BigShinyThing

The marketing and communications industry often find its inspiration through outreach to ‘edgy’, street or political artists. Think Barbara Kruger‘s work with Selfridges, or street artist Speto’s posters for Brahma beer. At the occasional cost of some credibility points, everybody wins: artists get funding and exposure, brands get cooler creative executions than agency ‘creative’ teams could dream up unaided.

But sometimes, ideas are appropriated for campaigns without the consent of their creators. Consent can, at first glance, seem a particularly grey area for street art, say, or activist content. After all, if you’ve gifted an idea to the commons without a clearly-stated and enforceable license in place, what right have you to complain if that idea gets spotted by an agency and used to sell, say, soft drinks. Or indeed, sports shoes?

Consider, for example, Chalkbot — a robot which writes messages in chalk on the road as it bumps along behind another vehicle. You can send Chalkbot tweets, you can text it, you can probably email it. And whatever you send, ends up on the road, writ large in chalk. Chalkbot is cool. Geek cool. As we understand it, Chalkbot was developed by DeepLocal, and, via ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, is being used by Nike as part of its brand tie-up with the LIVESTRONG campaign of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, at the Tour de France (yes this can get confusing).

We first heard about Chalkbot on Twitter today. But actually, no — we didn’t first hear of it today. We first saw the technology demonstrated a few years back, at a Dorkbot event in London. The project was called StreetWriter, and its creators were a group of highly technical activists called the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). Not just cool, StreetWriter was also political. Watch the video.

Chalkbot isn’t StreetWriter. Although based on IAA’s work, Chalkbot is far from political. It’s commercial. It’s also built, in part, by former IAA members. Nothing wrong with that in itself. DeepLocal present their version of its history on their website [thanks to Nathan at DeepLocal for providing us with that link in response to my earlier shoutout on Twitter].

Crucially, however, Nike and W+K’s press releases apparently make no mention of their robot’s activist ancestry.

Our problem with that? One word: Attribution — a key concern of us commons-loving content-creators. Play, mix, mash-up, create using what we’ve made, but give credit where credit’s due: show respect to those who came before, on whose ideas you build. This is simple: even leaving aside the politics, Nike should be putting some more love out. It seems the IAA shares our views on this. In the past hour or so, they’ve issued a press release which details their dissatisfaction with Nike’s appropriation of their work. Read it. Respond as you see fit.

This story is developing. We’ll keep you posted as and when Nike or its agencies make any public response.

As part of its California Video exhibition, The Getty launched a website called Video Revolutionaries. This website invited the public to upload their own video art inspired by the works of the artists in California Video collection. In spite of this request for work influenced by many of the outrageous and transgressive artists in the show, the website also lists criteria that the public’s videos must abide by. A list of rules and regulations imposes traditional censorship upon the applicants. The site then also gives the public rules on how they can interact with the videos on the website.

The “Video Revolutionaries” website states that all video posts will be reviewed by the Getty and deemed acceptable before being posted to the Video Revolutionaries website. It further explicitly forbids sexually explicit material, certain kinds of violence, and the use of any sort of automated voting methods. So much for artistic freedom.

Now, there’s nothing like a little bit of censorship to provoke the online anarchists. Hence a collective known as The Infinity Lab took it upon themselves to produce a number of very silly videos for the site which they then pumped to the top of the ‘most viewed’ list. They pretty much own this section of the site now. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters would be proud. Small act of subversion? Yes. But also a reminder (as if one were needed) that the Internet remains an anarchic space. And one which brands and institutions should still engage with carefully.
Getty’s site rather archaically doesn’t allow their video to be easily embedded elsewhere, so you’ll need to click here to view the currently-top-rated content.

Via Nettime.

Six members of the Ztohoven collective, whose aims include “penetrating public space”, are to appear in court this month charged with spreading false information. The artists sent shock waves through the Czech Republic in June last year by splicing footage of the atomic explosion into a live panoramic shot of the Krkonose mountains, in north-east Bohemia.

The fake blast prompted panicked calls to the switchboard of the TV channel CT2, with some viewers fearing that a nuclear war had begun while others suggested there had been a gas explosion. The impact was compared to that of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio broadcast of 1938, in which listeners were led to believe that Martians were invading Earth. Listeners who took it to be a news broadcast panicked, and several suffered heart attacks.

Ztohoven said the aim of its project, which it called Media Reality, was not to harm, but to illustrate how the media manipulates reality. In a statement it said:

We are neither a terrorist organisation nor a political group. Our aim is not to intimidate society or manipulate it, which is something we witness on a daily basis both in the real world and that created by the media. On June 17 2007, [we] attacked the space of TV broadcasting, distorting it, questioning its truthfulness and its credibility.

The group added that they hoped their action would “remind the media of their duty to bring out the truth”.

But Martin Krafl, spokesman for the TV channel, called the hijack irresponsible. “The fake broadcast was really very inadvisable and could have provoked panic among a wide group of people,” he said.

Which brings us neatly to this article in Technology Review where veteran news reporter John Hockenberry bemoans the lack of bravery and empathy in modern news reporting. Maybe he should get in touch with the folks at Ztohoven…

Source: The Guardian.