From the same people who brought us the Helsinki Complaints Choir comes the Brioni 2007 Summit of Micronations.

The works of the YKON group are situations rather than objects. The key thing is their approach: people as social communities producing speech and ideas. The group typically brings together different elements to create situations somewhere between serious and playful, even absurd sometimes.

Their booklet (PDF) produced for the M8 mini-summit at the Singapore biennale in 2006 gives an insight into their thinking:

After a long period of oppression, localism is back, but in a more democratic and environmentalist form. If we are not in some sense even living in a time of dialects, perma-culture, and village thinking, a powerful wave of admiration and interest for the small and the superlocal is rising.

On this growing wave of consciousness, micronations gather an aura of pioneering (some central tenets of) the spirit of our era.

Welcome to the ocean of ‘differentialism’, ‘federationalism’, ‘segregationalism’, and ‘autonomism’. From out of the blue, the small and wild ones surf in, tanned by their freedom of distant, yet not found shores, untouched by the painful prisons of everyday bureaucracy which all big states, communities, and alliances from China to Coca-Cola, United Nations, and even overgrown computer game communities have to surrender to.

The times are changing, who knows how and to what extent, but at this peculiar moment of world history the rebellious Hobbits of nationalism and state ideology are a newly-found wonder, bringing us a scent of far away islands with necklaces of utopian promises draped around their necks.

David Fulford’s work captures an extraordinary sense of life — from the dramatic candid portrait of his mother (Untitled, above), which featured in this year’s BP Portrait Award exhibition, to the wistful gaze of Untitled (Harry), below.

David’s studying at Camberwell College of Arts, and his work has included conceptual painting and portraiture as well as illustration and hand rendered stop-motion animation. He’s currently in the process of documenting a recent trip to Kenya, part of a broader project to explore the confluence of portraiture and anthropology.

A portfolio of David’s work can be found online, along with contact details.

“The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences. Because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.”

The article suggests that we’re becoming more aware of and upset by plagiarism, and it points to the advances in self promotion and self publishing which have swept the world over the last few years. An almost entrepreneurial desire to maximally exploit ones own publishing power means that when we see people making money from what we perceive to be the work of others, we feel the need to express a vitriolic disgust.

It’s true that the opportunities for self commercialisation, as the article puts it, have increased. Whether one chooses to blog, or to post videos on YouTube, or whatever, it’s easy to publish and own content. And it doesn’t seem unnatural to want to protect that content, and have some control over the way it’s used — after all, that’s what the Creative Commons project is all about.

At the same time, though, I’d be interested to find out whether the opportunities for influence, and therefore unconscious inspiration, have grown in number.

My hypothesis is this, taking the literary world as an example: ten years ago, people reading newspapers, magazines and books probably read in greater volume from a smaller number of authors than someone today, who’s not only faced with the same array of print publications but millions of blogs and websites. As a result, those opportunities for unconscious inspiration have grown in number, and so it’s becoming increasingly hard to be individual at the sentence level, as demanded by Gladwell’s narcissists.

Whether that supposition is correct or not I don’t know, but I wonder whether those people offended by Ian McEwan’s writing are similarly horrified by Shakespeare’s borrowing. How do we define the boundary between inspiration and theft?

Some clever observations, although none of them shocking — while vaguely amusing, the whole performance seems frustratingly impotent as a piece of performance art.

On a side note, the Guardian reports that Verizon have signed a deal with YouTube which will see popular clips being made available in a mobile-friendly format.

Writes Andrew Clark:

Critics suggested the limited scope of the deal could undermine the key to YouTube’s popularity — the freedom to browse through a vast archive of largely uncensored clips. But mobile phone companies believe even a small-scale offering will encourage customers to sign up for lucrative web browsing services.

Could YouTube finally bring the 3G operators something worth marketing?

VaXzine’s mind maps are a stunning visual feast — and certainly worth wasting half an hour gazing at. A sort of violent manifesto of positivity, it’s often hard to believe that they’re genuine examples of note taking.

He also links to a page about information mapping theory, which has this to say about visualisation:

Many organizations attempt to manage information by cataloging it in databases, filtering it through complex algorithms, and presenting the results in written and graphical formats. Scant methodology, however, has been applied to the organization of data and its presentation to make it immediately comprehensible, in innovative visual formats at multiple levels, and for varying audiences. These are the minimal requirements to enable the making of correct and critically timed decisions. The management of knowledge and the taming of information overload are critical endeavors of every practice.

Maybe it’s time to scribble more.