It was the culmination of their research, illustrated through how known artists create a revenue stream for themselves, such as those in the Recording or Design areas. The audience had artists from the recording, DJing, Vjing and writing areas. I think I was the only one representing New Media or Fine Art(correct me if I am wrong). Reason for the underrepresentation I think is this gritty friction around fine art and money. Professor Feng Li’s(the primary investigator) standard phrase is “Imagine that you could be successful as an artist and incredibly rich”. At previous workshops, some of the participants had a visceral reaction to this, and I can understand it. However, the interviews have brought about some understanding of each side, the suit and the tshirt.

David Parrish was there to explain how they are not so incongruous. You can buy his book Tshirts and Suits, or download for free. One of the main take home points, was that a smart entrepreneur makes a device that makes money even when the inventer is asleep. The problem with the arts, is that it doesn’t make itself, and if something happens to you, the artist, the work stops.

A lot of the ideas explained in the taxonomy made by Danielly Netto could be described as making communitiy, making limited eddtions and merchandising your one offs. Radiohead’s strategies were discussed and the use of creative commons was also brought up (great!). The idea is to control your IP, and give away what you want.

This ties in nicely with something that was sent to me recently, about ideas, and whether they should be pursued. (from http://coudal.com/newsletter/recent.php)

Here are the questions, all equally important:

1. Will we be able to make money? We’re a business. We have mortgages and tuitions to pay. Plus, if we don’t make some cash once in a while, how will we feed our habit of continually screwing around?

2. When we’re done, will we be proud of the work we’ve done? Slaving for months on a project only to not want to show it to anyone when you’re finished just plain sucks. No amount of money can make that feel better.

3. Can we learn a little something new along the way? Executing the project has to make us smarter and help satisfy our curiosity, which we think is our greatest asset.

For an artist, not all of these are as important, we are not used to a work making money so concentrate more on being proud of the work and learning along the way, at least for the time being.

Which probably leads me back to Hans Abbing, and his book on Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam University Press, 2002)….but I will leave it there today.

First up was Bengt Sjolen(Stockholm)(http://www.automata.se/people/bengt/). He talked about a number of his works including one utilizing a servo-controlled citroen rearvision mirrors (Picture house at Belsay Hall, Northumberland) that used reflection to make a pixelated picture.
An elegant piece was the wifi camera – a single pixel camera that builds up images over a 20 min period of the local wifi environment.
The elephant phone connecting two distant elephant house, allowing the elephants to talk to each other.
One of the take home messages was that time is not money, money is time. So the few months he is working on other people projects buys him the time to make his own(http://www.automata.se/).
He placed an emphasis on peer production networks, in that the network became the artist. This network is sited at Teenageengineering(http://www.teenageengineering.com/), where Bengt and a number of others run their commercial operations(eg http://www.elektron.se).

This is full of useful tech like cnc machine and laser cutters etc. Not coming from a design or manufacturing background I found his brief description of small scale fabrication of circuitboards interesting eg the cnc machine can be used to cut circuit boards, place solder paste and pick and place components, then into the oven.

One of the questions that was directed at Bengt was why if there was software that was off the shelf that could drive his cnc machine, why he chose to code in python.
This gets to the heart of being a tooluser vs a tool maker.
A generic software needs to be generalised, and is often not open to modification. A bespoke software can be built to do what its maker wants.
Bengt mentioned that the process of making the tool slowed him down and thus errors werent made later in the process but as part of the development of the tool. This slight slowdown was preferable to an error at the production level.

This also brings into the debate, should new media artists know how to code? Are the simplified tools that are being provided to us (ie Arduino, Processing) a help or hindrance?
Are we asking for it to be too easy, and losing some of the nuances? This issue came up at the SketchingInteractions and SpacePlacePace events at Culturelab in the previous week.
My take is that the opensource tools arduino and processing allow a gentler introduction to the complexities of microcontrollers and programming than a full blown avr programming suite. At this stage I am not likely to do a 4 year engineering course.