Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a We Belong To You
Yesterday I went to a tea party at The Chateau and picked up a work on paper, FAC 2 by Slateford. It’s an A3 poster with text that reads WE BELONG TO YOU and a notice that the work is licensed under the GPL.
The GPL is more usually applied to free, open source software and is designed to allow anyone to distribute and modify the software code. Applying it to a work of art works the same way, so I thought it might be fun to hack the poster into a web page.
Rather than just refactor the poster for a different medium, I chopped up the original poster image and wrote a very simple script to display five variations of the original text - YOU BELONG TO WE, TO YOU WE BELONG, and so on - on a web page. Interpretation of this small intervention is left up to the viewer. Or whatever.
You can view my version of FAC 2 here. Feel free to distribute and/or modify it in any way you see fit!
And the beat goes on, da da dum, da dum dada.
See here:
http://rob.annable.co.uk/fac2/index.php
Hope you approve!
Posted by Rob Annable at 12am on 31.08.04
Nice one Rob!
I wonder if this will now propagate around the web until someone makes an A3 poster version identical to the original ; )
Also, I hope Slateford approve - there’s no contact info on his/her/their site. (And, despite the GPL, there is a note in the README saying ‘You are free to add to the poster in any way you wish
provided that the original content is not removed or obscured’ and it’s hard to say whether our versionings go against that…)
Posted by Jack Mottram at 1pm on 31.08.04
Good point, we may have bent the rules a little. She’s off on her own now though…
http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2004/08/31/eulogy
Who are we to stop it?
Posted by Rob Annable at 8pm on 31.08.04
One more thing, he’s tweaked your code too.
http://www.kryogenix.org/random/fac2-remix/source.txt
Posted by Rob Annable at 8pm on 31.08.04
I didn’t tweak it much, as far as I can tell. I seem to have set paragraphs to be 500px wide, not 570, for reasons which entirely escape me. The only other change I made, I think, was to add around words, but that’s because my words are made up of individual letter images.
This whole process is intriguing.
I wonder if it’ll take the movie soundtrack route — “songs inspired by the film”…
Posted by sil at 2pm on 01.09.04
This whole process is intriguing.
Certainly is - interesting that the versions so far have concentrated on manipulating the text and maintained, roughly speaking, the look of the poster. I wonder if anyone will, say, download the original and paint over it, or Photoshop it up a bit…
Posted by Jack Mottram at 12am on 02.09.04
My version only manipulated the text because I have the design ability of a rubber hammer. I’ll be interested to see nicer versions, though :)
Posted by sil at 7am on 02.09.04