Cory Doctorow wrote an article for The Guardian describing an experience he had at an exhibition of pop art at London’s National Portrait Gallery. They are displaying art made from using other peoples copyright and yet prevent anyone coming to view the gallery from taking photographs because it infringes on the artworks… copyright…
It’s a fascinating read and a compelling argument on how we really can’t turn back from this hole we’ve dug.
Warhol is turning in his grave
An exhibition of pop art at London’s National Portrait Gallery unwittingly celebrates a golden age before copyright was king
The excellent programme for Pop Art Portraits, the current exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, has a lot to say about the pictures hanging on the walls and the diverse source material the artists used to produce their provocative works.
Apparently they cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time magazine, made ironic use of a cartoon Charles Atlas, painted over iconic photos of James Dean and Elvis Presley – and that’s just in the first of seven rooms.
The programme describes the aesthetic experience conjured up by these transmogrified icons of high and low culture. Celebrated pop artists including Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol created these images by nicking the work of others, without permission, and transforming it to make statements and evoke emotions never countenanced by the original creators.
Despite this, the programme does not say a word about copyright. Can you blame the authors? A treatise on the way that copyright and trademarks were – had to be – trammelled to make these works could fill volumes.
AnimeNewsNetwork is reporting about the coming Hollywood adaptation of Dragonball:
Twentieth Century Fox has officially announced that it signed director James Wong (Final Destination, X-Files television series, The One) and casted twenty-five-year-old Justin Chatwin (War of the Worlds, The Invisible, Lost television series) in the lead role of Goku for the movie adaptation of Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball action manga. According to the Variety newspaper, filming is set to begin this month, and the film is slated to open worldwide on August 15, 2008. James Marsters (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Spike, Smallville’s Brainiac) will play the antagonist Piccolo, and Stephen Chow, of Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer fame, is producing the project.
Wong will not only direct the film, but he also rewrote an earlier script that was submitted by Ben Ramsey (The Big Hit). According to The Hollywood Reporter newspaper, the story centers around the alien Goku as an adult as he protects Earth — the very planet he was sent to destroy. Chatwin is training under the stunt firm 87Eleven (The Matrix, The Bourne Supremacy, 300). Other roles are still being casted. Previous reports have indicated that shooting will take place near Montreal, Canada and in Mexico, and that Heroes actor James Kyson Lee is auditioning for the role of Yamcha.
Between 1984 and 1995, Toriyama created 519 installments of the original manga for the publisher Shueisha and its Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. The manga’s 42 compiled volumes have sold over 150 million copies in Japan and over 300 million copies worldwide. Both the manga and its anime adaptations (Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z) have enjoyed success in countries in Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. The 17 animated movies in the franchise have been seen a record 49 million times in Japanese theaters. Fox first acquired the live-action film rights to Dragon Ball in 2002.
I’m not sure what to think. The inclusion of Stephen Chow, who is famous for doing comedies, has me a bit worried. I would hope they do a fairly good adaption to the long running series. Unfortunately I will be very shocked if it turns out to be anything but terrible.
The Android development team as released a demo video of the new Mobile Operating System:
The phone looks like it has a lot of features that the iPhone does, with some obvious improvements. The fact that the platform is open source makes the platform far more powerful than the iPhone. But, what will work better for a powerful phone. The Mac model of a closed platform or the open source model google is developing. Only time will tell, right now we see a brief look at some functionality that is better than the iPhone, but looking at this small demo it isn’t at the level of the iPhone yet. When developers start to get at it, we’ll see which direction this new platform is taken.
November 3, 2007, a man by the gamertag of Moviesign proposed to his girlfriend, furtive penguin… through Halo 3. At least it wasn’t a virtual wedding, right guys?Moviesign did it through a saved Forge map, in which he tricked furtive penguin into thinking they were playing a two-on-two match.
He led her to an area where there was an “energy sword”, but instead she was surprised with his proposal spelled out in weapons, and he asked her to be “his teammate for life.”
Am I the only one who would have sniped them in the middle of this? Or shot a Spartan Laser down on them? Anyone?
They haven’t set a wedding date yet because they claim to be “waiting to see what the release date is for the next Halo game. We don’t want any conflicts.” I’m sure their kids will be perfectly normal.
Sorry guys, you can’t do THAT through Halo 3–you’re gonna have to do it like normal people do.
Anyone feel really sad for this poor girl? She agreed to marry a man who can’t tell the difference between reality and a Video Games, a really bad video games to boot. He could of at least purposed in Team Fortress or Portal, then she would have known he has some brains to work with.
Crave revives a long-running rumor that Apple may be working on a Tablet Mac.
The latest claim comes from “friends at Asus” who told Crave that “Asus is helping Apple build a Tablet PC.” Further information from their source indicated that it will not be based on existing Asus designs and will come from a completely new blueprint.
While Apple Tablet rumors have been running for years, the possibility of it seems more likely now than ever with all of Apple’s research into touch-based interfaces. The last rumor of an actual “Tablet Mac” came from Smarthouse.com.au in late 2006 in which Apple was said to be working on an Intel-based Tablet Mac with docking station and HDMI output. More recently, however, Appleinsider described a project inside Apple that was described as a PDA but would carry a form factor about “1.5 times the size of the current iPhone” which we could see as early as January at Macworld San Francisco 2008.
Rumors of a Tablet Mac hit an all time high in 2003 when multiple sources pointed to the existence of a Tablet device from Apple, but for whatever reason was never released.
Just from the pictures I have to say, “Me want very much!” and I hope that this rumor turns out to be true. Apple leads the mobile computer market with the Macbook and the iPhone, this tablet might not only make sure that apple continues that dominance, but create a whole new area of the industry that apple can dominate.
Urban Retro Lifestyle posted a picture from the new Computer Game Museum in Berlin, a great tribute to the classic Donkey Kong. It seem they take their video games very seriously in Germany.
What a great idea to promote the Computer Game Museum in Berlin.. use scaffolding to great a larger than life level of a game that a major part of video game history, Donkey Kong. Now if only this was a giant playable level we would really be in classic gaming heaven. [via Aeropause]
Tablet Mac.
