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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1302 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed. This post was made on August 30, 2004 and belongs in the art and culture category. The previous post was Gokouun O Inorimasu, Ranald & Meg!, and the next post is Tweaking Safari.

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!

Posted at 1pm on 30/08/04 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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  1. And the beat goes on, da da dum, da dum dada.

    See here:

    http://​rob.​annable.​co.​uk/​f​a​c​2​/​i​n​d​e​x.php

    Hope you approve!

    Posted by Rob Annable at 12am on 31.08.04

  2. 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

  3. Good point, we may have bent the rules a little. She’s off on her own now though…

    http://​www.​kryo​genix.​org/​d​a​y​s​/​2​0​0​4​/​0​8​/​3​1​/​e​ulogy

    Who are we to stop it?

    Posted by Rob Annable at 8pm on 31.08.04

  4. One more thing, he’s tweaked your code too.

    http://​www.​kryo​genix.​org/​r​a​n​d​o​m​/​f​a​c​2​-​r​e​m​i​x​/​s​o​u​r​c​e.txt

    Posted by Rob Annable at 8pm on 31.08.04

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

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