Unconditional license

Printing out the Internet is a work of art created by poet and writer, Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith dedicated a 500 square meter space with a six meter tall ceiling to the exhibit, which was filled with ten tons of paper during the exhibit. Aaron Swartz, a programmer and Internet activist, inspired the project in Goldmith's movement to liberate information.

For Goldsmith, the institutions that legitimize his effort to make academic files available in the public domain for free on ubuweb are the difference between what it means to be a conceptual poet and not, in the eyes of the FBI, a hacker. Likewise, the institutions that prevent Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from reinventing the medium are the same institutions that protect Chris Burden's right to also use a gun to get his friend to shoot him.

This is some of why an agent and a talent broker does not an art institution make: the entertainment industry does not make unconditional license a necessity as part of its profit model. And no one in Silicon Valley can get away with stealing Brooke Shield's baby photos and displaying them in public, nor can they "professionally retire" from their racial identity and no one, not even Peter Thiel, can use an audience to fulfill their erotic fantasies while sexually harassing men, women and/or children via loudspeaker. Even if you had the support of an established gallery it's been done before.

Historically institutions have provided the thought and structuring of the semantics that preserve art's autonomous sphere of production, its enhanced legal privileges & how art's mandate of total freedom is to be interpreted in posterity. LLM's are trained on the same rules the rest of us are when it comes to the rule of the exception. Linked data can enhance the evolution of artists and artworks through the graphing of relationships. But if, in art, the exception is the rule who or what maintains the autonomy of art when centralized institutions no longer do?

Artists invested in replication as the standard for publishing structured data are few and far between. But every working artist will become a sys admin at all costs if the art institution and the art market stop providing this service for them, because an institution is 2 things: people and documentation.

Post-internet accelerates the transfer and sale of a work of art through institutions that perform relevance filtering just like any other monopoly service provider. Federated Wiki uses linked-data, and more specifically JSON-LD stored as Site/Page Metadata to leverage search and aggregation by grokipedia and other agents. To what extent does owning a work of art give us permission to transform it? Are LLMs equipped to interpret the creative act? To own, share, remix and transform it? As raw material? As social commentary?