Posting about Cliff Evans roundtable.

Well, you said that this could be a place for graffiti...

Last Friday, I attended the Cliff Evans roundtable. Cliff is showing work at the Victoria H. Myhren Gallery, and his work is quite striking. He has taken a lot of the structure of classic photo montage and applied it to digital video creation. These works are large-scale, and are often broken into unexpected shapes and sub-sections.

If you want to virtually view some of his work, you can check it out here.

One of the interesting things about his work is that it is all sourced from the Net - specifically from the Google Images search engine. He does painstaking searches for images that will be melded together into a single video work, then manually cuts and sequences them into massive Adobe After Effects creations. While the videos are not terribly long (the one shown in the Myhren is only 6 minutes long), there is so much to view that it takes a while before you notice that it is a simple loop.

During the roundtable, there was a lot of discussion about how Cliff's work pushes the boundaries of modern copyright law, fair-use law and Creative Commons licensing. Dr. Derigan Silver (from the Mass Comm department) was on-hand to give a detailed review of these issues, and was helpful in getting the details on how the courts are currently viewing this sort of unlicensed use, the facts of fair use and other people that are also pushing these envelopes. It was informative without being stuffy, and pointed to the many issues that current copyright law is facing.

I don't thing the roundtable was taped, so I don't thing there is any way to see it in action. But I thought I'd mention it as much to thank Chris Coleman and Laleh Mehran for their efforts in bringing Cliff in, and to point out the tremendous opportunities that occasionally land in our du.edu email boxes!

[ddg]