A fresh and brilliant edit/remix of ApocalypseAnimated clips. This is why I love free culture.
Passport by Paul Victor
Category: Free Culture
“Steal” my Gloves!
Copyright zealots insist every good idea will be “stolen” if not “protected”. If only that were true! In case it is, I’m putting this out there: PLEASE “STEAL” MY GLOVE DESIGNS AND MASS PRODUCE THEM MORE CHEAPLY AND EFFICIENTLY THAN I EVER COULD. I put the high-resolution artwork at archive.org. If you want me to modify it, just contact me (but only if you can actually mass produce them, don’t waste my time otherwise). I can make new designs too. Usually “knock-offs” are inferior imitations of the real thing, but I am offering you the real thing! For Free! Because I want the copies to be as good as the original.
Sewing hour after hour at my dining room table is fun and all, especially in this cold weather, but really I’d prefer my gloves to be mass produced. They would be much cheaper and easier to get into and on the hands that need them. I appreciate some people are willing to pay $25 a pair for the ones I sew myself but let’s face it, that’s unsustainable: I can’t keep sewing them for a subsistence income, the price is beyond what most people can afford, the novelty of being a one-woman glove factory is wearing off fast, and the tiny market of friends and followers demanding them will be fully saturated soon.
I could invest in having them produced overseas, but I don’t have $25,000+ lying around. Nor do I want the responsibility of storing and distributing the product. I would much prefer someone already in the business to produce these designs. Admittedly they might require some custom production architecture; most mass-produced gloves don’t conform precisely to a print as these must. I’m sure the technology to sew and cut using automated visual feedback exists, but not in my backyard.
Soul and Intention
People assure me AI art is “soulless,” that unlike human artists AI can’t be “original.” It can only copy. This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of how human artists work: we copy, and there’s no such thing as “original.” I understood this 16 years ago.
We draw from more or less the same pool of culture that AI does, only our pools are necessarily smaller as humans simply don’t have the capacity for exposure to as much stuff. No matter, because all works carry the influences and language — be it verbal, visual, or musical — as the works around them. You don’t need to see every painting to get the styles and grammar of its time and place, just as you don’t need to hear every English speaker alive to learn English. But AI can read, see, and hear vastly more cultural artifacts than any individual artist can, making it capable of a much broader stylistic range.
All creative work is derivative. AI simply derives faster and better than humans.
What about Intention? The intention comes from the human prompter. All that AI art is prompted by someone; that’s its intention. Is that its Soul? No, its soul is the soul of human culture, that vast pool of source material it draws from and imitates. The same one humans draw from and imitate. Humans aren’t individual geniuses, we are imitators. Our “genius” lies in our shared* culture, and our skill in copying.
This is why I don’t hate AI, but marvel as it shakes the ground beneath my feet and blows apart my orientation to culture and my fellow human beings. Those who hate it believe in the myth of originality and think copying is theft. They were delusional 16 years ago when I freed Sita Sings the Blues, and they’re delusional now. Delusionality is part of shared human culture too, and AI will imitate, remix, and regurgitate it just like we do, only much faster and more efficiently.
And, perhaps admirably, without the ego.
*Shared despite countless delusional egos insisting it’s private property. Fools.
PRESS RELEASE: Nina Paley Declines Screening Permission to Vagina Museum
Urbana, March 15 – Nina Paley, a renowned filmmaker known for award-winning films like Sita Sings the Blues and “This Land is Mine” has announced her decision to deny permission to screen her film Seder Masochism to the UK Vagina Museum, an organization which purports to stand for the values of respect, integrity, and inclusiveness, but which has demonstrated a pattern of behavior directly opposite of those aims.
Although Seder Masochism is Free Culture, dedicated to the Public Domain and therefore free to show, edit, reuse, remix, and redistribute by anyone, Vagina Museum Community Cinema Co-Founder Charlie Corubolo (They/Them) wrote in the UKVM’s enquiry, “Even if our understanding is that we can screen the film for free, we would like to ask you for permission to do so and if there is any requirement prior to the screening,” thus granting Paley this opportunity to deny.
As a committed artist who has produced comics, textile arts, films, books, and other works, Paley has historically supported the screening of her work by small organizations, schools, and festivals, believing that culture should be open, free, and inclusive of everyone. Seder Masochism has won awards from the Moscow Jewish Film Festival and Fantaspoa (Brazil), but since its release has been pulled from venues by fearful organizers who surrender to anti-woman activist calls for Paley’s works to be canceled due to her personal gender critical views.
Paley’s decision is extraordinary. This is the first time she has refused permission for a screening of her work, but Paley is standing up for the belief that an organization that purports to realize feminist goals must be consistently inclusive of women. When women objected to the Vagina Museum deploying woman-erasing language, the Vagina Museum reacted with derision and mockery, even referring to objectors by the misogynistic slur TERF. “How can I, as a woman, work with organizations that cancel women? I would be working against myself and my sisters,” Paley added.
Paley hopes this decision will encourage other artists and organizations to reflect on the values they support and promote their work through partnerships with organizations that respect women. “Organizations can support women by acknowledging the definition of women: adult human females. Until they do so, any claims to support women are meaningless,” said Paley.
The Vagina Museum and others like it which wear a feminist cloak and then muddle and confuse the meaning of biological sex, conflate gender identity with sex, and deny the well-established historical oppression of women on the basis of sex, must be held accountable for their detrimental behavior against women.
For further information:
Nina Paley
nina_paley@yahoo.com
https://twitter.com/ninapaley
Nina Paley remains dedicated to free culture and the widespread screening and distribution of her work, which can be used without permission by anyone, even those she disagrees with.
“Free Speech” for Alex
A Hundred Hundred-and-Fifty Dollar Drawing. Hundred Dollar Drawings are now $150 due to inflation, but still a bargain! Available here.
Have At It
HUGE VIDEO FILE AT ARCHIVE.ORG
Compressed hi-res MP4 at Vimeo
After 4 tedious days of rendering hundreds of high-resolution video files, only to discover they seemed to be missing one frame each and so weren’t looping properly, followed by a few days of unhappy procrastinating, followed by 3 additional tedious and crabby days of re-rendering, I finally have all the animation of ApocalypseAnimated.com in Ultra HD (3840 x 2160 pixel) uncompressed Apple ProRes video for your remixing pleasure. Roughly in order, each loop in this gigantic, 20GB file appears exactly once. They can be cut apart and looped again and again in your video editor.
It’s under a Share-Alike license, so you can do whatever you want as long as what you make with it is also Free. I understand some projects want proprietary licenses, and I can negotiate a waiver for those if you email me.
People have used my other Free Cultural works as backdrops for dances and runway shows, illustrations in books, giant puppets, and of course music videos, and I hope all that happens with these too.
In my heart of hearts, some creative sound designer(s) would make fresh audio for these. I made my own short musical video, but it’s barely 3 minutes, and with almost 12 minutes of animation total, most of the work wasn’t included. Plus, I almost always animate to music; what I never do is make animation first and add sound effects later, and these clips provide an opportunity for just that. By looping, the total length of the piece can be extended indefinitely. That means if someone wants to attempt an audio reading of the Book of Revelation, with this animation as the visuals, it can be done.
If you want to try your hand at editing and/or sound design, please have at it. Credit me for the animation and yourself for your work, and anything else you throw in there to whomever else is responsible. Do whatever you want. No permission needed. Have fun and send me a link.