Public Domain Day
Between 2013 and 2019 Constant contributed to Public Domain Day, a worldwide yearly celebration of new works entering into the public domain. The series The Death of the Authors brought together new works of art that remix, rethink, reuse … these oeuvres.
In collaboration with CRIDS (Centre de Recherche Informatique et Droit, FUNDP Namur), Cinema Nova, the Royal Library of Belgium and PACKED.
2019
Death will not tear us apart
In the course of 1948, the lives of the authors Sergej Eisenstein, Louis Jean Lumière, Marie-Elisabeth Belpaire, Jacques Feyder, Cissy van Marxveldt and many others came to an end. Together with Nova Cinema and Plus-tôt Te laat, Constant celebrated this synchronous demise and resurrection with a blasphemous collage, a vitrine filled with projections-on-projections, re-drawings and remixes.
2018
This year we welcomed the creations of amongst others Victor Horta, Anna Kernkamp, Felix Timmermans, Gustave Van de Woestyne, Ernst Lubitsch and William Moulton Marston.
The Death of the Authors, 1946: Xavan & Jaluka by Pléoter Spilliaestenberg
“On Friday 17 Frifek of the year Zek, a qualifier Demolineutron reduces the Large Zone of Zendium the size of a vibratory pudding, which has dramatic consequences for the lovers Xavan and Jaluka.”
2017
The Death of the Authors, 1945: Anne Frank’s collective voice
Website: http://annefrank.constantvzw.org
In 1945 the fifteen year old girl Anne Frank died in the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. Her diary would have entered the public domain on 1 January 2016, but the arrival of this event caused a lot of commotion. The Anne Frank Foundation, an organisation that was set up by Anne’s father, Otto Frank, collects the rights that come from the sales of the world most known diary. Parts of these benefits are regularly donated to charities. They claim that Anne’s diary is still under copyright until 1 January 2051.
The book as we know it, published in 1947 in Dutch under the title Het Achterhuis (The Back House), is a compilation by Anne’s father, Otto Frank. He copied and pasted fragments from the original manuscripts. And he would also have rewritten parts of the diary in his own style, which would make the book a derived work, and Anne’s father the co-author. In this case, the copyright would expire only seventy years after his death in 1980. In the Netherlands and Belgium the fragments of the original manuscripts are in the public domain. The question remains whether the fragments Otto Frank has rewritten can be considered as an artistic intervention.
As an experiment, but also as a paragon of the complexity that is so often hidden behind the notion of the ’public domain’, we free Anne’s Diary sentence by sentence. You are warmly invited to lend your voice to one or more sentences. You will be able to listen to the spoken sentences in random order.
By recording a sentence you contribute to the construction of Anne Franks collective voice, as a call for worldwide freedom, tolerance and inclusivity. Furthermore, the sentences will be donated as training-data for free speech recognition softwares, like Voxforge, which suffer from a crucial lack of Dutch spoken language. The day the journal will be entirely in the public domain, the textbook will be freely available, as well as this collective audiobook. This promise will be integrated in the testaments of the two authors of this work, Stéphanie Vilayphiou and An Mertens.
See also:
- Hoe zit dat nou? Auteursrecht op dagboek Anne Frank
- Uitspraken Rechtbank Amsterdam
- Anne Frank’s diary is in the public domain; editors aren’t co-authors
- Anne Frank’s diary is now free to download despite copyright dispute
Documentation:
2016
The Death of the Authors, 1944: Reimagining ‘Le Traité de la Documentation’
A small exhibition in the heart of the Royal Library let you discover several explorations of the form materiality and content of the Livre sur le Livre in which utopist and universalist Paul Otlet reimagined the future of the book and the distribution of knowledge. Otlet died in 1944 and his works that entered the public domain in January 2016.
During two days of ‘re-booksprint/hackathon’ in October 2015, developers, designers, artists, theoreticians, writers, archivists and copyleft activists gathered in the Mundaneum in Mons to rethink the ‘Traité de documentation - Le livre sur le livre’, a publication he wrote in 1934. The book was digitzed by Wikisource.
This dense publication combines the genres of manual, encyclopedia, pamphlet and science-fiction to include many of Paul Otlet’s visions on the practice of documentation and the future of books. Lemmas on the current state of censorship, the history of the alphabet or “inventions to be made” alternate with precise descriptions of how to reference a book on an index card, or what would be the ideal working conditions for a documentalist. The participants explored the form, materiality and content of the Traité, in order to re-create a series of experimental digital re-editions of the book.
More information on the the project and final publication: Mondotheque wiki.
2015
The Death of the Authors, 1943: A Bot Opera
This chatbot opera features Fats Waller, Nikola Tesla, Beatrix Potter and Sergei Rachmaninov, four artists who died in 1943, and whose works entered the public domain on 1st January 2014. These authors are reanimated in the form of a “chatbot”: a small software program that automatically intervenes in a chat conversation pretending to be human. The bots enter in dialogue with each other and with visitors who join them in their online room: http://botopera.activearchives.org where the bots produce images, sound and text.
The botopera premiered on Public Domain Day 2015 in the presence of three plotters who interpreted and plotted the activity of the bots on large posters.
The botopera was shown in the vitrine of Constant, where the activity of the bots is interpreted and plotted on a weekly poster, by the beautiful Roland, a gigantic printer from the 80s. On Thursday 9th April 2015 at 18h the posters were auctioned. Benefits were donated to the new magazine for independant journalism Médor
Botopera was performed again in Wiels as the opening act of the International Underground Poetry Festival.
A work by Michael Murtaugh, Anne Laforet, Gijs De Heij, Antonio Roberts, An Mertens with : BotsWaller, NICKola tesla, Beatrix Botter, Rachmanibot & plotter Roland.
Botopera uses Python, nltk, mplayer, Pure Data, imagemagick and git.
Le Petit Prince au pays des Hackers
“a particular scan session. Peter does not have the right to scan his book nor to share digital copies. Why? Because Antoine de St Exupéry may have arrived safe and well in the public domain in Belgium and the rest of Europe, fans in France will have to wait another 30 years because Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who disappeared in the sea during WWII, received the postume title of « Mort pour la France », which extends the copyright on his work.”
2014
The Death of the Authors, 1942: Public Domain Cinema
An unlikely encounter between the work of four women who only share the year in which they died, 1942. Their work came into the public domain in 2013. Every time you launch the script, a different cinematic experience is created, combining the music of Blanche Selva (Cloches dans la Brume), photographs by Tina Modotti, plus randomly selected phrases from novels by Neel Doff (Jours de Famine et de Détresse) and Violet Hunt (A Hard Woman).
2013
The Death of the Authors, 1941: The Novel
A generative novel made with Python and nltk, based on texts by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Von Arnim, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson.
The work was also featured as part of Print Error, an exhibition in the virtual gallery of Jeu de Paume.
One-click remix
Generate your unique version of The Death of the Authors, 1941 in one-click:
The Couplets
As a seasonal variation on the generative novel, we created a generative poem. A script selects random sentences from the works of Rabindranath Tagore and couples them phrase by phrase to the works of Virginia Woolf, with the help of the Natural Language Toolkit:
They had many quaint jokes, which afforded them much amusement.
Mrs. Hilbery looked from one to the other in bewilderment.
To surrender one's pride in devotion is woman's only salvation.
You were laughing because you thought I'd changed the conversation?
In fact any talk at all from him is resented.
Saturday, Sunday, Monday--there are only three days more, she counted.
Bipradas came to me for advice, and told me everything.
Well, said Katharine, I don't see that you've proved anything.
Do not change or edit the header without written permission.
She urged poor Miss Vinrace to come on the expedition.
The couplets were performed during FREE?! on 29th November 2013 in Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.