The ethics, aesthetics and practical politics of ownership in co-creative media

What is ‘best practice’ when it comes to managing intellectual property rights in participatory media content? As commercial media and entertainment business models have increasingly come to rely upon the networked productivity of end-users (Banks and Humphreys 2008) this question has been framed as a problem of creative labour made all the more precarious by changing employment patterns and work cultures of knowledge-intensive societies and globalising economies (Banks, Gill and Taylor 2014). This paper considers how the problems of ownership are addressed in non-commercial, community-based arts and media contexts. Problems of labour are also manifest in these contexts (for example, reliance on volunteer labour and uncertain economic reward for creative excellence). Nonetheless, managing intellectual property rights in collaborative creative works that are created in community media and arts contexts is no less challenging or complex than in commercial contexts. This paper takes as its focus a particular participatory media practice known as ‘digital storytelling’. The digital storytelling method, formalised by the Centre for Digital Storytelling (CDS) from the mid-1990s, has been internationally adopted and adapted for use in an open-ended variety of community arts, education, health and allied services settings (Hartley and McWilliam 2009; Lambert 2013; Lundby 2008; Thumin 2012). It provides a useful point of departure for thinking about a range of collaborative media production practices that seek to address participation ‘gaps’ (Jenkins 2006). However the outputs of these activities, including digital stories, cannot be fully understood or accurately described as user-generated content. For this reason, digital storytelling is taken here to belong to a category of participatory media activity that has been described as ‘co-creative’ media (Spurgeon 2013) in order to improve understanding of the conditions of mediated and mediatized participation (Couldry 2008). This paper reports on a survey of the actual copyrighting practices of cultural institutions and community-based media arts practitioners that work with digital storytelling and similar participatory content creation methods. This survey finds that although there is a preference for Creative Commons licensing a great variety of approaches are taken to managing intellectual property rights in co-creative media. These range from the use of Creative Commons licences (for example, Lambert 2013, p.193) to retention of full copyrights by storytellers, to retention of certain rights by facilitating organisations (for example, broadcast rights by community radio stations and public service broadcasters), and a range of other shared rights arrangements between professional creative practitioners, the individual storytellers and communities with which they collaborate, media outlets, exhibitors and funders. This paper also considers how aesthetic and ethical considerations shape responses to questions of intellectual property rights in community media arts contexts. For example, embedded in the CDS digital storytelling method is ‘a critique of power and the numerous ways that rank is unconsciously expressed in engagements between classes, races and gender’ (Lambert 117). The CDS method privileges the interests of the storyteller and, through a transformative workshop process, aims to generate original individual stories that, in turn, reflect self-awareness of ‘how much the way we live is scripted by history, by social and cultural norms, by our own unique journey through a contradictory, and at times hostile, world’ (Lambert 118). Such a critical approach is characteristic of co-creative media practices. It extends to a heightened awareness of the risks of ‘story theft’ and the challenges of ownership and informs ideas of ‘best practice’ amongst creative practitioners, teaching artists and community media producers, along with commitments to achieving equitable solutions for all participants in co-creative media practice (for example, Lyons-Reid and Kuddell nd.). Yet, there is surprisingly little written about the challenges of managing intellectual property produced in co-creative media activities. A dialogic sense of ownership in stories has been identified as an indicator of successful digital storytelling practice (Hayes and Matusov 2005) and is helpful to grounding the more abstract claims of empowerment for social participation that are associated with co-creative methods. Contrary to the ‘change from below’ philosophy that underpins much thinking about co-creative media, however, discussions of intellectual property usually focus on how methods such as digital storytelling contribute to the formation of copyright law-compliant subjects, particularly when used in educational settings (for example, Ohler nd.). This also exposes the reliance of co-creative methods on the creative assets storytellers (rather than on the copyrighted materials of the media cultures of storytellers) as a pragmatic response to the constraints that intellectual property right laws impose on the entire category of participatory media. At the level of practical politics, it also becomes apparent that co-creative media practitioners and storytellers located in copyright jurisdictions governed by ‘fair use’ principles have much greater creative flexibility than those located in jurisdictions governed by ‘fair dealing’ principles.

Aesthetics of urban media façades

This paper sets out to develop and extend current literature on design practices for ambient media façades. It does this by bringing together theories of ambient media, computational aesthetics, and urban aesthetics. This unique theoretical combination has informed the design of several exemplars produced by the author, which are discussed as case studies.

Transmedia as ‘Unmixed Media’ aesthetics

What is ‘transmedia’? This chapter attempts to understand what this phenomenon is from a transhistorical perspective. The transhistorical nature of media combinations is interrogated in light of media specificity and in relation to the key phenomena of Intermedia. Transmedia is argued to be a transhistorical urge towards unifying that which has been artificially estranged.

Atmospheres : Aesthetics of emotional spaces[Review]

More problematic than his avoidance of recent geographic scholarship is his treatment of indigenous, ethnographic and postcolonial perspectives on island life. Not only is much of this scholarship absent, the bits that are there are mostly derided. He slams Kamau Braithwaite and his concept of ‘tidalectics’ as ‘unpackable’ (p. 20) and also claims that Greg Dening’s approach to islands as having ‘permeable cultural boundaries’ has ‘intellectual costs’ (p. 23). In a section of the book on ‘Naming and Sovereignty’, instead of an in-depth examination of the processes of decoding and recoding that goes on in indigenous island landscapes under colonialism (as could be discussed at length if Shell chose to examine Aotearoa, Hawaii, or hundreds of other places) we are instead presented a vignette about his childhood street fights with other kids over the naming of a hometown island in Canada, as well as ruminations about what Herman Melville and Ellen Semple thought of islands in the nineteenth century. In short, if you want to know what dead Caucasians like Shakespeare, Melville, Kant, Mackinder, More, and ancient Athenians thought about islands, then this book is a good resource. If, however, you are looking for information about what islands are like today – and what they mean to the people who live on and interact with them – then you will have to look elsewhere.

Reconsidering Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation : Donald Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism

This study focuses on two philosophical issues related to the interpretation of art. Firstly, it considers the role of authorial intentions in interpretation. Secondly, the study raises the issue of relativism in interpretation through a discussion of the relativistic tendencies apparent in the views of three major figures of contemporary philosophy: Joseph Margolis, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Richard Rorty. The major goal of the thesis is to develop a theory of interpretation supporting the role of authorial intentions in interpretation on the basis of Donald Davidson s late philosophy of language and the holistic account of interpretation that underlies different parts of his philosophy. It is my belief that an intentionalist view of interpretation built on Davidsonian elements manages to form the most convincing defense of that interpretive position against the skepticism present in the views of Margolis, Gadamer, and Rorty. The theoretical issues addressed in the thesis are illuminated by discussions of case-examples, most importantly Richard Wagner s The Valkyrie, Thomas Adés America: A Prophecy, and some symphonies by Dimitri Shostakovich. In chapter one, I present a critical discussion of Margolis robust relativism. While finding Margolis criticism of the self-refutive argument plausible, I, nevertheless, argue that the relativistic logic Margolis offers should not be favored in interpretation. The first parts of chapter two outline Davidsonian intentionalism by presenting a reading of Davidson s later work in philosophy of language and mind, and by indicating its relationship to Davidson s views of literature. Then, I shall compare Davidson s ideas with some recent modest forms of intentionalism found in analytic aesthetics, and argue that Davidsonian intentionalism is in many respects more satisfactory compared to them. Chapter three engages Gadamer s hermeneutics by defending E.D. Hirsch s criticism of Gadamer. Uncovering the shortcomings in the replies of Gadamer s followers to Hirsch s criticism serves as a basis for the defense of intentionalism in interpretation carried out in the chapter. That defense is then extended with a discussion of some recent hermeneutic readings of Davidson s views. Chapter four deals with the standing of intentionalism through Rorty s pragmatist approach to literature. By indicating the position of pragmatist notions of aesthetic experience and imagination in Davidsonian intentionalism, it is shown that an intentionalist approach need not be as impoverished with regard to the value Rorty attributes to literature as he assumes. The concluding chapter outlines some ways in which one can be a pluralist with regard to art and interpretation without falling into relativism.

Fictionalising Trauma : The Aesthetics of Marguerite Duras's India Cycle

Marguerite Duras (1914−1996) was one of the most original French writers and film directors, whose cycles are renowned for a transgeneric repetition variation of human suffering in the modern condition. Her fictionalisation of Asian colonialism, the India Cycle (1964−1976), consists of three novels, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Le Vice-consul (1966) and L'amour (1971), a theatre play, India Song (1973), and three films, La Femme du Gange (1973), India Song (1974) and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desért (1976). Duras’s cultural position as a colon in inter-war ‘Indochina’ was the backdrop for this “théâtre-text-film”, while its creation was provoked by the atrocities of World War II and post-war decolonisation. Fictionalising Trauma analyses the aesthetics of the India Cycle as Duras’s critical working-through of historical trauma. From an emotion-focused cognitive viewpoint, the study sheds light on trauma’s narrativisation using the renewed concept of traumatic memory developed by current social neuroscience. Duras is shown to integrate embodied memory and narrative memory into an emotionally progressing fiction. Thus the rhetoric of the India Cycle epitomises a creative symbolisation of the unsayable, which revises the concept of trauma from a semiotic failure into an imaginative metaphorical process. The India Cycle portrays the stagnated situation of a white society in Europe and British India during the thirties. The narratives of three European protagonists and one fictional Cambodian mendicant are organised as analogues mirroring the effects of rejection and loss on both sides of the colonial system. Using trauma as a conceptual prism, the study rearticulates this composition as three roles: those of witnessing writers, rejected survivors and colonial perpetrators. Three problems are analysed in turn by reading the non-verbal markers of the text: the white man as a witness, the subversive trope of the madwoman and the deadlock of the colonists’ destructive passion. The study reveals emotion and fantasy to be crucial elements in critical trauma fiction. Two devices intertwine throughout the cycle: affective images of trauma expressing the horror of life and death, and self-reflexive metafiction distancing the face-value of the melodramatic stories. This strategy dismantles racist and sexist discourses underpinning European life, thus demanding a renewal of cultural memory by an empathic listening to the ‘other’. And as solipsism and madness lead the lives of the white protagonists to tragic ends, the ‘real’ beggar in Calcutta lives in ecological harmony with Nature. This emphasises the failure of colonialism, as the Durasian phantasm ambiguously strives for a deconstruction of the exotic mythical fiction of French ‘Indochina’.

Audience members (including Max Rieser?); 3rd International Congress of Aesthetics; Venice Portraits Groups

Digital Image

Audience members (including Max Rieser?); 3rd International Congress of Aesthetics; Venice Portraits Groups

Digital Image

Ethics and Aesthetics : Intersections in Iris Murdoch's Philosophy

The study addresses the question concerning the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. The main argument is that Murdoch s philosophy cannot be accurately understood without an understanding of the relationship she sees between the aesthetic experience and morality. Reading Murdoch s philosophy with this relationship in mind shows that it must be considered as a relevant alternative to the main forms of aesthetic-ethical theories. The study consists of seven previously published articles and a summary. It shows that Murdoch belongs to a tradition of philosophers who seek to broaden the scope of ethics by reference to aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. She sees an attitude responsible for aesthetic experiences as relevant for morality. However, she does not collapse morality into aesthetic experience. The two meet on the level of the subject s attitude towards its object, but there is a distinction between the experiences that accompany the attitudes. Aesthetic experiences can function as a clue to morals in that they present in a pleasing manner moral truths which otherwise might be psychologically too difficult to face. Murdoch equates the aesthetic attitude with virtuous love characterized by unselfish attention to its object. The primary object of such love is in Murdoch s account another human individual in her particularity. She compares the recognition of the other person as a particular existence to the experience of the Kantian sublime and offers her own version of the true sublime which is the experience of awe in the face of the infinity of the task of understanding others. One of the most central claims in Murdoch s philosophy is that human consciousness is evaluatively structured. This claim challenges the distinction between facts and values which has had an immense influence on modern moral philosophy. One argument with which Murdoch supports her claim is the nature of great literature. According to her, the standard of greatness in literature is the authors awareness of the independent existence of individuals in the particularity of their evaluative consciousnesses. The analysis of the standard of greatness in literature is also Murdoch s only argument for the claim that the primary object of the loving unselfish attention is the other particular individual. She is convinced that great literature reveals a deep truth about the human condition with its capacity to capture the particular. Abstract philo¬sophical discourse cannot compete with this capacity but it should take truths revealed by literature seriously in its theorising. Recognising this as Murdoch s stand on the question of the relation between philosophy and literature as forms of human discourse settles whether she is part of what has been called philosophy s turn to literature. The answer is yes.

Product aesthetics: representing designer intent and consumer response

This thesis reports on the development of a conceptual framework for product aesthetics. By adopting the theoretical perspective that products are a medium of communication between designers and consumers, the nature of consumer response and designer intent is explored. By integrating a range of disparate literature within a single coherent framework, the varieties of consumer response to product visual form are illustrated. To investigate the ways in which designers intend to evoke these responses, a qualitative research study was undertaken. This primarily involved interviews with industrial designers and consumer investigators. Analysis of these interviews led to the development of a conceptual framework for designer intent which both mirrors, and integrates with, that produced for consumer response. By representing processes beyond design that are influential in determining product form, a broader contextual framework is presented within which product aesthetics is situated. In concluding the thesis, applications for this framework are discussed and future research directions are proposed.

The aesthetics of he eyes and mouth position in a three-point face schema

Oculographical research of people watching a human face indicates than beholder's eyes stop most often and for the longest period of time on the eyes and the mouth of the face looked at and that they move among these three points most frequently. The position of the eyes and mouth in relation to one another can be described with a single number being a measure of an angle with the vertex in the middle of the mouth and with arms crossing the centers of the eye pupils. The angles were measured from photographs of people from all over the world, as well as of residents of Lublin. Subsequently, the subjects from Lublin were asked to make face schemas by positioning the eyes and the mouth in the way they considered most attractive. The eye-mouth-eye angle of these schemas was measured. Additionally, measurements of the same angle were taken from the faces depicted in icons. The schemas of the most attractive - according to the subjects - faces were characterized by angles approximating the mean angle from the photographs, and significantly greater than the mean angle from the icons.