Summit:
The Winter Night’s Copyright Fairytale is the main evening program of our event. It is a three parts extravagant show, in which several talks and music performances will cosily gather around a fairytale about creators, authors, lawyers, publishers and pirates.
Once upon a time in the wonderful Folklore Valley, a creator wonders about the becoming of her memetic folktale legacy and decides to take some distance from the anonymous creative practices of her community
Femke Snelting is an artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is member of Constant, a Brussels based association for Art and Media. Femke co-initiated the design- and research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and coordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a network of four European medialabs that investigates the many interrelations between tools and practice.
'The creator is warned by a giant caption. It reads: “Do Not Want”. Despite the viral warning, the creator leaves her community and starts to sign her work as a mean to legitimate her individual contribution to the folktale scene. On her way to authorship, she encounters the Lawyer and the Publisher. The Lawyer delivers rights to the creator.'
Born in Hinterkappelen in 1976, Manuel Schmalstieg is an artist, designer and educator, operating in the murky area between media art and hacker communities. A graduate of HEAD Geneva and ASP Kraków, he founded multiple collaborative entities, including N3krozoft Ltd (2001), a technological think tank; the realtime online performance group Aether9 (2007); post-digital publishing house Greyscale Press (2008); 1904 Carbon Copy, an initiative for the preservation of networked art. His electronic media works include LOL (2004), a stage performance based on IRC chatlogs; BlackBox:GVA (2006), an augmented stage performance that foreshadowed current NSA wiretapping; LowRez Stories (2010), a remake of the 1972 sci-fi movie Solaris shot inside of Google Streetview.
The creator becomes the Author. At this point the Author and the Publisher begin to promote copyright laws in the Folklore Valley. With the help of the Lawyer, the Publisher uses the Author as an excuse to transform the Folklore Valley into a profitable folktale factory.
Rob Myers is an artist, hacker and writer from England now based in Vancouver, Canada. He promotes free culture through art shows, software systems, and community and commercial media projects. Currently he’s exploring 3D printing and Open Data while working with the artist community Furtherfield in the UK and the free culture company FooCorp in the US.
'The Author receives distressed calls from another creator persecuted by the Publisher for making a derivative work from a copyrighted folktale. The Author hears the sound of a flute. The free melody comes from a campsite, beyond the Folklore Valley. The Author leaves the, now fully copyrighted, Folklore Valley and heads toward the campsite, attracted by the melody of this open invitation. The Lawyer is following her from a distance. Arrived at the campsite, the Author learns from the Man with a Beard, that useful information should be free. And by free he is not referring to its price. The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Paul Keller (1974) is vice chair of Kennisland. Together with Chris Sigaloff he manages the Kennisland team. As senior copyright policy advisor Paul initiates new projects, advises governments, cultural heritage institutions and other organizations on open approaches to copyright policy, new media and innovation stategies. Paul is a frequent public speaker and lecturer both in the Netherlands and abroad. Paul is public project lead for Creative Commons Netherlands, Collecting Societies liason for Creative Commons international and a board member of iCommons an organization that promotes interoperability in the field of open content, open data and open knowledge. Paul is also member of the board of the Dutch non-profit organizationTrans Artists and of the advisory board of the Virtual Platform.
Leaving the campsite, the Author wonders whether or not cultural expressions can also be free and, somehow, now liberated from copyright. The Lawyer appears in front of the Author and hands over free culture licenses.
Dave is an Irish artist, musician and researcher currently based in Edinburgh. His research deals with the Cold War history of networked culture, exploring the emergence of cybernetic theory as an ideology of the information age and the influence of military technologies on popular culture.
Eleanor is an artist, activist and facilitator from Oxford, UK. She facilitates participatory projects that explore the conflicts involved in doing democratic (sexual) politics, feminism and participatory production. She graduated from Piet Zwart Institute in 2013. Now in training as a psychotherapist, current work explores group collaboration by excavating practices of fortune-telling, superstition and ritual.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Florian Cramer, applied research professor on the impact of new media on arts and design professions, director of research center Creating 010, Hogeschool Rotterdam &dean of WORM Parallel University at WORM Rotterdam. Recent publications: Post-Digital Aesthetics, Jeu de Paume/le magazine, http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/; Anti-Media, NAi Publishers, 2013
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Annet Dekker is an independent researcher, curator and writer. Currently she is core tutor at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. In 2009 she initiated aaaan.net with Annette Wolfsberger; they coordinate artists-in-residences and set up strategic and sustainable collaborations with (inter)national arts organisations. Previously she worked as web curator for SKOR (2010–12), was programme manager at Virtueel Platform (2008–10), head of exhibitions, education and artists-in-residence at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (1999–2008), and editor of several publications on digital art and issues of preservation. In 2008 she began a Ph.D. research into strategies for documenting net art at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University, London.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Gülşen Emre is a graphic designer and photographer currently studying at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She is also the designer behind the copy/paste campaign that was developed for FREE?!.
Luc Nagel is a graphic designer and former student of Willem de Kooning Academy. He developed the Quotation Adaptation poster and video campaign for Free?!.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
A data liberation enthusiast, currently nurturing twin interests in piracy and privacy by working on a PhD at Goldsmiths College and developing cost-effective means of defeating forensic surveillance measures and increasing the security of those facilitating unbridled nonlegal information sharing, as well as on dismantling the myth of Intellectual Property in all of its manifestations.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Marcell Mars is one of the founders of Multimedia Institute – mi2 and net.culture club MAMA in Zagreb. He initiated GNU GPL publishing label EGOBOO.bits, started Skill sharing regular informal meetings of enthusiasts in mama + Skill sharing’s satellites g33koskop, ‘Nothing will happen’ and ‘The Fair of Mean Equipment’. Marcell participated in many collborative artistic projects, was one of the organizers of summer camps “Otokultivator” on island Vis, Regularly runs workshops, runs Wonder of technology/Čudo tehnike at Faculty of Media and Communication and at Jan Van Eyck in Maastricht works on Ruling Class Studies.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Dušan works with art, theory and software. He is the founding editor of Monoskop.org and a member of the artist collective La Société Anonyme.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Working as a web designer / code monkey for cultural organizations, he has been contributing to the WordPress UI, written plugins, and helped kickstarting a local community in Switzerland around that free software platform. He has directed workshops at Lift Conference, Mapping Festival, the Bucharest Biennale and some art and design schools, which mostly consisted in messing around with tactical media tools and open web standards. Manuel has spoken at public events including RMLL 2012, LGM 2013, Books in Browsers 2013, and may be bribed into DJing at your after party.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.
Femke Snelting is an artist and designer, developing projects at the intersection of design, feminism and free software. She is member of Constant, a Brussels based association for Art and Media. Femke co-initiated the design- and research team Open Source Publishing (OSP) and coordinated the Libre Graphics Research Unit, a network of four European medialabs that investigates the many interrelations between tools and practice.
'The Lawyer, hiding, is listening attentively. The Man with a Beard resumes his flute practice.