While I’m building-up my mental engines in Cao Chang Di (Cultural Industries) in Beijing, I received an invitation to speak at Gnome’s first Asia conference, aptly titled, Gnome.Asia in Beijing. I’m going to take a crack and speak about something I haven’t been directly been involved in hacking, promoting or developing, but have been using massively which is what I’m just calling Autonomo.us Open Software Services, particularly micro-blogging on Identi.ca. I want to zoom out a bit from Creative Commons licensing, Open Source hacking and postulate where computing culture is heading, and how FLOSS developers can surge ahead by looking beyond Gnome 3.0, Gnome Online Desktop, etc. The presentation is called “The Autonomo.us Open Software Services Evolution, featuring Identi.ca” and I start the statement with:

Who provides your e-mail service? Where do you post your photos? Do you download music still? When all of our data is spread amongst multiple devices between multiple locations – home, office, and mobile – then it becomes clear why on-line network services rule supreme over managing personal computers in providing synchronized capable services that don’t require us to update software or hack-in fixes. The modern person’s primary concern in using a computer is to get things done and stay connected with others globally in the most effective ways possible.

And continues…

This presentation looks at the landscape of services like Identi.ca which are adapting the Free and Open Source Software approach to on-line network services publicly championed from the Autonomo.us blog. This is timely because the personal computing shift from the desktop to the web is a hot topic with the Gnome Online Desktop and Gnome 3.0 initiatives. However, with long development cycles, arduous community learning curves and reliance upon cranky software languages, the simple accessible nature of web application development is thriving. This presentation instigates increased development on web services that protect user autonomy by commonly using the GNU Affero GPL 3.0 software license, creating free services to replace popular non-free alternatives, and by replacing centralized services with open distributed ones when possible. This presentation emphasizes the role of the Gnome Desktop to be a lean mean on-line desktop machine and what role Chinese businesses can play in accelerating this next dynamic wave of the FLOSS movement.

The complete description and location details are at the Gnome.Asia site. My presentation is at 3 PM next Saturday, October 18 in Beijing. I posted it up on my wiki with some basic research to get the talk together. If there is anything missing, or research I should jump into please do add to it.

Right now there are very few services committed to the Franklin Street Declaration and I want to use some brain power to investigate what services might be easily converted, services that should be created, with rankings for priority and level of difficulty for replacement. Identi.ca is mind blowing example of openness at its best. So, how can I help push this plan forward more?

I’m thinking a lot right now about my moves in both contemporary culture, art and technology. And, I want to most definitely keep pushing on the FLOSS side of things, but keep in mind the larger picture, cultural priorities, as well as personal priorities Yes, we all have those!

Chinese street bomb, originally uploaded by rejon.

Ok, this is a simple burner I saw on the street in Beijing’s Cao Chang Di. It looks explosive, as in explosively cool in an Ikea Houtong type of way.

Extreme coffee, originally uploaded by rejon.

Saw this in Missouri Gas Station, but I just had to remind myself it wasn’t from Guangzhou Airport…hahahaha…many parallels!

One of my favorite “get it done” people, Michelle Thorne from CC, wrote a nice plug for the conference on the CC site:

Free Culture, Free Software, and Free Content will join forces under the banner of “Free Society” at FSCONS on October 24-26 at the IT University of Götheborg, Sweden. The orgnaizing trinity, Creative Commons Sweden, Free Software Foundation Europe, and Wikimedia Sverige, see FSCONS as a chance to reach out with their respective communities and build joint projects with like-minded activists and organizations.

A strong speakers lineup provides the rhetorical food-for-thought in the Free Culture track. Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons) asks, “How far is free culture behind free software?” as he charts key indicators and historical factors in the progress of each. Eva Hemmungs Wirten argues that the digital commons extends back to nineteenth-century London, while Oscar Swartz keynotes the events with the warning that Sweden’s controversial “Lex Orwell” may usher in “The End of Free Communication”.

In chatting with Mirko, he mentioned that they are still seeking travel sponsorships for the conference. In putting together Libre Graphics Meeting over the last three years, it is pretty obvious that the most important thing that a conference like this can do is provide travel sponsorship to the people making free culture happen. It gives the much needed face time that developers don’t get and provides a source of collective memory making to further focus development and personal relationships.

If you can help support the conference corporately or personally, please do contact Mirko and the other organizers to make a nod. Yes, I know this comes at a problematic time with the global economy, but please, contribution brings stability

I’m now in Beijing out at CaoChangDi near 798 (DaShanZi) living it up, coming out of my fake retirement and generally relishing the fact that I’m waking up and doing whatever I want to pretty much each day. Its pretty funny to be out here right now in a studio right next to Matt’s studio in nearly similar circumstance to our old UCSD VAF lifestyle of old.

The primary difference is that we are in Beijing, on the outskirts, next to a village from some other era, and have more resources to realize all those dreams. We had a bbq last night and pulled out one of two speakers custom beijing north sound system speakers and blasted it until midnight with no complaints. Fun!

Many fun projects on the horizon as I’m realizing many great things with space to deal with experiments and creativity once more. Cluster speakers, sustainable open source development, and a possible dubstep event are coming up quick!

I’m still interested in having a high-bling presentation app. I still can’t believe that this doesn’t exist on Linux. If someone else is interested in this, I would consider running funds through my company to build up an open source application to do this possibly based on clutter. Or, better yet, I should try out http://go-oo.org/ which has 3d effects, SVG support, and gstreamer support! Is there a Gentoo overlay for this?

I gave this presentation today at the famed Beijing-based Central Academy of Fine Arts in Deer Fang’s Experimental Video Lab course. It was strangely like a real art school!

A big super thanks to Pat and Gwen for having me speak at the well-respected Electromediascope program. Also, please check out Mark Daggett’s work. He presented the week prior and his presentation sounded much more high-level and put together than my open diatribes. He held me accountable on a few topics I’ve become lazy about differentiating like the diffs between Free Software and Open Source, and Open Content.

Here is the slide show:

While in SF and BoCoMo (Boone County, Columbia, Missouri), I have been mulling many ideas and plans over deeply. After I get back to Guangzhou in time for the Cantocore Export Opening (and then onto Beijing), I am going to be doing some internal code review, drop some files on the floor, and churn out more writing. I’ve been spending massive time in the applied arts, and not so much in more theoretical and pure research. Don’t worry, I’m not going to spin out in “prep” mode or anything. It is just a good time to clean house

Oh, and I forgot to give a summary of my talk last night: I build remix communities which make systems for producing objects. Currently, I’m making cultural remixes.

Her photos also unveiled my installation, Artonomics #11: Special Economic Zone, which uses 24, 7 meter pieces of bamboo, constructed into a tower to hold a 1.6 meter by 1 meter LED sign, as often found in Chinese hospitals and government buildings, which displays common economic data that reigns down upon Chinese (and global) citizens about the direction of the new superpower.

Artonomics #11, Special Economic Zone by Jon Phillips

I’m not sure if the installation I made is more interesting than the process of constructing it, as shown below. This involved finding bamboo, trying to get it far across the massive city of Guangzhou (which this fella did by three-wheeled bicycle), hire carpenters to construct it, re-do it to make it stronger, and then put the big LED sign atop the solid structure. Getting the LED screen happened to be the simplest part.

Misako Inaoka, who had a detailed installation with a zen garden, and her hybrid toy creations from Chinese toys (not the poisonous kind!), has also posted her photos up showing off the space and some great highlights of the installation (I’m waiting on the go ahed to post her photos up after she CC licenses them

Above are a couple of my good friends, Hu Xiangqian and Lu Jun, from Guangzhou who are both Lang Zai (pretty boyyyyz).

I’m still pulling together my thoughts from the show right now. I really needed to do something completely different than my gig at Creative Commons, and spending a good solid month on making this show happen successfully really took tons of energy. All the hard work paid off IMO, and I’m hopeful to get some other reviews of the show here shortly to highlight the work.

UPDATE: I just wrote an post on the cantocore.com website about the Cantocore Export opening and updated text on the website. And, Justin just posted a bunch of his photos as well. Here is a sampling:

I have the honor of being the featured presenter at one of the longest (if not the longest running) curated experimental media events in the world, Electromediascope, put on by my mentor, Patrick Clancy and his wife Gwen Widmer. I studied with Pat as an undergrad newbie at Kansas City Art Institute in his radical Photo/New Media department which allowed me to break out of walls of my previous involvements in commercial media production, and escape the hell of film/video production I had started on at UT-Austin. Well, not that these things are about schools whatsoever, making art at Kansas City Art Institute helped to form my early ideas. Pat is the original person who nudged me towards getting involved in Open Source and I remember the first time we tried to figure out how to install FreeBSD — I spent way too long on trying to get X windows to work!

We worked on so many other things together like the Cybersite new media research project which was to be part of the Wizard of Oz theme park that never took off and then countless other things like Pat’s Writing Machine project. Pat and Gwen continually show me how good friends and artists live. And, Pat, is really great teacher and really cares for his students own paths in life.

Here is a synopsis of what I will be talking about this friday, Sept. 19 at 7 PM at the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City:

September 19: Visiting artist Jon Phillips will analyze the state of remix culture and mashups and questions whether they are sustainable cultural software that has the potential to run continuously and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.

I just found this which is what I originally wrote to explain what I am talking about Friday if it helps make things more vague

“The myth of sole authorship is perpetuated throughout contemporary culture. With the mass popularization of remix culture through You Tube videos, inexpensive media production software, and cheap broadband, anyone can chop audio samples, blend multiple sources of video, globally broadcast mixes, and more easily access and create works collaboratively. But what is so broad about the band, and who or what is in the band? And, if no content in these broad pipes is new, is there some proximity of originality between works to that some may be considered more original than others? How does this play out in the global and art economies? While not rehashing obvious connections to the previous art histories of collage, appropriation and new remix, this program will actively analyze the state of the remix culture and mashups and question whether they are sustainable cultural software that has the potential to run continuously, evolve, and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art. Videos will be shown from the vast Internet archive collection, You Tube, and other sources from around the world. Also, the implications of copyright law and piracy on the state of art as commodity and a critical look at future sustainable models of intellectual property that are being rapidly constructed around content industries will be explored, including my Fabricatorz.com.”

NOTE, it sounds like you must get tickets even though the event is FREE. I bet you can still walk in, but anyway: Reserve your tickets for September 19

Here is another excerpt from another press outlet:

KANSAS CITY.- Electromediascope, the popular experimental film, video and new-media series at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, focuses on the Internet for its fall series Opening Networks. The effects of Internet technologies and usage on artistic expression, art economics and art authorship will be examined. Three programs in September will feature two visiting artists and several film presentations.

Artists Mark Daggett and Jon Phillips will introduce their own work and address other digital media projects. Daggett works with software design and social software. His presentation will show how networks and social software are reshaping attributes of community. Phillips works with the open source code movement and Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization devoted to creating an alternative to existing copyright laws by providing free tools that let authors, scientists, artists and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms of use they want it to carry.

Films and works of art streamed from the Internet will be featured on the final program.

Here is some links posted from Nelson-Atkins press:

• http://www.nelson-atkins.org/calendar/EventDetail.cfm?id=9430
• http://www.nelson-atkins.org/art/Exhibitions.cfm?id=65
• http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/30176/
• https://www.artskc.org/ArtsTakepart/Calendar.asp?IdS=00113F-41958C0&Id=3778
• http://presentmagazine.com/calendar_print.php?calentryid=4357&calid=683
• http://arttattler.com/archiveopeningnetworks.html
• http://identi.ca/notice/490868 (hahaha)
• http://www.kcai.edu/newsevents/artnotes/

And, here is a google search for electromediacope if you are curious about this program.

#!/bin/bash

# monitor_switcher

app=`which xbacklight`
current=`$app -get`
ans=$(zenity --scale --text "Set LCD brightness 0-100" --value "${current%%.*}");
$app -set $ans

Just name this something like monitor_switcher and put into path on your system, then you can use wherever to get a basic slider for setting your brightness. Yes, please make it shorter, prettier or just fix the brightness gnome applet which I’m too lazy to do