Creative
Note: more programming is being announced every day, and everything here is subject to change.
Panel: EFF v. Burningman
Each year, Nevada’s Black Rock desert plays host to the Burning Man festival. Tens of thousands of people make the pilgrimage to celebrate self-reliance, creativity and freedom. It’s a week of fire art, bad techno, art cars, combat boots, and more.
For some time, the organization behind the event has enforced a highly restrictive set of policies around photography in Black Rock. Through its ticket sales and online terms of use, the Burning Man Organization claims ownership over all photos and videos created at the festival.
Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Corynne McSherry criticized these rules in a post at EFF’s Deep Links, which set off an internet battle for the agess. Burning Man argues these restrictions protect attendees’ privacy. People do wacky stuff out there, in various states of undress and sobriety, and they need to be protected. But EFF thinks attendees’ freedom of expression, and their copyrights, must be respected. How do you balance both concerns?
In a interesting turn of events, Burning Man, the EFF and Creative Commons have entered into negotiations to transform the largest counter cultural art gathering in the world into a legal platform for human readable language and free culture. Will it work? Will it crash? What will they as a team decide?
Join us for a real world ethics question, with insights into the governance of online video platforms, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression. Throw in panelists from Burning Man, EFF—and giant burning wicker man—and you have one interesting discussion. http://blog.burningman.com/digitalrights/
Presenters:
Corynne McSherry — Electronic Frontier Foundation
Lightning Clearwater III — Burning Man IP Legal Counsel
Rosalie Barnes — Burning Man
Moderator: Katherine Chen - Assistant Professor of Sociology, CUNY
Featured talk: Damian Kulash, OK Go
Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of the rock band OK Go, talks about the band's experience leveraging sharing and the social web.
OK Go is perhaps best known on the web for its mega-viral “Here it Goes Again,” the famous music video of the band dancing on treadmills. OK Go choreographed and shot the video themselves, and posted it to YouTube in 2006 without the record label’s permission. A legion of bloggers and positive word of mouth helped popularize the video and launched the band into the stratosphere. “Here it Goes Again” has been transmitted over 200 million times and counting.
Since then, OK Go has produced a number of other massively viral videos, each more creative than the last (be sure to check out the amazing video for “This Too Shall Pass,” for which the band built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine). The videos have been an effective promotional tool and have continued to earn the band exposure. But earlier this year, a decision by the band’s record label to forbid embedding videos on blogs and other social media created a small controversy. The move frustrated fans and followers, and views dropped precipitously. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000,” Kulash explains in a recent New York Times op-ed.
As one of the bands to most successfully leverage the web, OK Go are at the center of a discussion of how artists can reap success from sharing and open networks. In addition to being a major creative force, Kulash and company are also outspoken advocates for an open internet—in 2008, Kulash served as a lead witness for a House judiciary committee hearing on net neutrality.
Featured talk: Marc Scarpa on Participatory Video
With real-time media becoming more pervasive in culture, society and entertainment, this session will explore the history of live participatory media from its inception through today and into tomorrow and how this new genre has shaped and re-defined live broadcasting. Learn about the first recorded User Generated Content in known history.
Marc Scarpa is a seasoned Director/Executive Producer of original real-time participatory programs since 1995, and the founder of the visionary JumpCut platform.
Featured talk: How NextNewNetworks to 1 Billion Views by Giving it Away
Co-founder Tim Shey tells the story of how a small media startup decided to embrace Creative Commons, letting fans share and remix their thousands of freely distributed videos, and how this helped them build an audience of tens of millions of viewers per month.
Workshop: Effective Collaboration*
Details TBA.
Workshop: WebMadeMovies: How the Web Can Change Storytelling
Details TBA.
Workshop: Theory of Remix
In this two-part workshop, learn how artists are appropriating and recontextualizing popular culture to speak their own voiced through video. In part one, hear from scholars studying the theory and practice of remix. In part two, watch a selection of remix videos and hear from the artists themselves about the art and mechanics behind their works.
Adam Quirk
Byron Russel
Diran Lyons
Eduardo Navas
Elisa Kreisinger
Mark Cantwell
Martin Leduc
Mette Birk
Owen Gallagher
Tara Zepel
Vicki Callahan
Virgina Kuhn