Date: Fri, Mar 12, 1993  (03:14)
From: Eric S Theise <estheise@WELL.SF.CA.US>
Subject: File 4--Computer Freedom and Privacy III Conf. (Report 4)

I caught the Wednesday afternoon sessions: Censorship and Free
Speech
on the Networks and Portrait of the Artist on the Net.  The
censorship
session was chaired by Barbara Simons (EFF), and featured Mike
Godwin
(EFF), Carl Kadie (Computer and Academic Freedom News), Virginia
Rezmierski (U.  Michigan), and Jack Rickard (Boardwatch).  Most of
the
issues discussed should be familiar to WELLbeings and USENET
readers.
I can't say that I got any deep, new insights, but Godwin and
Rickard
were right on.  Rezmierski's positions seemed too conservative and
indicative of not spending much time on the nets.  Some good
stories
were told, and our own bozofilter was held up as an example of
noise
filtering.

I was a co-organizer of what ended up as the Portrait of the Artist
on
the Net session (with Anna Couey and Mike Godwin).  We tried to
pick a
collection of artists spanning a range of media whose work had all
been influenced by the nets.  Joe Green spoke first.  Green is a
writer who (Mike check me if I'm wrong) steered rec.arts.poetry
away
from being a warm fuzzy place to a no holds barred online poetry
critique and improvement workshop.  His presentation *was* a poem,
an
amazing rant against many things wrong with life and society that
he'd
originally posted nothing else, it showed the power of text in the
hands of a craftsman.  I haven't heard writing that powerful since
my
summers at the Naropa Institute.  It was presentation by example,
though it could also be the biggest case against ever having an
artist
speak at CFP again, too.

Tied in nicely with the censorship session.

Tim Perkis, currently composer in residence at Mills College, spoke
next.  Perkis is inventor of The Hub, a band and a technology that
allows for collaborative performance of computer music.  Perkis
spoke
against the technological materialism of being a computer musician,
of
the line of thinking that can trap a musician into having to own
the
newest and most expensive equipment with the end result that they
have
to use it all for commercial work to pay it off.  Perkis has
constructed a number of relatively low tech computer/synthesizer
instruments that he has focused on learning to play expressively,
forcing himself to stop diddling with the software.  I'm not really
doing justice to his comments here.

Host of the WELL's new arts conference, Judy Malloy, read from a
ream
of taped together index cards.  Some documented online projects
she'd
worked on, others street performance art.  Others were observations
about the nature of her work.  Given her directions with hypertext
and
other narrative data structures, it was quite good.  And
entertaining.

Robert Edgar spoke for a short while about how his aesthetic as an
experimental film maker has come together with video and multimedia
technology.  He showed a short video piece that he'd assembled in
next
to no time in celebration of the panel using his own desktop
multimedia system.

And Randy Ross, of American Indian Telecommunication, spoke about
changing currents in this, the year of indigenous peoples.  He
talked
about the respect for native cultures that appears to be on the
rise,
and about the use of telecommunication technologies to link
together
schools and reservations, and the links between Indian and American
culture that telecom can provide.

There were questions about the distribution of artwork over the
nets
and payment for that work.  Vint Cerf asked about the use of
networks
to create art, meaning specifically the use of networked machines
to
create artwork together; unfortunately, the panelists uniformly
missed
the network aspect of the question and couched their answers in
terms
of working at stand-alone machines.

Still, I couldn't have been happier with the way the arts panel
turned
out, and you should get the audio tape of this one.

The EFF Pioneer awards were fun, especially the bit with Mitch
Kapor
and John Perry Barlow in matching beltway suits.  Glenn didn't
mention
all of the recipients: Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the
ARPANET,
Dave Hughes the cursor cowboy, Ward Christiansen, inventor of the
XMODEM protocol, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, the initial developers
of
the software that led to today's USENET.  And the guy responsible
for
IP (Internet Protocol).  I can't remember his name.  How
embarrassing.
Around this time the flu kicked in hard, and I spent three hours on
a
couch in the hotel lobby.

We had an arts birds of a feather session where all of the artists
demonstrated their work.

Today I spent most of the day in bed with a side trip to the
Exploratorium to return some audio-visual equipment of theirs.  I
caught Rosemary Jay's dinner address about the United Kingdom's
approach to data privacy; quite good.  Also lurked at Robert
Steele's
E3I birds of a feather which was interesting, although it seems
that
we spent a lot of time talking about recompense for work
distributed
digitally.  Very similar to the arts session in that way.  But
<steeler> managed to assemble an interesting crowd of spooks and
geeks, and it'll be interesting to see where he takes this stuff.

Hey, I want to try and make all the sessions tomorrow, so I'm going
to
bed.  After I go post an update on Arts Wire.

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