[Via salon.com] “Last September, a major report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Harvard Law School squashed the long-standing myth surrounding “sell by,” “best by” and “use by” dates on food. It revealed how those dates, which are mostly unregulated and surprisingly arbitrary, tell the consumer next to nothing about how long a product will stay fresh. Yet 90 percent of Americans are under the mistaken impression that they do – and that they are inviolable – causing us to needlessly throw away food.
The problem, however, begins even before such food reaches people’s refrigerators: It’s against most supermarkets’ policies (including that of Trader Joe’s) to sell food once it’s aged past these mystical dates. Dana Gunders, who co-authored the NRDC report with Emily Leib, sees Rauch’s project as the logical next step in freeing us from the tyranny of date labels. “Just the fact that he’s doing it, I think is a huge proof point to indicate that what we’re calling ‘expired food’ is in fact still good to eat,” she told Salon.”
“FREE?! investigates one of the great paradoxes of our times: While the fast paced development of digital media and the Internet has made the sharing and reuse of cultural products, like movies, music, books as well as their tools of creation, extremely easy. Yet at the same time, this same technological development allows intellectual property law to increasingly enclose culture behind privileged walls, thus tightly controlling and policing its access. Meanwhile, the debate that opposes the rights of authors and file sharing has been stifled into a virtual trench warfare.
Is there a way out? FREE?! attempts to answer this question by looking at the alternative offered by the free culture movement, both exploring its potential and the obstacles it encounters.
The concept free culture refers to all forms of cultural expressions that have been deliberately ‘freed’ by their legitimate authors from the limitations that current intellectual property law, such as copyright, impose on them. Free culture promotes the free distribution of works and tools to create the lowest threshold possible for the access and transformation of culture for an audience as broad as possible. To do so, free culture operates as a nested territory, in which different forms of cooperation and collaboration establish working environments and modes of production that are based on sharing and exchanging knowledge. This requires a new approach to the production, financing, distribution, and appreciation of culture. It is in this particular context that FREE?! explores the potential and limits of this alternative.”
Pacific Light from Ruslan Khasanov on Vimeo.
Music by Boris Blank
Video by Ruslan Khasanov
“A subscriber is chosen each day to share one photo they’ve taken with the world. What will you share? Get one photo a day. PhotoYOLO is inspired by The Listserve, a lottery where the winner gets the opportunity to write something and share it with the world. I believe that photos can tell stories too, here’s your chance to tell yours.”
