Jul 26, 2024

“I do not in any way want to commercialize the films. We do it because we love it. And for the vanity of the arts. Putting them into the domain of the Creative Commons is a direct, clear statement”

After a busy day at the Library coalface, last night I headed to the Francis Alÿs exhibition at the Barbican hoping to switch off from work and enjoy a bit of culture.

Alÿs is a Belgian artist based in Mexico working in a wide range of media, including film, painting, photography, performance and video. The Barbican exhibition focuses on a long-term project over the past two decades led by Alÿs and his team of collaborators that documents children’s play around the world. Since 1999, Alÿs has recorded the lived experience of children at play in different contexts and environments in over 15 countries as part of his Children’s Games video series. Now approaching 50 in number, the Barbican exhibition is the most comprehensive survey of the Children’s Games series to date.

The exhibition opens with Imbu, #30 in the series, a mesmerising film of a crowd of children at dusk in the Democratic Republic of Congo mimicking the sound and movement of a swarm of mosquitoes above them.

At the end of the film credits a Creative Commons logo briefly flashed up. I see this logo at least a hundred times a week as part of my work in the Library at Goldsmiths managing our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO) and supporting and advocating for open access publication. I initially thought that I was getting a flashback to work and was slightly irritated at the fact that I never seem able to completely switch off from my job. But as I watched more of the films of children at play in Nepal, Denmark, Cuba, Mexico, Iraq, Hong Kong, Morocco, Afghanistan and London, the Creative Commons symbol was displayed every time at the end of the credits, and it was clear that Alÿs is using Creative Commons licensing as a crucial element of his practice.

In my role as Open Access Adviser, I help to support practice researchers in the visual and performing to arts to create an effective digital representation of their research on the GRO repository. I know when speaking to practice researchers that defining and protecting intellectual property in practice research is complex and it is an area that many researchers in the performing and visual arts understandably lack confidence in.

As I spent more time at the exhibition, I began to think that exploring Alÿs’s work would be an interesting route into discussing what Creative Commons licences are, how they can work for artists and practice researchers, and how Alÿs and other artists have found Creative Commons licensing to be beneficial to their work.

What are Creative Commons licences?

Creative Commons is a system of licences for digital content. They provide a way for creators to licence the use of material they create and share. Creators retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work.

Creators can build a license which suits their needs and authorise the appropriate use of their work. There are six main licences; the more letters in the licence, the more restrictive it is:

• CC BY (Attribution Licence): anyone can reuse the work as long as attribution is made to the original creator of the work (i.e. they must cite the original work). This allows maximum dissemination, and it enables all kinds of academic and creative reuse.
• CC BY-SA (Share Alike): the work can be reused for all kinds of purposes, but any newly created work must also be shared under the same licence (e.g. you could not create a new work and then issue it under a more open or more restrictive licence).
• CC BY-ND (No Derivatives): the work can be reused as is, without modification. This might be useful if the integrity of the original work is important.
• CC BY-NC (Non-Commercial): all kinds of reuse are permitted as long as they are for non-commercial purposes.
• CC BY-NC-SA (non-commercial, share alike): re-use permitted only for non-commercial purposes; any newly created work must be shared under the same licence.
• CC BY-NC-ND: the most restrictive CC licence. It only allows others to freely download and redistribute the work for non-commercial purposes, but not modify or build upon it for any purpose.

Francis Alÿs licences his films CC BY-NC-ND which enables the example below to be shared on this blog. Further examples of Alÿs’s films are available on his website.

Alÿs, F. (2015). ‘Cut’ (CC BY-NC-ND)

The licences allow other people to know how to use a work in an appropriate way without infringing copyright, ensuring creators get the appropriate credit. Creative Commons licences do not replace copyright; they let users of digital works to know what they can and cannot do with that content. It protects the rights of creators, while helping them achieve wide distribution of their work.

Creative Commons licencing underpins the system of open access publication and is now commonly used to licence journal articles, monographs, edited collections, PhD theses and research datasets. Although, the licences can be used for any digital content they are yet to be widely applied to licence work produced by practice researchers in the visual and performing arts.

How do Creative Commons licences work for artists and practice researchers?

Defining and protecting intellectual property rights in practice research can be complex. Practice research is often collaboratively produced and can make use of multimedia documentation which can have particularly complex copyright and licensing implications.

Creative Commons licencing will not be appropriate for every practice research project, but many practice researchers have found that making their work openly available under a Creative Commons licence is the most efficient and ethical route for sharing practice research outputs.

In addition to institutional repositories such as GRO which have been the cornerstone for preserving practice research outputs and making them discoverable, there are many interesting examples of practice researchers making their work available through new open access platforms.

Research Catalogue is a non-commercial, collaboration and publishing platform for artistic research with much of its content made available under a Creative Commons licence. The platform hosts several open access journals that disseminates artistic research, including the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), Journal of Sonic Studies and HUB — Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society.

Other examples include The Journal of Embodied Research which focuses on the dissemination of embodied knowledge through the medium of video, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Studies a peer-reviewed journal of videographic film and moving image studies, Screenworks  an open access publication of practice research in film and screen media,  PARSE an international artistic research publishing platform, and Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies, a five-year research project exploring Africans’ contributions to contemporary screen worlds and audiovisual cultures that makes content available under a Creative Commons licence.

Francis Alÿs on Creative Commons licensing

Francis Alÿs has spoken about the benefits that Creative Commons licensing brings to his work:

“I do not in any way want to commercialize the films. We do it because we love it. And for the vanity of the arts. Putting them into the domain of the Creative Commons is a direct, clear statement. Also, before I start filming, I always tell all the people involved that they will be able to download and watch the films, that the films will not be commercialized, and that nobody is making money out of this. This makes the relation much healthier.

His long-time collaborator Rafael Ortega added that:

“When you put something in the domain of the Creative Commons, people make it theirs. This is very interesting for me because it puts me into contact with a lot of people. I meet will all kinds of people who work with children or, for instance, visit refugee camps to help children as part of NGO work. Some of these people have used the Children’s Games as a trigger to talk to children in particular situations. A friend of mine works as a psychiatric researcher and uses Children’s Games with some of the patients to talk about their memories of childhood. The series has become something completely and gloriously uncontrollable.” (Claes, G. and Symons, S. (2023). ‘Interview with Francis Alÿs and Rafael Ortega, Nov. 9 2022’, in Claes, G. and Symons, S. (ed.) Francis Alÿs: The Nature of the Game. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp.51-52)

Although, Creative Commons licensing will not be appropriate for every practice research project, it is inspiring to see artists engaging with open licensing and speaking so eloquently about the benefits it can bring in widening access to their work and enabling groups and individuals to reuse the films in novel ways.

Further help and support

If you want to find out more about open access, Creative Commons licensing and using GRO you can read our LibGuide.

In the Library, we support practice researchers at Goldsmiths to create an effective digital representation of their research on GRO. If you need help or advice on adding your practice research to GRO or would like to arrange a 1:1 training session you can contact gro@gold.ac.uk.

Pieter Sonke, Online Research Collections