My machinima project and how it relates to a Burger King trayliner...
Artists and Free Software—From FLOSS +Art
After reading this article, I realized I was facing a conundrum. Take my own final machinima project for example. While I used some free tools to create my movie, the fundamental material and primary medium is actually World of Warcraft, a proprietary software program. This made me to start thinking about how this ultimately affects my film as a work of art. Obviously I used music and pretty images and spliced it all together to form a cohesive whole that told a story. I conveyed emotion and visual and audible stimulation through my work. However, the fact that it would not have been possible without the use of proprietary software bugs me. Isn’t the primary message of my piece not the emotions I tried to convey—but instead an advertisement for World of Warcraft? If that’s the case, then my machinima is no more a work of art than the tray liners at Burger King…Then I began to think more philosophically. How does the issue of proprietary tools affect the work of art itself?
For example, if I was an artist desiring to rebel against convention and depict the struggle against consumerism and advocate freedom from oppressive powers, yet I use a well-known brand of paint on my high-quality brand-name canvas…what am I really saying? Wouldn’t my work be more genuine if I had ground my own pigments and made my own canvas from scavenged materials? Wouldn’t my anti-consumer work created using consumer materials be a fraud? I guess on some level it would be an artistic irony or it could portray some perpetual struggle that we can never escape. I don’t claim to have reached any enlightening conclusions. I guess the most important thing is that there is some truth to the famous saying: “The media is the message.” For artists to be truly free, then the tools they use need to be genuine and untainted. Here’s to free software and the countless, anonymous people who work so laboriously so that we may use it!!!
After reading this article, I realized I was facing a conundrum. Take my own final machinima project for example. While I used some free tools to create my movie, the fundamental material and primary medium is actually World of Warcraft, a proprietary software program. This made me to start thinking about how this ultimately affects my film as a work of art. Obviously I used music and pretty images and spliced it all together to form a cohesive whole that told a story. I conveyed emotion and visual and audible stimulation through my work. However, the fact that it would not have been possible without the use of proprietary software bugs me. Isn’t the primary message of my piece not the emotions I tried to convey—but instead an advertisement for World of Warcraft? If that’s the case, then my machinima is no more a work of art than the tray liners at Burger King…Then I began to think more philosophically. How does the issue of proprietary tools affect the work of art itself?
For example, if I was an artist desiring to rebel against convention and depict the struggle against consumerism and advocate freedom from oppressive powers, yet I use a well-known brand of paint on my high-quality brand-name canvas…what am I really saying? Wouldn’t my work be more genuine if I had ground my own pigments and made my own canvas from scavenged materials? Wouldn’t my anti-consumer work created using consumer materials be a fraud? I guess on some level it would be an artistic irony or it could portray some perpetual struggle that we can never escape. I don’t claim to have reached any enlightening conclusions. I guess the most important thing is that there is some truth to the famous saying: “The media is the message.” For artists to be truly free, then the tools they use need to be genuine and untainted. Here’s to free software and the countless, anonymous people who work so laboriously so that we may use it!!!
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