy technology. For my installation at the Pompidou Center in 2004, for example, I solved my lighting problem with a 5€ bathroom lamp from the BHV down the street. Now, if I can make Hypertables with household appliances, Microsoft can probably commercialize the thing with more professional processes.*

I’m also intrigued that so many people are offering the same solution. That more or less solves the patent problem right there.

Also, Vista is running behind Surface, and while I think Vista is oh-so Mac 10.2 (which is still just a fancy NeXT machine), it’s ultimately great news that there’s a boring old operating system sitting under that coffeetable. Running Processing or Flash or vvvv or whatever on top of it shouldn’t be all that hard.

This is going to sound bad, but personally I’ve got about a five-year start on what works and what doesn’t in these touch-contexts, and plenty of ideas that have just been waiting for the technology to become a reality. But I’m also a little bored with it as well, so we’ll see if I invest a new round in this technology. Our crew has it’s work cut out for it whatever the case: neither Microsoft, nor Apple, nor Perceptive Pixel for that matter, have proposed any tangeable experience with this technology. So far, we’re just talking about « interfaces ». So artists still have a lot to offer in this field.

So thanks Microsoft. I guess I’m trying to say thanks for being so reassuringly tweed coat and making this technology feel like Daddy’s old jalopy…

Note to readers. Please observe that I am just about to condemn myself from all future speaking engagements by unabashedly biting the hand that feeds; even worse — coward that I am — from the comfort of my little countryside home, after-the-fact, far from stone’s throw. Whatever. Let the chips fall where they may. Some things just have to be said.

I’ve just gotten back from a very strange festival, of the likes I’ve been avoiding for quite some time: Flash Festival, a very well-produced, well-intentioned festival + prix, but with an absolutely vaccuous artistic core. It suffered from being what in French can be considered the worst of all insults: gentil. I say « gentil » and « vaccuous » not because of the invited artists — I have nothing but esteem for many of the speakers, amongst them Christophe Bruno, Michael Sellam, Jean-Louis Boissier, entre autres. But in reality these artists had very little to do with the themes and orientation of the festival, which for its part seems above all to revolve around that very ambiguous thing: the artistic prix. And when it came to the actual prix itself, and the artistic values it defended, I am here to say here are the nails, and if you don’t have the courage to do it, give me the hammer and I will nail that coffin shut for you.

Oh and, as much as I like anonymes, it’s not « net art », which is normally spelled « net.art » by the way, even if in 2007 most people have more or less dropped the term. Net.art traditionally maintains a critical approach to the web as a medium, or form, not just as a means of distribution. Please, oh pretty please, can we bury the cultural CD-Rom past of France once and for all? Maybe we could call Mexico and see if they have any room left next to the landfill with all the E.T. 2600 cartridges. There is still this echo of desire that the web will become a pure means of transmission of cultural artfacts, i.e. what in France is called édition: books, magazines, comic books, music, cinéma, … Works that can only be approached from the point of view of its « content », and for which the technological underpinnings have become ubiquitous or banal. The current political climate seems to reinforce this view, making it all the more incompatible with the web 2.0 (or call it what you will). The technological field is still shifting and has not yet coalesced into any one format. I have mentioned it before here, and I will mention it here again and again, but the current powers-that-be are trying to form a wall around content-based media precisely because it is terrified of new algorithmic forms of expression.

At one point, someone for whom I have too much respect to name here, got up on stage and commended the festival for being one of the « last few » to defend works of this sort. Perhaps it should, in fact, be the last. While I know it’s sometimes hard to hear, and we would all like to assume some larger conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that it is also just as often the case that artistic institutions die because it was their time to do so, and that there is some public money that is better spent elsewhere. Most of the Flash-inspired festivals have either died, or matured into something far more complex than some Adobe love-fest.

As for some of the comments I made during my talk on the proximity+distance double-step artists need to maintain with industry, a few clarifications are in store. For one, let it be known that I think that Flash is a great animation program, perfect for people wanting to make stuff like this. It’s also great for cool on-line stuff like this. And during the awards there was a very slick site that won the commercial category: crazyhorse. I can without reservation see the use of Flash for all that stuff. But this is not what Flash is being groomed for. It is currently in the middle stages of a full-scale assault as a closed platform for protected content (ignore recent open-source annoucements, c’est du bluff). And as a platform, it not only is wrong-headed, it is out-and-out dangerous. Can someone explain to me why Microsoft/Explorer has nothing but haters for all the damage it did to the web back in the 90’s, whereas Adobe/Macromedia/Flash has nothing but admirers? Flash is not just about animation anymore, it is about the « full experience ». Are graphic designers really that myopic? The commercial strategies of the two platforms (concerning the web at least) are exactly one and the same: dominate the landscape and become the de-facto web standard, only privately owned. A private standard for the public. A strategy based on protocols as the nexus of control. Are we really that politically naïve?

Also, a word of advice on the role of sponsors in artistic institutions. Many people asked me about this after my talk (cf. Etienne’s comment). I’m all for sponsors — who isn’t? — it’s an absolute win-win for everyone. But there are limits on what that sponsorship gets you.

To explain myself, let me tell you a story about a childhood friend of mine: Jonathan. Jonathan just stepped down from over a decade of stewardship of one really kick-ass festival for digital video shorts. Everyone knows this festival. It’s been all over the world. It’s got a magazine. It dominates the landscape in its own way. Now, I know Jonathan very well, I should because the two of us started our own television show when we were just 16 years old. And back then, he already knew exactly how to work with sponsors. When to say yes, when to say no. Back when we were 16 he was convincing music companies to give us exemptions for music video fees, and he was sending back the tapes of the synthpop wannabies the labels were trying to push on us. He’s got guts that guy. So ten years later, it came as no suprise to me to learn that he had quit what was quickly becoming a world-renowned festival, in part because his partner lacked artistic integrity. As just one example, Apple wanted stage-time to present whatever software it was presenting in the 90’s — in return for the large donations it was making to the festival. I give you this, you give me that, right? Wrong. While his partner caved in, Jonathan knew right away that it was poisoned fruit, promptly quit and started his own festival, leaving the previous one in the dust. Lesson? Street cred and artistic integrity goes a lot longer than you might suspect. People can smell a dirty deal, even Apple, who quickly decided to back Jonathan’s new festival.

You would figure that the Centre Pompidou would balk at inviting Adobe on their stage not only once, but twice. I can understand the pairing in other contexts, like Siggraph, or whatever, but not at the Pompidou. This is not a trade-fair, this is an arts center. They don’t need that kind of funding, do they? They already funnel a huge chunk of the public arts budget already, they can’t be that desperate. I might be wrong on this, maybe Kodak or Canon demo their new cameras at the opening of each photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art, or give out free prints to the participating artists (yeah right). Or perhaps we could look at existing hybrids such as the Hugo Boss Prize — but even there I have a hard time imagining models walking around the opening at the Guggenheim with the new underwear collection. Well, now that I think about it, that might be funny. I’ll have to see if Victoria Secret has its own arts competition…

So let that be a reminder that we need to be techno-power conscious just as in previous battles we needed to have a class consciousness. Today, class consciousness has become public final class consciousness (lame coder’s joke), i.e. an understanding of the social role of programming structures and their function in shaping discourse. Within this context, artists are neither neutral, nor necessarily in a position of inferiority. Processing nicely held its own yeasterday, and I thought it looked pretty damn slick next to Adobe’s offerings. Especially the OpenGL stuff, the PDF examples (more Adobe there), and its interfacing with robotics and sensors of all sorts. Sure, Processing’s built on Java, and that wasn’t officially open-sourced until only a few months ago. Maybe Sun is just a lame competitor to Adobe, and open-sourced because they had to. Maybe. But we still need to be very careful in the current political climate, especially here in France. Meanwhile Silicon Valley itself is embracing open-source en masse (and gasp as an economic model!) while most of the big media companies (outside of the big French holdings) are dropping DRM like it was the plague. Allez la France, encore un effort!

As you may or may not have noticed, I was teaching last month at the Chicago Art Institute. I met some pretty amazing people while there, but the person who really stood out for me was the very charming Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal (cf. http://www.crudeoils.us/) who was preparing an interesting online performance entitled Domestic Tension: all throughout the month he has been living at the Flatfile Galleries where — via a locally housed server — you can chat with him, watch a live video feed of his life in the gallery, and shoot at him with a collective remote controlled gun.

Now, if you somehow think this is either lame (your call) or disturbing (whatever), you should at least know that while Wafaa is enacting this mostly symbolic performance in (relative) comfort as an art student in the United States, the rest of his family is very much enduring the real deal back home — and with very real casualties. So while it is symbolic for us in one way, it is symbolic in an entirely different way for him.

It is also interesting to frame this performance within the larger context of the displacement of the American discourse on casualties and friendly fire in Iraq: there is no longer the whimpy media smoke-and-mirrors proxy-debate that skirted shamelessly around the issue of cadavers within the video frame. The original debate (constructed pro and con by the pentagon) on how to honor lost american solders, has now transformed into a count not only of full cadavers and dead football players, but of all the missing body parts that will never be coming back. And on the backs of those incomplete bodies, we are finally feeling the weight of the enormous the narrative of the Iraqi body count, and particularly the breadth of this body count, i.e. it’s no longer about numbers, it’s about demographics.

Although I tend to yawn at on-line performances, especially heavy-handed ones, somehow I fell for this one. I suppose it’s the ambiguity of the whole thing (and the good nature of Wafaa) that warms me to it. Of course this work references some far more hardcore pieces of Chris Burden such as when he locked himself in a locker for several days, shot at planes, or had a collegue shoot him in the arm. Wafaa is also making some very broad strokes towards other famous works in the construction of an American mythology, for example Beuys’ I like America and America Likes Me.

But when it comes down to it, I have actually only seen the Burden performances via short crappy videos which grow their semiotic gravitas precisely out of of the crapiness of the video qua deficient document. Much of the 60’s and 70’s performance art has been tainted by this documentation process. I’m thinking precisely of the spic-and-span Los Angeles exhibit last year at the Pompidou Center where the contrast was particularly annoying. Coming back to Wafaa’s current plight under the gun makes me wonder to what degree the crappy webcam refreshing every n seconds helps to construct the mythology of the performance.

I had promised to Wafaa that I would post something about this performance, but I couldn’t get a decent enough connection until now to check it out myself. Watch the following video from Day 8 to get a sense of their troubles keeping the gun online:

A few weeks back, the cool French journalist Marie Lechner asked me to collect a list of interesting YouTube videos. I was originally going to do something more interresting than what I came up with, but I was busy travelling and so I quickly scraped together this fairly traditional list along with a there-goes-the-professor-again accompanying verbiage. Even if you don’t read French, the videos are fairly explicit: there’s insolent stuff, code stuff, remix stuff, political stuff, etc. Here’s the link: Playlist #1 par Douglas Edric Stanley. If you want a translation, Google will do it for you here: link.

My list will be followed in the next few days by people far hipper than I, such as Anne Laforêt, Vincent Epplay, or Michaël Sellam.

Vincent Cogne found some time (between evaluations and the whatnots of end-of-semester madness) to put up the source code to the solution he found for creating stereoscopic Processing sketches [link]. We tried a few different solutions before this one (well, to be honest, I just made teacherly suggestions with a lot of OpenGL theory and Vincent did all the work). This was all while Ben Chang was here teaching us his solution using Ygdrasil. I think Ben has done great work on making a viable solution, but I just cringed when I saw all the hackery-clickery that had to be done just to set the environment up. I figured there had to be a better way.

The advantage of Ygdrasil over Processing/OpenGL is that it’s higher level, so you can just say « put this model here, and that model there » and the thing takes care of it for you (sort of like Shockwave3d in that sense, but on a more serious foundation). But on the other end, from an artistic perspective, I actually prefer to work closer to the bone — screwing around with the OpenGL directly because you get more visually interesting results (= easier to make pretty mistakes). But that’s just me. Anyway, with Vincent’s solution we were able to play around with the basics of stereoscopic imagery very quickly, and in the little hour I found to fiddle around with it, I saw the power of working this way rather than the higher-level stuff. You can iterate the designs so much faster this way (thank you Processing). I wish I had more time to play with it, but ultimately that’s the great thing about running an atelier : you can follow several different directions simultaneously.

As a side note, we also noticed very quickly that the stereoscopic images really pop out of the stucture better if you work off of a black backround. In other words, if you lose the « image » reference, and even lose the frame, and work off of the structure as if it were an architectural element within the room and not just a big TV screen. This is the mistake most « Virtual Reality » environments make (god I hate that term). They make a huge effort to get stereoscopic images, and then project it onto a conventional surface.

Oh, if you don’t know how to make a stereoscopic image, it’s actually very similar to how to make a Hypertable. But in this case, you need two projectors, with polarized filters, and a rear-projection screen that respects the polarization. (Huh? That’s not much of an explanation) Oh, just ask Vincent, he’ll explain it to you. He’s quite brilliant at everything 3d-programmable, so go bug him. I just got off the plane for @&#§$*@#¡ and I need some sleep.

And while we’re on the subject of 3d engines (see that? it’s called the bait-and-switch), John Klima just finished a two week workshop at the school showing our students how to use the Torque Game Engine. I didn’t have the time to hang out with them as much as I would have liked, but I got enough of a glimse to know that it’s an even better soluton than XNA which was really bothering me because of the licence, the Microsoft-centric aspect, etc. Whereas Torque is Mac/PC/Linux/Xbox. Pretty impressive. So like XNA, you can make Xbox360 games with it (and even distribute over Xbox Live Arcade, although that’s far more complicated because you have to go through the Bill, even if Bill does give you a good cut).

Jack Stenner took some time out at ISEA2006 to walk me through Torque as well and I had left with a good impression. We were exhibiting next to one another and often up late plugging things in, so I got to see how the system worked for him. As with everything, there are some wonky aspects, but so what, it’s open-source and cheap. And I think that’s really cool that there is a viable open-source platform for gaming. In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that we will not have a true massive gaming culture (on the same scale and deep influence as cinema, for example) until the platform becomes truly open and open-source. No one has a patent on 24-images-per-second, so too should it be for game platforms.

Enough techno-art-geek soap boxing for tonight. Zzzzz….

So, Steve Jobs, being the kinda guy he is, has decided to post his personal thoughts on Digital Rights Management in an open letter. It’s an eye-opening read. As usual, he turns the whole thing ass-up, claiming that in fact he would rather just get rid of the DRM, while still maintaining that Apple’s DRM does not in practice tie users to their iPod since only 3% of users have DRM’d music on their machines (hmm, how to you say « bullshit » in Norwegian?). He also claims that there is healthy competition (here comes the smoke and mirrors) because other competitors (he names Sony and Microsoft) are also locking users into hardware-content configurations. So we are perfectly free to choose who locks up music that we have paid for in machines that we have also paid for, but that we do not entirely own.

But the best part comes at the end. According to Steve, it’s the record companies who have his $#&§@, because they’re scared $#@!§%§# of opening up the floodgates to illegal filesharing and are basically !§&#@%§ all over themselves. Calling them a bunch of $%#@& in public, he reminds us all that these same record companies hypocritically release non-DRM’d content through their own channels (CD’s), and that anyone can easily upload those to the Internet. In other words, stop $%§&##§ on us, start $%§&##§ on the record companies. This is the whole reason he wrote the letter, and as usual, there was a strategy: to change the dynamic in the debate and throw the ball into the laps of the record companies who indeed are pretty unsavoury characters and not really the types you’d want to meet in a dark alley (especially when they have a pen and contract in their hand).

If you haven’t been following, Apple is currently up against the wall, with Europe now on their doorstep. Lately, American businesses have been very scared of having Europe on their doorstep (see Microsoft) and seem to be listening. Since America has apparently abandoned applying the very economic model it pretends to sell to the rest of the world — namely market expansion through fair competition —, it seems that Europe now has to do the dirty work of keeping their own markets open for them (instead, America is currently embracing massive market consoldiation, especially in media markets where dominance equals delegated control while maintaining the gloss of democracy). Now it’s Apple that finds itself in Europe’s crosshairs, with Norway threatening to open up Apple’s DRM for it by the end of the year if they don’t find a solution. Norway has also been joined recently by Germany, the Netherlands, with France bringing up the rear (when they were supposed to be the ones leading this fight).

This is actually all great news. It’s good news for Apple that Europe is giving them extra leverage to go back to the negotiating table with the record companies, and it’s even greater news that Steve Jobs has gone on public record stating that Apple would remove DRM from their technology « in a heartbeat ». It looked like Apple was heading down a different path, and European public policy might just now reverse that. This also means that Apple still wants to remain a technology company, and just licence content for distribution, which is an interesting turn as well. This would make Apple a very different company than Sony, even if Steve Jobs does sit on the Disney board.

Now if Europe could get around to opening up gaming platforms, especially now that France has just passed a tax credit for game developers. I don’t mean by that that game platforms should, like cinema’s 24 frames-per-second, be technologically homogenized. I just mean that if we shouldn’t be locked into Sony-distributed music to play music on our Sony digital walkman, why should we be locked into Sony-licenced games on our Sony Playstation? Especially if, as Sony says, the Playstation is a computer, and makes us pay computer prices for it. Sounds like a Sony-tax, just like the Apple-tax Norway is trying to remove.

• Program: Partage du savoir, privatisation des connaissances
• Radio Station: Radio Grenouille 88.8, Marseille
• Times & Dates: 18h, Monday January 29th; 18h, Tuesday January 30th; 18h, Wednesday January 31st
• Speakers: Jean Cristofol, Douglas Edric Stanley, Paul Devautour (Art et propriété intellectuelle); Emmanuel Vergès, Philippe Aigrain, François Deck (Société de l’information et économie de l’immatériel); Fabienne Orsi, Jean Cristofol, Bertrand Jordan (Appropriation du vivant)

I already mentioned this back in December, but Radio Grenouille recorded several speakers from the series of conferences organized by Jean Cristofol entitled Partage du savoir, privatisation de la connaissance. Those recordings have now been edited and will play at the end of this month, starting next week.

The first conversation took place between Paul Devautour, Jean and me, and will be rebroadcast on the 29th. I have to admit, as usual I was pretty lame and didn’t have all that much to say. I suppose I was a little taken aback when at the start of the conversation the fellow interviewing me had no §@#&*$% idea who the hell I was, so didn’t really ask me very good questions. Please, journalists, either come prepared, or simply have the humility to ask! Little by little we got there, but, well, it wasn’t easy. Paul and I went back and forth over a topic he and I disagree about — i.e. the role of design in art schools and society — so that part of the debate should be fairly energetic. But the most important section, i.e. the relationship between art and private property, was pretty much a bore. Perhaps in the editing room they can make it a little spicier. Basically Paul, Jean, and I have all been working towards the same cause, fighting the new laws on intellectual property, so there wasn’t really much to debate.

What we didn’t have time to get to, was the role hacking is playing in the current debate. For example, I am in a strange position right now where the work that I and my students are doing in my atelier has been rendered hors-la-loi by the very Minister of Culture that is supposed to be defending my rights as an artist. All in the name of DRM, he passed a law that goes easy on light piracy (peer-to-peer) with fines that range from a few hundred dollars to caps set at two thousand. That’s the part that was designed to keep the public at bay. But as for those that would dare inform others how to bypass digital rights management, well the fines can go up to about 35,000€. Sympa, as we say here in France. Open Source software, this means you.

Now, of course, all this is open to interpretation, so we will see what happens in the courts, but the idea behind all this is to lock up the system such that large media players can operate freely by distributing whatever protection formats they like, and thereby unleash state-sanctioned private software virii throughout our machines, infiltrating the infinite recesses of our own folders and files. Nobody asked for this. Sony, on the one hand, gets lawsuits over their Rootkit, while on the other hand, the French law similar technologies a legal reality. And anyone caught explaining to people how to free up their media from these formats will be severely punished. In my situation, this means that the classes I teach on hacking into gaming consoles are basically illegal if someone wanted to take the time out to make our lives difficult. Which is of course completely rediculous, because we all know the importance of hacking to keep these platforms economically alive, and even give them a second life.

What I am interested in, is seeing how we can usher in a new generation of artistic forms that are based on generative or simply algorithmic processes, i.e. media creations that match the modular nature of the machines that animate them. An iPod is a little computer, so ultimately I should be able to generate not just music files for that little machine, but actual musical programs or patches. For example, Maxim Marion told me the other day that it is now fairly easy to put Pure Data patches onto Linux’ed iPods. But when you look at the new French DRM laws, they are designed precisely to protect the holders of massive libraries of old, un-dynamic media. And since the new gadgets are becoming more and more tied to the media themselves (i.e. iTunes), it is become harder and harder to open up this new potential field. We can hack into these machines (with some risks, see above), but we cannot distribute our creations on them because only the select few will have opened them up. It seems amazing to me, although quite telling, that someone like Brian Eno can make generative compositions for video games (cf. Spore), but not for the iPod. Perhaps it’s the case that we are simply going to have to don the sheep’s clothing of video games for everything we do artistically, just to get our foot in the door?