Red Labor

We believe in transparency and sharing, which lead us to this experiment in hosting our latest art piece and its source photos as a download for remixing.

The horseman meets the oarsman by Red Labor — super high-res interactive

Our experiment in hosting an open remix

Trends in digital culture have shaped our thinking about contemporary image making, image rights/ownership and the idea of originals and copies. Having an artistic foundation rooted in digital concepts puts us in a unique position in art history where images (originals and otherwise) are increasingly easier to copy, not harder. The major media companies try to defy this when it’s obvious they should embrace it; people sharing your art isn’t a crime, it’s good for culture and humanity. Maybe originals are starting to lose value at this point in time; certainly the ways in which we discuss and share images (and other art media) are changing. We like change, so this seems like the logical next step: we’ve decided open up all future projects and offer the original layered photoshop file as well as associative resource files for remixing. Sharing makes us happy.

So, we got an Amazon S3 account for file storage and we’re releasing our files under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license. Download our elements and remix them in your own art. There should be some interesting art that will come out of this. At some point we’ll review all of the uploads and our favorite pieces will be posted here. If the artists are interested maybe we’ll get a small edition of prints made and sell them on Resist Today; we’ll work out details like that with individual artists. Josh and I are winging this; let’s see where it goes.

Email us your remix (proper upload form coming shortly)

About the piece

We decided to try something different with this piece: we started with a photo shoot. Portraits, close-ups of our face, skin textures, macro shots of hair, eyes and tongue. Josh started working on a horse-like head made up of some drawings he scanned as well as our skin textures; I started making a photo collage of strange portraits that merged different elements of our faces into a few odd looking portraits. Then Josh remixed my version for a while and started this visual dialogue between my faces and his horse head. Finally we both sat down in person and made some changes together to finish the piece. We’ve long been enamored by all things grungy, messy, painted, touched by human hands, eroded by nature and marked by entropy, so naturally this piece has some grunge in it. The final piece is 70x30 inches on canvas and was in the Pale Horse’s “The Second Coming” show in St. Pete, Florida.

Framed or unframed prints are available.

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Remix downloads

We invite you to download our source files and make new art with them. At some point we’ll post our favorite pieces that people send us and work with artists to get some kind of edition printed and sold on Resist Today. We’ll post some details as things go; we’re embracing the unknown and seeing where this takes us.

The layered PSD file has been saved to ensure compatibility with older versions of Photoshop. We tend to flatten elements as we go to keep memory use down, so this file includes a layer group with Dave’s layered piece prior to remixing/flattening.

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