In Conversation: Philippe Perreaux

Philippe Perreaux studied Law at the University of Zürich, where he specialized in issues around global copyrights. For over 10 years he’s been legal adviser to major photo agencies, as well as global copyright negotiator for various artists, writers and producers. Over the past five years he has been founder and entrepreneur in fields of New Media, Copyright and Startups. Since 2004, he has been the representative of the alternative licensing system, Creative Commons, in Switzerland. In 2009, he co-founded the Swiss Foundation Public Domain Project: a project to digitize and promote free works of music.

Libby O’Loghlin asks Philippe about Creative Commons licensing, piracy and obscurity, and what the Swiss arm of the Creative Commons organisation is up to.

Image courtesy: Aufnahmen von den Mitarbeiter von restorm.com vom 29. März 2011

The Creative Commons (CC) organization is often touted as  a great advocate of  creativity and collaboration. What is the CC philosophy and goal, and what sets its licenses apart from traditional copyright licenses?

In Conversation: Susan Jane Gilman

Made, born, and raised in New York City, Susan received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Before that, she attended Brown University and Stuyvesant High School, where her English teacher, Frank McCourt, became her mentor and is largely to blame for her becoming a writer. She currently divides her time between Geneva and NYC. In addition to being the author of three nonfiction books, Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Kiss My Tiara, and her 2014 novel, The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street, she has contributed to numerous anthologies, worked as journalist, and written for New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ms., The Daily Beast, Real Simple, Washington City Paper, Us magazine, and others.

JJ Marsh asks Susan about the implications of plundering your own life in the name of humour and fiction.

Image courtesy: Susan Jane Gilman

Gallery: Plunder

Antonio Scarponi, founder of Conceptual Devices, is an Italian architect and designer currently based in Zürich. Read the full interview with Antonio here.

 

01_A. Scarponi, Malthus. A Meal a Day, 2010.

02_A. Scarponi, Orto Perpetuo, 2014.

03_A.Scarponi, ELIOO 30, 2013.

04_R. De Luca, A. Scarponi, Hotello, 2013.

05_A. Scarponi / Conceptual Devices, Urban Farmers Strategic Design, 2011.

06_A. Scarponi, Malthus. A Meal a Day, Components, 2011.

07_A. Scarponi, ELIOOO, Book Cover, 2013.

08_A. Scarponi / Conceptual Devices, Hedron, 2011.

09_A. Scarponi / Conceptual Devices, Harvesting Station, 2012.

10_A. Scarponi, TANTOOO. A fairy tale bean bag, 2011.

11_A. Scarponi, Readykea (Luther), 2012.

12_ A. Scarponi, Readykea (Catalogue), 2012.

13_ A. Scarponi, Just Undo it, Instruction Drawings, 2010.

14_A. Scarponi, Just Undo It (Computer Sleeve) 2009.

15_ A. Scarponi, Design Narrative Manifesto, 2010.

In Conversation: Antonio Scarponi

Antonio Scarponi, founder of Conceptual Devices, is an Italian architect and designer currently based in Zürich. Last year, he released ELIOOO—a book about how to create your own hydroponic garden with IKEA parts—using a crowd-funded publishing model. With a translator, he recently completed the Japanese version.

Antonio talks to Libby O’Loghlin about the attraction of crowd-funding for publishing, and about architecture as concrete poetry.

Image: screenshot 16.11.2014, Google Image search for Antonio Scarponi

Antonio, you are very hard to fit in a (word) box! You publish books and teach, and you design all manner of things from hotels and other public and private spaces … to clothing and ‘home’ furnishings. If there were a theme running through your work, what would it be?

I am an architect. I do architecture. Architecture today does not mean necessarily a building. I think architecture today is a sort of a geography.

Notes from the Unexpected: The voices of Radio LoRa

Text and images: D.B. Miller

It’s Friday morning, just after nine, and the 31 trolleybus lurches down Militärstrasse into parts of Zurich not featured in guide books. As a man rushes past with an open can of Feldschlösschen, I think, Welcome to the neighborhood, until it occurs to me that the ladies at the Bürkliplatz market are probably knocking back their first flutes of Prosecco. At least he has somewhere he needs to be.

This scruffy sense of urgency is just as palpable steps away, at the studios of Switzerland’s first and Zurich’s only community radio station, Radio LoRa (a derivative of “alternative local radio”). The station, on air well before its first licensed broadcast in 1983, is still hell-bent on

Plunder: Remix or Robbery?

Copyright, rights management and original content has become a whole lot more complicated in the digital age. Once published, to whom do your articles, books, poems or blog posts actually belong? JJ Marsh gives her two cents’ worth.

In his excellent novel Perlmann’s Silence, Swiss author Pascal Mercier explores the relationships between who we are and what we tell as our stories. The central premise revolves around an act of plagiarism, when a linguist is invited to speak at a conference and finds he has nothing to say. Instead, he translates the ideas of another, both literally and metaphorically, and claims them as his own. The (stolen) philosophy he espouses is appropriation of memory through language or, to put it another way, you are who you say you are.

Times have changed.

Making Tracks

Goings-on this Winter in the city of Zürich (and beyond).

Partial image: 02_ORTO_PERP_06_©ph_Ottavio_Montanari_2014, courtesy Antonio Scarponi

Snapshot of a writing life: Tao Lin

Chris Corbett reports on Tao Lin’s recent reading at Kaufleuten

Critics have a love-hate relationship with Tao Lin—some compare him to authors like Hemingway because of his sparse style—while in the same sentence admitting they find something lacking in his work.

Maturity?

Image courtesy: Tao Lin

The protagonist, a young