Xanadu & Mona Lisa

[Charles Cameron <hipbone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ted, Friends:

Let me put a problem / issue before you...

Suppose for a moment that the Mona Lisa is a digital artwork in which
Leonardo has the rights.  Marcel Duchamp wants to make his own artwork
which will be identical to Leonardo's, except that he is adding a moustache
to Mona, and putting a small note at the bottom of the image which says
LHOOQ (pronounced "elle a chaud au cul" -- "she has a hot ass" if my French
is still working).  Clearly, the rights in Duchamp's work are largely
Leonardo's, but the rights in the moustache and comment are Duchamp's.

Now suppose that someone else wants to make another artwork which has the
basic facial features of the Mona Lisa, but the outlines of nose, eyebrows,
eyes, cheek, mouth and chin, etc., are to be "built" of neon strips -- see:

     http://losangelesdowntown.com/Neon.html

Clearly, the derivation of this work from Leonardo's original is similar to
the derivation of Duchamp's: but, so to speak, *all the pixels* have
changed, in a way that they haven't in the Duchamp work.

How does one (ie Xanadu) assess the dependence of this Neon Lisa on the
original?

This seems to me to be a problem in the comparison of structures, rather
than a simple matter of quotation as with Duchamp.  How far has Xanadu come
towards the point where this type of homology can be explored and
quantified?

I get the impression from Ted's own pages that this may be the sort of
question that deeply interests him, the sort of thing addressed by his
words:

::  I am especially concerned about parallelism in many ways:
::  parallel presentation on computer screens, parallel data
::  structures, and considering how things are alike and different,
::  which requires comparing them in parallel. This is what my
::  computer work is about.

Any comments?

Best,


--
Charles
Charles Cameron <hipbone@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
*
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