Photography Crime

I can imagine a pastiche of the 1971 film, Dirty Harry, where the alleged lucky feeling punk, who makes Detective Harry Callahan's day reaches for a digital camera instead of a gun. Milo sent me this link that once again poses the conflict between National Security and the essential rights of every American to Express Free Speech and Bear Cameras.

Is Photography Becoming Illegal?

Even though there's no law against it, you may be interrogated the next
time you snap a picture of the Empire State Building.

How Journalists and PR Professionals Use Blogs

A Forum sponsored by PR Newswire in the San Francisco Bay Area highlights how blogs are becoming more influential on mainstream media outlets. One major advantage sited in this forum of blogs over traditional print and broadcast media is the speed and ease of bloggers to correct mistakes online.
Panelist David Whelan, staff writer for Forbes, countered that mainstream media has one big advantage over blogs: "Most blogs are derivative; very few bloggers pick up the phone or look through documents. They do a lot of important analysis and commentary, but mainstream media will do more reporting."

Thanks to Steve Rubel for deriving this before me.

Call for Submissions: Enso and Lorg

From Andrea Fitzpatrick at the National University of Ireland (NUI) in Galway, Ireland.

Enso and Lorg call for work by performance, video & sound artists, dancers, musicians for collaboration at various venues around Galway during the Galway Arts Festival 2005.

Please send samples of work to ensoart[at]yahoo.ie or to
Enso, c/o Artspace,
7-8 Addley Park,
Liosban Industrial Estate,
Galway, Ireland
www.ensoart.com
Closing date: 13th of June 2005

Once Hactivist Hero Now Called Fraud

Spanish University Lecturer Forced to Resign Over P2P -- Now discredited by the Spanish Blogoshpere that gave him his rise, Jose Cortell has come under attack for his crudentials.

Cortell had been teaching about "Intellectual Property" among other subjects in the Polytechnic University of Valencia UPV (Spain) for more than 5 years, when he tried to organize a Conference to defend the legal use of Peer to Peer Networks in Spain. What followed were claims that pressure was applied by the Spanish Recording Industry Association, and even the Motion Picture Association of America to the Deans and Directors at the University for Cortell's resignation. Then the stories of a fake C.V. emerged. See Comments.

Bill Moyers on Media Reform

The National Conference for Media Reform, organized by Free Press convened last week in St. Louis. I picked this up from Grace Hanson, writer for the Utne Reader Online. Be The Media, blogging from the audience, hallways and streets of the conference collected and commented on some pretty substantial content, even some audio files of speeches, including Bill Moyers rousing speech, his first public appearance since leaving PBS six months ago (transcript here). He quotes Jason Miller on corporate corruption of mainstream media "...the real hope [for Journalism] lies within the Internet..."

Tess Gallun's Women Combat Photographers

Documentary filmmaker Tess Gallun, while pursuing her MA in The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at UWM, is doing some amazing work that draws on her own experiences, as well as the timely subject of Representation of War.

What I like about Tess' work is that it is very active, having an activist quality to it, but the call to action does not seem partisan. This call is to examine closely the experiences, feelings and actions of female photographers shooting (their cameras) in the midst of killing. How do these photojournalists justify their subject/object relationships in very raw situations where death, brutality, compassion, and ambition spill out and pool together in dramatic scenes?

Tune in to find out, Gallun is presenting a paper called Death's Conflicted Responsibility: Female Photojournalists and Front-line Ethics, to the International Communication Association Conference in New York, at the end of the month.

Visual Culture in Music Culture

Louisville based Peter Berkowitz writes music critcism and interviews artists.
He just showed me his blog where his two most recent reviews are of Louisville bands and musical combos named the Photographic, Instant Camera, and VHS or Beta (groovy website).
Berkowitz on Instant Camera:
What gives Instant Camera an edge on similar groups is its ability to draw inspiration from yet another source: hints of the theatrical German cabaret style emerge in the last songs, "Terrorvision" and "Hearing Is Disbelieving."

What I find amazing are these Louisville bands' referncences to Visual Culture and Photography. Louisville is where I came from, and before me, Muhammed Ali, Hunter S. Thompson, and Louis Brandeis. But what is going on down there, now?

Jon Stewart Burns Corporate TV on Blogs

Jon Stewart did a nice bit of scathing news on the news on the news. It's getting hard to see the parody through the truth anymore. In any case, here is the link to the clip describing the lackluster job that mainstream Television News does in reporting from the Blogosphere (from the May 9, 2005 Daily Show).
Thank you Lisa Rein.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: "Open City" Video Pool (Winnipeg)

Paul Couillard maintains this FADO elist with lot of amazing intermedia performance calls:

Artists are invited to submit works for an art exhibition during the 2nd annual Open Source Cultural Exchange called OpenCity, taking place August 17 - 20, 2005 in Winnipeg's Exchange District. We are looking for art in any media which responds to the idea of a Cultural (and Technological) Commons, Free Software, Open Source and the creation of shared-culture alternatives to corporate-controlled culture.

OpenCity believes that creativity always builds on the past, and that unrestricted, unbalanced copyright law wielded by powerful media conglomerates can stifle an artist's transformative re-use of material. If you are making artwork which explores these ideas, submit 10-20 slides, a CD or DVD, video, audiotape or URL, plus a curriculum vitae and a brief artist's statement. OpenCity invites submissions of: New
Media, Experimental Electronics, Video, Performance, Installation, Audio Art, Painting, Sculpture, Digital Art etc. The jury will consist of professional artists and OpenCity programmers.

Artist fees will be paid. Deadline for submissions: June 10, 2005

Send submissions to:
OpenCity Exhibition
c/o Video Pool Inc.
300-100 Arthur Street
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3B 1H3

Please enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope if you would like your material returned. Only artists selected for the OpenCity Exhibition will be notified. For more information on OpenCity please see http://www.freeculture.ca

Morgan Freeman Wins Control of morganfreeman.com

From Yahoo!News AP:
Arbitrators for the World Intellectual Property Organization ordered the transfer of the domain name to the American actor, who had complained that it was being used in bad faith to divert Internet traffic to a commercial search engine.