In 2016, Marshall University professor Jason Morrissette was playing Batman: Arkham Knight. While sneaking around the shadows, Morrissette stumbled upon a soda machine. Like many games, Akrham Knight doesn’t feature any real-life soda products; that’d cost money.

New Media Artist and Educator Nick Briz has a perspective on copying, stealing and sharing on the web that all artists and creatives need to hear.

I wrote an essay for the publication accompanying Alma Alloro‘s solo exhibition, Apophenia, held at Transfer Gallery, New York – January 4th through 25th, 2014. Excerpt from my essay : Alma Alloro’s machines reel and spin in homage to the kinds of correspondences and affects images can make. In the tradition of Oskar Fischinger’s An Optical Poem (1938), or Hans Richter’s Rhythmus series (1920s) Apophenia is ‘about’ the preponderance of images: about what takes place when images move, but also about the very substance of the static image — a thing we had no need to conceive of until motion had been thrust upon it. Her works are concerned with performing a net aesthetic apart from the rigidity of digital codes and databases, linking her machines through animated GIFs back to… the principal technologies of animation… The machines, devices and contrivances of Apophenia celebrate similar instances when the coming into being of an image traces a noticeable and long-lasting mark in physical space. To be truly confronted with an image is to become aware of one’s own construction as a thing — ‘Here where the world touches’ — something that high-bandwidth, high-resolution and optical speeds tends to camouflage in the clarity of simulation. Download as PDF More info : almaalloro.com and TransferGallery.com

So when I say the internet is a gift economy, I don’t just mean that many of us read and watch and write and post for free. I mean that the way content changes hands on the internet works more like a potlatch than the stock market.

I started thinking of the internet in this way after reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a modern classic that describes the artistic process using the anthropological literature on gift exchange. Gift exchanges, says Hyde, paraphrasing Marcel Mauss, create “the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.” The gift must always be kept in motion. If you’re a one of the Uduk people in northeast Africa, for example, and someone gives you a goat, you can kill the goat and throw a big party, or you can give the goat’s milk to your neighbors, but you can’t use the goat to start an artisanal cheese business. “One man’s gift … must not be another man’s capital.”

Another example Hyde offers is the Kula gift exchange practiced by the Massim people in the South Pacific. Two items circulate in constant, ceremonial exchange: red shell necklaces move clockwise and armshells move counter-clockwise. You are obligated to give an armshell and receive a necklace in return, then pass the necklace on in the other direction. If one person refuses to give, the circle, and the community it creates, breaks.

With an eight-track tape recorder and 100,000 times less memory than an iPod, Voyager 1 is celebrating its 35th birthday at the edge of the solar system. Traipsing through a giant, turbulent, plasma bubble near the fringes, the longest-running, most-distant spacecraft in NASA's history celebrates a l

This month, Art Forum published a very timely, and beautifully written essay by Claire Bishop entitled, Digital Divide: on contemporary Art and New Media“. In it, Bishop analyses the contemporary art-world’s reluctance to conceptually engage with the changes which have been wrought by the proliferati

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number of audio clips, including (amongst others) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night. Projected onto a double-sided, cinema-sized screen, these images – but not the audio clips – are the basis of Steve McQueen’s solo show ‘Once Upon a Time’. The images range from photographs of children being born to family portraits, the monumental (Jupiter) to the miniature (a leaf), and the poetic (a sunset with birds) to the mechanical (a calibration circle). There are ordnance photographs of the Sinai Peninsula and an intimate portrait of a nursing mother. Ethnographic portraits, perhaps inevitably, feature too and, despite the generally auspicious and upbeat tone of the Golden Record, there are also premonitions of more immediate concerns: