World's Fair Use DayMAY 4, 2012
WASHINGTON D.C.
World's Fair Use Day is an annual, day-long celebration of fair use, creativity and remix culture, brought to you by Public Knowledge.
We’re excited to announce our second of three keynote speakers: academic, musician and cultural scholar Aram Sinnreich. During his keynote, Aram will provide an introduction to his recent book, Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture, which “chronicles the rise of ‘configurability,’ an emerging musical and cultural moment rooted in today’s global, networked communications infrastructure”.
Aram Sinnreich is an assistant professor at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information, and the author of the recent book Mashed Up: Music, Technology and the Rise of Configurable Culture. He has written about music and technology for The New York Times, Billboard, and Wired, has testified as an expert witness in several cases including the Supreme Court file sharing suit MGM vs. Grokster, and has offered his expertise as an analyst and consultant to hundreds of companies, from major labels to fledgling startups, since 1997. He is also a working musician, playing bass and composing with bands and artists including Brave New Girl, Agent 99, and the late, great Ari-Up.
We’re very excited to announce the first of three keynote speakers: Jace Clayton a.k.a. DJ /rupture. In addition to being a critically-acclaimed DJ with a number of classic mixtapes, albums and collaborations under his belt, Clayton is a renowned blogger, writer and public speaker. During his WFUD keynote, Clayton will use his infamous three turntable setup to demonstrate how samples can be transformed into exciting new works using traditional DJ skills.
Jace Clayton is an interdisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn. His interests include music, technology usage in low-income communities, and public space, with an emphasis on Latin America, Africa, and the Arab world. Performing as DJ /rupture, Clayton has toured internationally, DJ’ed in a band with Norah Jones, done two John Peel Sessions, and was turntable soloist with the 80-member Barcelona Symphony Orchestra. Recent collaborators include guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex) and filmmaker Jem Cohen. He has lectured at Harvard University and other cultural/educational institutions in Europe and South America. Clayton’s essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Abitare, and n+1, and he contributes regularly to Frieze and The Fader. He maintains a blog, Mudd Up!, and hosts a weekly radio show on WFMU, which is re-broadcast on several European stations.
Good news: you can has cheezburger. World’s Fair Use Day is thrilled to announce that we’re teaming up with our friends at the Cheezburger Network for a happy hour/fan meetup of epic proportions! From 5pm to 7pm, World’s Fair Use Day attendees and panelists will have a chance to mix and mingle with Cheezburger Network fans at the Washington Post Conference Center. There will be free cheezburgers! And beer! And giveaways from the LOLMart.com store! Cheezburger Network founder and CEO Ben Huh will also be on hand to sign books/cheeseburgers/cats/etc. and we’ll have a few interactive art exhibits for you to play with. Best of all, admission to the happy hour is free with your World’s Fair Use Day RSVP. Click here to register—spots are filling up fast!
For the second year in a row, we’ve been lucky enough to have beloved comic artist and children’s book author Neil Numberman design our official World’s Fair Use Day poster! That’s the poster you see above, jam-packed with allusions to popular cartoon characters and famous works of art. Click here to pre-order your poster now—if you’re attending the event, simply pick your poster up on the 13th and save on shipping!
UPDATE: Unfortunately, Lauren Cornell has had to cancel and will NOT be appearing at World’s Fair Use Day. We apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause.
Rounding out our panel on visual art will be Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome and Adjunct Curator at the New Museum in New York City. Cornell recently curated an exhibition entitled “Free,” which “explores how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space”. The New York Times described “Free” as “an exercise in open-source curating,” featuring pieces that communicate “[a]n intense desire for communal experience”.
In her joint position as Executive Director of Rhizome and Adjunct Curator at the New Museum, Cornell tracks developments in contemporary art and emerging technology. She oversees and develops Rhizome’s programs, all of which are support the creation, presentation and preservation of art engaged with technology. In April 2010, she organized the seminal Rhizome program “Seven on Seven” which paired seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenged them to develop something new over the course of a single day. Cornell recently curated “Free,” her first major exhibition for the New Museum which opened at the New Museum in October 2010. At the New Museum, she has co-curated exhibitions including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus”; the Museum’s inaugural exhibition “Unmonumental”; and has also curated a solo show of works by Young-Hae Change Heavy Industries. In addition to her curatorial work at the New Museum, Cornell organizes the monthly New Silent Series, featuring screenings, events and performances by emerging artists.
World’s Fair Use Day is thrilled to announce that artist Jon Rafman will be joining our panel on visual art. Throughout his career, Jon has repurposed and recontextualized images in a variety of mediums. His work ranges from large-scale canvases of Google Street View screenshots to tours of the Second Life universe conducted by the Kool-Aid Man. As part of his appearance at WFUD, Jon will be conducting “Kool-Aid Man in Second Life” tours during our post-event happy hour, so be sure to stick around after the event for some surreal fun.
Jon Rafman is an artist, filmmaker, and essayist. He holds a B.A. in Philosophy and Literature from McGill University and a M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has gained international attention and has been exhibited at Fotofest Gallery in Houston, FutureEverything in Manchester, the Woodmill in London, Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Future Gallery in Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, and the New Museum in NYC. Rafman’s “Nine Eyes of Google Street View” project has been featured in Modern Painter, Der Speigel, Wired, NPR, Libération, and Harper’s Magazine.
Rounding out our panel on fair use in videogame culture will be videogame designer, filmmaker and remix artist Jay Pavlina. Jay is best known as the man behind Super Mario Bros. Crossover (trailer embedded above), a playable Flash game that combines the levels from “Super Mario Bros.” with the characters and mechanics from a number of different 8-bit games, resulting in a disorientingly manic reimagining of one of the most well-loved games of all time.
Jay Pavlina is an all-around creative-minded individual who dabbles in various art forms and has a great appreciation for comedy. He is mostly known for his popular flash game, Super Mario Bros. Crossover, but he’s also an independent filmmaker and has made over 100 short films. Jay loves most of all to laugh and to make others laugh, and he likes to inspire people to enjoy their lives as much as possible. He’s always working on something new and looks forward to sharing his next creation with you.
We’re happy to announce that New School lecturer Josephine Dorado will be moderating our panel on the importance fair use in videogame culture! Over the course of her career, Josephine has analyzed and engaged in gaming culture as an academic, entrepreneur and virtual talk show producer:
Josephine Dorado is a social entrepreneur, educator, interactive events producer and skydiver. In her work, she explores the extension of the performance environment with technology and the process of cultural exchange through creative interplay in virtual spaces. She was a Fulbright scholarship recipient and initiated the Kidz Connect program, which connects youth internationally via creative collaboration and theatrical performance in virtual worlds. Josephine also received a MacArthur Foundation award to co-found Fractor.org, which matches news with opportunities for activism. She currently teaches at the New School and is the live events producer forThis Spartan Life, a talk show inside the video game Halo. Commissioned performances include interdisciplinary productions for the ISEA and Romaeuropa Festivals as well as speaking engagements at SIGGRAPH, PICNIC (Amsterdam), Queen’s University (Belfast), and London Knowledge Lab. Upcoming ventures include reACTor, a location-based mobile gaming app that connects news with social action, as well as ongoing projects in mixed reality and networked performance. Josephine’s experience ranges from theater for at-risk children to technology and design, and brings perspectives on theater-inspired collaborative methodologies as well as the issues of working within a virtual context.
World’s Fair Use Day is excited to announce that NYC-based visual artist Joshua Caleb Weibley will be joining our panel on fair use in visual art! Much of Joshua’s work consists of degraded reproductions of popular and corporate iconography that evoke the worn aesthetic of a multi-generational photocopy.
Joshua Caleb Weibley was born in 1986 in Peabody, Massachusetts and studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. Since graduation, his work has been exhibited in a variety of venues in New York including Charlie Horse Gallery, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Art Production Fund, The Drawing Center and NP Contemporary Art Center (where he is scheduled to present an on-going project series in the coming months). Joshua Caleb Weibley lives and works on the east coast of America.
We’re super excited to announce that Larry “Liontamer” Oji and David “djpretzel” Lloyd of OverClocked ReMix will be speaking at World’s Fair Use Day! OverClocked ReMix is “an organization dedicated to the appreciation and promotion of video game music as an art form”. The site boasts thousands of free remixes of video game music and boasts an active community of fans that discuss, critique and collaborate on compositions. Members of the OCR community have gone on to work as composers in the game industry and OCR has worked with major players like Capcom to produce official soundtracks for popular games.
David W. Lloyd is a software engineer, musician, producer, and graphic designer residing in the Metro/DC area of the United States of America. Mr. Lloyd is the president and founder of OverClocked ReMix, an organization dedicated to the appreciation and preservation of video game music. He has popularized unofficial arrangements of this music by encouraging fans to submit mixes to the website he developed and maintains at http://ocremix.org. He has composed and produced numerous such arrangements himself, under the name of “djpretzel”.
Larry “Liontamer” Oji has been a judge at OverClocked ReMix since July 2004, having evaluated more than 3,000 submissions. Reporting to site founder David “djpretzel” Lloyd, Larry is responsible for primary submissions evaluations, informational database maintenance, community management and other otherwise sundry & unsexy tasks at OCR, becoming head submissions evaluator in June 2006. Oji worked through OC ReMix as assistant soundtrack director for the remixed soundtrack of Capcom’s Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, developed by Backbone Entertainment. Larry currently resides in Atlanta, GA with The Lady, Paige.
World’s Fair Use Day is happy to announce that DJ, anthropologist, journalist, public speaker and legal scholar DJ Ripley will round out our panel on fair use and hip-hop culture. Here’s a quick rundown of DJ Ripley’s many talents:
Larisa Kingston Mann is a legal anthropologist, public speaker and award-winning DJ. A PhD Candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at Berkeley Law, she does ethnographic research on copyright law and local creative practices, focusing especially on Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora. As DJ Ripley, she has also toured 19 countries across 9 continents over the past 14 years, also giving talks and workshops on law, technology, creativity and community, from Jackson, Mississippi to Lujbljana, Slovenia to Brisbane, Australia.
We’re excited to announce that Ben Huh, CEO and founder of the Cheezburger Network, will be speaking at World’s Fair Use Day! Over the course of the last three years, Ben and his team have been responsible for countless LOLs, thanks to popular blogs like I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog and Graph Jam. Perhaps even more impressive, they’ve managed to build a sustainable business out of Internet memes, image macros and messageboard humor.
Ben Huh is the CEO and founder of Cheezburger Network. He’s a former journalist turned dot com entrepreneur who has a knack for nailing the zeitgeist and has been credited with bringing Internet memes to the mainstream and popularizing Internet culture. The success of Cheezburger Network is attributed to Ben’s knowledge of memes, viral content, and crowd sourcing. Ben graduated with a BSJ from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
We’re pleased to announce that NYC-based visual artist and event producer Ben Sisto will be speaking at World’s Fair Use Day! Ben will be moderating a panel on visual art, which will highlight the work of some of today’s most promising young visual artists. If you attended this year’s Open Video Conference, you will likely recall Ben’s presentation “Happy Birthday, Edgar,” which delved into the complex copyright issues surrounding the song “Happy Birthday to You”.
Ben Sisto is an artist and event producer living in Brooklyn. His works range from monochrome paintings to posters, word games to Powerpoint-presentations - and have been exhibited at Harvard, Mass MoCA, Artists Space, Printed Matter,etc. Sisto has previously organized events for the likes of Susan Blackmore, Fugazi, Silver Apples, Miho Hatori, and Oneohtrix Point Never, and will be speaking at this years Art Basel, Miami.
We’re very excited to announce that New York City hip-hop trio Das Racist will be speaking at World’s Fair Use Day! Over the course of just two years, Das Racist has cultivated a sizable following in underground hip-hop and indie-rock circles, on the strength of two critically-acclaimed mixtapes (both of which are available for free download on their website). They’ve been featured in The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Spin and countless other publications. The New York Times duly noted that “Das Racist’s lack of piety has become an aesthetic of its own, with songs that are as much commentary on hip-hop as rigorous practice of it.” In conjunction with their appearance at WFUD, Das Racist will be playing their first-ever shows in the D.C. area: 1/13 at the Talking Head in Baltimore and 1/14 at the Rock and Roll Hotel in D.C. Both shows are on sale now—don’t sleep on those tickets!
![UPDATE: Unfortunately, Lauren Cornell has had to cancel and will NOT be appearing at World’s Fair Use Day. We apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause.
Rounding out our panel on visual art will be Lauren Cornell, Executive Director of Rhizome and Adjunct Curator at the New Museum in New York City. Cornell recently curated an exhibition entitled “Free,” which “explores how the internet has fundamentally changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space”. The New York Times described “Free” as “an exercise in open-source curating,” featuring pieces that communicate “[a]n intense desire for communal experience”.
In her joint position as Executive Director of Rhizome and AdjunctCurator at the New Museum, Cornell tracks developments in contemporary art and emerging technology. She oversees and develops Rhizome’s programs, all of which are support the creation, presentation and preservation of art engaged with technology. In April 2010, sheorganized the seminal Rhizome program “Seven on Seven” which pairedseven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teamsof two, and challenged them to develop something new over the courseof a single day. Cornell recently curated “Free,” her first majorexhibition for the New Museum which opened at the New Museum inOctober 2010. At the New Museum, she has co-curated exhibitionsincluding “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus”; the Museum’sinaugural exhibition “Unmonumental”; and has also curated a solo showof works by Young-Hae Change Heavy Industries. In addition to hercuratorial work at the New Museum, Cornell organizes the monthly NewSilent Series, featuring screenings, events and performances byemerging artists.](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ldug5mjI2D1qexrbko1_500.jpg)
Rounding out our panel on fair use in videogame culture will be videogame designer, filmmaker and remix artist 
