Andrew Orlowski » art

How to copyright Michelangelo: Eicher

admin — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:02:08 +0000

Commissioned as a Christmas special for 2007, this was a couple of years in the making.

Some of the world’s greatest artworks are turning into copyrighted properties. Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Today, those images are copyrighted. How can ancient cultural icons become commercial properties, centuries after they fall into the public domain?

How this happened is a story that takes us from a Crusading Pope in the Borgias era, all the way to Bill Gates’ mansion on the shores of Lake Washington.

…Read more at The Register.

Burning Man, meet Drowning Man

admin — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 17:13:12 +0000

Silicon Valley’s freak-out meets Katrina, with a bump

The writer had found an elusive internet connection, and reaching beyond exhaustion was finding words to record the madness around him:

“We are operating on something beyond tired, beyond care, beyond recognition,” he wrote. “You just keep going, because you have no choice.”

New Orleans? No, Burning Man.

The writer was describing America’s greatest party, although word only seeped through about the disaster unfolding in America’s greatest party city, 2,000 miles away.

The Burning Man festival is a survival experience by design, not force majeure. Each year around 30,000 throng to a Nevada salt desert for a week, bringing their own food and water with them to create “Black Rock City”, and endeavoring to leave no trace behind them. It’s a celebration of creativity, community and endurance that for many in Silicon Valley is the highlight of the year – around two thirds of Burners are from the San Francisco Bay Area. By no means the largest festival in the world, Burning Man is still a truly astonishing visual spectacle, and the intensity of the experience leads Burners to host “decompression parties” on touchdown.

This year, however, the decompression shock has been particularly severe.

Cell phones don’t work out on the Nevada playa, and only a handful of attendees use the Wi-Fi hotspot that’s set up for the media. The nearest hamlet is 11 miles away. So the news that the US had been hit by a catastrophe which may dwarf 9/11 trickled through the temporary city fitfully.

By Thursday, Disaster Relief buckets were collecting money in Center Camp – BRC’s nominal hub and the one area where money can be exchanged (for coffee, cold drinks, or ice). But canny Burners shun Center Camp, with its commercial frenzy, and its hippie-tinged, NPR-style events program, so most of those who do drop by use it as no more than a meeting point. As the catastrophe unfolded, many attendees were barely aware of the scale crisis and many more – your reporter included – were to be unaware of the extent of human suffering – which prompted the poorest countries in the world such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh to pledge aid to the USA – it until leaving the camp this week.

Back to the SF Chronicle‘s John Curley, who had been pressed into blogging duty:

“Just when you think you just won’t be able to make it through the afternoon, that this one is just too long and hot and tiring and you don’t want to see another installation and you’re sick of being on this damn bike and you just want to sit some place cool and green, you find salvation in the form of a snow cone. A blessed soul has set up a cart in the middle of the playa, in the far reaches out near the perimeter fence, and he’s shaving a block of ice and putting a mound of the blessed coolness in a small plastic cone, and he’s pouring fresh concoction of raspberry/lemon syrup on it. Ohhhh, and now he’s putting a little vodka on as a finish.”

Ohhhh, Burning Man. The New Orleans disaster relief buckets dotted around the Festival remained depressingly ignored. Meanwhile, a collection of the wealthiest people in the world couldn’t do enough … for each other.

Radical Self Obsession

Burning Man is a minor miracle, and is the best and worst of the United States in a microcosm, with the best eclipsing the worst can do. But no attendee can have returned to reality without feeling some sense of unease.

The event’s co-founder Larry Harvey, who has steered this marvelous gathering over twenty years occasionally sounds like he’s steering a global movement, too. Supporters say it’s based on the principles of “Radical Self-Reliance” and “Radical Self-Expression”. People who like to speak on behalf of the festival take these principles very seriously indeed. What do we make of these principles now?

Harvey likes to talk about the “spirit” of Burning Man spreading across the globe, but without the folk art, and removed from the rigors of life on the harsh desert playa, Burning Man might look a lot like Spring Break. (Veterans complain that it already does look like Spring Break, but these complaints are vastly overstated, and there’s nothing that a more rigorous policy of refusing entrance after Monday couldn’t fix).

In fact almost every cynical cliche about the event is true. It seems to bring out every New Age fraud, groper and leerer from Northern California and beyond – many of whom seem to volunteer for the Black Rock City Postal Service, it seems. Women found it particularly hard to post a letter without having to show their tits, or kiss the “counter clerk”.

You could take refuge and primp your ego with class hosted by Winking Lotus, called I’m Perfect – Self Discovery Through Art, or brush up on Male Tantric Masturbation, which is “a nude solo activity open to all men” … as if we didn’t already know.

But none of the bogosity or self indulgence detracts from the uniqueness and sense of wonder of Burning Man itself, thanks to the creativity, hard work and ready spontaneity of so many Burners. The daytime creeps have gone to bed by the time the city really wakes up, at night – the fondlers retiring to brush up on their Tantric Masturbation techniques, perhaps – and it’s then that the city comes alive with thousands of bicycling party people, weaving across the dark playa like shoals of exotic, glowing fish. This is a space like no other.

If you’re looking for the “soul” of Burning Man, the sassy, bitchy and righteously hedonistic on-site newspaper Piss Clear holds the torch. This year, as before, the paper spent as much time scorning the pompous Burning Man credo and the “gift economy”, which many understand as bartering.

“I really want to give you some free booze,” writes Malderor. “I don’t want your gift. Please don’t give me anything. I don’t want your stickers, your flyers – or god forbid – your pipe cleaner sculpture of the Burning Man”.

Burning Man’s secret is that it really is an incredible party – the reports that coyly refer to “an arts festival”, are really a device to kid the authorities. And perhaps to kid the organizers themselves, who as Stephen T Jones of the San Francisco Bay Guardian reports, did their best to keep sound systems out of the event in the late 1990s. Most of the wonders at Burning Man aren’t the gigantic artworks, which receive just $400,000 of the $7m the Burning Man Organization grosses from gate receipts, or the staged spectaculars: they’re often the very simple, very inventive art cars or costumes, assembled at the participants’ own expense.

The question is what Harvey, or anyone else who wishes to speak for our Burning Man experience, can find to turn into a practical philosophy that reaches out beyond the self-selecting few.

Yes, but…

If it’s a program of action, some criticisms begin to look justified. Burning Man is, as the San Francisco Chronicle notes, even whiter than the prosperous Bay Area itself.

The rules force attendees to monitor their consumption, and leave their wallets untouched. But what else is “a gift economy”, except Trickle Down Economics with a cute name? If you’re already struggling to afford a $200 ticket, then the chances are you won’t be able to be Lady Bountiful with the consumables.

And most strange of all to this European’s ears is the absence of words like unity and collective. The two words, which form either a tacit or an explicit part of almost every other festival in the world, are as unspeakable at Black Rock City as they are in the mainstream American discourse. In place of common purpose, which Europeans have discovered speaks to power like no other force, is the right to do whatever you want and damn the consequences. And it’s all about you.

And once armed, you don’t even have to be nice about using it. On Saturday night, I heard one haddock-faced party bus MC (her mullet-haired husband standing guard behind her) repelling would-be boarders with the message,

“Some Free Speech for ya – Fuck Off!”.

(Regular readers who’ve seen the internet’s early communities atomize into the “blogosphere” – where a Million Nation States of One can enjoy the freedom to shout past each other, to no effect at all – will recognize this at once).

Or another example. On Sunday morning, your reporter heard a self-appointed “preacher” tell a string of jokes involving Jesus, Mary Magdelene and anal sex, before launching into a tirade against organized religion – a force, he insisted, that prevented him enjoying as much alcohol as wanted to. “Can’t we do,” he asked, “just whatever we want?”

At about the same time Oakland’s Gospel Choir, one of the few black “theme camps” on the playa, was launching into its second session, and through its joyful noise was raising as many donations for the New Orleans relief fund as had been gathered throughout the entire festival.

So is Burning Man just a headless freak-out, or as some suggest, a new model for social organization? Is it escapism, or the future? To damn this annual flowering of fun and creativity as a hedonistic indulgence (which it is, of course) merely reinforces the Puritan sensibilities and strictures which Burning Man was reacting against in the first place. Action and reaction: we could be running round this loop for a very long time.

At the end of the day, Burning Man is no worse for being a great party – so perhaps we shouldn’t take the Burning Man Organization’s own cliches about radical self masturbation all that seriously. My wish is that Harvey, who has a really good grasp on what’s missing from the disconnected and spiritually impoverished life of American suburbia, would drop these now their time has passed. After America’s response to its own people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it’s surely about time.

Sun's newest star lauds the PT Barnum way

admin — Sat, 07 May 2005 13:16:40 +0000

“The web is now nature,” says Glenn Edens, one of Sun Microsystems’ most important executives, and its fastest-rising star.

The senior VP has been Director of Sun Labs for around 18 months, but the bright lights of Hollywood now beckon. He’s been picked to head Sun’s newest creation, a vertical business unit aimed at converged media, entertainment and broadband, which was announced with a flourish in Las Vegas at the recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.

The new unit has inspired great excitement and anxiety at Sun. It may not be overstating the case to say that it represents a battle for the soul of the company.

In a wide-ranging interview last week Edens enthused about sensors and “digital ectoplasm”, the value of amateurs, and the inspirational example set by … er, PT Barnum. You’ll begin to see why his new media unit is such a contentious move.

But he parried questions about the new unit, which had already got off to a rocky start, we discovered.

“The NAB press machine got a little ahead of itself, and we probably got a little ahead of ourselves on that,” he told us. “We hadn’t even done all the internal stuff yet.”

One of the immediate concerns is that Sun Labs traditional research focus, devoted to solving deep problems with today’s computing infrastructure, will lose out given the new focus on media and “sensors”.

“I do have R&D funds, and we are slicing and dicing budgets now,” said Edens, a little ominously.

On the face of it, the thinking behind Sun’s media unit is pretty 1980s and naff. Converged media is nothing if not a cliche already, and SGI has long trumpeted such a strategy with a conspicuous lack of success. Why should Sun, at this stage, fare different? However, Edens’ himself makes the pitch for a group devoted to media and broadband sound fairly plausible.

“Satellite, cable and mobile operators are all getting into each others business, and as everything becomes digital and IP, you’re not going to be able to tell the difference. The telcos are getting into cable, the cable operators are getting into VoIP; and they’re all trying to use the attributes of their network to get as many customers as they can for their services,” he says.

In which case, he reckons, there are a lot a technology-savvy company like Sun can do to help them.

As well as presenting the big picture, Edens is also keen to the nuances. A Citibank requires very different service offerings to an HBO, he explained. He’s isn’t impressed by some of the hype around the converged business, either.

“Frankly the whole VOIP business is amusing, because you can get fixed rate unlimited long distance for $20 a month from all the carriers, which is less than what VoIP costs,” he observes.

But what worries some Sun veterans is that how the new focus affects the relationship between R&D and wealth creation. Research may takes years to pay off, but if a company can claim to solve one or two of the industry’s many difficult problems, then it has something of real commercial value to pitch to its customers, and a genuine competitive advantage. With the US’ chief economic rival now determined to innovate rather than imitate, this takes on a new urgency.

Isn’t the next Google inside Sun Labs, we asked Glenn? In projects like Celeste,asynchronous computing, and the HPCS proximity communication, Sun has work with multi-billion dollar potential. However the sensor free-for-all we saw at the Labs Open Day seems much more emblematic of the new Labs.

But Edens sees the new emphasis as returning Sun Labs to its original goals.

“The Lab had become somewhat disconnected from the business,” he says. “The Labs original mission statement which Bert Sutherland had helped draft – which was to solve difficult problems that our customers had brought to us – the Labs had got away from that.”

Sensorama

But while the underlying business case for a focus on media and sensors is sound, the some of the approaches are sure to raise eyebrows. Edens enthused about letting art and science collide – with the emphasis on collision.

For example, the Labs Director enthused about how the sensor platform, just a fortnight old, had allowed non-programmers to develop product demos.

“We just got the sensor boards back, and the for first time the sensors were accessible to the software team members and they were in the labs hooking up little motors and doing little things, and it was really great. We had literally tripled the number of people in the lab who could do a sensor project.

“We had David Simmons put together a refrigerator demo, he’s not a hardware or software engineer, and he did it!”

That’s an internet enabled fridge – one of the forgotten icons of the dot.com bubble.

The idea behind the internet enabled fridge was that you could tell, without opening the fridge door, whether you needed to buy more milk. The fridge would cybernetically order milk on your behalf, perhaps delivering it on the back of a Java-enabled sensor-bearing robot. Maybe one that looked like a miniature Gary Numan. But even a half-wit is able to open their fridge and realize “I’ve run out of milk!”, and so the idea deservedly fell to earth.

But for a while the iconic internet-enabled fridge was an emblem of a great computer R&D experiment that failed: MIT Media Labs. So since he’d raised the subject, we discussed the legacy of MIT Media Labs’ decade of producing interactive fridge demos. What lasting contribution had that made to the field of human inquiry?

“The MIT work – I didn’t even judge it. My question is what do those students know when they come out – because they know something. They’ve ve been able to experiment and express ideas.”

Another researcher, in a gentle rebuttal to our Labs report last week, hoped that, “Ideally we’d like to see college and high school students using Java to develop wild new wireless and embedded systems.”

In place of rigorous exploration designed to build a residual body of expertise, which can then be applied to the company’s commercial advantage, the new Sun Labs does rather sound like a hippy high school’s after-hours science club, only with the teacher absent.

That’s not fair, Edens insisted. Look how the web only took off after artists got involved. (After some prodding by your reporter, Edens said he was using the term “artist” synonymously with “designer”). We had text, then we had fonts, and finally web man ascended to the heights of Macromedia Flash.

“The invention of Flash came about because you wanted a vehicle for a non-programming person to program,” he said.

Um, but don’t people hate all that, though? We do.

“Well, some people do, some people don’t – that’s the beauty of society,” he replied rather crisply, before confessing, “I sure hit that Skip Intro button.”

So much for amateur programmers, then, you might well wonder.

Edens strongly defended the have-a-go heroics of his new “amateur” approach.

If Sun Labs looks more like a product shop, then that’s no accident. The examples Edens cites showcase real commercial services that Sun customers can pick up and use, such as offerings designed to show fixed line operators how they can do more with their existing infrastructure. Some of these are quite plausible.

“In OfficeCentral we’re showing a lot of new things you can do with conferencing. Teleconferencing is a multi billion dollar business, we’ve been showing a secure, stereo, multichannel audio conferencing demo. Stereo telephony totally changes the nature of conferencing calls.”

The OfficeCentral demo has years of deep thinking on human interaction, trust and identity informing it. But how representative it is of the newer generation of projects is debatable. In the rush to produce a demo, the knowledge gained may be lost, or never even noticed.

Art for Art’s Sake

While several researchers have been “helped to find new careers” during Edens tenure, we were delighted to hear of an new appointment.

Sun will appoint an Artist-in-Residence, for the very first time. That’s because, Glenn explains, “two things inform technology over the years: art and the military.”

“The military has driven the internet, through the development of semiconductors, and artists have driven the web,” he says. “It’s a combination of the two.”

By this logic, Sun’s next hire should be a “Soldier-in-Residence” – a quite tantalizing thought. Just as the Artist-in-Residence could sculpt inspirational artwork or fashion giant murals to provide the engineers with a muse, so a soldier could be hired to run around the campus bayonetting bags of straw, or if he’s really resourceful, wiring up the gardener to the electricity supply.

But rather than reaching back to a renaissance man such as Leonardo, we were astonished to hear Glenn summon a more recent inventor for inspiration.

“It wasn’t PT Barnum who said you ‘never lost money underestimating the taste of America’ – it was someone else, and it’s attributed to him,” said Glenn. “But the neat part of all this technology is that society sorts out over the long haul what’s important.”

For a contemporary PT Barnum, we mused, one need look no further than the MIT Media Labs’ former chief Nicholas Negroponte. The Labs’ founder cheerfully glad-handed corporate sponsors for years, and he even thought horizontally, creating a kind of gadget supplement - Wired magazine – to showcase this work.

Today there is no shortage of media outlets eager to seize on gadgets Wired is still with us, and both USA Today and National Public Radio can be relied on to fill editorial space with news of the latest wonders. But in the end only one of these two hit upon a reliable cash cow – and it wasn’t Negroponte.

Empire of the Sensors

So which way will Glenn Edens’ take the good ship Sun?

At times, his analysis sounds so rigorous, exacting and succinct you can’t help but agree. MP3 has been a disaster for audiophiles, he says, but he optimistically believes that this will be cured when the networks have more bandwidth. Interactive TV will always be doomed because people want to be told a story – “film making works because people want to be told a story”. Digital TV has made channel flipping impossible, because the systems aren’t fast enough.

“We need to get control of the spam, get QoS nailed, and get the whole thing converted to IP. That’s for the rest 3 to 4 years. It took 50 years to get the POTS to built up to be the platform for the growth of the nation. We’re not there with the internet.”

Quite so.

Then again, there were times when it sounded like the captain needed better navigation. When we raised the prospects for the web’s survival, Glenn was horrified. It’s a rational calculation that because of the failure to find a consensus to fix its many technical inadequacies, and commercial pressures from vested interests, we suggested that the web as it is may only have a slim chance of surviving. But Sun’s Media VP looked as if we’d invented a new and horrifying blasphemy.

The problem with Edens’ new Media Unit is that he must kill the internet he cherishes in order for it to succeed. If there’s one thing Sun’s biggest “media” customers such as Vodafone and DoCoMo understand, it’s that they understand what sells, and preserving an “open internet” isn’t exactly their top priority. Something has to give.

And once or twice he sounded like a man who’s rowed so far out to sea, that even the Coast Guard can’t help.

Edens urged us to look at one example of the web’s wonders, a graphical interface that uses Google as its data source, and plots all the occurrences of numbers between one and a million.

“It’s a beautiful display that allows you to scroll through and see a 2D representation of all the numbers … and it’s just astonishing what you can learn.”

“You can just scroll through this, and see a frequency of an occurrence of a number. It’s black or white with all these green in the middle. So you go to one of these white hotspots in the middle of nowhere and go, ‘What’s that number about? Why does the that number occur so often in nature?

“Because the web is now kinda nature.”