Great to hear from Eva Weinmayr and Femke Snelting that the Collective Commitment to Reuse (cc2r) now has its own dedicated site, thoughtfully designed and developed by Sarah Magnan and Ludi Loiseau.
Take a look: https://cc2r.net/
There’s also a downloadable PDF you can print as a 12-page booklet.
#copyright #IP #culture #FreeSoftware #SettlerViolence #feminism #decolonisation
#DefundCulture
That was fast. My discussion on Monday about #DefundCulture with Seth Wheeler for the Minor Compositions #podcast, hosted by Stevphen Shukaitis, is already online.
Minor Compositions Podcast - Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary'
https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1885
YouTube: https://youtu.be/mk-j2uh9cdk
'In this episode we are joined by Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler for a conversation on cultural #funding, radical #publishing, and the changing conditions of collective #knowledge production.The discussion begins with Hall’s recent book Defund Culture, which challenges conventional calls to increase #arts funding by asking a more fundamental question: what – and who – is cultural funding actually for? Hall proposes the current #crisis in arts funding might be an opportunity to rethink the entire landscape, redistributing resources away from entrenched, upper-middle-class infrastructures toward more collective, plural and relational forms of cultural production....'
Great conversation last night about Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal with the independent #artist and researcher Seth Wheeler for the Minor Compositions #podcast, hosted by Stevphen Shukaitis.
At a time of #political upheaval, institutional #crisis and growing disillusionment with #liberal #democracy, Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal argues that the problem is not simply that #culture is underfunded - but that it is funded in the wrong way, by the wrong structures, for the wrong ends.
So we explored the #politics of cultural funding and what a more radical (less white, male and #middle-class) approach to creating culture might look like.
Should go live soon. In the meantime, the book is here:
Defund Culture: A Radical Proposal: https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal
And you can listen to the Minor Compositions podcast series here: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?page_id=1102
'Being a #celebrity, it can be easy to forget that the constant interviews and accolades are not an indication that you are genuinely important or even worth listening to; more that the industry platforming you is benefiting in some way from your public presence.' - George The Poet
Looking forward to launching a more politically and environmentally responsible set of badges.
They’re designed as a creative and critical response to the extractive, exploitative and dehumanizing logics that lie behind the idea of putting a logo on #books to certify they were written by #humans - such as the new scheme launched by the UK’s Society of Authors.
Rather than reinforcing a simplistic human vs nonhuman divide, the project asks what kinds of #labour, resources and #infrastructure are being obscured by these kinds of labels.
#DefundCulture #SettlerViolence #environment #ai #societyofauthors
‘Thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman have published an “empty” #book to protest against #AI firms using their work without permission.’
Yet #copyright itself has long been criticised as part of broader systems of enclosure and #SettlerViolence. So the assertion of copyright is not a victimless crime, any more than is the training of AI #chatbots and image generators on vast #datasets (often scraped without permission from the open web, digital repositories and shadow or #pirate libraries containing copyrighted books).
So what exactly is being defended here? Do the authors protesting against the training of AI really not know the long history of critique of copyright? Or do they know perfectly and are just too selfish and are profiting too much from it themselves to want to challenge it or think of something different?
'#Labour is spooked… somewhere in its collective soul it knows we have reached the belated end of the political 20th century… “Politics needs to change in some huge way, doesn’t it?’ I.”' — via The Guardian
This is why I argue we need to make the case for defunding now - because the ‘undermining of certain #liberal institutions (rather than the familiar left-liberal move of protecting or gently reforming them)’ may be what’s needed if we’re serious about reconstructing a better world after #brexit, #COVID19, the second coming of Donald #trump, and the wars in #ukraine, #Gaza #israel and #Iran.'
More here: https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal
‘The real takeaway from this #film for me, is about who gets to make art, whose voice matters, and what they choose to disregard, in this #creative climate. For all its attempts to be shocking, Fennell’s film has stripped away all that is #radical about #WutheringHeights, and even aesthetically her attempt to out-weird a #Bronte falls flat, feeling to me like a two-hour-16-minute-long perfume advertisement for watered-down eau de Tim Burton.’
This review of the new ‘Wuthering Heights’ film really captures why we need to #defundculture - not to destroy it, but to radically redistribute resources and opportunities. It’s not just about what gets made, but about who gets to make it, and how cultural power quietly filters out anyone or anything genuinely different and disruptive.
Defunding #culture in this sense, isn’t only about budgets; it’s about how institutions systematically defund risk, anger and unruly voices.
Voted ‘Britain's ugliest building’ when it opened in 1967, the #brutalist Southbank Centre has finally been granted listed status:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8d5je92j2ro
It would be good to think a certain book cover — which proudly features said slab of uncompromising #modernism — may have played a small role in its #architectural rehabilitation.
https://www.mediastudies.press/defund-culture-a-radical-proposal
You’re welcome, Southbank.
#BrutalistArchitecture #SouthbankCentre
#london #DefundCulture #culture
If you’d like to sign the petition calling on the UK government to amend the Equality Act 2010 to make social class a protected characteristic, you can do so here:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/752554
#class #SocialClass #EqualityAct #ClassMatters #UKPolitics #classwar #ClassCeiling #DefundCulture #WorkingClass
Gary Hall
