Intellectual Property

Remember how we live in an individualized society where we’re taught that we all have to Make It On Our Own and can accumulate wealth to be passed on to our heirs so they Don’t Have To Work As Hard As We Did  etc etc. It’s about back there where intellectual property starts — the idea that a product of your brain is yours alone to monetize and no one else can get in there. Fast forward to fifteen years ago when the digital revolution made it possible to very easily copy things: documents, pictures…music files, computer programs, are you getting where we’re going?

The fact that we can make copies of things is a radical change in the way these assets are distributed, and has brought up a lot of ideas about how to preserve the monetization of these assets, and even more radically, how to make things that are intended to be copied without monetization. Copyright law is ever too complicated to go into here, so lets go to the entrance of copyleft and Creative Commons, and new laws extending copyright from 50 to 75 years+ and now it’s hard to download Adobe without paying.

BUT — some people like that their computer programs and art can be shared with other folks, tested and improved, and so we’ve got a whole world of software that is easily available…

Shareware vs Freeware vs Software

What the hell is going on here? The folks at netc.org have a great tech glossary, and break it down like this:

Freeware: Software distributed at no or neglible cost.

Shareware: Software you can use without paying for upfront. If you regularly use the software or want all the features you pay for it. Not necessarily open source. Not the same as freeware.

Open source software (OSS): Any computer program with accessible source code.

Mac Software That’s Not Audio-Related: Interesting/New/Useful Programs

It seems like every shareware out there is designed to somehow cut tracks out of youtube videos or pull audio off your windows-based cameraphone. Well, none of these do that. These are programs that connect via text and use new technologies for digital distribution. You can see my other posts if you’re interested in web programs or print design programs.

I find decent programs for my Mac on this shareware site.

RapidSMS is a free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology.

Flipbooks – freeware/open source
Mac – http://www.macshareware.com/software/digital_flip_books

CMS for images/portfolios
you might want to try Stacey, it’s a SUPER simple, you structure your site as a bunch of text files, images, etc in folders and it’s there. [Note: You need to have PHP5 on your server, but if you get a error message that you don't you can usually email/call your host and have them walk you through updating your PHP version. Don't let the jargon stress you out here.]

Part of my favorite media strategy has always been postcards. I love them: I let them collect in my purses to remind me of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, and I think they’re a really effective strategy to let people know about your art, your project or your business. Below the cut I’m pleased to display four of my newest postcards, but first lets talk a bit about production and printing. I have some links to cheap printers and tips to make your cards look great!

Designing a postcard:

You need good images. Get a photographer friend and dress up, like we did for the Animal Print photo shoot. Or source something copyright-free or copyleft and shareable from Wikipedia Commons or the Library of Congress Digital Collections or NYPL archives. Or get your digital camera out and take a picture of someTHING in this beautiful world. And credit your source!

Once you have your image in your computer, make sure it’s set to print resolution and not web resolution! 300dpi! This is critical so you don’t get that weird little-crystal effect when you print. To design, you can use photoshop or indesign, or GIMP [free!]. The most important part when you’re laying out your postcard is a little something called margins and bleed.

Next, before you perfect your postcard, know your print specs. How big is your image going to be? 3.75×5.5 is far off from 4.25×6, when it comes to font size and layout. This means sourcing your printer ahead of time. Will your image bleed off the edge or have a border? Make sure that text is not too close to the margins, and remember that the way things look on your screen often don’t exactly translate to the way they look when printed, so beware of color values that are too close to one another side-by-side.

Printing. I like using overnightprints.com because there are a lot of good discount codes out there for them, and they usually get your order to you in about a week. I just ordered 500 full-color one-sided cards for $20+shipping. Sweet. However, walking into your local independent printer cannot be beat in terms of putting a face to your process, and in my experience, chain-print-place employees are often really rad and discount-y after the managers leave at 5pm.

Here are my most recent products, if you’re curious. And they got here just in time to take to the USSF!

Postcard for performace + creative arts

This is from photo's I got from many of the performers and presenters from the upcoming Femme2010 conference!

This illustration is by Cristy Road

We’ve given this workshop several times starting in 2007: at Women, Action and the Media at MIT/Boston, The Anarchist Bookfair in NYC, The Desiree Alliance Conference in SF and Chicago, and at the Hart Collective in Brooklyn.

To fun(d)raise to get ourselves to the USSF, we’re giving a series of BDSM 201 workshops: one on Bondage May 30, and one on Edge Play June 10. Now that’s intersectionality!!

Programs

Audio on a PC has always been relatively easy because there are about a thousand good free programs out there for PC users to make music:

• Start –>Accessories –>Entertainment –>Sound Recorder–>talk — aaaand done.

• Being real, the last time I was on a PC [was when I made my first album using $40 of RAM I installed myself on a machine running Windows ME, but even though] my technology was crap, and I easily ran Modplug Tracker — great audio creation [not recording] software. So good and intuitive to use I sometimes bust out the PC virtualizer on my Mac so I can play with it.
• And you have Audacity…

Audio on a Mac has gotten basically awesome in the last few years, in part because of Garageband, yes, but also you’ve got:

• Audacity which is so perfect my friend who pays $$$ for techy grad school got taught it in class. It’s free and available for both Mac and PC and lets your record via your computer’s mic input and/or import all kinds of audio files to mashup and play with.

• and if you want to get cray* and record audio in other ways, say an interview via Skype, you can use Soundflower** [brought to you by the makers of Max/MSP/Jitter, the A/V program I want to marry*** and spend all my time with. Someone give me $$ so I can, please]. With Soundflower you can record any audio from one program to another: iTunes to Audacity, for example.

Hardware

RAM you probably have enough memory [RAM] on your computer to record sound without crashing the thing and frustrating the shit out of you. But just in case, do you?

Microphone You can get a mic at many dollar stores for $2. You can get a mic at radio shack for $15. You can get a mic at a pawn shop / on ebay for  $50-$100. You can afford it! Just make sure it has a 1/8″ stereo plug. If it has the common 1/4″ mono no problem – you’ll need to get two adapters at radio shack / your local electronics corner stort for $3 a pop. One will decrease the jack to 1/8″ and the next will go from mono to stereo.

1/8 - stereo, note the double black lines

1/4 - mono, note the one black line

*a familiar form of “crazy”
** thanks to Sébastien McLaughlin for pointing me to this software!
***maybe marriage is the right goal after all?

1. Pick a name[s]! Decide!
I know that picking a name is the hardest part, but luckily we live in a plentiful linguistic world — so you do that part and come back. Before you get soooooo excited please check that it’s not already registered to a real person or robot by typing it into your browser of choice or use a domain search tool.

2. Buy & Register it: Goooo creepy bueruacracy!
Get yourself* to godaddy.com or dotster.com [two larger domain registrant organizations] and search to see if your domain name was bought in the 2 days since you decided what to use. Go ahead and make an account and buy the name**. When it gets to checkout you can choose crazy hosting packages for your site, which are usually a little OOC and you can always buy them later, and you can also choose whether to pay more to make your registration private. If you don’t use privacy, people who creepily search WhoIs databases can see the last name, city and zip code of who each non-private URL is registered to. Sometimes that won’t bother you and sometimes you are freaked out by that and want to pay for the privacy – your call.

*my recommendation #1 – register it yourself. Don’t get your buddy who is helping you with your site to do it, because if tragedy befalls your buddy or your friendship, well then whoops – you can’t access your internet name when you need to update your site / it expires and a german porn site buys it.

**recommendation #2 – buy your government name, too: the one you pay taxes under, and for god measure the one you f*ck under/travel under. If you have the extra $10 each, do it! Otherwise someone else will.

3. Be like a Domme and Direct It
Since you have control over your Domain name, you can log into the account you bought it under and either:

- Direct the “namservers” of the domain name to point to server space you bought or your friend is giving you [the server space will have this information]
OR
- Direct the domain name to a free or other servive you are using, such as blogger, wordpress, freewebs, etc. You have two options

1. Forwarding – someone types in yourdomain.com and wordpress.yourwordpressname.com comes up in the address bar of the browser
2. Masking – someone types in yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com remains in the address bar. This is good if you have some janky-looking free service name [www.cheapofreebizsite.com/damienluxe] and want to appear more professional than that. Bad because people will not ever be able to get directly to a page on your site because the address bar is masked with just your domain name.

4. Mom…I changed my name/I have six names
That’s ok. The internet will never judge, it’s just a series of 1′s and 0′s electromagnetically linked. Some of us like naming, it’s cool. You just need to go through steps one and two above and then…

a. Move your existing site/blog to your new URL [that's a whole other post].
b. Keep your “old name”/URL site active, but just have one index.html page instead of all your content
c. Automatically redirect visitors from the “old name” site to your “new name site” by placing the following HTML in the index page of your “old” site in between the <head></head> tags of your web pages or blog:

<META
     HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
     CONTENT="1; URL=autoforward_target.html">
So 1 is the amount of wait time before the viewer is forwarded and the ...html is the page the browser takes the viewer to.

• Silas, Heather and Leah are all really talented in different arenas so we make up a really interesting teaching team – covering theatre, writing, video, DIY booking, community healing, web and audio production…
• And because of that, each of us *performs* really differently, too. Silas’ piece on Hollywood, quistory and integrity; Heather’s highly performative work on loss; Leah’s multimedia razor word work…and the Hot Pink Jesus Trash work I’m bringing is some of my best, creating magic out of dirt and shame.

We decided to change the name to How To Build A Fire, because that really reflected what we are accomplishing with this project — by pairing our performances with “how-to” interactive workshops and/or lectures that offer practical, hands-on techniques, our participants are encouraged to deepen their critical anlayses of cultural production, and will walk away with a collection of  techniques, tools and technology necessary to create artistic work and sustainable community projects in their own communities — with the ability to build their own fires!