Kester Brewin

Category: Arts

  • Mutiny! [2] – Rethinking Copyright and Enriching the Public Domain

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      The second big reason I’m choosing to self-publish Mutiny! is to do with copyright issues. One of the things I explore in the book is how messed up ideas of copyright have become, moving far away from the sense in which it was originally intended. You can read the whole argument below, but, in…

  • Taste in the Age of Universal Access

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    Nick Hornby’s column ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading‘ in the McSweeney’s writing mag The Believer is always the thing I turn to first, and this month’s (well, March/April – but it has to be rowed across the Atlantic in a bath tub, it seems) is one of the best for ages. He is ostensibly writing about…

  • The Nausea of Digital Reflux

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    Re-pins, re-tweets, re-posts, likes, shares and reddits… sometimes social networks seem like a case of terrible digital reflux, where everything you consume is reprocessed, redigisted, remixed, reconstituted…and begins to repeat on you. Surfing the net soon makes me ache for the quiet privacy and mystery of making original. Sketching, writing, playing, thinking without surfing, reading…

  • ‘We Need Books That Hit Us Like a Painful Misfortune’

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    Interesting article on Ceasefire looking at Zizek and de Botton, which includes this great quote from Kafka: “Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?…

  • Holographic Resurrection | Tupac, R2D2 and Pirate Performance

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    I have to say, I’m pretty stunned… I really didn’t know this was yet possible, but there’s a great piece in The Independent today about the holographic resurrection of Tupac Shakur at the recent Coachella festival – using technology developed by the British firm Musion. The footage above – start around 15 seconds in –…

  • The Society of the Spectacle(s)

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    Ended up going to see Orbital last night – some nice throwback tunes in the rather odd, but acoustically brilliant Royal Albert Hall. The gig was good, but as is normal with this sort of ‘live’ electronic stuff, there’s not a lot to look at musically, and with the beats going around my mind starting…