Rocking the Virtual World

Jennifer Yip, September 19th, 2006

Our first Second Life concert packed the seats in the popular venue, Menorca. Audio simulcast made it possible for listeners, who couldn’t enter the full sim, to hear the the performance via iTunes or teleporting to other sites, such as the Big Horn Lodge in Selby, Akasha Village in Goryeo, and CC HQ in Kula. Despite the griefer activity that caused a brief crash in the system, the talented musicians continued with the show which ignited the audience’s enthusiasm to last through the end of the show. We heard a wonderful range of vocals and music from Melvin Took, Kourosh Eusebio, Etherian Kamaboko, Slim Warrior, Jaycatt Nico, Frogg Marlowe, and Cylindrian Rutabaga. Jonathan Coulton’s feature performance evoked cheers, jokes, and laughter with his clever lyrics and wild stage props (including a zombie attack).







Thanks to Popular Science for sponsoring the event; Slim Warrior for not only providing her venue, but also performing during a late London night; and Scott Schram with his team of resourceful concert coordinators for making it all happen. To find pics and audio, visit PopSci’s site and Flickr.

Reminder: 9/29: NYC Creative Commons concert f/ Peeping Tom, Diplo, Girl Talk

Eric Steuer, September 19th, 2006

If you’ll be around New York City on September 29, please join us at Irving Plaza for a Creative Commons concert presented by WIRED and Flavorpill. The show will feature Mike Patton’s experimental pop supergroup Peeping Tom, DJ/producer Diplo, and mash-up/remix artist Girl Talk. Creative Commons’ CEO Lawrence Lessig will be on hand to introduce the artists.

This concert is a great way to show your support for our work, as proceeds from all ticket sales will go directly to Creative Commons (please note that ticket price is *not* tax-deductible). Tickets are $25 each (plus service charge) and are available online at Ticketmaster.

The event is a part of Next Music, which kicks off WIRED NextFest, a four-day festival featuring more than 130 interactive exhibits from scientists and researchers from around the world.

Please join us if you can. Again, 100% of the proceeds from every ticket sold go directly to Creative Commons.

Details:
WIRED + Flavorpill present:
Next Music
Featuring Peeping Tom (with Mike Patton, DJ Rob Swift, and Rahzel), Diplo, and Girl Talk
All proceeds go to support Creative Commons
Friday, September 29 | 9:00 PM, doors open 8:00 PM
Irving Plaza
17 Irving Place, NYC

Cool CC Flickr find-Dendrology Beauty

Francesca Rodriquez, September 19th, 2006

Here is a cool Flickr find. Jordyn Meredith , an art student in Baltimore, has licensed her digital dendrology collection under a CC Attribution, Share-Alike license. These are absolutely gorgeous digital microscope shots of tree cross-sections. My favorite is Lilac Chastetree.

From her description:

“After identifying the type of tree to which the branch belongs, I use a digital camera attachment on my microscope to photograph the samples. Piecing together over fifty photographs for each sample, each final image is a 100x magnification of a glimpse of life not seen by the human eye alone. They become abstract structures reminiscent of any number of things.”

Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse Remix Contest

Eric Steuer, September 19th, 2006

Since last month, bestselling author Greg Palast has been offering tracks from his recent audio book Armed Madhouse online under a Creative Commons BY-NC license, so that musicians and producers can use them in remixes. If you’re into sampling and mash-ups, download the audio, create a remix, and send your finished mp3 to submitremix@gregpalast.com before October 23, 2006 to enter the Armed Madhouse Remix Contest. All eligible entries will be posted online and voted on by the public. The producers of the five winning remixes will receive a prize package courtesy of Alternative Tentacles records, Palast Productions, Evil Twin Booking, and Air America Radio. The top five winners will also be featured on the next Greg Palast spoken word CD on Alternative Tentacles records.

GOOD Magazine Comes to LA

Francesca Rodriquez, September 14th, 2006

LA CC friends: You are invited to a party this Friday, Sept 16 at St. Vibiana’s in downtown Los Angeles, hosted by GOOD Magazine! In June, we blogged about CC’s participation in the Choose GOOD Campaign, in which you can subscribe to a year of the magazine for $20 and choose a partnering non-profit organization that you want 100% of your subscription fee to go towards helping. So…for $20, subscribers get:

(1) 6 issues of GOOD

(2) Entry to party & free drinks

(3) And all $20 goes to Creative Commons. Subscribe here.

Details:

GOOD Magazine comes to LA!

Friday, September 16; 8pm to 2am

St. Vibiana’s, 210 S. Main Street (at 2nd St.), Los Angeles, CA , 90012

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s “The Concert”

Eric Steuer, September 14th, 2006

Visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s website to download “The Concert,” a new classical music podcast offered under the Creative Commons Music Sharing license. The podcast features unreleased live performances by master musicians and talented young artists recorded from the museum’s Sunday Concert Series. “The Concert” includes music by Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Chopin for solo piano, orchestra, string quartet, and voice. A new podcast will be posted on the 1st and 15th of every month; users can subscribe to receive free, automatic updates delivered directly to their computers or mp3 players. With “The Concert,” the Gardner Museum becomes the first art museum to encourage sharing and free distribution of its online programming by using a Creative Commons license.

Charlotte Landrum, the museum’s podcast project manager, says:

The single greatest thing about this is that the podcast is providing a really great chance for the public to hear and share recordings that might never have been heard otherwise, that were literally sitting on a shelf in the museum. There are two benefits: first, you get to hear new voices in classical music, artists that might not be distributed as widely on recordings; second, you get to hear master musicians, the ones who are more widely-recorded already, playing things that they may never have released commercially. We’ve already seen these ideas at work with so-called “popular” music online, but this is something new for classical music lovers.

You can read more about this exciting news in our press release.

Lonely mixter girl

Mike Linksvayer, September 14th, 2006

The lonelygirl15 videos have been featuring music from ccMixter. Grant Robertson sorts it out:

Ever wondered where to find all that great music used in the Lonelygirl 15 videos? Having spent months looking for songs featured in TV commercials, I totally feel your pain.

(Metric’s beautiful “Grow up and Blow Away”, which was featured for 15 seconds in a Polaroid commercial a few years ago, nearly killed me)

So, if your Jonesing for that sweet music fix you came to the right place.

Get your fix.

dive into mixtape

Mike Linksvayer, September 14th, 2006

Mark Pilgrim: Freely licensed Creative Commons music that I liked enough to put on a mix tape. With attitude!

Thanks Mark! That’s what I’m talking about.

Dropping Knowledge’s Living Library

Eric Steuer, September 13th, 2006

Dropping Knowledge has announced that it will soon offer over 600 hours of audio-visual material from the recent Table of Free Voices event under a Creative Commons license. The Table of Free Voices took place in Berlin, Germany on September 9, 2006. At this historic gathering, more than 100 esteemed artists, academics, entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists gathered to answer questions about the state of the world. The recorded results will be published online as the Living Library and offered to the world under CC terms.

This rich archive of thought will certainly be a valuable addition to the commons. Very exciting stuff!

New World Notes interview with Jonathan Coulton about tomorrow’s concert in Second Life

Eric Steuer, September 13th, 2006

Yesterday, Wagner James Au posted a great interview with Jonathan Coulton up at New World Notes. In it, they talk about tomorrow’s concert.

Don’t forget: Tomorrow, September 14 at 5PM (SL/Pacific), Popular Science and Creative Commons will be hosting a concert at Menorca, in the 3D online digital world of Second Life. The show will feature acclaimed singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton as well as popular Second Life musicians Melvin Took, Kourosh Eusebio, Etherian Kamaboko, and Slim Warrior.

Previously blogged here.