still/open

These are the notes I took down from my perspective as we presented our group work in the Alessandro Ludovico workshop. Our group handled the content aspect of hypothetical open source publication. We discussed the group making comments on these notes as there was plenty more discussed in the session that my be quite different form what I write here:

What it is about? Face to global is the title of the publication. The sub-heading for the publication “Source to Openness”. The concept for the idea comes from previous publication examples ‘Factsheet’ and ‘Whole Earth’ that Alessandro mentioned in his presentation. The publication is a directory for all things ‘open source‘ starting at the local level. This is what is happening in your neighbourhood from free wireless, free software development through to community based activities like ‘mothers groups’ who act as type of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. These groups as an example are voluntary brought together to network, socialise and share knowledge about raising a child. This is specialist knowledge that cuts through all the plethora of books and literature on the subject. The conversations in these groups are about editing this knowledge through hands on experience. ‘Face to global’ provides an index and reviews all these activities occurring locally. Activities are mapped and can be viewed electronically via social software. A theoretical influence “Think Global and Act Local”. The publication in hardcopy format or as a softcopy pdf, from front to back, starts local and progresses to global. Working with the ‘mute’ idea of being able to re-edit your own publication from existing content each location has the potential to assemble a publication that starts local and moves to specific global interests. With the editorial there would be differing forms of editorial overview applied to the varying types of publication that emerge from the content. An aspect of this approach would be to facilitate specialist publications like from the mothers group for example. Other publications could be edited from user-generated content that is collected through some type of social software. Each distributed in varying ways using for example print-on-demand for hardcopy output where the idea is to distribute tangible real paper publications back into the community. Like Brewster Kahle with his Internet Bookmobile these could be printed on street corners on demand.

Hi all workshop participants,

This a reminder of the times and dates for the upcoming workshops.

All workshops are from 9am - 5pm. Please be on time! We have lots of great material to get through.

The Perth days are 11th and 12th and in Brisbane are the 15th and 16th. See you then!

http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/stillopen/

Melinda said it would be ok to post some info about an event in Brisbane. For those attending the lab and arriving a bit early, this event might be of interest. The event is being organised by Keith Armstrong who is also attending the Lab.

MEDIA ART, TECHNOLOGY AND THE POLITICAL
Challenging positions on new directions for Arts practice, technology and the political
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Noon - 2:00pm
The Hall Z2-226 - QUT Creative Industries Precinct
Musk Ave, Kelvin Grove

This seminar brings together two seminal thinkers and practitioners to each present challenging positions on new directions for Arts practice, technology and the political. Following their 30 minute presentations the speakers will engage in conversation, which will subsequently be opened up to the floor.

PRESENTATION 1: SIMON PENNY
University of California Irvine, Arts Computation and Engineering Group Director, Media Artist - Experience and Abstraction: The Arts and the Logic of Machines

PRESENTATION 2: TONY FRY
Designer, Writer and Editor of Design Philosophy Papers Journal - From ‘That Which Is Not One’ to Another Practice

Presented by QUT Creative Industries Faculty & the QUT Computational Arts Research Group. Introduced by Dr Keith Armstrong (QUT Research Fellow/Media Artist).

This is a short article I wrote for Dumbo Feather, Pass it On about Creative Commons:

Elliott Bledsoe

You’re online, you see some prose you like and you press ‘apple and c’. Copied. Simple as that. When the functionality of the internet lets content be copied as easily as that, it is hard to maintain the traditional “all rights reserved”/can’t touch this rhetoric of copyright. Sure, at law it’s a breach of copyright. But that doesn’t stop copying. There are a lot of internet users who don’t even realise that the copies they make are illegal. Copyright is dead.

Stop. Remix that. Copyright isn‚Äôt dead, it‚Äôs being (re)born. To the copyright traditionalists I say stop trying to stop copying, because you won’t. Start looking at regulating how people can copy. There is a mass of benefits to be gained by letting people have access to your content. The trick is knowing how to identify what bits to give away and what bits to keep. “But how?” you’re thinking, “I don’t know anything about copyright and I can’t afford a lawyer.” No problems, think Creative Commons.

Creative Commons is remixing copyright into a voluntary “some rights reserved” system. At the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences that are made freely available to authors and artists and which provide a range of protections and freedoms for their material. For CC it’s about options. Want to be recognised as the author of your blog? Then require Attribution. Don’t want others making money from your animation? Easy. Put the work under a Non-Commercial term. Just want people to pass your novella around but don’t want them changing it? A No Derivatives licence will do that. And what if you want to see what people will do mashing up your work, but think they should share too? No problems, Share Alike compels them to let others remix anything they’ve made from your work.

But why stop there? Want to be acknowledged as the creator of your podcast and allow people to use it for non-commercial purposes? Put it under an Attribution-Non-Commercial licence and you’ve done just that. Using the CC licence generator on creativecommons.org, a mix and match of the permissions is as easy as answering a few questions.

At Creative Commons we don’t want to get rid of copyright, we want to remix it.

http://creativecommons.org
http://creativecommons.org.au

Elliott Bledsoe is a Project Officer with Creative Commons Australia. CC in Australia is part of the funded research under the Australian Research Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, www.cci.edu.au.

This is for everyone taking part in the workshops. You will need to download and install the following software:

http://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Software
http://processing.org/

As an introduction to some of my interests regarding Open Source I’d like to reproduce a post by Rob Myers that was originally published on rhizome.org. I suppose Myers summarises my general outlook in this debate.

Further down the post Myers talks of a potential infringement of Cadbury’s trademark. French net-based artist Christophe Bruno has made a humorous project which I think relates to this idea.

Wikipedia comes under fire - have a read of this article. I’ve also recently come across a couple of amusing Wikipedia based hacks - unwiki and wikiscanner.

The Myers post in its entirety:

Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of commons based peer production. This means work made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals. For Eric Raymond the virtue of Open Source is its efficiency. Open Source can create better products faster than the old closed source model. Many of the most successful software programs in use today, particularly on the internet, are Open Source.

Applying the ideas of Open Source to other projects, be they political, philosophical or artistic, is more difficult than it might seem. The idea of Open Source as a more efficient means of production has nothing to say about what Open Source politics or art should be like.

To take the example of the Open Congress event at Tate Modern, artists struggled to find an Open Source ideology to apply to their art, activists struggled to find an Open Source ideology to apply to their organisations, and theorists grinned and invoked Deleuze and Spinoza to cover the gaps.

This confusion is not a problem with the idea of Open Source. Rather it is the intended result of it. The name Open Source was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness and ideological vacuity. This was intended to make the results of a very strong ideology more palatable to large corporations by disguising its origins. That ideology is Free Software.

Free Software is a set of principles designed to protect the freedom of individuals to use computer software. It emerged in the 1980s against a backdrop of increasing restrictions on the use and production of software. Free Software can therefore be understood historically and ethically as the defence of freedom against a genuine threat.

Once software users freedoms are protected the methodology that we know as Open Source becomes possible and its advantages become apparent. But without the guiding principles of Free Software the neccessity and direction of Open Source cannot be accounted for. Open Source has no history or trajectory, it cannot account for itself or suggest which tasks are neccessary or important. Free Software requires freedom, which is a practical goal to pursue.

Free Software is a historical development, a set of principles, and a set of possibilities. Free Software projects have converged on the methodology that Raymond describes as Open Source because of this. To describe this methodology as commons based peer production causes further confusion. There are no peers in a Free Software project. If contributions are deemed to be of acceptable quality, they are added to the project by its appointed gatekeepers. If not, they are rejected and advice given. This methodology is a structured and exclusive one, but it is meritocratic. Any contribution of sufficient quality can be accepted, and if someone makes enough such contributions they themselves may gain the trust required to become a gatekeeper.

This confusion leads to projects such as Wikipedia trying to create an open space for anyone to use as they wish. This leads to social darwinism, not freedom, as the contents of that space is determined by a battle of wills. Wikipedia has had to evolve to reproduce many of the structures of a real Free Software project to tackle these problems. But people still regard its earlier phase as a model for emulation, whereas it should serve as more of a warning.

It is therefore the condition of Freedom rather than the condition of Open Source that art should aspire to. Prior to the extension of copyright to cover art as well as literature, art was implicitly free. The physical artefacts of art were expensive to own and difficult or impossible to transport. But the content of art was free to use. Michaelangelo could rip off christian and pagan imagery to paint a ceiling, generations of artists could riff on the theme of the cruxifiction, and anyone could carve a statue of Venus. The representational freedom of artists, part of which is the freedom to depict and build or comment on existing culture, to continue the conversation of culture, is the freedom of art.

With photography and now electronic media, copyright and trademarks have increasingly restricted the artists freedom to continue the conversation of culture. Where once artists could paint gods and kings, they must now be careful not to paint chocolate and the colour purple or they will infringe Cadburys trademark. And new computer technology makes it possible to physically lock artists out of mass media imagery, closing off part of the world from arts freedom of representation.

In this context artists are not volunteers when they take on issues of cultural freedom. They are exemplars. Free art, a free culture, is of vital importance for a free society. Part of this freedom may be ideas of commons based peer production. But it is important not to confuse the results of an ideology with its principles. It is these principles that artists should pursue.

How then can art learn from Free Software?

* Artists should campaigning to oppose the extension of copyright and trademark law and the reduction of fair use.

* Artists should use copyleft licensing to ensure the free circulation of ideas.

* Artists who are interested to do so can investigate the use of collaborative project management.

* Artists who are interested to do so should produce work to show the value of fair use and the public domain.

* Artists who are interested to do so should challenge copyright maximalists and censors by using mass media imagery and transgressive
imagery.

* Artists should use Free Software and free (or open) file formats for accessibility, and help drive improvement of them.

What mistakes of Open Source can people avoid?

* Read Free Software Free Society and Free Culture not The Cathedral And The Bazaar.

* Dont try to organise your organisation in an Open Source way. That methodology is for content, not structure.

* Dont try to emulate early Wikipedias world-writeability. Emulate the meritocratic model that Wikipedia is converting to instead.

* Dont hide your ideology. Renaming Free Software to Open Source has cost the people who have done so the biggest software market in the US, as the military are much more comfortable with freedom than
they are with openness.

regards,

Pierre

For my part in the ANAT Still/Open workshops we’ll explore a little bit about the history of independent publishing (from the zines till the electronic networks), and how it evolved through different technologies and methods of distribution. Furthermore the many strategical and aesthetic differences and similarities between the ‘blog’ phenomenon and the printed magazines will be analyzed and discussed, reflecting on why the death of paper never happened, and how paper and pixels are more and more integrating their peculiarities. It’ll be useful then to see a few practical cases of how to integrate an open source approach with print-on-demand and pdf-based technologies. Finally we’ll discuss how establishing networks (like Mag.net or the experiment of the Documenta Magazine project) is actually strategical for surviving the publishing market niches retaining the freedom of expression that every independent publishing effort needs.

Links useful to check:
http://www.magnet-ecp.org
http://www.neural.it
http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1

My¬†interest in open source is in its ethos and how that can¬†be applied to¬†or alter the fabric or practices of cities and urban spaces. Whether that’s literally through the use of open source technologies in urban spaces or through¬†practices such as open source design and architecture. Another question that interests me is how open source communities might inflect in the current thinking on ‘creative capital’ and urban revitalisation. My current studies and work in urban planning and design encourages me to look at as many layers and webs of urbanism as I can. I am not particularly computer literate and really do appreciate reading the reassuring comments from the tutors that the workshops will cater to less experienced people.

I’ve just been reading an essay about the Digital Mile Project in Zaragoza, Spain,¬†which is described as an ‘open source city’ experiment. The project was undertaken in conjunction with MIT’s Smart Cities project. The authors Dennis Frenchman and Francisca Rojas in discussing the idea of the open source city¬†write:

It was imagined that an open source approach to the development of content and use of digital media along the Mile would serve serveral purposes. It might help break down people’s fears of technology by being a means of technological capacity building. it might create a sense of ownership of the Mile for Zaragoza’s residents. Moreover, it might provide a means through which people could construct and reveal narratives about the city’s culture, functions and history. Of course, since the Mile will be a networked environment, remote development of content is also possible. That is to say, people could conceivably access, experience and contribute to the development of Zaragoza’s Digital Mile from anywhere in the world …

Once articulated, such an open source concept seemed readily applicable to the design of urban places.

It’s a way of thinking that really needs to filter into the bureaucratic environment and resound through policy making and strategy development for urban design.

My interest in the still/open workshop is motivated by both my teaching and PhD research, with particular focus on a couple of projects that I am currently developing. The first is the Video Vortex conference that I have been working on as a principal researcher with the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) in Amsterdam. Video Vortex focuses on how video is potentially being used on the Internet and critically analyses from an alternative perspective social media websites like YouTube and video blogs. The second project is videodefunct which is an experimental work that explores a hybrid form of video blog. Currently, as a work-in-progress, a number of prototypes are being developed in the open source blog publishing system WordPress. In a broader context this critical analysis of online video practice supports my teaching in the Internet based subjects Networked Media and Integrated Media, in the Media department at RMIT.

Open source as a concept in these activities extends beyond the area of software with important connections into ideologies being explored around copyright as part of ‘free culture’ initiatives and peer-to-peer alternatives. I am interested in examining the notion of what it means to operate, produce and share in an ‘open’ process, through a critical analysis that investigates these “modes of thinking” from varying perspectives.