Amsterdam, 1st, December, 2006, Jaromil presented a script with with the GRUB loader can be automatically installed on a memory stick. Dyne:Bolic 2 is out in a stable version, working from a memory stick, making us ready to test Cinelerra from virtually any PC with broadband connection!

During the same week the DocAgora conference took place in Amsterdam. A follow up conference will take place on http://www.d-word.com in the week of the 19th of February 2007.

DOCAGORA NOTES 30/11/2006

General Intro by moderator Peter Broderick:
People talk about the coming transformation of documentary filmmaking
and distribution under the influence of new web-based media. I say the
transformation is already upon us. Yochai Benkler (sp?) writes in the
?Weatlh of Networks? that there is a shift in economic systems from
hierarchies to networks, and this has far-reaching repercussions for
doc film distribution. First in the late ?90s there was the changes
engendered by digital film production, now we see changes as a result
of digital distribution.

It leads first to reconceptualising the idea of the Audience:
filmmakers who have been successful in digital distribution have
usually found a loyal niche target audience first, and only reached a
wider audience later. Filmmakers should now think about a distribution
strategy from day one of the project.

Working relationships with the distributors will take a more hibrid
character. Filmmakers will work more as partners rather than
supplicants and will allways keep a slice of the rights. In case of
political and social documentaries filmmakers can do public
screenings, networking events. This way filmmakers turn consumers into
potential patrons and mentors and I believe that filmmakers will have
greater control then ever before. The challenges for distributors and
funding bodies are going to be greater, especially for distributors
who will loose their role as gate keepers to the audience and will
have to work more as partners and mediators. Funding bodies are also
have to be more flexible to allow hibrid funding models.

Panel One

Introduction of moderator frank boyd who is ex BBC and is a producer
with unexpected media. Frank boyd shows a graph of two waves of
technological innovation, the first wave in which digital and analogue
technologies co-exist and digital technology is used to enhance
anaogue content. Many big media companies have been successful in
using this technologies. But in the second interface in which both the
media and the interface are digital entirely new plattforms are being
created.

Some statistics:
25% was the audience share of bbc 1 in july 2006, this was at the time
of the world cup and I believe this will be the last time one
broadcaster will have such a share.
62% of media consumed by people under 26 is made by people they know
personally.
0.03% of content on tech blogs is sourced from mainstream media

so what are established media doing in this situation? According to
Roger Graef, TV is retreating, increasingly playing it safe. What
about VPRO?

Stan van Engelen (VPRO): the space and resources for docs are on the
way down in public TV. VPRO started ?Holland Doc? two years ago to
find other audiences for films. It started as a digital TV channel and
still runs as a linear channel on the web.

FB: how is Fourdocs different from YouTube?
Emily Renshaw-Smith (FourDocs, UK): Channel4 recognized that as a
public broadcaster we?d have to recognize there?s new platforms and
that we have to engage with them. Fourdocs is a curated space, unlike
YouTube ? anyone can upload films but they are rated by us and by the
viewers, and we insist on legal compliance, which only helps the
filmmakers in the long run.
We get about 30 new films per month and 60% of our audience is outside
the UK.
We don?t pay for films, but neither do we claim rights; the filmmakers
can always sell the films on.
For Channel 4 it is a way for talentspotting new directors ? in two
cases it has lead to commissions on the main channel, but we?ve done
some research and the majority of our contributors are hobbyists who
are not interested in using it for career development.
FB: does it provide opportunities for professional filmmakers?
Filmmakers have used it to upload trailers to look for further
financing.

Huub Roelvink ? CinemaNet
We are now busy with a new project which is called Cinema
Delicatessen, which is a follow-up of DocuZone. CinemaNet helps to
create technical access to digital cinema by helping cinemas to
acquire digital cinema equipment and then screen digitally ditributed
content. Our threshold, like in any cinema distribution, is quite
high, so I guess I am a kind of a gatekeeper.

FB: so far the models have been ?updates? of existing distribution
models ? what about other ways of using digital distribution
altogether?
Gillan Caldwell ? director of ?Witness?:
Witness has always used AV media to create political change, and to
expose human rights abuses. We use the term ?video advocacy? and do
not produce for broadcast, although some productions have made it to
broadcast. One important aspect of our work is to create targeted
screenings for decision makers, and in many cases we have seen a
direct effect in the form of a policy change soon after such a
screening.
We are now working on the next level of using digital distribution by
making a human rights video hub, where activists can post and exchange
audiovisual material, even raw footage. It will come with downloadable
?tactical media toolkits? to help activists in production.
Witness also uses YouTube and similar sites to further distribute some
of our titles, and oru recent report on torture by CIA trained
mercenaries is the most downloaded long-form video on YouTube.

Katherine Cizek ? indie filmmaker
I?ve been hugely inspired by the work of Witness: documentary has
always been hitched to the TV wagon, but now we are in a position to
experiment with new forms. This means that the filmmaker?s
realtionship with the audience changes, but also the relationship with
the subject changes: I am a filmmaker-in-residence at an inner city
hospital in Toronto, sponsored by the Canadian Film Board: and rather
than produce a long form doc, I?m working with the community to create
media content for a form of interactive online documentary (demo: this
is full screen in Flash!). So people ask if it can still be called
documentary, but I think documentary is about giving voice to unheard
viewpoints, in whatever form, so that?s exactly what I?m doing and I
call it documentary.

FB: so we come to the question: what makes docs possible? When it is
supported by public funding there is always the connection to idea of
public service. My question to Google is inspired by a quote from Tim
Berners-Lee, who said he was concerned by the ease with which lies are
propagated in unmoderated space. Does this concern Google?

Sydney Mock ? Google Benelux: Google has always said it is not a
content company, it is a technology company, so on the internet  it is
like in the real world: you have to check your sources, and ultimately
it?s about trust in the source.
One successful example of the use of Google video is Fabchannel.com:
musicians connected to Paradiso webcasting their gigs here to the
world ? they put trailers up on Google Video to promote the webcasts.

FB: how about revenue ? could filmmakers get revenue via Google?
SM: there?s different models how that could be done: one is Adsense,
in which publishers can run Google ads on their own websites and share
revenue.

FB: well I was recently in a conference on interactive TV in the UK
and the consensus was that we?re still in the R+D phase.

Cay Wesnigk (from the audience): the rollback of the revolution is
already underway: the internet haas created new monopolies ? and how
many places will you be able to upload video in a few years? time? Who
will own the portals?

Heather Croall (from the audience): distributors are now looking at
making their own ?curated channels? on their own websites.

Sydney Mock: I don?t agree with the idea of the lock-in effect Cay is
referring to: you don?t have to log in on Google Video, it?s free to
use it or not and in the end it?s about trust in the brand that the
user chooses.

Huub Roelvink ? CinemaNet
CinemaNet can be used directly by filmmakers, so it could serve as an
alternative.

Adnan Hadzi (from the audence); I just want to mention that there is
an initiative called ?Google eats itself?, which involves setting up
google ads and clicking on them and using the revenue to buy Google
shares ? eventually the whole company could belong to the users.

Q from the audience to FourDocs: what is the benefit of Forudocs to
the filmmakers other than exposure? For instance a not unsimilar
initiative from the Knitting Factory in NYC became a fiasco because
the musicians felt they were strong-armed into participating and felt
they weren?t paid for having their material up on the web.

Emily Renshaw-Smith (FourDocs, UK): we?re not claiming rights on the
material, we see it as a way for filmmakers to develop their career.
But we?re also looking at a couple of shared revenue models that might
work for us, like Revver or the way 3 mobile shares with users hwo
upload mobile content.

FB: another place to look at is BBC Innovation labs. I also want to
mention how new consumers expect you to come to them: broadcasters are
no longer the centre, but the individual consumer is.

Witness: we also are interested in giving the users access to content
whenever and wherever.

FB: I think the Submarine online TV channel is an interesting attempt
to create a kind of online broadcasting company. But what do people
actually watch? How do you get them to watch something they don?t know
about already in advance ? soemthing they don?t know they want to see?

Mercury Media (from the audience): we made a film called Loose Change
and we tried to sell it to broadcasters, but were rejected. Then we
put it up on YouTube and become the most downloaded film ever and now
we have sold it to two broadcasters ? after it proved it had an
audience.
{The_D-Word.Community.11.792}: Lennaart Van Oldenborgh {lenn} Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:27:49 EST (221 lines)

hello here’s the other half of the notes all nicely typed even if at
times they don’t really make sense to me either… enjoy

PANEL 2 DOCAGORA, IDFA 30 NOV 2006

Is moderated by Peter Broderick, focuses more on financing and revenue
models. PB asks all participants to introduce themselves in under 2
minutes.

Marc Goodchild ? BBC Interactive:
I work for the BBC but have been an indie producer and what I do may
be relevant to indie producers in two ways: 1) in their realtoin to
the BBC, and 2) as content owners in their own right.
What I do at the BBC is to think about opening up and reusing the
substantial BBC archives in interactive applications. Rather than just
make old programs available, I?m trying to structure the content
differently in an interactive environment. Here?s an example form our
parenting interactive site: all the content is parcelled up into small
chanks and given extensive metadata, so if you click through
?personality? and ?age group 6-12 months? you get an auto-created
assembly of material relevant to that topic, from different sources.
It is a way of seeing the archive not just as films but as content.

Gerry Flahive ? Canadian Film Board:
Apart from the usual film projects, we also fund younger web-based
filmmakers, and projects such as Katerina Cizek?s. For examples see
citizenshift.org.ca

Klara Grunning-Harris ? ITVS
Sums up the ITVS mission

Maria Silvia Gatta ? MEDIA distribution EU
Sums up MEDIA mission and newly approved MEDIA 2007 program
Among others MEDIA supports ?RealPort? online distribution and Midas
network of film archives.

Patrick Crowe of Xinephile Media, Canada
Is indie producer in Toronto, working with doc in linear and non-
linear form, engaged with broadcasting model but also interactive
programming. Example: Beethoven?s Hair: the online part is nota
?companion? site to the film but a serious part of the production
itself.

Stefano Portu ? Buongiorno! Italy
Gives intro on mobile video market ? 3G, or UMTS, is most mature in UK
and Italy (in Europe). Buongiorno! Provides ?snackable video? for the
?interstitial spaces in our busy schedules?, mainly sports,
celebrities and news.

James Fabricant ? head of myspace UK+Ireland
Describes Myspace as the new portal based on a social network

Robert Greenwald gives a prerecorded statement on the financing of
?Iraq for Sale?:
Three months before production the money still wasn?t there, they
decide to put out an open call on the internet and a ?thermometer?
with the target budget on the website and within three months they
raise around 350k dollars from the public.

PB: can we hear more about the issues that MEDIA is concerned about
when funding digital distribution?

MSG: main issues are:
– how to secure content? MEDIA exists to stimulate an industry so it
is in the interest of MEDIA that the actors in this industry can
survive. Hence digital rights management is a core issue
– differences in the rules between regions in the way they set up
local funding get in the way of a system that can transcend these
boudaries
– also: since the web is a global system does it still make sense to
stimulate specifically European content?

JF: MySpace is used for viral marketing of films, we call it ?mass
roots marketing? ? example is the ?lovemap? distribution model of the
Four Eyed Monsters site.

KGH ? ITVS:
We support an online film festival: the winners are broadcast on
?independent lens? slot

MG ? BBC: what digital distribution does is create communities of
interest: if we want to speak to these communities we have to be more
like hosts and less like auteurs. Example: joiningthedots.tv
Also: cycling TV is effectively a digital TV channel run on 60k with
very specific content and a very specific audience which allows
smaller companies to advertise in a very targeted way. So we can think
about financing in terms of ?symbiotic revenue splits?.

SP ? Buongiorno:
In the beginning mobile content was spun off from mainstream content
but this was not very succesful. So now we have two other forms:
1. interactive content: you have to get people to do something every
few minutes otherwise people feel stupid string at such a small screen
2. user generated content: for example we get football fans to submit
little clips from the football grounds about the match or to do a song
or a stupid joke.

Q from audience: what about mixed funding?
GF: well in canada the networks have no online strategy at all ?
they?ll try anyting for a while so there?s opportunities for
filmmakers.

Adnan hadzi: two comments:
– only some forms of distribution are measured, for instance peer2peer
filesharing is not measured so download figures don?t necessarily
represent how many people see something
– question for the BBC: what about rights, for instance in the case of
the BBC Creative Archives?

MG:
Well I don?t speak for the creative archives that?s another dept., but
in general I think we should think more in terms of ?windowing? of
rights for the broadcaster, and that after each such window rights
revert to the content maker

Q from audience:
What about royalties?

PB: like I said before, never sign away all digital download rights

PANEL 3

Moderator: Peter Wintonick
Begins a rant on gadgets, quotes Octavio Paz on technology and quotes
Philip K Dick?s definition of reality: ?that which if you stop
believing in it doesn?t go away?

But first Heather Croall?s report on Panel2:
– canadian film board and ITVS are traditional funders continuing with
their existing parctice which is to stimulate underrepresented voices
– there IS money for cross-platform funding but only if you live in
canada or australia: in these places TV and ?new media? funding can
trigger eachother, multiplying the cash
– what the BBC does is more about ?re-purposing? content
– a new EU commission policy paper on digital rights management has
recently been published and can be found via MEDIA website

so now panel 3 for real which is called a ?brainstorm?

first: Pat Aufderheide ? centre for social media, school of journalism
what can we teach our students about tomorrow?s world?
Example: rights issues ? we published ?best practice in fair use?,
because copyright is about liberating tomorrow?s creators ? our slogan
?you don?t have to pirate stuff in order to quote it?
Broadcasting hasn?t changed all that much ? you get the same kind of
negotiations that you had 20 years ago. But now we have in addition to
that new enterprises that provide new paradigms: according to these
– you don?t have audiences but you have partners, networks, contacts
– rather than a film director you become a ?strategic designer of a
project? in which film is only part of the project. This is also not
entirely new: most filmmakers in IDFA also think of themselves as
social actors
Both models live side by side at the moment, and I predict that new
mediators will arise between the two: not every filmmaker wants to be
a strategic designer of a project.
I would also want to raise the question: what will public media look
like?

PW: waxes lyrical about Aljazeera
Flora Gregory ? Aljazeera London, ex-indie producer
Aljazeera English is a new channel, started just a few weeks ago.
It?s based on an odd funding model: it?s paid for by the Qatari
government, so it?s public service and has no advertising, but it?s
very divers, with a very international labour force, and it wants to
encourage different POVs
It is a news channel but has a major doc strand called Witness: a
daily 22 min. slot, which is commissions and acquisitions, and a
weekly 43 min. slot which is for now only acquisitions.

Aljazeera is an odd combination of the old and the new: it?s very much
built in the traditional BBC/ CNN mould: studio hosted, and with
traditional journalistic storytelling.

Cameron Hickey ? indie producer Pattern Films
Presented ?docsite? which is a free tool for creating websites for
filmmakers.

PW: Sheffield ?meet-market? was an example how half the process of
connecting filmmakers with CEs was conducted online.

Adnan hadzi introduces Djaromil, creator of dyne.bolic ? see dyne.org
Djaromil: you can also think about funding from the other side: to be
less dependent on expensive technology ? after all the less you need
the richer you are ont eh same budget. On dyne.org you can find free
open source tools for production and distribution of video.
Another great advantage of open source is in longevity: you are not
dependent on formats that are corporate owned and that can be
discontinued and be left without any software supporting it. Open
source will always be adapted so it gives you long term archiving
security.

Announcement from audience: filmmakers in Sheffield got together and
started a distribution platform for docs called docutube.com

Q from audience: what about using archive in films you want to post ?
do you have to own all the rights?
A: well we don?t really have an answer but in the end you can always
leave black holes where the archive goes with a description and then
put it in for broadcasts.

Emily from Fourdocs: on our site films are on a Creative Commons
licence, so they can be quoted freely.

Pat Afderheide: we also did a study on agreements about rights called
?the new deals?

Comment from audience: there ARE already models from the music
business, which has struggled with these issues a while ago. Also:
some of these supposed ?free platforms? actually claim copyrights on
posted material and may be extracting value in the long term so
they?re not as free as they look.

Q from audience: surely we can?t all finance our films striaght from
the public like Robert Greenwald?
Peter Broderick: there?s also models not so similar to Greenwald?s:
for example patrons, small loyal audiences could support sertain work
and certain filmmakers. But I believe that overall we are moving to an
era where filmmakers can be truly independent.

End on Peter Wintonick riff.

At the transmission festival one of the discussions was around FLOSS manual (see also http://www.flossmanuals.net) the importance of documenting multimedia tools. One of the projects dealing with manuals is http://converge.org.uk looking at video distribution of the x.264 codec (vodcasts). We decided to hold a follow up event at the Limehouse on April 27, 2007.

(quoted from http://transmission.cc/About)

Re-transmission was a three day gathering of video makers, programmers and web producers developing online video distribution as a tool for social justice and media democracy. The two events at the British Film Institute were made up of presentations and screenings, firstly exploring citizen video reporting on the Net, secondly discussing how to collaborate and share content on the net in the new era of Open Source and WebTV. For the full Re-transmission program see

http://retransmission.org.uk

for documentation of the event see:

http://www.archive.org/details/retransmission the film

http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/London%2C_October_2006 the wiki

Online video, 10 years in.

Metadata process update

Thanks to some funding from the alt-media-res project, we now have a draft metadata standard PDF prepared by JJ King and Jan Gerber:

This report and proposal is under consultation within Transmission-connected networks until Monday November 6th;

We are looking for substantive responses, feedback, proposals, in particular direct inputs from the other Transmission working groups – eg Translation/Subtitling, DoNoHarm, Aggregator R&D, Documentation….

I am posting summaries of responses in the wiki and hope that people with experience of this field of work can suggest practical ways forward to finalise and then begin to implement the standard.

After 6th November we will gather the working group together to review and improve the schema, spec out next steps etc. please add to and improve the metadata to do list

As part of this process, JJ King and I have drafted a proposal for implementation of this standard.

28th October 2006 (zoe)

http://wiki.transmission.cc/index.php/Responses_to_draft_schema

http://www.shiftspace.cc/j/meta/tx_report_0.2.pdf

http://www.clearerchannel.org/transwiki/index.php?title=Proposal_for_further_funding_for_implementation_of_RDF_schema

In the week of the 2nd of June the Bitnik media collective visited Deptford.TV at Deckspace and the second TV Hacking session was held together with people from the Hacklab, PureDyne, OpenStreetMap and Boundless projects.

We discussed the editing and publishing systems of Deptford.TV. The decision is to design a memory stick on which all the production software is installed so that every contributor can use any computer connected to the internet.

Therfor the Dynebolic system using Cinelerra is ideal. For the distribution bitinik wants to release the copyfight as an installer towards march next year. Hopefully by the next Node.London session (if there will be one) Deptford.TV can present the system flow running from production to distribution on FLOSS systems.

For Deptford X in November Deptford.TV plans to hold mini DIY soldering TV transmitter workshops on the concept & idea of the hut project, see similar project on radio transmitters presented at Briklane in the same week, from the hut project website:

Dispersed Radio Network / FM Transmitter Workshops

On the 1st of June 2006, from a location on Brick Lane, The Hut Project made the first in an ongoing series of public radio broadcasts, beginning the first leg of our Dispersed Radio Network project. Over a four-day period, our broadcast, covering a 2-mile radius, invited listeners to come to a micro-FM transmitter workshop. We have mappped the location of every transmitter that was built during this first workshop event, and will be asking everyone who built a transmitter with us to take part in a simultaneous broadcast in the next month. Our broadcasts will now be spreading out across London, the UK and wherever we else we get to, as and when the opportunity arises, allowing participants to construct their own micro-radio transmitters, and broadcast their own programmes to their homes, buildings, and streets. At intermittent periods, as we request that all those whio have taken part in our project take part in simultaneous broadcasts, we will be creating, momentarily, a dispersed micro-radio network. We will soon be publishing the map of transmitter locations on this site, and we’ll announce the times of any broadcasts by the network. An archive of all the material broadcast by the network will be stored here as and when it develops.

for the metadata editing we will try out the meta data hootenany, what a name! quoted from metadata hootenany:

Metadata Hootenanny

This is a page about my latest piece of clever software: Metadata Hootenanny.

What Is It? It’s a viewer/editor for all the spiffy metadata you can put into QuickTime movies. You know how you can view, edit and sort by your mp3s’ ID3 metadata in iTunes? Well, a similar metadata system exists for all your QuickTime movies, too, but until now the only way to access it was through the horrid interface of QuickTime Pro Player (You can see certain metadata items in QT’s Info window, and add them in the Movie Properties window under Annotations).

Metadata Hootenanny lets you access this information more easily (and for free!). You can make a playlist of all the videos in your collection with a certain director or writer. You can search your videos for a certain performer, or a keyword in the description. Of course, you have to add all this information to your movies yourself…which is a breeze with Metadata Hootenanny.

Why Would I Ever Want To Have Metadata in My Movies? Ok, ok. Most people probably don’t care about movie metadata yet. The best use I see for this program is for people (like me) who have large collections of TV shows or music videos, somewhat short movies that might conceivably be played back-to-back, or collected into small lists based on subordinate criteria, as might be stored in QuickTime movies’ metadata tags (like writer, director, author, album, etc).

What Kind of Metadata Are We Talking About Here? The Program supports all the Annotations that Quicktime uses (Album, Artist, Author, Comment, etc). Custom categories can be used as well, if they are four characters long and starting with ‘©‘, like “©CMT.” You can type a © in MacOS with option-g. In Addition, there are (mostly) read-only properties about the movies, like video/audio formats, file size, and movie length. Finally, it lets you add or edit Chapter Tracks, which are a cool little feature of the QuickTime container format that is seldom used. They’re like little bookmarks in the movie with a popup-menu that lets you jump between them. In QuickTime Pro, in order to make a chapter track, you have to create a text file formatted in a certain way, with timepoints you must type out by hand, then import it to QuickTime, add it to your movie, un-enable it, and set it as a chapter track.

My way is much easier, trust me, plus if you have a problem or better yet a suggestion, I will be happy to fix it for you. And in case you feel nostalgic for the QTPlayer way, Metadata Hootenanny exports chapter lists to the QuickTime text format, ready for import.

That’s Fine, But What Else Does It Do? I’m glad you asked. In addition to adding metadata and chapters, you can also add DVD-style interactive menus, using QT’s wired sprites. Menu buttons can have images from image files or from the movie itself, and have rollover and on-click pictures as well. Button actions include going to a certain chapter, enabling audio or text (subtitle) tracks, and stepping forward or backward.

Other features include integrated www lookup with IMDB.com, EPGuides.com, TVTome.com and BlockBuster.com, and reading of chapter times directly from the DVD drive or from other movie files. Also movie playback features like fullscreen and rate control.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK, although little risk is really involved. The program never even tries to write to the original files (unless of course you choose the unrecommended “save-in-place” option from the save-as window); it only creates new files [NOTE: an unexpected “feature” of the QuickTime API had lead to version 1.0 modifying input files when chapters are added. It is fixed in the “unstable beta” version] I don’t know what it would do if you ran out of hard drive space, though….

Download
unstable beta (check out the version notes and latest beta changes in News + History)
source code (I have a sourceforge project but apparently I’m not competent to use their cvs, so if someone who is wants to upload the source let me know and I’ll add you as a dev on the project)
Here is the source code of what I’m working on for the next version. It has some interesting new stuff, and just about everything is broken in some way. Since I don’t anticipate having much time to fix it, I encourage you to mess around with it in any way you like.

Please email me with any bugs you find and I will fix them toute suite. You can also receive prompt technical support by visiting the 3ivx forums.

Here’s a little picture of it

After having finished the Deptford.TV workshop some of the participants gathered together at the Takeaway Festival which was held at the Dana Center to take part in two workshops. Dynebolic & Hivenetworks. Dynebolic is the media plattform used for producing content for Deptford.TV. . Hivenetworks is linked to the Boundless.coop network in Deptford which is the distribution channel of Deptford.TV. Xavier made a small film for Canal + in France.
quoted from Takeaway:

Jaromil: dyne:bolic

dyne:bolic – Held by Jaromil
29th March 2006

The new 2.0 release of the free multimedia operating system dyne:bolic GNU/Linux will be presented and introduced with its functionalities for streaming and producing audio/video materials employing only open source software, for the freedom of speech.

In the panorama of existing operating systems we see that there are a great number of possibilities to listen: all kinds of “free to download” players for audio and video, but no easy way for everybody to speak out loud and spread their words.

The way communication is structured follows a hierarchy of well established powers and, worst than ever, money is the main requirement for making a voice spread and possible to be heard by others.
About the lecturer:

Jaromil the Rasta Coder is a Mediterranean GNU/Linux programmer, author and maintainer of three free software programs and operating systems: MuSE (for running a web radio), FreeJ (for veejay and realtime video manipulation), HasciiCam (ascii video streaming) and dyne:bolic the bootable CD running directly without requiring installation, a popular swiss army knife in the fields of production and broadcasting of information. All his creations are freely available online under the GNU General Public License (Free Software Foundation).

He is a featured artist in major new media art exhibitions and publications, from CODeDOC II (Whitney Museum Artport), to Read_Me 2.3 (runme.org software art) and Data Browser 02 (engineering culture). Jaromil has been artist in residence at makrolab (Venice Biennale), medien.kunstlabor and the Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst / Montevideo Time Based Arts where he is now in charge of several open source research and development projects.

Alexei Blinov: Hive Networks

Hive Networks – Held by Alexei Blinov
31th March 2006
HIVE Networks – wireless networks of things, built and owned by users, using open source software and cheap disposable appliances.
Alexei Blinov of Raylab and a group of collaborators have set out to create an exciting project, HIVE Networks, which promises to change the perception of ubiquitous or pervasive computing.

HIVE combines the virtues of free software, free networks and open hardware to generate a framework for virtually any type of networked media application on small and cheap consumer devices. In this workshop he will show how HIVE devices can be customised to a range of applications.
About the lecturer:

Alexei Blinov is a Russian born artist/engineer living and working in London. He was and is strongly involved with wireless community networking. His areas of expertise include sensors, lasers, hardware design and programming. He has created his own projects as well as working with many artists and groups such as Take2030, audiorom, Tanaka, Hobijn and others.

Jamie King: Copyright and the new technological environment

Two recent technological developments – the digital format and the network – are starting to make the old model of distributing and paying for cultural content based on copyright protection seem antiquated.

Copyright – the right of a creator to exert control over the reproduction of a work and to sell others this control – is a legal device which was designed for an earlier social/technological moment.

Digital copies – whether of text or anything else – can now be produced almost infinitely at next to zero cost.
We need to examine new models for funding creative works – to address the central question of how cultural producers will survive under the new paradigm. Where many in what is loosely referred to as ‘industry’ regard the challenge to copyright as essentially hostile, others see it as positive, and potentially socially transformative – seeking first and foremost to explore positive models for creativity in the new technological context.

Jamie King is a writer and activist. He is involved with projects such as Open Business (www.openbusiness.cc), Pretext ( www.pretext.org) and Creative Commons UK. He lectures contemporary studies at Ravensbourne College Postgraduate Programme.

and Rama was chilling on our couch…

Rama/Platoniq.net: Burn Station

Burn Station – Held by Rama/Platoniq.net
30th March 2006

Burn Station is a mobile copying station which – as it travels through suburban spaces – supports the free distribution of music and audio. Above all it is a social event which congregates people together for listening, selecting and copying net label and net radio audio files with a Copyleft Licence. Burn Station is an open-source, non-commercial project involving the new means of free networked distribution. It is based on the Burn Station software which was developed by Platoniq and Rama as a 100% free software. Burn Station aims to establish links between the media space and the physical space of the city.
About the lecturer:

Rama (Ramiro Cosentino) is an internet and PureData developer exiled from Buenos Aires (Argentina) during the last economic crash. Previously based in Barcelona as main headquarter, he moved to Graz (Austria) for a residency at the Medien.KUNSTLABOR; currently based in Vienna, he is further developing media/art distribution platforms. (i.e. Burn Station and R23.cc)

Rama is member of several mediahacktivist collectives: hackitectura.net, riereta.net, platoniq.net bcn, straddle3.net bcn, developing open source systems for global communication, developer and administrator of media streaming servers/applications; user-friendly PD works for video (based on PiDiP) and audio mixing, processing and streaming.