A certain wear & tear has started to set in already. This years Piksel has a very tight schedule, and by the simple fact that new people are coming & leaving constantly makes it less of a MadMax road movie than last years event. Is this good or bad? I guess both. It seems anyway that the social part of Piksel is now somehow more dispersed than last year - and it is no longer a matter of "us against them". And there is definitely something to learn for most of us in terms of communicating our visions to a larger public.

Todays workshop sessions were concentrated on GEM (by James) and VeeJay (by Mathiis and Niels). I wasn't there, but the always revealing webcam installed at the 3rd floor showed many people gesticulating wildly, so I everything OK I guess.

The evening programme this tuesday night started late, because mr Prodromos Tsiavos from Creative Commons in the UK missed several plains from London and Oslo. Well, he finally arrived around 10.30pm and gave us an introduction to the ideas and aims of the Creative Commons licencing system. It pretty quickly became clear that CC system is not really compatible with software development, since the GNU/GPL family of licences are so well established. The CC licences first and foremost apply to media content, basically music but also obviously text, video etc. At the moment they have 11 licences which basically consists of a mix-and-match between these four elements:
1) Attribution
2) Noncommercial
3) No derivative
4) Share Alike

Most of these are pretty similar to existing software licences in principle, but Prodromos pointed out how they work totally differently within the legal system. Most musicians/composers have their work registered within the collecting societies of their respective countries, and this poses a big problem for the establishment of CC licences in todays digital world, where artworks (at least the good ones) normally don't confine themselves within national borders. So currently CC is based on work by lawyers in many countries working for free, and it is going sloowly!! So there are many challenges ahead, but there seem to be a good wind of Open Sourcing (with emphasis on Open) blowing across many parts of the world, and the CC initiative has definitely something going for it - IF one support the idea of any kind of copyright at all, that is!

The CC people are working constantly on new licences, as for example a set of new sampling licences (which should be quite relevant for many Piksel DJ/VJ/samplist participants). Here it is possible for artists to allow sampling of their work for different purposes. The sampling licence project work is led by longtime sampling activists Negativland (USA) and Vicky Bennett aka People Like Us (UK). Currently they have come uo with the idea for three proposed sampling licences:
1) Sampling
2) Sampling Plus
3) Noncommercial sampling plus

Read more at http://creativecommons.org/projects/sampling

Rama was supposed to go on next, but he doesn't seem to make it to Bergen this year. Some problems with a crumbled picture in his Argentinian, or was it the Italian passport. So he is stuck in London, waiting for a friend to come with another set of papers or something. Gisle and the staff at BEK has been constantly in touch with the Norwegian and Italian embassies in London, but in vain it seems. I would have loved to give you a good hug at least, but when I am writing this it is already friday and the chances for that are getting bleak. It has been good though to have some people following Piksel from the outside world, and Rama has been one of them together with Pedro and Andraz. Hope to see you in person next year, guys!!!

Fijuu aka Julian Oliver (aka delire) and Steven Pickles (aka pix) demoed a VJ application they have made for 3D live animation played on Playstation gamepads consisting of some roboty creatures, plus a nicely visualized audio sequencer (Oh, I want to try that one!!). Fijuu build this work on the open source game engine Nebula, plus a set of other apps like PD etc. Their presentation was full of half-mumbling witty inside tech comments, and despite very nice imagery (+ sound) I am personally not sure if this was the ideal way of presenting work to the general public (norwegian one, too), if the aim is to communicate evangelistically about Free Software. I will come back to this!!

The remaining 30mins of this evening was left to the VeeJay Crew showing what they have been up to since last year. Niels and Mathiis together with resident DJ Anders G completed the evening with a set consisting of going through many of their application's features such as live video sampling and manipulation and 84 (!) built-in effects. A short, but powerful set, and a good demonstration of a highly versatile application, currently at version 0.6.2 and highly involved in the Livido discussions.. (quite a cliffhanger that one!)