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.

by Toni Prug

Ideas Can Not Be Free
The Free Software and free culture movements are today’s loudest opponents of the wide introduction and implementation of patents and copyright, the main tools of intellectual property regimes. At the heart of their arguments lie the values of sharing and creativity. Yet, obsessed as it is with novelty, innovation and the possibility of bursting creativity, theory coming from and around these movements has remained largely free from an engagement with the history of technology and its role in the development of current civilization. Whatever historical reflection does take place is usually limited to the consideration of US history, and works through a re-examination of American documents, events, organizations and processes. Rare exceptions are partial inclusions of French and British histories and cultures, which are read selectively so as to compliment the dominant US discourses that theorise Free Software/culture movements. In British academia, the same has been said about international relations studies,^[1] where “most of the rest of humanity is rated according to its degree of importance to ‘western interests’”. (Pilger, 2002, p 160) No wonder then, that when economy is mentioned within and around Free Software theory, discussion hardly ever moves beyond free markets, and trade and any kind of production are assumed to be beneficial. The logic of growth through creation is unquestioned and its value inflated. As with history, such narrow theorising falls apart under a global view of economics, as we know from ecological studies: U.S. levels of consumption are unsustainable for the rest of population of the planet, and economic growth (Rivero, 2001, p 87), as currently defined, is neither possible or desirable globally without a complete reconceptualisation.^[2]

Labour, Life and Unstable Networks

by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter

In Florian Schneider’s documentary Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), Raj Jayadev of the DE-BUG worker’s collective in Silicon Valley identifies the central problem of temporary labour as one of time. Jayadev recounts the story of ‘Edward’, a staff-writer for the Debug magazine: "My Mondays roll into my Tuesdays, and my Tuesdays roll into my Wednesdays without me knowing it. And I lose track of time and I lose hope with what tomorrow’s going to be". Jayadev continues: ‘What concerns temp workers the most is not so much a $2 an hour pay raise or safer working conditions. Rather, they want the ability to create, to look forward to something new, and to reclaim the time of life’. How does this desire to create, all too easily associated with artistic production, intersect with the experiences of other workers who engage in precarious forms of labour?

by Matteo Pasquinelli

Source:
http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/pasquinelli.html
(from Journal of Hyper(+)drome.Manifestation, September 2004)

Everyone of us is a machine of the real, everyone of us is a constructive machine. - Toni Negri

Technical machines only work if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction. - Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, L’anti-Oedipe

by Jo Walsh

The World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures is a gathering of practitioners, who are also thinkers, in open source GIS, software and hardware, community FM radio and WiFi networking, open information/knowledge, open education,open money ...

by Harwood

C2C Railway Journey <-> ADULT RETURN = The mouth of the Thames to the Tower of London.

by Critical Art Ensemble

Chapter 5 from The Electronic Disturbance by Critical Art Ensemble (abridged)
Source: http://www.critical-art.net/books/ted/ted5.pdf

Plagiarism has long been considered an evil in the cultural world. Typically it has been viewed as the theft of language, ideas and images by the less than talented, often for the enhancement of personal fortune or prestige. Yet, like most mythologies, the myth of plagiarism is easily inverted. Perhaps it is those who support the legislation of representation and the privatization of language that are suspect; perhaps the plagiarist’s actions, given a specific set of social conditions, are the ones contributing most to cultural enrichment. Prior to the Enlightenment, plagiarism was useful in aiding the distribution of ideas. An English poet could appropriate and translate a sonnet from Petrarch and call it his own. In accordance with the classical aesthetic of art as imitation, this was a perfectly acceptable practice. The real value of this activity rested less in the reinforcement of classical aesthetics than in the distribution of work to areas where otherwise it probably would not have appeared. The works of English plagiarists, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, Sterne, Coleridge and De Quincey, are still a vital part of the English heritage, and remain in the literary canon to this day.

by Matthew Fuller

Digitality and objects
If software has a social and technical imaginary, if it is culturally active as a force in itself, what does that mean for data more generally, the objects constructed, giving rise to or handled by software?

by Mike Lenczner

Why Build A Community Owned and Run Wireless Network?
There are two ways to interpret this question. The question asks for reasons why creating and sustaining a free network (often a Community Wireless Networks or CWN) is important. The question could also be what are our motivations. The answers to the second have a lot to do with sharing a beer, with the joy of having friends who understand your jokes and the typical hacker response of “because it’s there”. The first question is what I'll try to address here.

1) Free as in speech.
This is a biggie. Access to information has always been important and in an “Information Age” it is becoming essential. The concept of network-neutrality is that network operators should provide non-discriminatory transport on their networks between the endpoints of the Internet. Community Networks are important because there is much less of a chance that there will be interference in what content or type of content is sent over them.

by Jon Ippolito

Source: http://www.nothing.org/osc/WhyArtShouldBeFree.htm

The text is presented here in abbreviated form: only its final sections. (The full text is available at the site above.) Most of the essay is concerned with the way in which the current economy of art production benefits the artist last and least. We take up the argument as Ippolito considers the value of Creative Commons licences – which might be seen to favour the artist more than current copyright legislation, but as Ippolito proposes, could beneficially be replaced by a far more radical arrangement.

“Where there is no gift there is no art”. Lewis Hyde
[…]

Weaknesses of the License Approach
Voluntary licensing doesn’t require any changes in intellectual property law; this is both its strength and its weakness. As the name ‘Creative Commons’ suggests, open licenses have the potential to demarcate a public space immune from the restrictions of intellectual and physical property – in the same sense that a public park like the Boston Commons is a communal territory available to all citizens equally. But the rest of the digital world is already functionally a commons anyway – it’s just not legally one. Software piracy is rampant; Napster and its variants permit unlimited music sharing; and Web designers routinely pilfer code from other online sites whether it’s copylefted or not.