To those of us who spend the better portion of their lives online, the idea of a convention catering to the cultural, political and artistic yearnings of the online soul is a lofty and welcome event.
Like most of us, South By Southwest (SXSW) is in its 20s. It was originally a music festival in which hundreds of bands and thousands of fans converged on downtown Austin for a long weekend of listening, drinking and dancing. That part hasn’t changed much over the years; SXSW is still the premiere music showcase on central standard time in the spring. Along with the thousands who make the annual sojourn into Austin, the sponsors flock with them. Jim Beam, Miller Lite, The Austin Chronicle. 107.1 “Radio Austin”. Bracelets for unlimited access cost more than $100.
If you ask your shuttle driver, he will tell you it’s still one of best places in the world to catch genuine music and flat out enjoy yourself to the sound of some 1,000 bands. If you ask that same shuttle driver if he knows anything about the Film and Interactive parts of the SXSW week, he pauses, and without similar glee says, “Yeah, I think I heard something about that going on.”
The Interactive Festival, to my surprise, is making little impression on the scene. Perhaps it is because “geek-turned-artist” has are shy, inward appeal; online arts have no guitars, crooning, celluloid, or drama. But that's precisely the aim of the SXSW organizers: to bring Digital Art into the fold of Music and Film for celebration.
Josh Davis, Jeffrey Zeldman, Derek M. P o wazek, Gabe Kean. What we talk about when we talk about Internet arts is them. They all believe independent content is, for lack of a better term, the killer app. While the dot-coms come and go digital content lives forever. It gets ripped, mixed and burned a thousand times a day in bedrooms, classes, kiosks and board rooms worldwide.
Independentsday.org is a movement started last year to harness the spirit of online community. It is a critical thinking movement whose timing purposefully flew in the face of general ill-will -- both on and offline -- toward the Internet. With the flood of late nineties business plans for taking businesses of all kinds to the web, both the public at large and the architects of those unfulfilled promises softened their stance toward anything Internet. Independentsday.or is not a commercial movement and in the context of SXSW represents perhaps the most independent spirit that the festivals founders had intended. Nor is Independentsday.org a movement for superstars. Instead, it is a movement designed to give a stage to the otherwise anonymous voices of the people on the web who believe the Internet is this era’s answer to what Laurie Anderson calls “Fire around which we tell our stories.”
“When we talk about independent content,” says Jeffrey Zeldman, “we’re not against the commercial Web.” The Web is useful to buy plane tickets, trace your genealogy, do research and get news. All of these are respected components of the Internet we’ve grow depend on. Indeed, as Jon Styn parodied at the SXSW Web Awards this year, ask any San Diego beach-goer what they think the Internet is, and they will reply, “AOL.” To Jeffrey Zeldman this misconception has a curiously ignorant sensibility to it. “The Internet is a medium that allows anyone to publish anything and be heard.”
This spirit is shared by Derek Powazek, Josh Davis and Gabe Kean, all of whom came from the schooled tradition of art at the mercy of publishers. Derek traces his roots to the gonzo newspaper he started in college. Josh traces his desire the “paint the digital canvas” to an insatiable self-actualization that had to “lose everything to gain everything.” Gabe, as ‘publisher’ of Born Magazine, a community magazine for the collaboration of design and the written word, independent content is a “proactive response [to publishing], that’s not client-driven,” but driven only by a passion for self-expression. The Internet is a place to exorcize your demons, collaborate with others, get feedback from the audience, and elevate one’s frustrations under the guise of self-expression. These spaces that they have created are solutions to problems that otherwise were not being answered in both traditional and online media.
Fray, like Born magazine, was started by Derek Powazek with the notion that he wanted to give something back to the community from which he sprang — storytelling and design— without relying on advertising or succumbing to censorship by vested interests. As professionals who daylight as designers and programmers for corporate websites, this Warholian yearning to make meaning spring from the commercial arts has a powerful pull to it for artists all over the web. Nine-to-five for so many of us is the reason we see a need to get it right during the moonlight hours, from the office veal fattening pens to the home studio.
Similarly, Alistapart was Jeffrey Zeldman’s answer to “The topics I find interesting.” As a former musician, art director, and journalist, he found that his favorite (usually commercial) sites like Webmonkey were not being published often enough, nor were they particularly responsive to his use of the Internet. Since then he and alistapart have become the starting place for many Web builders, who find his independent approach to problem-solving untarnished by a profit motive.
“If you want to learn Photoshop, you pick up a book about Photoshop, and that itself has advertising [for Adobe] built into it," Zeldman says. "When you’re talking about DOM, CSS and Writing Technique, you don’t have that problem. The message is impartial.”
Josh Davis calls his art the “public display of my impairment.” As a painter who makes his own oils, the process of art is as much the message as the abstracts he disseminates freely on his Web site, praystation.com. While praystation started “as the place I would work out religious satire and pay homage to gaming,” Davis says, the art he makes is now the combination of code and design, inseparable from his intimate “sketchbook” where he would spend days “just writing algorithms and letting them take him where they wanted to go.” To fellow "geeks," this is code nirvana. To the rest of us, it’s just plain interesting. And to Josh’s surprise, his art has allowed him to pay the proverbial rent. He no longer works in the commercial realm designing Web sites for Motown Records, Barney’s and Puff Daddy. Instead, he does workshops and speaking tours, which this March have him traveling from Africa to Texas to Barcelona. As an artist he’s reached the coveted sweet spot most independents envy. He’s getting paid for his ideas and his ideas alone. His hours and years of irreverent research and development into shapes, sounds, motions and code have paid off quite literally.
This idea that you can give away your art and still pay rent is an idea that has most definitely been reborn. The online community is embracing the ideas of open source and peer-driven networks at a pace that offline entities fear. The RIAA, MPAA, and Disney are all driving copyright into a realm legally that is, as Lawrence Lessig testified during his keynote speech, antithetical to these movements and to the original intent of American intellectual property. We’re not talking about Napster here, Lessig insists. We’re talking about “the three stooges.”
“Stooges” is Lessig’s way of explaining how intellectual property is being monopolized by publishers at the expense of artists in general. Citing Disney CEO Michael Eisner, RIAA president Hilary Rosen and MPAA president Jack Valenti as “the three stooges,” he claims that our culture is being held hostage by large corporations. “Culture, like information, wants to be free,” he insists.
Lessig is a Stanford Law Professor who is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the loudest voice in America challenging that the issues born with Napster years ago, are not dead now that Napster is. What he hopes to accomplish is to get American copyright law to reflect the “original intent of the constitution.” Citing Thomas Jefferson, and tracing American copyright from Colonial Britain, he paints an historical picture that has been slowly taking ownership and value of intellectual property from the artists in order to fatten publishers’ pockets.
His beef with copyright law as we know it “destroys independent creativity.” The notion that a filmmaker needs to get permission from Coca Cola in order to use Coke cans as props is, to him, ridiculous. So much of our culture, for example, comes from pop culture, which is itself corporate in nature. It is nearly impossible for independent expression to overcome the legal barriers to entry. “Now that technology is enabling artists by lowering the cost barriers to entry, publishers and Hollywood are using the law to preserve their monopoly power on art,” Lessig asserts. “U.S. copyright laws exist in order to protect artists from publishers and not vice versa.”
Rip. Mix. Burn.
“Public domain is the lawyer-free zone.” Lessig says this in his keynote address and the hundreds of SXSW gatherers from Music, Film and Interactive applaud. Public domain, according to his book The Future of Ideas, is important in copyright because it allows artists to freely express their work in the context of other works. With a scope beyond fair use, music sampling, pop-culture icons and interpretive works like the Wind Done Gone, by Alice Randall, public domain is the legal way of enabling artists to express themselves in so-called "derivative works." He argues that as long as copyright continues to be perpetual (as "the three stooges" would have it), creating a work that derives from another will continue to be illegal. And unless you have the support of Houghtin Mifflin, as Randall did when her novel, an interpretation of Gone With the Wind told from the perspective of a female slave, then you will be prohibited from expressing yourself legally. This is why Lessig calls the Sonny Bono Copyright Protection Act the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act.” “Every time Mickey Mouse nears its copyright term and will soon become part of the public domain, Disney gets copyright limit extended,” thus preventing artists to use this pop cultural icon without permission from Disney’s legal department.
Many in the arts industry resent the idea that others can create works from theirs. The meme embraced in Apple ads for CD-Duplicating iBooks, “Rip. Mix. Burn.” is one that he hopes most Americans can learn to embrace through technology. Indeed, many Americans oppose the idea of limiting copyright terms, as Lessig suggests. The idea that art is “the freedom to rip, mix and burn the past” is irrelevant to the public. The reason Lessig sites for such apathy is that the publishing industry has a greater ability to frame the debate. They staged Bob Dylan against Courtney Love in the Napster debate before the public. “There is no public support and no political support for freedom because [the public] hears what the publishers want you to hear,” he says. Furthermore, the American public is not quite prone to see the value in what he calls the “creative commons.”
From the John Sayles flyers along the Austin 6 th street bar and restaurant row that exclaim in large poster type “Independent” to the series of independentsday panels on community building, buzz-building, the politics of open source and trends in independent expression online, it is apparent that this convention caters to those who are embracing the artistic spirit as a community. And there is nothing that embodies this spirit better than Fray Café.
Fray Café is an offline ‘spinoff’ of Derek Powazek’s Fray Magazine which publishes the personal stories of writers and non-writers alike. Coming off the first full day of standing-room-only panel discussions, the SXSW Web Awards commenced Sunday in the ballroom of the Four Seasons. Emceed by San Diego native John Styn, the flamboyant purveyor of hugnation and cockybastard.com, the audience of convention goers and the media quickly and lightly made ceremony of the best work online. In the spirit of celebration, much of the crowd descended upon several after-parties, one of which was Fray Café.
Held in a black box theatre in the back of The Hideout coffeehouse, Fray was perhaps the most-anticipated non-convention event of the week. This is its second year in Austin. Fray Café has traditionally been staged in Powazek’s home San Francisco though it did make a stint in ten cities worldwide last year.
Fray café is at first glance the digital generation’s answer to Beatnik poetry, jazz improv and stand-up comedy. The format has featured speakers and audience members alike standing on a stage telling true stories. The effect is something akin to friends sitting around on couches in a coffeehouse for three hours talking about the remarkable experiences in their lives. Imagine the idle conversations you’ve had over a drink or next to a campfire with family and friends. Now instead of the setting being a long drive, a bar or a campfire you’re on stage in room full of strangers. It has the instant appeal of celebrity what with the attention granted to each successive story-teller. And because everyone has a story to tell – “the worst day in my life”, “the first time I kissed a girl”, “that time I got food poisoning in Stockholm” – the moment in the spotlight is fulfilling for the speaker and listener alike.
This may not seem like a recipe for a good night out, but to the SXSW goers, this is the sublimation of the online community as we know it, and the best offline expression of what independent content seeks to accomplish: uncensored, raw, personal experiences and interpretation of the past. On the one hand, Fray Café is the offline equivalent of blogging. One the other it is the offline equivalent of community spaces like the mirrorproject which offer a structure for any individual to contribute to a great big artistic dialogue. And like those Web sites, no topic is off limits and the audience itself is receptive to all personal accounts told from the heart.
Stories Sunday night ranged from 12-step style confessions from heroin and alcohol obsession, to saving a child’s life, to remembering a recently deceased brother, to confessions of a rock-and-roll granny. The common thread is life-changing events, and the lessons native to such timeless parables. They are endlessly recyclable and entertaining. Fray Café lasted three hours with more than 20 speakers. There was much applause, tears, laughter and all-around sympathy. The age range of the audience was from teens to 70s. The material was both heartwarming and frenzied. Mostly heartwarming.
What is so remarkable about Fray Café is that the format is so energizing. One would hardly expect to be fully entertained for three or more hours in a black box theater. But with true stories and receptive ears one gets the impression it could, like the Web, continue for 24 hours a day, surprisingly addictive and strangely intimate. With audience members coming and going, it is the perfect offline analog for what happens in the Internet. Storytelling, feedback, making friends with strangers and celebrating what Lawrence Lessig calls “the freedom to rip, mix and burn the past.” Fray Café is the essential contemporary offline art form where no one gets paid, no one is the star and everything past and present is public domain.