[music playing] The internet is this great, organizing force, brings with it a lot of power and a lot of opportunity.
The internet was encouraging a wide range of people to create and to share their creativity.
The internet revolutionized the way that we experience and interact with artistic work.
[music playing] The internet's incredible ability to align people with similar interests makes it very possible for normal people to make big things happen, and that's something that wasn't possible at any other time.
We wanted to have a space that was devoted for people to explore creativity, to indulge those sorts of ideas that everyday life make really difficult to follow through on.
The hard stuff about art is to fund it and to find an audience, and here you get to do both right from the beginning.
We see Kickstarter as being a medium that is very distinct.
It is something where the backers of a project will benefit from its success just as much as its creator.
It's something that's probably driven more by creative expression than some sort of commercial interest, so I think for a creator it has very little risk.
It's a great way to mitigate a lot of the challenging things about art.
Kickstarter projects have not just found support from audiences on the internet, but they've also found support in the real world.
We've had projects get book deals, land in the Whitney Museum, get Oscar nominations.
10% of the films that got into Sundance this year were Kickstarter funded.
Over 10% of the films that got into South by Southwest this year were Kickstarter funded.
So we're seeing over and over that the products that find support, they're not just these novelty things that manage to find love from the Internet.
They're things that have gone on to have real significance in the greater world.
There's a project called Double Fine, which is by a game developer named Tim Schafer.
Tim is a legendary guy.
He's made a lot of games that people have really loved.
He's also been the guy that's always been on the margins of the video game industry.
Even he has a hard time getting things he wants made.
And so rather fight against the system as he's done over and over and over, here he took the opportunity to go straight to his fans and give them a chance to make a game with him, and that raised $1 million in its first 24 hours.
It's the kind of thing that I think showed a lot of people the amount of power and authority they have with their audiences, and it's going to lead to a lot more like it.
And so at this moment, with the internet being what it is, this idea of people contributing to the arts in this kind of way is really able to take hold and flourish in a way that it never had the chance to do before.
We had a regime of copyright, and the internet completely flipped the technical foundation upon which that regime had been built.
Creative Commons is just a nonprofit corporation, and we're committed to only one thing, to make it simple for artists to choose the freedoms they want their creativity to carry.
Copyright law has always been about I create a work.
I don't want it released or used or exploited in any way that I don't control.
Fine.
Now, shift to the digital world.
There's kids taking some video images and posting it on YouTube.
They don't care what you do with the work.
Or academics who write articles, and they want other people to copy and distribute their articles.
I don't care what you do with my work.
I just want my work out there.
So people have come to recognize that this isn't a simple black and white are you for copyright or against it.
They begin to recognize the space between black and white that Creative Commons is trying to occupy.
So what we did is built a series of free, copyright licenses.
You can say take this work and share it, do whatever you want with it, but you have to give me attribution.
Or like Wikipedia uses our Attribution ShareAlike licence.
What that means is take it, exploit it commercially, modify it, but if you modify it, you have to release your modification under the same free license.
Or we have a noncommercial licence which basically says take it, share it, do what you want with it, but if you want to commercially exploit this, then you need to talk to me about getting permission.
These are basic ways to try to divide the world between those who need and depend upon their copyright and those who are just creating for the love of their creativity and not for the money.
If you think about the value that has been added to the internet by people voluntarily creating and sharing creativity, it is huge.
Now it's amazing to see that artists through new technologies are able to embrace the internet and actually use it as a tool to create artworks and artistic experiences.
One of the challenges is how do you showcase those works?
How does it continue to live online and have a long term life that would be similar to a physical work?
One first step in that experiment was Chris Milk.
Chris Milk is a film director.
He has collaborated with Arcade Fire on a number of projects.
He developed a physical installation idea for Arcade Fire.
Balls would draw drop at the end of their set.
They'd have LEDs in them.
They'd be synced to go with the crowd.
But then what the challenge is, how do you bring that back online?
So we created a site and a call for people who actually got those balls to submit their photos and their stories, and it was so crazy to see the stories that came in about that.
When you extend the life of a physical project on the web and give people the ability to be remix that media, they'll do some really inventive stuff with it.
For the Marina Abramovic show specifically, the MoMA was putting out portraits of all the people who sat with Marina on Flickr, and so just releasing those images struck a chord with the online community and people started remixing it.
And this wasn't the intention when they put that out.
And I think The Artist Is Present video game is sort of an extension of her physical projects on the web.
Rafael Rozendaal makes works that are for an online consumption.
He started the interesting process of actually creating individual domain names that are sold.
And so they exist as one work of art.
That is, kind of framed by the domain the way that might frame a painting.
The internet is forcing us to broaden what an artistic studio should look like and what an artist themselves, what their language, should be and what language we need to use to talk about them.
My creative utopia is that we have a huge proportion of all of us creating all the time.
There is no preconcept whatsoever to the kinds of things that could be made, and I think that's a very powerful opportunity.
You know, I think you can hopefully start to see radical jumps through this sharing of research and knowledge and see how quickly things progress.
[music playing]