It could be an art project. It could be a response to information overload. The work involves retrieving text and images from an RSS reader and randomly rearranging and combining them and observing the results. Daily, 100 entries over the past 24 hours are randomly selected to be “cut up”. The idea is that from a diverse source of recent published text and images, a new construction is formed. This construction should both comment on the source material and provide an artistic expression. Based on the idea of a Dada Poem.
This activity is for research, in the form of random data sampling of information published on the Internet in the past 24 hours. Critical review and reporting on this material is the aim. I think presenting the information artfully makes it more interesting. Rather than an automated digest, an automated “cut up” presents a new perspective on the source material. You could say it is a parody or satire of many types of blogs. There are also many “daily” services, such as the Wordle puzzle, a daily word or poem. My service provides a daily collage of blog posts. I’ve coined the portmanteau Coblage to describe this activity, collage + blog.
The issue of copyright is problematic. Since only small portions of text are used which are submitted for syndication, the case can be made for fair dealing. On the one hand, using a small portion of text as reference material in a new creative piece of writing is widely accepted fair dealing. On the other hand, control over what can and cannot be done with a creative work is usually thought to be dictated by the artist. Just as the original creator has no control over who may reference their work, how can you argue that the author should have control over who uses a small portion of their work in a new creative assemblage? Ok, sometimes it is a larger portion. The measurement of where appropriation ends and transformation begins is a tricky business.
The use of images in each post is even trickier, since no permission is sought to reuse the images in derivative works. It’s not clear what licenses or copyright restrictions are placed on each source image, or what the license should be for the resulting composite images from combining the images in random ways. The use of a creative commons license for the text and images of each post would happily be used here, but it may not be clear to someone wanting to reuse an image that they would be exposed to the same risk of copyright infringement as the original collagist. The author maintains the works presented in this blog are transformative and protected under the concept of fair dealing or fair use in whichever system of copyright you are familiar with. The resultant transformative text and images are all rights reserved to the creator “Floyd Wilde” even though they would prefer to use a less restrictive license.
It is true that when a quotation or a passage is included in a new work, there should be a citation or reference to the source material. While it was not part of the original intention, the creator of this blog hopes to at some point begin publishing details about source materials used to produce each new work. The list of RSS feeds which the RSS reader is consuming is posted here from time to time. If you find you are the author of one of these feeds, and do not wish to see your content included in the daily cutups, see below on how to contact me for getting your feed removed from the list.
The site is offered as a daily word and image sculpture. While the material of the art is information itself, the site is not intending to convey any information. Any similarity to real events, things that have or have yet to happen, is purely coincidental. The cut up is generated by an automated process, but moderation is done manually. Some content may be objectionable and where this happens the content will be removed upon request. Contact me via Twitter or Mastodon with links to the objectionable text or image, and it will be removed.
This project makes use of several Free and Open Source software applications.
Currently the RSS reader software in use is called CommaFeed:
A Python script, along with some other techniques are used to create the cutup text:
Another technique, which is referred to by the author as the “Galactic Pot Healer” method, a step which translates text into other languages (Primarily Chinese) and then back to English, is done with this tool:
Obviously, for those that recognise it, the blog software in use here is WordPress:
The maintainer of this website would like to thank and credit the developers of the WordPress CLI script which makes keeping the software updated much easier:
The Linux distribution in use on the server which serves the site is Ubuntu. It’s what I use on the desktop as well.
Images are composited and otherwise manipulated using the ImageMagick program:
Occasionally, an image might be cropped or further enhanced using the Gimp:
More will be added to this page and to this website over time. Just like everything else, it is now and always will be a work in progress.