Unchained Art

Unchained Art is an attempt to create a common pool of creativity at Swarthmore that every can draw from and build upon. There are two criteria necessary to accomplish this.

• One, the art must be available under free and open licensing conditions, preferably the excellent licenses from CreativeCommons.org. We must demonstrate the power of sharing, and build a living alternative to the practice of locking creativity away. Art that cannot grow and change, or used to create new art, is dead art. Resist the petrification of art!
• Two, the art must be easily accessible, which means that it has to be well-documented, and ideally documented in a format that can be shared on the Web. So much art and knowledge has been lost in the past because it was never documented; many brands of performance art and theater have died with their creators because they were never videotaped or written about adequately. A creative commons means that the art must be there for people to build upon, we shouldn't have to keep reinventing the wheel. If a puppeteer figures out a great way to make a giant puppet, we should be able to borrow his design so that we can concentrate on improving upon it or customizing it to our needs, instead of having to figure it out from scratch. The ultimate goal should be to make it possible for "amateur" or community art to be as, um, "professional" as professional art.

We have not yet determined the best way to go about this project, we'll probably be doing heavy R & D over winter break. Our first idea was to make something like Common Content, with downloads possible both through normal http and Bittorrent, demonstrating yet another case of legal filesharing. The Pool, by UMaine's Stillwater project, is very inspiring. We need programmers to help us put together something equally cool... Swatties, please join Code for Social Change and help us out!