Liquid Culture

**Liquid Culture is part of the Free Culture UK movement, a national organization which aggregates grassroots groups that promote an open, participatory culture.

Our aim is to promote awareness of social, cultural and political issues related to free culture and free software, to promote the use of Creative Commons licenses for creative works and of Free Software Foundation licenses for software.

We believe the current global movements and crossings of people, cultures, media, ideas and technologies to be a uniquely exciting opportunity for people to independently reshape the social and cultural environment and to build a better global community based on inclusion instead of artificial barriers.

Free access to culture and to communication tools is a fundamental prerequisite for the development of this non-hierarchical, distributed and active human community, and defending and promoting this freedom. Our central aim is to support Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation.

We're focusing on our local environment and are open to collaboration and exchange with other UK and overseas groups sharing similar aims and ideals towards a multi-dimensional and liquid society.

What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization. Through free legal tools, we help enable the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge.

With our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses, Creative Commons provides a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work based on your conditions. For example, Creative Commons licenses allow you to easily change your copyright terms from the default: "all rights reserved" to the conditional: "some rights reserved."

Please note that Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright. Instead they work symbiotically alongside copyright, enabling a person to modify his/her copyright terms to best suit his/her needs.

 

What is the Free Software Foundation?

One of the most successful social movements to arise from the computing culture, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing, is the Free Software Movement. However, the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching everyone, from our friends and neighbors to our work colleagues not only about the danger of not having software freedom, but also about the danger of a society losing control over its computing. While this movement distinguishes among the various non free distribution schemes as to how far they fall short of being free, all are equally unethical. Free software is when the program's users have the three essential freedoms:

  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose, as desired.
  • The freedom to learn how the program works, and modify it according to your computing needs. Obviously, access to the source code is a precondition.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies of the program or a modified versions to others thereby benefiting the whole community

 

Join Liquid Culture!

If you would like to be part of the exciting Creative Commons environment in Goldsmiths College please create an account on this website and drop us a line at info@liquidculture.info. We'll get back to you with all the information you need and a Liquid Culture welcome pack!

We embrace all, whether a geek or a jock. Some of our founding members have gone on to do cutting edge technical design work. Several were/are involved in the cutting edge cloud based Saleforce platform which manu businesses and organizations are flocking to. Salesforce is considered by many to be the leading CRM system available. CMS is "business speak" for Customer relationship management, an approach to managing a company's interaction with current and future customers among other things. The user interface for the Salesforce CRM application Configuration enables businesses and organizations to modify objects, fields, validation rules, workflow, security settings, formulas, etc. with more configurable features available with higher iterations of Salesforce. You can see it gets pretty technical, particularly if customizing Salesforce with specifically developed apps is needed. See what's involved. Anyway, some of these "geeks" are improving business processes through the use of Salesforce. Who knows, many of you out there might end up working in the fast growing technology field and you'll be able to point back to Liquid Culture as the defining moment that pointed you in that direction.

Membership fee (as for any society of the Goldsmiths College Students Union) is 4 GBP per year.

Our award-winning Goldsmiths Students’ Union provides a range of services and student development opportunities including clubs, societies, volunteering opportunities, sports facilities, student media, representation, advice, meeting rooms, and entertainment.

Did you know that Goldsmiths was recently voted one of the top political universities as voted by students in a Which? University poll.

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Education Events

Goldsmiths College, University of London (perhaps one of the first universities to do this) is offering new graduate research students starting their courses in September 2005 the unique opportunity to have a lecture specifically focused on Creative Commons copyright during induction week.

Tuesday 27 September, 2005
12.00-1.00pm, room MB 137

Creative Commons: a range of protections and freedoms for researchers, authors and artists
Lecture by Andrea Rota, member of Liquid Culture

Download the media kit (slides, handout, list of materials used) and remix it! With the exception of the third party logos used in the slides, the presentation is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

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Liquid Culture Flix Screening Programmes

Featuring some of the most exciting films and videos under a Creative Commons license from festivals and creative projects worldwide, the Liquid Culture Flix screening programme offers the public and the creative community an all-visual introduction to participatory filmmaking, grassroots creative and cultural projects, issues of freedom of speech and expression, and to the fast-growing worldwide Free Culture environment.

The new Liquid Culture Flix video screening programme starts in Goldsmiths College on Thursday 6 October 2005.

 

Thursday 6 October, 2005 at 5.15pm, Small Hall Cinema
Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW

 Admission is free!

First episode: a walk through big media and manipulation of information, with original interviews used in the highly acclaimed film "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism".

The Outfoxed film itself is not available under a Creative Commons license because BraveNewFilms could not clear rights on some video material copyrighted by Fox News. On the contrary, the Outfoxed interviews are available under a Creative Commons license allowing anyone to sample them freely in their own works. Even Fox News.

Extra behind-the-scenes material will also be screened.

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The new Liquid Culture Flix video screening programme is at its second rendezvous this Thursday.

Thursday 20 October, 2005 at 5.15pm, Small Hall Cinema
 Goldsmiths College, New Cross, London SE14 6NW

 Admission is free!

Flix #2: Nosferatu, one of the must-not-miss classicals of all times, is available for fans to watch and remix in the public domain.

Nosferatu was originally shot in 1922 by F.W. Murnau. He had wanted to film a version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but his studio was unable to obtain the rights to the story. Murnau decided to film his own version and made only slight changes to the story. The resultant movie has many similarities to Stoker's original tale.

"Dracula" became "Nosferatu" and the names of the characters changed, with Count Dracula changed to Count Orlok. Lawsuits followed, but Nosferatu as a remix of creativity was not affected.

Would this still be possible today, when media corporations want to control every single bit of culture that is created and shared?

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**Liquid Culture is a distributed network of collaborators. At this time the people working on Liquid Culture are: Jonas Andersson, Adnan Hadzi, Andrea Rota and Melissa Fernández, among others.

LiquidCulture.info