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Art Intercom: featuring net.art duo, MTAA
Paddy Johnson · New York (United States) · May 05th, 2007 2:49 pm · 26 votes · no comments made
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| Simple Net Art Diagram, by MTAA |
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Art Intercom is a six part series conducted by Art Fag City blogger Paddy Johnson, who will be interviewing the iCommons Summit Artists in Residence. In the weeks leading up to the conference, interviews will be posted once weekly, profiling the artists' work and describing their approach to Creative Commons licensing. Artists to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Zeleznikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern and this weeks interviewees, Mike Sarff and Tim Whidden (who go by the names M.River and T.Whid), of MTAA. Tim will be representing MTAA as one of the Artists in Residence at the iSummit in Dubrovnik.
MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) is simply described on their website as 'a Brooklyn, New York-based conceptual and net art collaboration founded in 1996.' I like them because they give me wine when I visit their studio. I like their work, because it is characterized by economy of expression without being generalized or simplistic. What's more, they frequently extend this aptitude to create feedback systems that require the same streamlined response from their audience. The result is very clean and eloquent communication mediated by or in the form of websites, installations, sculptures and photographic prints. Creative Commons licensing plays a critical role in their work, because it provides a set of pre-established rules for use of their work so that they don't have to. In short, it simplifies the conversation, and facilitates the elegance that defines their art.
In the two part interview that follows I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit.
AFC: So you guys are a team - how will you be working with one of you in Croatia (Tim Whidden) and the other one (Mike Sarff) in New York?
M.River: I've defaulted to Tim!
T.Whid: Well, I guess there's sort of an online discussion happening, so we're both taking part in that and then in Dubrovnik I'll just be there as the representative of MTAA so I'll have to email Mike before I do anything and ask 'Mike should I do this?'
M.River: 'Get lunch first!' (laughter)
T.Whid: We had two ideas and we wanted to do both of them, so the first idea was that we have this illustration called the 'Simple Net Art Diagram' that has had a Creative Commons licence applied to it for a few years now, like one of the most liberal licences beyond just going in the public domain.
AFC: What does a 'very liberal' licence mean?
T.Whid: I guess it's called the attribution licence meaning that any one can use it for any purpose as long as we get attribution. So that means someone could make t-shirts and sell them and that's fine with us.
AFC: As long as your name is on it.
T.Whid: As long as our name is on it, someone could use it for an ad for Cadillac for example, and that's fine for us.
M.River: And people have used it. A group of artist made art work off of it; we've had it published in different books as examples.
AFC: Of course it showed up in the dolls (pictured on the left)
M.River: We like to refer to them as action figures!
T.Whid: Yeah! Screw dolls!
M.River: Do dolls have guns?
T.Whid: So the first idea was why don't we get this printed on different kinds of stuff. You know t-shirts, posters, buttons whatever kind of scarab they might be handing out at the Summit. Um, but then we thought it's sort of specific to net art so maybe we should do something similar but more specific to the idea of the commons. So we're going to do something new, but we don't know what we're going to do with it yet.
M.River: But going back to your original question which is what am I doing for [the Artists in Residence project in Croatia], the answer is very little because that moment in the simple art diagram was really Tim's part in the collaboration, and I trust him to nurture and do things with it. Occasionally I would say something like, 'why don't we make a print of it?' which we did, but mostly that's kind of his thing. But the other thing we were talking about before you got here is the strange moment when you have a licence and this project about allowing people to use your work. It's a gift you give to the general public. What's implied a lot of times is that you're collaborating with everyone, but really it's just the act of saying 'here, you're welcome to it.' So what we're running into in Croatia then is that our usual mode of operation is, 'here's something, you're free to do with it what you want' but in this case, we also have to play the other part, which is to then make the exhibition or event and let people understand, 'you can do with it what you want, here are some ways that you might do that.'
T.Whid: Right, yeah, I think Mike makes a really good point so I'm just going to repeat it. It's not a collaboration. I don't really want to have any sort of back and forth with anyone. That's why I have this licence, so people can go do whatever they want within the constraints of this licence, and I don't need to communicate with them at all. It's like, if I give you a sandwich to eat, we're not collaborating on that sandwich, I made the sandwich, you eat the sandwich, and it's as simple as that. And so, I think that's an extremely important distinction and I think people are unclear about that a lot of times.
M.River: So following that through, you have to look at it on the other side which is we use something we're appropriating. We'll take an image and manipulate it, or take a document. There is also a relationship a user has to these cultural items. And a lot of times that's part of why Creative Commons licences work.
Read part two, here.
tags: dubrovnik croatia culture art artists-in-residence summit07 art-intercom
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