NEWSgrist: *Austin Thomas | Perchance: A Floating Scenic Overlook* Vol

NEWSgrist: *Austin Thomas: Perchance: A Floating Scenic Overlook* Vol.4, no.14

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Vol.4, no.14 (Sept 22 2003)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* Austin Thomas: ‘Perchance’

- *Quote/s* No Sharing!

- *Url/s* Electronic Frontiers

- *Sign of the Devil* Verisign wants to be God (boingboing)

- *Kid Rocked* 12-yr-old Sued by Music Industry (Gothamist)

- *Shamnesty* Are the RIAA subpoenas legal? (boingboing)

- *Secret Sharer* more on lawsuits + file sharing (NYTimes)

- *Character Ware* Art Interactive panel at MIT

- *Leaving New York* Rem Koolhaas splits Apple (NYObserver)

- *Grounded* More visions of/at Ground Zero (greg.org)

- *Points* (Mr. Pointy’s) (Gothamist)

- *End Game* Mirapaul on Grim Realities (NYTimes)

- *Protest Pixels* Open Call

- *Book Grist* Artists + War: Steve Mumford; Howard Zinn

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*Splash*

http://newsgrist.net

Austin Thomas: Perchance: A Floating Scenic Overlook

A social platform designed to slip into the back of a 1973 El Camino.

‘Perchance’ is like a weekend tailgate in a backyard living room in the

back of a car, a traveling piece, a road show...

splash archived at:

http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_Thomas.html

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*Quote/s*

"Instead of treating customers like criminals, the industry should look at

what they want and find a way to offer it to them," said Wendy Seltzer, a

staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Instead of asking

people to come to them with a signed admission of unlawful conduct they

should be asking people to come to them with payment for a system for

file-sharing services."

from: 261 Lawsuits Filed on Internet Music Sharing

By AMY HARMON. NYTimes 9/9/03 [see *Secret Sharer* below]

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*Url/s*

Recording Industry Assoc. of America

“Form UR-SCROO D”

Personal File-Sharing Amnesty Application Form

http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030907

The Electronic Frontier Foundation

“Defending Freedom in the Digital World”

http://www.eff.org/

Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society (CIS)

“In the heart of the Silicon Valley, legal doctrine is emerging

that will determine the course of civil rights and technological

innovation for decades to come.” (one of Lawrence Lessig’s sites)

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/

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*Sign of the Devil*

Verisign is damage: route around it

posted by Cory Doctorow

boingboing.net, 9/17/03

http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106380970226047032

Yesterday, Verisign (the company I'd like to see put to death) broke the

Internet by redirecting all unregistered .COM and .NET addresses to a

page on their site where they run a search-engine. For a lot of good

technical reasons, this is a bad idea, and it makes a savage mockery

of Verisign's (unbelievably lucrative) monopoly on critical pieces of the

Internet's infrastructure.

Today, the makers of the BIND DNS software responded by announcing

a patch that will interpret Verisign as damage and route around them.

However, the ISC is about to undercut the Site Finder service with a

patch to its BIND software.

BIND runs on about 80 percent of the Internet's domain name servers –

the machines that translate human-readable Web addresses like

www.wired.com into machine-readable Internet addresses used by the

Internet's vast network of computers.

The patch will be released by the end of Tuesday, said Paul Vixie,

ISC's president.

Link: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,60473,00.html

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*Kid Rocked*

12 Year-Old Settles Lawsuit with RIAA For 2 Grand

Gothamist, 9/10/03

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2003/09/10/12_yearold_settles_lawsuit_with_riaa_for_2_grand.php

+ more info at The Electronic Frontier Foundation: http://www.eff.org/

Little 12 year old old Brianna LaHara, sued by RIAA for downloading

songs off Kazaa, is going to settle with RIAA for $2000. The Daily

News' exclusive reports that LaHara's mother agreed to pay up (and

said Brianna will not be file sharing anytime soon). RIAA was looking

for up to $150,000 for the 1000 songs she downloaded, so maybe

$2000 in the scheme of things didn't look so bad to LaHara's mother.

Brianna herself says, "I am sorry for what I have done. I love music and

don't want to hurt the artists I love." The DN tried contacting two of her

favorite singers, Mariah Carey and Christina Aguiliera (both

multimillionaires, the newspaper points out), but there was no comment.

Some file-swappers who haven't settled are freaking out - one is a

Columbia senior, sued for downloading Kid Rock and whose father passed

away recently; she tells the DN, "I feel I'm at the breaking point. I just

don't know how much more tragedy I can handle." Others are unchanged:

NYU junior Kathy Aghalarpour says, "That's my life. I make, like, a

different CD every week."

Read: The heated debate on Gothamist's comments over file sharing

and the state of the music industry from last week.

Updated: Emmett at Datatype is starting a collection plate for Brianna.

Gothamist is going to kick in some dough, 'cause we were 12 and clueless

once. Hell, we're almost 27 and we're still clueless. [Via boingboing]

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*Shamnesty*

Are the RIAA subpoenas legal?

sept 12, 2003

boingboing.net

http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106337285595526271

posted by Cory Doctorow

Lisa Rein has written a very good article for O'Reilly, reviewing the ways

in which the RIAA's latest attack on P2P users (and due process!) are

legal and how they're legally questionable.

A recent decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals finds that a

party using "patently unlawful" subpoenas to obtain access to another

party's stored electronic communications could be liable for violations of

electronic privacy and computer fraud statutes. This could have serious

implications for the RIAA's mass subpoena campaign in that, if such

subpoenas were also determined to be "patently unlawful," for whatever

reason, the organization could be held liable under electronic privacy and

computer fraud statutes for accessing user data under false pretenses.

(Read a summary of the decision.) http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a/4174

Does this mean, if the RIAA's subpoenas are determined "invalid," that

they are illegally snooping? It's extremely possible. However, the DMCA

subpoena law is new and there aren't many decisions on it, so the RIAA

could try to hide behind the "newness" of the law to avoid liability for

misusing it

back to top

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*Secret Sharer*

Recent articles [excerpts] from NYTimes on

Music, Copyright + File Sharing

NYTimes, September 19, 2003

Music File Sharers Keep Sharing

By AMY HARMON with JOHN SCHWART

full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/technology/19TUNE.html?hp

Despite the lawsuits filed last week against 261 people accused of

illicitly distributing music over the Internet, millions of others

continue to copy and share songs without paying for them.

Last week, more than four million Americans used KaZaA, the most

popular file-sharing software, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, only

about 5 percent fewer than the week before the record industry's lawsuits

became big news. One smaller service, iMesh, even experienced a slight

uptick in users. [...]

NYTimes, September 11, 2003
Technology Briefing | Internet: Music Industry Sued Over 'Amnesty'
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40C16FA385F0C728DDDA00894DB404482&fta=y

ABSTRACT - Recording Industry Association of America is sued by

California resident Eric Parke over its 'amnesty' program after it filed

lawsuits accusing 261 people of illegally trading songs over Internet;

lawsuit asserts program is deceptive and fraudulent business practice

designed to lure people 'to incriminate themselves and provide RIAA

and others with actionable admissions of wrongdoing under penalty

of perjury.'

NYTimes, 9/9/03

261 Lawsuits Filed on Internet Music Sharing

By AMY HARMON

full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/09/technology/09MUSI.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The recording industry filed 261 lawsuits yesterday against people who

share copyrighted music over the Internet, charging them with copyright

infringement in the first broad legal action aimed at ordinary users of

file-sharing networks.

The blizzard of lawsuits which is expected to be followed by thousands

more is a turning point for the music industry, which has sought to avoid

direct conflict with its potential consumers as it battles online piracy.

But industry officials said they now believe that the only way to stem the

widespread file-swapping is to make people realize they will be punished

for participating  even in the context of an Internet culture where many

forms of information are free.

"Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation," said

Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of

America. "But when you're being victimized by illegal activity there

comes a time when you have to step up and take appropriate action."

In an effort to soften the legal attack, the record industry group is also

offering amnesty for file sharers who turn themselves in before legal

action is taken against them. Under the "clean slate" program unveiled

by the industry yesterday, people seeking amnesty must destroy files

that they have downloaded illegally and sign a notarized form pledging

never to trade copyrighted works again.

Since the rise of Napster, the first popular file-sharing network,

millions of people have traded copyrighted music on the Internet

without paying for it. The suits filed yesterday are intended to change

the perception of many people that they could do so with impunity.

The record industry's trade group said it selected the defendants by

employing simple search techniques that allow anyone using the major

file-sharing services to see what files other users are making available

to copy from their own computers.

The group chose to sue a sampling of people using KaZaA, iMesh,

Blubster, Grokster and Gnutella, who each had placed more than 1,000

songs in a folder that allowed millions of strangers to copy them.

For now, the industry is pursuing people who actively "share" songs,

rather than those who download. In making it more risky to share, the

record labels hope to upset the ecology of file-sharing networks by

choosing those who make it possible for the much larger population of

users  sometimes known as "leeches"  to copy songs.

"They're hitting the networks in their Achilles' heel, which is that

everybody can share but no one person has incentive to share," said

Jonathan Zittrain, a co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and

Society at Harvard Law School.

"It's not as if people are excited about sharing, they're excited about

taking."  [...]

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*Character Ware*

Art Interactive proudly presents...

Engaging Characters: Between the Virtual and the Real
A Panel Discussion with

Bruce Blumberg, Toni Dove, Julia Heyward, and Joe Paradiso
Moderated by Kathy Brew

When: Thursday, October 2, 7:30pm, reception beginning at 7:00pm
Where: MIT Bartos Theater, 20 Ames Street, E15-lower level

Is it live or Memorex? Is it real or is it virtual? Just like the mirror in

Alice's looking-glass world,the boundaries between the real and the

simulated are less and less distinct. Exploring these boundaries, artists

and technologists are utilizing new technologies and new interactive

paradigms the very notion of artist and viewer, of character and

narrative. In many cases the art experience is no longer a passive

one, but requires active participation. How does interactive,

responsive work shift a viewer's relationship to narrative and

character? How are character, time and space altered in these

kinds of works? What are some new methods for conveying narrative

and character in non-linear and interactive forms of art, entertainment,

and cations?

Coinciding with the final weekend of 'Engaging Characters' (an art

exhibition on view at Art Interactive through October 5th), this evening

explores these questions, showcasing the work and research of NYC-

based artists Toni Dove and Julia Heyword, and MIT Media Lab
Professors Bruce Blumberg and Joe Paradiso. Join us on Thursday

evening, Oct 2 at 7:00pm for this unique opportunity to hear from and

meet some of the artists and researchers who are redefining the notion

of interactivity, character, and dialog.

Panelists
Bruce Blumberg is an Associate Professor of the Media Arts and Sciences

at the MIT Media Lab. He is head of the Synthetic Characters Group as

well as co-director of the Digital Life Consortiumat the Media Lab. He is a

frequent lecturer in courses on ALife techniques for interactive characters.

Toni Dove is a NYC-based artist/independent producer who works primarily

with electronic media,including virtual reality and interactive video

installations, performance and DVD-ROMs, that engageviewers in

responsive and immersive narrative environments.

Julia Heyward is a NYC-based artist whose work centers on the

orchestration of music, image, and language through the forms of

multi-media and live performance. She has written,directed, and

performed numerous pieces in the US and internationally.

Joe Paradiso is Associate Professor and Sony Career Development

Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. He directs

the Responsive Environments group and co-directs the Things That Think

Consortium at the Media Lab. An expert on sensing technology, Paradiso

has developed a wide variety of systems that track human activity, using

electric field sensing,microwaves, laser ranging, passive and active sonar,

piezoelectrics, and resonant electromagnetic tags.

Moderator
Kathy Brew is an independent media producer, curator, and educator

who curated Engaging Characters, now showing at Art Interactive

through October 5th. She has recently completed a video with her

collaborator, Roberto Guerra, for the MIT Media Lab on an exhibition that

originated there entitled, ID/entity: Portraits in the 21st Century, that will

be released as a DVD this fall.

============================

*Leaving New York*

Still Delirious: Has Rem Koolhaas Abandoned City?

by Clay Risen

New York Observer, 9/9/03 (excerpt)

http://www.observer.com

More than any architect in recent memory, Rem Koolhaas bet his career

on New York City. But he didn’t do it by building; he did it by writing.

Visiting the city on a fellowship during the architecturally moribund

mid-70s, Mr. Koolhaas wrote Delirious New York, a self-styled "retroactive

manifesto" that laid out what had made New York an architectural capital

and what it would take to regain the title. It put him at the forefront of

New York’s architectural elites before he had laid a single brick.

But lately, Mr. Koolhaas position in New York has been severely

diminished. He has lost a slew of American contracts, and after landing a

major deal in China he’s been building a harsh critique of architecture in

New York, and in the West in general. He is, it would seem, delirious no

more. As he mounts his critique, the new Koolhaas will have to prove he

is still relevant--and not just picking sour grapes.

Mr. Koolhaas relationship to New York City is at the center of his

conundrum. Shortly after writing 'Delirious New York,' he left the city

for the Netherlands, and he now lives in London. But the central argument

in 'Delirious New York'--that New York’s architectural greatness stemmed

from a meeting of two opposing forces, the strictly maintained street grid

and the unstoppable power of speculative building--made him the leading

theorist of New York’s built environment. New York was the singular

place, he wrote, where "creation and destruction [are] irrevocably

interlocked." And he declared, portentously, that his theory would "yield

a formula for an architecture that is at once ambitious and popular."

No one doubts whether 'Delirious New York' matters: Today it is required

reading at many architecture programs, even though its author didn’t

complete a project until 1991. Its gone through a number of printings,

and original copies fetch hundreds of dollars on the used-book market.

And it laid the foundation for an entire Koolhaas library, much of which

built on the ideas first presented in Delirious. And though Mr. Koolhaas

has recently begun to add actual buildings to his resume, it was largely

thanks to his written work that he received architectures Nobel, the

Pritzker Prize, in 2000--the youngest recipient ever.

So when Mr. Koolhaas and his Rotterdam-based firm, the Office for

Metropolitan Architecture, finally won a series of high-profile contracts

in New York during the late 1990sa new Prada store in Soho, a $200

million Whitney expansion and a new Ian Schrager hotel on Astor

Place--architectural insiders wondered aloud whether the time had

come for him to prove his mettle. [...]

back to top

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*Grounded*

Ellsworth Kelly on Ground Zero

http://greg.org  9.11.2003

The reconstructed text of a letter from Ellsworth Kelly to the Times'

architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp:

    "On October 19, 2001, I wrote a letter to you (that I never sent) in

response to an article in The New York Times which discussed the

controversy of what was to be planned for the `Ground Zero' space,

asking artists and others for their opinions. (Two artists, Joel Shapiro

and John Baldessari urged that no building be erected at the site, and

the architect Tadao Ando made a similar proposition.)

    "At that time, my idea for the World Trade Center site was a large

green mound of grass. (When I saw the aerial photograph of the site on

the cover of the Aug. 31 Arts & Leisure section of the Times, [which

accompanied art critic Michael Kimmelman's article, not Muschamp's. Go

figure. -greg.org]) I was excited to see the site from this vantage point.

I was inspired to make a collage of my idea for the space, which I am

sending you.

    "I feel strongly that what is needed is a 'visual experience,' not

additional buildings, a museum, a list of names or proposals for a

freedom monument. (These are) distractions from a spiritual vision for

the site: a vision for the future."

The collage will go on view at the Whitney, which has a show through

November titled "Ellsworth Kelly: Red, Green, Blue," of work from

1959-65.

Tadao Ando's proposal, meanwhile, was inspired by a Japanese burial

mound.

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/ando/regeneration/

John Baldessari (via NYTimes, 9/30/01):

"I don’t think anything should be built. The site should be a park. Its an

insane idea because the site is going to be an office, because the

business of America is business."

I can't find Joel Shapiro's idea online, but this year, Joel Shapiro

collaborated with Vinci Hamp Architects on a WTC Memorial proposal.

9.10.2003

Greg.org

New Yorker on the WTC memorial and rebuilding

I'm a Paul Goldberger fan, and mad praise for his dogged reporting,

following Daniel Libeskind around the country,

http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?030915fa_fact

but I'm not getting anything new from the profile in this week's New

Yorker. When I schmoozed him last spring, Goldberger talked with great

relish about digging in and laying out the powerful forces shaping the

WTC rebuilding process. But this article comes too late to illuminate

Libeskind's POV on the Silverstein-Childs hubbub, and too early to

capture his reaction to the alterations and "fixes" that the Memorial

finalists will inevitably introduce.

Contrast that with Louis Menand's excellent profile on Maya Lin from

last July, http://newyorker.com/archive/content/?030915fr_archive02

which the New Yorker just put online. Menand interprets some of

Lin's sensibilities a bit broadly, but re-reading this article shows him

to be very prescient about (and possibly influential on) her quietly

authoritative role in the WTC memorial process.

 [Related: Get Maya Lin's book, Boundaries, where she revisits her own

work and inspirations.]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684834170/ref=ase_shagpadcom06/102-8497648-1906520?v=glance&s=books

back to top

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*Points*

Mr. Pointy (and Takashi Murakami) Comes to Rockefeller Center

Gothamist, September 08, 2003

http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2003/09/08/mr_pointy_and_takashi_murakami_comes_to_rockefeller_center.php

After noticing our interest in Takashi Murakami, Greg of greg.org invited

Gothamist to check out the Murakami installation at Rockefeller Center. We

happily accepted and headed over to midtown with Peter Rojas. The huge

30-foot ballons were strung over the rink, and the main sculpture was

flanked by smaller areas of mushroom-toadstool growths. It's dramatic in a

very different way from Puppy or the Spiders; there is a lot of visual

information, with the colorful, complicated forms, as well as details that

are enjoyed up close. When Takashi Murakami arrived, he spent some time

inspecting the artworks, and told us that he needed to come back and fix

some areas. Gothamist was most amused when more than a few blonde

women went up to take pictures with him; we're pretty sure it's all

because of the Louis Vuitton collection.

back to top

============================

*End Game*

Online Games Grab Grim Reality

By MATTHEW MIRAPAUL

NYTimes, Sept 17, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/17/arts/design/17GAME.html

As flames crackled and the wind howled through a gash in the sky-

scraper's wall, a gray-suited businessman wandered in a daze through

the smoke. Unable to find an escape route, he suddenly strode toward

the sky and leaped.

This appalling scene appears neither in print nor on film but in a

computer game, "9-11 Survivor," that was briefly available this summer

on the Internet. Using a mouse, players could move through an

animated, three-dimensional rendering of a burning World Trade Center

office. Ultimately one might perish in the fire, opt to jump like the

businessman or, if concealed stairs were discovered, flee to safety.

"9-11 Survivor" provoked an immediate outcry on the Internet. Infuriated

e-mail correspondents accused the game's makers of lacking taste and

moral decency by exploiting a tragedy. The game depicts only one scene,

and although an online description, at www.selectparks.net/911survivor,

makes it seem as if a full product were still coming, "9-11 Survivor" was

never planned for commercial release.

It was created as an art-class project by three students at the University

of California, San Diego, John Brennan, Mike Caloud and Jeff Cole. They

said their goal was to reinterpret a historic moment by transplanting it

to the medium with which they were most familiar: computer games.

Inured to the distant televised images of Sept. 11, they hoped an

immersive, interactive version would restore an immediacy to the day's

horrors. Mr. Cole, who examined photographs to reconstruct the scene,

said, "The more I delved into it, the more personal it became."

Computer and video games were once the province of futuristic gladiators

and soldiers of yore. But as better graphics technology has made games

more visually realistic, digital artists have been using 3-D game

environments to recreate real places and simulate recent events. In the

process they are turning what has been a platform for pure fantasy into a

medium for social realism. At the very least the violent action at the

heart of many games accurately reflects the world that game players

confront when they step away from their screens.

Digital games appeal to artists for several reasons. Their very mass

appeal makes them a target for tweaking in much the same manner that