December’s ccSalon SF will be a celebration of CC’s 7 years and the wrap-up of our 2009 annual fundraising campaign, so if you’re located in the SF Bay Area, we hope to see you there!

On the evening’s agenda:

• We’ll hear from Twitter‘s General Counsel, Alex Macgillivray. Alex was previously Deputy General Counsel at Google and has been a supporter of Creative Commons from our very beginning.
• A unique installation and presentation of the dublab/Creative Commons art and music collaboration, Into Infinity, an online project built on audio loops and circular canvases paired together in infinite combination. Salon-goers will have the chance to draw on some of these 12-inch canvases as well as participate in a live recording of an 8-second audio loop – so get creative and bring a noisemaker of some kind (kazoo, bell, travel guitar, etc.) to help us make some sweet sounds! We’ll submit the best one to Into Infinity.
• CC’s Vice President, Mike Linksvayer, will highlight some of CC’s major accomplishments from 2009 and talk about what’s in store for CC in 2010.

This salon will be a great chance to meet and talk to members of the CC staff, connect with other free culture enthusiasts from the Bay Area, or just learn more about Creative Commons.

When: Thursday, December 17, 7-9pm
Where: PariSoMa, 1436 Howard St. (map and directions). Plenty of street parking available. (Please note, the space is located up two steep flights of stairs, and unfortunately does not currently have elevator access.)

Light refreshments will be provided, and since we rely on the generosity of our community to keep us afloat, we’ll be accepting donations for the annual campaign at the door.

Check out the event posting and let us know you’re coming on Facebook or Upcoming. We hope to see you there!

Can’t be at the San Francisco Salon? You can still help us celebrate CC’s 7 years! CC friends, fans, and supporters across the globe are invited to find creative ways of celebrating the past seven years of CC successes and growth. We want to celebrate Creative Commons using the same ideals of openness, innovation, collaboration, and freedom that are central to CC, so the possibilities are limitless: create a remix or video, bake “CC” cupcakes, host a screening of a CC-licensed film, organize an informal salon or meet-up, plan an event around Public Domain Day on January 1, the list goes on. What CC has accomplished in just seven years is phenomenal and worth celebrating in any form!

Let’s mark the week of December 14th (and beyond!) as a celebration of free culture, creativity, and knowledge! Use the tag CC@7 and add any and all photos/videos/blogs/etc. to the 7th Birthday Wiki Page so we can highlight how people are celebrating CC that week. Questions? Contact development[at]creativecommons.org.

As if launching a dedicated iPhone application wasn’t celebration enough, dublab and Creative Commons Japan are teaming up on a series of amazing events across Japan in the coming two weeks to commemorate the launch of the Into Infinity project in Japan. The tour will be making stops in Tokyo, Sapporo, and Kobe and feature (depending on date and location) live Into Infinity performances, music from Daedelus and The Long Lost, DJ sets from dublab DJ Frosty, and much more.

You can see photos as they come in at dublab’s flickr page and see the full calendar of events at their website. For those in Tokyo be sure to check out Daedalus, The Long Lost, a live Into Infinity performance and sounds from dublab DJ Frosty at the Super Deluxe this Friday, December 4th.

UPDATE: iPhone/iPod Touch owners, if you haven’t had a chance yet be sure to check out the free Into Infinity app mentioned above (iTunes link).

When opened, the application connects to a server where the project’s resources are stored, automatically downloading sound loops (“EAR”) that are paired with visual circles (“EYE”). An Into Infinity logo serves as an anchor point to trigger sounds – users can drag and move circles with their finger and when brought into the logo’s orbit the sounds start mixing, creating new derivative works on the fly. Users can then share these mixes instantly by posting to Twitter or sharing via e-mail from within the application.

All mixes generated by the application’s users are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, keeping in line with the project as a whole. The release also coincides with the addition of 50 “ear” sound loops and 50 “eye” visual circles from Japanese sound and visual artists. If you have an iPhone, download it today!

Also, we just came across two videos by musician Keenan Gaynor that show him using Into Infinity’s Audio Mega-Mixer (see previous post) to mix the project’s sound loops and create new music on the fly. We’ll be adding more features to the mixer soon that will allow you to do things like record your jam sessions.

Thanks to Braydon Fuller, the powerhouse programmer behind all of Into Infinity’s online tools.

A reminder that TONIGHT CC Salon LA returns with a fantastic combination of presenters – joining us will be web radio collective Dublab and Lucas Gonze, net-label theorist and XSPF developer.

Both presentations will discuss how CC, and ‘openness’ in general, is affecting web radio and net labels, both from an economic and artistic vantage, with a Q&A to follow each. Additionally, Dublab will ask salon attendees to create noise – both as a group and as individuals – which will be recorded and turned into audio loops that will be used for the Into Infinity project, a new art exhibition produced in collaboration with Creative Commons.

The Salon will be taking place at the always wonderful FOUND Gallery (Google map) between 7:30PM – 9:30PM. Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, and make sure to come down and hear from two exemplary members of the CC community on their experiences with open licensing. As always, there will be free (as in beer) drinks for the entire night.

Can you give our readers a bit of background on yourselves? How did you get involved with music and art? What is Lucky Dragon’s background as an artistic outfit?

Fischbeck: lucky dragons started as a “band” in the loosest form possible around eight years ago, as a way to structure our activities as a group in an easily understandable and distributable way, making recordings or books or videos or performances and putting them out into the world. for the most part, we have definitely used the existing structure of independently produced music to do this, but as this structure has been changing so much in our lifetime, we have been keen to look for new and positive paths and models, trying to contribute to a new definition of “band” that includes contexts such as public art, the gallery system, museum programming, blogs, and small-press publishing.

Rara: My entry into making music was initially through making videos and composing sound to go with a moving image until I became more and more engrossed in the production of sounds and the potential of music to bring people together in a very concrete way, forming transient communities and generating equal power-sharing situations. It’s interesting now to alternate between music and art contexts, to slip in and out of each world and to borrow from each various modes and identities. I enjoy slipping into a “band” identity that confuses authorship and opens up the project to various collaborators, even going so far as to dissolve the separation between myself and the audience during the performance. I’ve always thought of the role of the artist as more diffused and inclusive, it can include sitting on a stage and playing a modified kalimba for half an hour or it can include an everyday situation like having a conversation with a stranger. But somehow the means of distributing art in the world are not as inclusive and wide-ranging as music distribution. Music has a tradition of self-publishing and cheap distribution that I find very inspiring; it’s easy to produce something that is accessible to everyone and easily shared when operating within the form of a musical group.

On a basic level, Lucky Dragons is a musical group that records/releases material and tours. With that said, your works explore much more than just music and you are self-described “artists who use music” – can you expand upon this?

Fischbeck: i’ve been thinking about the shift in how music is made, distributed, and appreciated as analogous to the evolution of photography as an artform, for example–as a technology, as a fine art, and as a popular and easily accessible medium for communication. we’d like to contribute to the idea that music exists as all of these things at once, to celebrate the idea that music can serve not only as an end in itself, but also as a means towards greater social connection, and something that is immediately open to everyone. mostly it has been a matter of identifying which barriers (in terms of ownership, context, genre, or even terms like “expert” or “professional”) are artificial and unnecessary, and ignoring them! art can sometimes provide the viewpoint that removes these barriers.

How are you using CC licenses within your works? Which license(s) are you using and why? What are the benefits and obstacles you have encountered by using CC licenses?

Fischbeck: everything we produce uses a creative commons attribution-non-commercial-share alike license. the simple benefit to this is that it allows other artists to use anything we make in a collaborative way. so much of what we do starts off as a collaboration, and a creative commons license allows us to embed this original spirit in the work itself in a practical way, over the course of its life as something separate from us.

Rara: our performances often involve improvisation and audience interaction, so it’s important to us that the recordings we release not be static, that they be used as a material for other music and maybe become something altogether different than what we started with.

You participated in the Dublab/Creative Commons art instillation project, Into Infinity. How was that experience?

Fischbeck: the “into infinity” project is a perfect working example of the kind of unpredictable and infinitely changeable collaborations that can occur when something is put out with a CC license. one of the main reasons we make music is how mutable it can be: a song goes into the world and gets adopted and recontextualized and comes back to you with all of the new associations others have added to it. to see that happening on a microscopic level, as in the random pairing of images and sounds on the “into infinity” website, suggests the grander possibility of creating something modular and open–a process that is inherent in music making on familiar levels, but stripped away by existing commercial models. as for the experience, the dublab folks’ positive enthusiasm is boundless, an attitude that in itself is a model for what should come next!

Talk a bit about your affiliated projects, Sumi Ink Club and Glaciers of Nice. What are they? Do you use CC-licenses in either project?

Fischbeck: sumi ink club is a collaborative drawing activity we started as a way to get friends and strangers and accomplished artists and people-who-don’t-think-they-know-how-to-draw to all meet together in an open way and make a work of art together. half of it is the drawing itself–topsy-turvy page-fillers where all styles connect and overrun–and half of it is the actual experience of hanging out and talking and working together. the drawings themselves are given CC licenses and treated as raw material for zines, prints, clothing, animations, etc; while the visual record of our meetings are posted on the sumi ink club blog. the “rules” that make sumi ink club what it is (everyone draws on the same sheet of paper, it’s ok to add to what someone else has drawn, if you get stuck get up and switch seats with someone) are so simple that it’s been very easy to “franchise” the project and hold meetings anywhere in the world completely independent from us as mediators. glaciers of nice is our publishing effort, a way of tying together the different projects and packaging them and distributing them a little as hard copies–extending the CC license to physical objects that can be duplicated and re-distributed at will!

What is up next for Lucky Dragons?

Fischbeck: we will keep trying to have everything we do make sense… there is the impulse to do many different, unrelated things and then sort out how they are connected later…! we have plans to open a very abstract “museum” in the park near our house in los angeles called the elysian park museum of art, and we will be doing a number of gallery-type art shows that will hopefully provide more of that oscillation between tidy and coherent on the one hand, and completely ambitious and nonsense activity on the other! also we have just started a record label that will have no money involved called new other thing with our friend brendan fowler… there are some video projects we’ve been meaning to attend to… oh i dont know! there’s a lot to do.

Into Infinity (see previous post) – the CC-licensed art and music exhibition produced by dublab in collaboration with Creative Commons – is going strong. Visit the project’s online home for regular additions by artists and musicians from all over the world. Everything on the site is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license that allows legal sharing and reuse – we’ve already seen some great remixes of the works, which we’re looking forward to presenting publicly soon.

For now, we’re pleased to announce the debut of the Into Infinity Audio Mega-Mixer, a soundboard that lets you create in-the-moment sound collages from all of Into Infinity’s 8-second audio loops. We’ll be adding more functionality and updates to the mixer soon – so stay tuned. In the meantime, have fun creating sound combinations!

In a little under two weeks, CC Salon LA returns (11/11/08) with a fantastic combination of presenters – joining us will be web radio collective Dublab and Lucas Gonze, net-label theorist and XSPF developer.

Both presentations will discuss how CC, and ‘openness’ in general, is affecting web radio and net labels, both from an economic and artistic vantage, with a Q&A to follow each. Additionally, Dublab will be bringing a physical ‘Into Infinity’ loop station, allowing Salon goers to create their own 8-second loops in the vein of Into Infinity, the CC/Dublab co-sponsored art exhibit ask salon attendees to create noise – both as a group and as individuals – which will be recorded and turned into audio loops that will be used for the Into Infinity project, a new art exhibition produced in collaboration with Creative Commons.

The Salon will be taking place at the always wonderful FOUND Gallery (Google map) between 7:30PM – 9:30PM. Follow the event on Upcoming, mark attending on Facebook, and make sure to come down and hear from two exemplary members of the CC community on their experiences with open licensing. As always, there will be free (as in beer) drinks for the entire night.

I’m happy to announce that dublab and Creative Commons have launched Into Infinity, a CC-licensed art and music project themed around the infinite possibilities of creative reuse. The online exhibition is available now; physical installations are being planned for Winter 2008 and throughout 2009.

Earlier this year, we distributed 12″ circular canvases to a collection of visual artists. We also commissioned an array of musicians to create eight-second audio loops. We went through all of the submissions and posted the best online, including pieces by world-renowned graffiti artist Kofie, 2008 Whitney Biennial alumni Lucky Dragons, Anticon collective member Odd Nosdam, and electronic musicians Flying Lotus and Dntel (AKA Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service).

Each time you refresh the site’s exhibition page, you’ll get a new art and loop combination. All of the images and sounds are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license and (as you may have guessed) we strongly endorse the sharing and remixing of this project. You can download the pieces individually via the links on the exhibition page; you can also download the entire project (including the site’s source code) all at once via the downloads page.

Stay tuned for updates, because we’re talking to new artists and musicians all the time and we’ll be adding new pieces to the exhibition regularly. Soon, we’ll also issue a formal call for remixes of Into Infinity’s works, many of which we’ll include in future versions of the show.

You can read a bit more about the project in the press release we issued earlier today.