Tech Thoughts, Part 2
This is a continuation post on that fanart citation circlejerk, but a tangent that began here (scroll down).
While it’s easy to go into the legal or moral/ethical aspect of this discussion, there is a technical one as well. Let me cite a few things to get the ball rolling.
First, there is a matter of context. JP said this in a few places:
Basically, if we think of fanart as a thing the artist conjures out of the Nether-Realms and into existence into this World, then, like a familiar, the art is bound to its creator. Now I say this in a simple sense of the analogy, and not the silly “free culture” sense. Simply, creators deserve some rights, may it be natural or artificial. The amount of rights afforded is a function of law and social norms. When we take Saito away from Louise, and free him from his servitude and feelings of affection (seriously he deserves way better) do we not have now a man who is free and moves on with life? And isn’t that a good thing? But what did Louise get from all her trouble? Is Louise big enough of a girl to move on? (Certainly not.)
I already said we should skip the law in this discussion, so there’s that moral/ethical aspect. And it is via that we get to the technical. Here is how we can sever Saito from Louise, the creator and her creation. Danbooru happens to be a site that is of interest to me personally and it serves as a good example.
For starters, a lot of the stuff on Danbooru is cited! You can find a link (source) which takes you to one of these commonly found destinations: pixiv, an artist home page gallery, or another image board. In recent years, a sizable number of the images are even tagged with the artists’ names. I don’t know what % is the stuff cited or what, but given its wealth of useful tags and ultimately its English-language interface it becomes a pretty good source for fanart in terms of a simple storehouse. It’s pretty much a no-brainer many people upload to Danbooru just stuff straight from pixiv. It serves as a reasonable gateway even just in that regard.
Second, which is a really obvious no-brainer, is that pixiv is all Japanese. Perhaps less of a problem than Nicovideo…I mean I had no problem registering an account on pixiv but I imagine it can be difficult. Short of it is, someone whining about using pixiv should actually write an English-language guide for it. Because, uh, it actually helps your cause?
Oh wait a Danbooru thread on just that. Who would’ve thunk.
Third, let’s go back to context. Now this is separate from control. If you have Saito standing next to Louise, you know he’s with her. Now if you have the two of them standing across two different dimensions, you would not have a clue he’s with her if you just saw Saito walking down the street. This doesn’t have anything per se to do with Louise cracking down on Saito with a cat-o-nine-tails but everything to do with removing the “purpose” of the artwork one degree away from its original intention. Now if you’re clever you’d know this is not always the case, as it isn’t. If I read a few chapters of Bakuman in Weekly Shounen Jump versus a few chapters on Onemanga, I’m still getting the full context, more or less. But if someone is “replying” to someone else on lol pixiv via artwork, much like video replies on youtube, then who would know?
And how much more disturbing if we lift poor Mayoi-chan from her novels and insert her in some tragic, yet adult situation? Slashing and doing bad porn on fictional characters are probably some of the worst ways you can do to sever context of creation from creator.
Fact remains far most fanart stand alone beyond the background knowledge necessary to invoke the basic character and franchise concepts. A picture of Azaka Kokutou looking like a prim badass is per se awesome after all. But instead of looking at pixiv confused, a site like Danbooru shows you a simple tag, which points you to the artist. What’s more, it serves to archive it even when the work gets subsequently removed from pixiv…
But my problem is just how Danbooru reduces the artist attribute to the same as one would consider image tags like “long hair” or “dress” or “Christmas.” The contextual link is there for the curious, but the work is now present alone and Louise has to get by with her own skills, with no help from her friends. Well, nothing right or wrong, good or bad about that I think, but it feels a little too lonely, vulnerable.
At any rate, that is the status quo. Is there a way that we can ask for better treatment, on a technical, organizational level, that brings more respect to creators as creators but not as individuals? (Tangent here, but someone whining about artwork has no real artist cred until he is talking his own works, right? This oh-so sacred context exists only between a creator and his or her works.) Solving social problems on the intarwebs through better intarwebs-based, social networking platforms sounds like a no-brainer to me. Here is one valiant attempt–an old-fashion image search engine that might be new to you. I previously proposed (scroll down to my 2nd and 3rd comment) a new organizational structure for Danbooru in which artists may get a different kind of tag, or pool, or something, which elevates it beyond mere intrinsic descriptors of a piece of artwork. It’s just another idea. But whatever works–you youngins know better than I do.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this, which apparently is a guide of sorts and also has a Firefox script to convert portions of the site to English. I dunno, haven’t tried.
The only real problem I have with pixiv is tag-searching. ガンダム would be easy, but character names would be a pain.
For character names, try going to the Wikipedia page on the series. Their character listings often give the kanji for the character’s name. Copy-paste the kanji name into the search of your choice.
Wow. That Danbooru image-search is astounding.
The thing is, while JP is generally on the ball, I don’t think I agree with his argument here. He said, “If I spill a can of paint it’s a paint spill, but if Jackson Pollock does it, it’s art.” This was the basis of his argument for context. But context is never truly preserved, and there is really no reason why JP couldn’t call his paint spill art (he just refuses to do so.) Consider The Treachery of Images: many people never recognize the symbolic confusion that pervades our mental shorthand.
I think people can debate about his context point either way, but in an ideal situation the application platform should be neutral, or flexible that you can use it either way you stand on the issue. But perhaps the way Danbooru (and other image boards) operates indicates a preference already.
A true story about context:
Years ago, MIT put up a Louise Nevelson sculpture next to a common area of two dorms. I passed it daily on my way to work as it was going up.
It was this ugly black thing.
Then, the day after the scaffolding had been cleared away, they finished the installation — the basic structure of organic forms was completed and complemented with dynamic and organic splashes of color. It was really beautiful, and completely transformed my view of the work — from distaste to appreciation.
It was only later that I learned that the colored paint was the work of vandals, and that what Nevelson wanted was the ugly black thing (which was eventually “restored”). But it means that, for me, a lovely work of art was lost forever.
Damn, nice image matching search! And I agree that an artist’s name shouldn’t be reduced to a simple tag. Tagging systems could do the job, but perhaps a little more understood complexity in the system would be nice, tags like:
artist:name
character:name
series:name
The tag system would need to understand that those are prefixes for the “type” of tag. Meh
Er, but the -booru tags have that context already. Character names are highlighted in one color, series names in another, artist names in a third. It’s very easy to look at a list of tags and immediately know “oh, this is the one I click on to search for more by this artist.”
The idea that you have moral rights to someone else’s characters is mistaken to begin with. (Snail porn, right.) We need not discuss that further.
The problem is that “preserving the original context” (presumably, by linking to the artist’s site) is actually something of a technical and social challenge. Technically, that’s a lot of URLs that someone has to index, especially given that images can be (and often are) provided without author information and that someone points out later “oh, this image is by that artist.” Socially, people’s websites move around, artists put images up and take them down, etc. You might click on the link to an artist who drew a lot of Naruto images and find that the web site is full of Boku no Sexual Harassment fanart now, or that all the images were taken down because the artist got a different job, or you might just come up 404.
Now, of course, it’s possible that a fan artist has come up with a series of images that are meant to be viewed as part of an organic whole, the synthesis of which produces a reaction separate from the reactions to the individual elements. But frankly, that just ain’t true most of the time. “Here’s my image gallery, please enjoy” is a heck of a lot more common.
So is there a way to do it more respectfully? No, honestly, there ain’t. Danbooru and its sister sites are not particularly interested in being “respectful” to the artists. They’re big art piracy search engines. It’s their bread and butter. They’re not around to NOT show images. They’re not there for the artist to display avant-garde website designs or the pretty kaleidoscope of thumbnails. They’re there so that someone can browse through a lot of images fast and find stuff that they enjoy. They’re not tools for the artist; in many ways they’re tools against the artist.
@Avatar
I would highly disagree with your conclusion in regards about Danbooru as a tool against the artst. People may download fansubs off tokyotosho but they do still care about Kyoto Animation should they choose to End Endless Eight. In that sense, the only thing that these platforms are against is some level of rights as inherently protected by copyright. However “moral rights” as defined commonly (not legally) is what attribution is about and that’s a separate issue from copyright. This context is often not severed but rather promoted through widespread piracy of artwork. Particularly in music, actually.
The problem with Japanese fanart specifically is that there’s a huge disconnect between artist and artwork. Or maybe perhaps that’s just the case for fanart in general. It doesn’t have to be that “you must go to my fancypants art gallery!!!” but it becomes a matter of having a brand, or trademark on your work. This is the ultimate context that gets tossed, when in reality it’s actually of some interest to preserve (Danbooru has artist tags at all, I imagine, for this reason). Of course most artists do not care for such things, let alone amateur fan artists, but as for people who freely passes around their artwork, it can become meta content of interests that get lost in the shuffle.
Eh, I don’t get that way of looking at it. The -boorus are there to index and distribute images. To the extent that the artist wants that to happen, sure, there’s no conflict. If that’s not what the artist wants to happen, or if the artist wants the art appreciated in a context that is different from what -booru offers, -booru doesn’t give a damn. ;p
At the end of the day, it’s going to be very difficult for me to appreciate the original context even if I’m at the artist’s site, simply because (heh) I can’t read the language. If an artist puts up a picture, I can look at it and say “ooh, pretty”, and if the comment after the pic is “this is the best thing I’ve ever done” or “I utterly hate how this came out and I’m so mad I’m inflicting it on everybody”, it won’t affect my viewing of the pic anyway.
So given that I’ve got to chuck a good bit of context out the door no matter how hard I try, doesn’t it make sense to not get too worked up about context in the first place?
“If that’s not what the artist wants to happen, or if the artist wants the art appreciated in a context that is different from what -booru offers, -booru doesn’t give a damn. ;p”
But if an artist contacts danbooru to take down their works and not post anymore, the website does comply. :/