Saga

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= "a piece of software for artists, to help those who prefer to host their own music, rather than upload and distribute it via corporate platforms".

URL = https://github.com/matdryhurst/Saga#saga

Description

Shadowproof:

"In a digital music culture where songs and videos can be embedded anywhere, how can musicians retain agency over where their work ends up?

In 2015, Mat Dryhurst released Saga, a piece of software for artists, to help those who prefer to host their own music, rather than upload and distribute it via corporate platforms. Using Saga’s code, musicians can do more than a basic embed of their video. They can control the entire plot of webspace surrounding everywhere the work is shown.

This helps creators have more control over where there videos are displayed online.

When an artist’s video is embedded somewhere on the internet, Saga sends a notification. They can then craft a response that is displayed specifically on that plot.

For example, if a media outlet embeds a video next to an article that the artist does not particularly care for, the video can be obscured by a sad face or a text expression. If the video is embedded next to an advertisement, the artist can charge before continuing to display the work.


In developing the project, Dryhurst tried to create a way to distribute artwork online that would feel “interesting and liberating,” he says.

Saga suggests individuals should control how their work is represented in those individual spaces, to offer “some kind of fluid mutable representation” of the work, where the creator has “as many options for expression as … in the flesh,” he says. “That brings with it a sense of liability or unpredictability.”

But as Dryhurst explains, most corporate platforms do not exist to facilitate unpredictability, “as ultimately human expression is only a small part of their greater objective. They want standardized, machine readable expression that—in the case of something like Facebook—satisfies their ability to present tidy information to prospective advertisers.”

This is why it is so powerful that Saga-hosted art can interrogate the advertisements surrounding it when embedded. It suggests that media and corporations cannot merely lift an artist’s work and use it without consent for their own financial gain." (https://shadowproof.com/2017/12/19/protest-platforms-saga-believes-artists-should-have-more-control/#)


Interview

" * Morgan Sutherland: So, with Saga you can embed an image, a video, or a piece of code as an iframe on another site and you are able to modify the embedded content individually for each endpoint?

Mathew Dryhurst: Exactly. People rightly criticize it as something that may not scale, as it would take hours to change each distinct version of a piece online, but I’m not recommending that. It’s more about simply having a choice. You may choose to respond to a conversation, or extend a part here. You may choose not to. The point is that both options are available to the artist.

Personalization is big business right now. It has become a whole industry of data collection and direct targeting. Saga is trying to look at that shift from the artist’s perspective, and put some of those tools in their hands.

I’m most interested in the implications it may have by adding “site specificity” to internet media, and it also adds to my “all time” art ideas from that old Dispatch talk, basically positing that our internet presence is in essence one grand, time-based medium, the micro-gestures we make being allegro notes in one unfolding composition. The term “allegro” itself is related to the concept of alacrity, or a readiness to respond, a liveness. I’m most interested in gestures that are live like a wire, and the possibilities to improvise and evade subsumption.

One logical conclusion of data collection techniques and this boxed, algorithmic way of approaching content, is that when someone like Beyoncé releases a music video, the product placement in the video will reflect the location in which it is posted. This already happens with ads being served on YouTube, for example, and so I can imagine this will become more commonplace within the content of the work itself. The pop group LMFAO actually experimented with this in 2008, when their song “I’m in Miami Bitch” was overdubbed with the name of each city in which the record was sold. I heard “I’m in Oakland, bitch” on the radio, and someone in Palm Springs heard something different. It was kind of a prophetic concept.

It makes sense financially, as licensing and product placement then becomes a time-based, contractual thing. Like the bottle of Pepsi can be in the music video until 2017, at which point a new license could be sold to a different drinks company. Also, regarding ads, this provides a model to have people return to the same page, which is also beneficial and defies the ‘infinite/ephemeral’ feed model. I think that this durational licensing model can also be applied in interesting and progressive ways to artworks. A magazine can license the rights to host an unedited artwork for a year, for example, or alternately publications are able to host an artwork for free, but in doing so cede control of that space on the page at the artist’s discretion. This negotiation or bargaining power seems more equitable to me than the current options available.

If our data is going to continue to modulate the content that gets sold to us, far better to start playing with these logics now. Are there potential benefits to these changes? A silver lining to the cloud? Art allows for us to explore that. What would happen if the process of posting someone else’s work became a negotiation? What if, in doing that, you were establishing a trust, or a contract, between the two parties that benefits both in tangible ways? Without these kinds of agreements in place, we strip the artist of agency, and Saga is ultimately about that agency and autonomy. It’s saying “wherever this thing that I am giving you goes, I have the right to speak my mind there! If you put my video next to Iggy Azalea, I’m going to straight up comment about it! If you want me to give up that right, then pay me!”

Why can’t this piece of media that I put out in the world serve as a conduit for me to communicate with the people posting it? I firmly believe that the communications and other stuff that happen around the work ought in fact to be considered a part of the work, and that activity can be archived and indexed, so why shouldn’t the work be given the tools to communicate with all that? Why can’t the places that digital work lands modulate the work itself?

I actually think that the distinction between ‘live/responsive’ work and work that can be easily quantified, tracked, and appropriated may become a gulf over time. An interesting parallel is comedy, where there is a huge philosophical distance between people who pursue improv as a living comedic practice, and those who work in canned jokes. A lot of artworks are encouraged to be more of a canned joke that is just ambiguous enough to be silently curated and relocated into any number of scenarios. Reza Negarestani really called this out in his ‘Human Centipede’ essay. So much art is just willfully interchangeable, operating under the alibi of being ‘open to interpretation’ or something. I find that approach a little blunt." (http://dismagazine.com/discussion/73345/mathew-dryhurst-data-sagacity-and-site-specificity/)