Public Domain Day 2015 – The death of the Authors, 1943

On 7th February I’ll be back in Brussels for a performance at Public Domain Day

The Public Domain Day is celebrating works of art which enter into the public domain because their copyrights have expired. These works can be freely enjoyed, used, changed, republished by everybody. Worldwide, this The Public Domain Day is celebrated on the first of January, and this year we celebrate, with a slight delay, the works of authors and artists who died in 1944. In Brussels, the Public Domain Day is celebrated by a yearly event that is organised by Constant, CRIDS (Centre de Recherche Informatique et Droit, FUNDP Namur), Cinema Nova and the Royal Library of Belgium.

The afternoon takes place at the Royal Library and is dedicated to Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the writer of Le Petit Prince. He
is a special case because he ’died for the fatherland’ and that delivered him a copyright extension of 30 years according to the French law. In Belgium as in the rest of the world, his work is free of rights since 1th January 2015.

The evening programme takes place at Cinema Nova.

For this performance myself, Michael Murtaugh, Anne Laforet, Gijs De Heij, and An Mertens will be performing in the Botopera.

botopera

Fats Waller, Nicolas Tesla, Beatrix Potter, Sergei Rachmaninov and Henri La Fontaine are some of the many artists who have left this world during the second world war. These authors will be reanimated in the form of a “chatbot”: a small software program that automatically intervenes in a chat conversation pretending to be human. The bots, the public, the printers and the projected images work together in this interactive performance.

With : BotsWaller, NICKola tesla, Beatrix Plotter, Rachmanibot, henrIRC lafontaine & their plotter

It’s all free and starts from about 20:00

OSP Print Party

For OSP’s Print Party on October 18th I made a bunch of new software and modified some old software that did sonification of text, bitmap, and vector images. I saw it as a way to differently engage with the usually static images featured throughout the festival. Here’s some of the visual output from a Processing sketch that, when combined with Pure Data, would redraw an SVG and convert it to sound:

ospprintparty_1

ospprintparty_3

ospprintparty_2

ospprintparty_4

And here’s an example of a fish being sonfied. Expect lots of bleepy noises:

If you’re interested in using the software the repository is located here and this particular code resides in the listetoSVG folder. The Processing sketch for that piece is a modification of this sketch by emainorbit. I may revisit and develop this software but for now there will be no detailed writeup of how to use it.

As an experiment it was really interesting to “bring to life” a static programme. There is a danger that the performances – whcih I’m sure OSP will write about at some point – deviated too much from the idea of a print party, but in isolation I felt they worked really well!

Balsamine – 18th October 2014

On 18th October I’ll be back in Brussels to join OSP for their appearance at Balsamine.

balsamine

Following the path started with the Seoul Fonts Karaoke, continued with the Bits and Sounds worksession at Relearn 2014, OSP is going to scratch its sonic itches once more with the re-thread of this (appropriately musical) years visual material and program.

The gang will do its best to convert as much of the program into sounds, then tracks, then mix them all together, we’re expecting it to be loud, at the very least.

I’ll be doing my now usual thing of converting things to sound 🙂

It all kicks off from 17:30 at Théâtre de la Balsamine on 18th October.

Libre Graphics Research Unit – Co-Position meeting

I’ll be in Brussels from 22nd – 25th February for the Libre Graphics Research Unit Co-Position meeting.

The Co-position research meeting focuses on digital tools for arranging texts and other graphic elements: How can we re-imagine lay-out from scratch? What tools do we need to support decentralized collaboration? How can we understand what workflows, distributions of work and media are coded into our tools? Can we bring canvas editing, dynamic lay-outs, web-to-print and Print On Demand together in more interesting ways? What kind of messages do we propagate and how does this change the tools we need?

I’ll be taking part in two of the sessions:

Wednesday 22nd February: Visual Versioning

I’ll be doing a brief presentation of my work – focussing more on the open source software side of things – somewhere between 19:30 and 22:00

Saturday 25th February: Prototypes

I’ll be part of a roundtable discussion, chaired by Angela Plohman and featuring myself and Stephanie Vilayphiou, Camille Bissuel, Ricardo Lafuente and Ana Carvalho and Lieven Van Speybroeck. Disucssion and presentations take place from 13:30, ending 15:00

The whole programme and schedule can be found at the main LGRU website.

Open Source Art

Although I’ve ordered a copy of FLOSS+Art, made by the excellent OSP I’m compiling my own thoughts on the concept of Open Source Art. You can view my progress on my wiki. I’m relatively new to using MediaWiki, having only previously used PBWiki, so once I have gotten my head around it more please do feel free to add or edit what I have written. I’m treating the writing of this document as an open source project in itself 😉