Julianna Yau’s blog

For the past few weeks, I’ve been drained and in dire need of a revival… and it turns out some fine films were all I needed. While stone is my favourite medium for creation, film is my favourite medium for “consumption” and I haven’t been exposing myself to enough fine film recently.

Tonight, I attended Double Vision, presented by The Images Festival, CFMDC and CAFKA. The films screened tonight were extremely fine and well-crafted.

Notes in Origin (Ellie Epp, 1987) was my favourite because of Epp’s playfulness and superb grasp of time and timing. At the end of each “note”, I hoped there was another, until I fell into Epp’s rhythm and understood how many notes there would be. The length of each note was perfect, and her punctuation of the end of the film was direct without taking the audience out of the film.

Christina Battle’s the distance between here and there was crafted with a brilliant crescendo and ended with a similar grace and firmness. With both Epp and Battle, I didn’t quite know where they were taking me or how they would resolve the film, but I knew for certain I was in good hands.

Kitchener-Berlin (Phil Hoffman, 1990) was an absolute feast for the eyes. The interlacing of images was done with immense purpose, and I had a distinct sense that Hoffman knew exactly what to show us and when. At the end of Part 1 was a short film-within-a-film which I absolutely adored. The film was The Highway of Tomorrow or, How One Makes Two, a self-proclaimed amateur film by Dent Harrison. It was wonderfully playful, and the R100 makes me yearn to see Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 1 to search for a connection which probably doesn’t exist.

There is another set of films tomorrow, starting at 8pm at The Gig.

Related posts

• Why SOME creative people are putting their work free on the Net (1)
• TIAC - Where Virtual Worlds Collide (0)
• The “Matthew Barney” Model (0)
• Love & Savegry & C-10 (0)
• Is there hope for alternative business models? (0)

This afternoon, there was a workshop presented by Rowley Mossop: When Virtual Worlds Collide - Challenges for the Arts in the Hypermedia Age. It was a much more focused presentation and discussion on some of the things discussed by Eli and John this morning, but with a much stronger marketing slant (comments with ~ are mine):

-songza.com

-new media –> impact on:
–concept of rarity
–production, distribution, etc
–behaviour & expectation

-the experience –> the emotional investment
-price/value of distribution & experience is shifting

-incumbent media are innovating to protect the value of their existing experience & products
-entrant media are innovating to build new businesses from new experiences & products
-innovations will impact how audiences expect to experience culture

-how can we use emerging technology to create something of value to attract and retain users/buyers?
-what is valuable to users? buyers? advertisers? funders?

-concept of RARITY
-emerging technology combinations are replacing rarity with ubiquity
–songza
–youtube
–the real news (broadcast out of Bathurst St in Toronto; technology has made it possible to reach a wide audience with a small budget)
-being able to find things
–rarity used to be a value because things were hard to find; ubiquity now more prevalent and effective
~~> but, again, what about Barney?

-”we all know now that intellectual property doesn’t mean much”
~~> what?!?!

-asking why people would go to concerts which were formerly sold on rarity if everything is available online
-need another strategy if your work is based on rarity (again, what about Barney’s success at forcing rarity?)

-market definitions based on geography
–no longer apply
–used to NEED to have geographic footprint & monopoly due to technological restraints
–because of reach, loss of local ads & personalities as value
–also loss of value for scheduled programming to reach specific audience

-users don’t pay content creators for access
~~> no, they pay the companies who provide access to the content, which is causing a whole host of problems between creators and those companies

-cost of content creation & distribution dropping
-boundaries of IP are dissolving
-offline, the cost of production is often higher than the price people are willing to pay for it

-new tarrifs, new ways to pay, new products
-ad-supported content

~it’s easy for people to make money by creating content in new formats and media, but what about people who are offering traditional things? how do we bridge the two? esp with physical objects?

-it’s all about “the experience”
-how to make live experience valuable rather than simply a replacement
-people find there is a higher engagement level online
-incorporate audience into the art!
-sampling ~~> not just for beauty products and food!

-metropera.com/metroperafamily.org
–haven’t changed the core of what they do or offer
–created impression of rarity
~~~>how does that fit with all the talk about rarity disappearing? I think there are two models here…
–redefined their market
–made themselves THE opera house of the world
–multiple formats of broadcasts; many ad-supported

Related posts

• TIAC - Understanding Your Audience and Your Community (0)
• TIAC - How is the web transforming the arts? (0)
• The “Matthew Barney” Model (0)
• Technology In the Arts Conference - Day 1 Session Summary (0)
• Technology in the Arts conference - Afterthoughts (0)

Close on the heels of Sidorkin’s article on Matthew Barney’s mode of generating income from his art is an article by Glenn Peoples about fan-funded musicians (via Michael Geist). Barney’s model is about selling more than merely the film and distributing the film differently. However, the fan-funded model is essentially turning the traditional model of music production on its head. Rather than getting a record company to cover the costs of production, the musicians are going to their fans for the money. It almost feels like a commissioned process, only with multiple financial sources and great creative freedom. If this can be maintained (and can maintain the financial stability of the creators), it would be an excellent model.

Related posts

• TIAC - Where Virtual Worlds Collide (0)
• The “Matthew Barney” Model (0)
• Quick update (0)
• Why SOME creative people are putting their work free on the Net (1)
• Week (or so) in review: Copyright (1)

Gleb Sidorkin has written for Tisch Film Review the article I’ve been wanting to write on this blog about Matthew Barney’s model for generating income from film. Unlike most “indie” film-makers (I use the term loosely — Barney is more of a multimedia artist than a “traditional indie film-maker”), Barney does not seek mass distribution of his work. In fact, most people are probably out of luck if they have missed The Cremaster Cycle or Drawing Restraint while they were “on tour”. It wasn’t until last summer when Anthology Film Archives in New York was screening Cremaster 2 as part of a Norman Mailer event that I was no longer one of the many Barney fans who had not actually seen any of his work. Sidorkin’s article is very thorough and insightful, and provides part of the answer to my burning question: what about visual artists?

Related posts

• TIAC - Where Virtual Worlds Collide (0)
• Is there hope for alternative business models? (0)
• Why SOME creative people are putting their work free on the Net (1)
• TIAC - Understanding Your Audience and Your Community (0)
• The Uninvited Guest (0)

A few days ago, a colleague sent me a link to the article Why creative people are putting their work free on the Net, by Katie Haegele. While I support innovative marketing and dissemination techniques (including many of the examples in the article), some of the opinions in the article are problematic.

Firstly, I, unlike Haegele, did not smile when I read “Reproduce/copy/imitate whatever you want. Just don’t sell it. This is the Internet, and everything is free.”. Phrases like that reinforce the dangerous notion that the internet is a free-for-all pirate bay. Yes, we should embrace the wonders of the internet to allow creators to reach a wider audience. And yes, the worldwide nature of the internet is problematic for traditional concepts of copyright law, but things are not free just because they are on the internet, nor should they be (at least not with the current way things work…maybe in the future when we can rethink the flow of revenue to creators).

Secondly, the statement “Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) is what makes the book legally sharable.” is misleading. Creative Commons licenses work within the parameters of current copyright laws in different countries to facilitate the sharing of a book. These licenses make it much easier for creators to indicate the terms under which their work may be shared, but this option would have been possible (albeit not as accessible) pre-Creative Commons.

Thirdly, the marketing technique of giving away some things for free is not new. What we’re seeing is a shift from giving by the creator toward sharing by the consumers. What I had formerly thought was innovative now seems more like the creators are trying to regain some control over what is being given by them versus what has been shared by consumers (which they may not want shared).

Lastly, I would like to remind people that giving away some things for free isn’t a marketing technique which works or is desirable for all creative forms or all creators. Keeping in mind that copyright law already has provisions for fair dealing (which could still use some additional defining/refining), it should be the creator’s choice to give away their work. Unlike music, literature and film, much visual art is more valuable (financially and otherwise) because of its uniqueness. My favourite example of this is Matthew Barney’s work, which is available for viewing through cinemas or to collectors with deep pockets because only a few copies of each work have been created. Although the release of Barney’s work through Youtube means it could reach a wider audience, it should be the creator’s choice to do so.

Related posts

• What about visual artists? (9)
• Waiting For Copyright Legislation… (0)
• Jessica Litman - Rethinking Copyright (0)
• Don’t steal? No, don’t devalue art (3)
• Yoav Mazeh: Fixation in Copyright - part two: the discussion (0)