a report by Nalini Haynes
Vision Machine is a kind of ‘open source’ comic book project by Greg Pak, R. B. Silva, DYM, Java Tartaglia and Charles Pritchett. The comic book itself features a story exploring the future of media, mostly relating to the internet and current moves to censorship and control, including companies claiming copyright over individuals’ work through the unread fine print in the terms and conditions. With the push from companies like Sony who seems to be trying to hold ISPs accountable for the actions of their clients, and the US government seeking to lock down the internet and Australia periodically visiting the government imposed netnanny regime, the themes of this comic are extremely relevant to us today.
Vision Machine goes beyond this. This project is effectively open source, with not only the PDF available for free download, but paper copies are free for interested people. The idea is to invite people to contribute, to grow this project and explore these issues. The conditions seem fairly simple: primarily, give credit to the people whose work you’re building on, and keep your part of this project ‘open source’ (not copyrighted) too.
I think this is a visionary project, and I’d like to see it grow. Write in with URLs and stories relating to this project. I’ll publish what I can to follow this project
Previously published in Dark Matter issue 6, November 2011. This blog post has been pre-dated to reflect the original publication date.
