The following is the second post in a two part interview with conceptual art collective MTAA. I discuss specific works and what the collective has planned for the iCommons Summit. We concluded part one of the interview talking about how MTAA define the workings of a 'collaboration', and the discussion continues below. (Read part one of two in this series here.)
T.Whid: So we're making this new graphic illustration or diagram and my first inclination was that I don't really need to collaborate with the people running the Summit. It's like, I'm giving them this thing, and they can do with it what they will. But at the same time, I want it used there, so I guess I have to be proactive in asking for certain things.
AFC: Right, but just to be clear on collaboration at the Summit, when you get there you're doing some sort of collaborative project are you not?
T.Whid: I guess. But we're not sure what that is yet! So then this other piece we're thinking about doing is this thing called On Kawara Update, which we had done a few years ago, and it lived on Rhizome's site for a while and then it broke when they reconfigured their web server so we decided we would have to remake it at some point. The way that piece works is that it updates [the conceptual artist] On Kawara's dating process, so you go to a web page and it displays the date for that day. If you click on the date, you'll see news stories from that day, and then there's an archive where you can go back and see other days. Because the way On Kawara's paintings work is that he'd paint a painting that day and then he'd package it in a box with news clippings from where he was that day.
AFC: Are you using the same sort of On Kawara font and everything? Sans Serif right?
M.River: It looks physically similar. The way it worked, was a black square with the date, and when you scroll over it news articles came up.
T.Whid: So in V2, in the rebirth, we felt that it would be cool for the Summit to have only news associated with it that was Creative Commons licensed. And then, that would be cool because then we could reconfigure it for different venues where it might be shown.
M.River: So this is the opposite of the first [project] that Tim would be doing where he proposes something and gives it away, the second [project] is that he's taking material to create a work or to finalize a work. So one's a producer and one's a user, so that's both aspects of how the license works.
T.Whid: But with a piece like that I don't know if it would even fall under a Creative Commons license because it's not really a visual piece, it's more software, so we might have to make it GPL or something.
AFC: GPL?
T.Whid: General Public License software, or MIT, there are different kinds of licenses, the MIT licence is the easiest one to read, it gives whoever wants to use it the most freedom. The only reason I wouldn't want to do that is because - it's funny I read this somewhere that there would be a lot more open source software if people weren't ashamed of the code that they write. So you don't want anyone to see it really because it's hacked together crap, and it's like 'hey, it works!' but it's not like good code, it's crap code. I think part of the deal with the show is that it has to have a Creative Common's licence applied though, and we don't have any problem doing that, it's just the nature of the piece lends itself more to one of these software licences rather than a licence you apply to a piece of music.
M.River: Just to clarify what I was talking about, part of the project is to use these things that have Creative Common's licences, Tim's also talking about the engine that runs the piece as a cultural object that Tim's using.
T.Whid: It has to do with the nature of the material.
M.River: But the heart of the GPL licence is the same kind [as the Creative Commons licence].
T.Whid: It might even be required because in the software I used there's RSS parsing software that I think is GPL, which would require the code that I write to also be GPL, so I don't know what we're going to do.
AFC: Getting back to collaboration, are there works in your 10-year history that you think fall into the collaboration category?
M.River: We did a piece that was a performance at Postmasters gallery where we got a pirated copy of the Pirates of the Caribbean when it first came out, someone bootlegged the image.
T.Whid: We just bought it from the subway or whatever.
M.River: We showed it at Postmasters, where we screened it in black and white, and we asked a group of sound artists to do a live sound track to it.
AFC: I mean do you consider, the Karaoke Death Match or 10 Pre-Rejected Pre-Approved Performances collaboration, pieces where you ask the net audience to vote on your performance or from a list of ten rejected pieces to determine which work you complete or not really because you've defined the perimeters of the piece and you're simply telling someone what to do?
M.River: Well, when we talk about online art practices and someone asks, 'What is your art about in one sentence?' the answer is that our art is about communication. So there's always a dialogue or a conversation, whether it's just between Tim and I, or online, the conversation goes back and forth, the 10 Pre-Rejected Pre-Approved one is a conversation, where we're asking people to participate in the conversation about the production of a piece.
T.Whid: Yeah, but at the same time, I don't know, we've done a lot of projects where we want audience participation, and I guess that's a sort of collaboration but there are all sorts of performances that we've made dealing with, you know, authorship, and what an artwork is, conceptually.
M.River: For me, Tim and I are collaborating and it's a correct use of the term because the authorship of what we produce is shared. We are the authors. And I'm not saying that collaboration can't have hierarchy, some of the things we do is our project and we ask people to participate, but I don't think there's a misunderstanding that everyone becomes the author. I do consider the pirate piece as a collaboration, each artist involved in that piece is the author of the piece. We're in a system we built. It's all our work together.
T.Whid: With some of the other [videos] we've done too, we have other people working with us and they don't get billing on the piece, they get credits. And this piece we're doing now with Alex Galloway, which hasn't seen the light of day yet - that's a true collaboration, it's MTAA and Alex Galloway's art RSG.
M.River: I think collaboration is an interesting foil to a lot of things in art, to be in collaboration, and to be in a net art background, when we started there was a lot of collaboration because it was a group production of these objects.
T.Whid: I would add that some of the pieces we did online early on in our collaboration were audience participation so they were systems that we'd set up. It just seemed really natural when Creative Commons came along that we would start embracing it because it's basically the same sort of thing. It allows you to allow people to participate in the work in a different sort of way without actually having to collaborate.
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 who are still to be interviewed include Ana Husman, Jaka Železnikar, Joy Garnett, Kathryn Smith, Nathaniel Stern.
tags: dubrovnik croatia culture artists-in-residence summit07 art art-intercom net-art
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