Open Congress - Introduction • M.A.Francis \

by Mary Anne Francis

Open Congress and its questions
As its title indicates, this section is concerned with an event at Tate Britain, Open Congress, which took place across two days in October 2005 and was organized by the Critical Practice Research Cluster at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. It addressed the possibility of taking the rapidly expanding phenomenon of Free/Libre [and] Open Source Software (FLOSS) and seeing how its methods could apply to art especially, and cultural production more generally. Whereas FLOSS refers to computer programmes/codes that are freely available for anyone to copy, improve and redistribute, we wanted to explore whether and how the ‘transport’ of FLOSS to cultural production would challenge the ruling paradigms of cultural production. Clearly, the enquiry would centrally engage issues of authorship or creativity, along with issues of the ownership of art. But questions of how a FLOSS (Art) practice affects knowledge (what is known and who knows) and governance (who rules, or wields power and how) were also crucial topics. Indeed, the themes of ‘creativity’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘governance’ organized the Congress’ concurrent strands, while plenary sessions addressed topics that cut across all three.

The practice of FLOSS
In playing a part in documenting and evaluating Open Congress, this section of the NODE.London of texts extends a key recognition that was realised both in the preparation for the Congress and the Congress itself. Namely: that the topic of FLOSS properly conceived as a reflexive subject, or a method, is not just an object for investigation but potentially, its medium. The debate around the values of ‘openness’, of collaboration, of breaking down distinctions between producers and consumers – to name a few – are ones that can be pursued at many levels of research and cultural practice. And while the form of an anthology that this section takes is necessarily collaborative in some ways, conventionally at least as a ‘togetherness of texts’, this section of the anthology went further in its ‘open’ production process; suggestions for inclusion came from all quarters.

‘FLOSS’ persists as a structuring motif for our research as the three-stage process of its practice, ‘source – copy/ modify/ derive – redistribute and evaluate’ has given shape to this anthology. Hence a (sub)section comprising, well, ‘source texts’ – for what else to call them? –  is followed by a section delineating how these were appropriated at the Congress, either in the form of re-presentations, ‘amendments’, and ‘derived’ texts, (for instance, in the question of how FLOSS methods transpose, or ‘port’, to use software terminology, to art), and this in turn is logically succeeded by a section which evaluates those copies, amendments, derivatives and their distribution.  At this point, if not before, the work of this anthology is poised to return to practice through better understanding and enhanced criticality.

Sub-se(le)ctions
An editorial openness (again, demanded by the reflexive implications of the subject) cues an explanation of why certain texts appear here and others not: indeed the note of ‘closure’ too rapidly resounds in this selection, and perhaps calls into question the way in which a book, in its traditional form forces crueller limits than online compilations with their hyperlinked archives. Moreover, explanation goes some way to countering the violence of selection that is seldom innocently formal – that is to say, just ‘for reasons of space’.

So, to rationalise the choice of ‘source texts’, and to thank David Berry and Neil Cummings for their work in identifying these. This selection could not overlook the ‘founding’ ‘Free Software Definition’ and ‘The Open Source Definition’, at odds with one another, though they are, in crucial details, if happily conjoined in the acronym ‘FLOSS’. Nor could it avoid an address to the complexities of ‘openness’ as a concept and a practice. First, this takes place via texts that look at openness in social practice (groups and organizations) and the way in which the political identifications of FLOSS principles are, in some respects, opaque or unexpected. That leads into a broader address to the political economy of network culture and its structural ‘others’ in Pasquinelli’s piece. This does service here as a token of the vast ‘post’-Marxist literature that, often in the wake of Negri and Hardt’s Empire, regards the intersection of politics and technology – in the age of the global. (It is productively put into play, for example, with Eben Moglen’s better known but less ambivalent ‘dotCommunist Manifesto’). Finally, two articles engage key principles of FLOSS (facilitation of recombination and ‘the commons’) as they relate specifically to art, or culture in its sense of ‘the arts’.

The second part, pertaining to the Congress’ proceedings, is merely a documentary snapshot, if hopefully indexical as such. Extensive recordings of the many presentations can be found online, either at http://opencongress.omweb.org/modules/wakka/ocdownloads or at http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/open_congress. The Open Congress site http://opencongress.omweb.org also documents the extensive research process that preceded the two days in October and which also addressed ‘openness’ as an issue for organization. The pieces in this part were chosen for their focus on the central question of the ‘porting’ of FLOSS methods to art practice and/or the authors’ willingness to rewrite their Congress presentations for written publication.

As for the third part: here editorial control is most devolved. A whole host of people involved in the Congress in various capacities were asked if they would like to write short reflective and evaluative pieces on their experience of participation in the event. A number agreed. Comments here are left to readers.

The role of the reader is as central to this collection as it was for its cognate, ‘the audience’, at Open Congress which quickly dispensed with the latter’s passive role and engaged them as ‘participants’. Likewise, this Open Congress chapter of this anthology hopes that its components will be re-appropriated – or to use David Berry’s concept – seen as a ‘tool box’, not only as it engineers encounters with different points of view, but also as it aims at a diversity of difference. After Open Congress, it is another opening up of issues that are – or should be – crucial for contemporary critical cultural practice.