Media Mutandis - a NODE.London Reader - Culture

Open Congress - Introduction • M.A.Francis

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 18:21:54 +0000

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 Mirror's Gonna Steal Your Soul • T.Prug

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 11:47:58 +0000

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]

From Precarity to Precariousness and Back Again • B.Neilson, N.Rossiter

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 13:33:01 +0000

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?

Radical Machines Against the Techno-Empire • M.Pasquinelli

Sat, 11 Feb 2006 12:38:10 +0000

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

Introduction WSFII • J.Walsh

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:14:54 +0000

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 ...

Free Media from the Mouth of the Thames • Harwood

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:13:06 +0000

by Harwood

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

Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality and Electronic Cultural Production • Critical Art Ensemble

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:41:24 +0000

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.

Digital Objects • M.Fuller

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:36:51 +0000

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?

WirelessFreeNetworksWhyTo • M.Lenczner

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:16:13 +0000

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.

Why Art Should Be Free • J.Ippolito

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 14:02:15 +0000

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.

From Systems-Oriented Art to Biopolitical Art Practice • S.Buchmann

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:46:24 +0000

by Sabeth Buchmann

(from a talk first given at the Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 conference, Tate Modern, London, 17 September 2005)

Concerning the question which the curator Donna de Salvo raises in her abstract of the conference on Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970^[1] “How can we use the period of the 60s and 70s to rethink notions like open systems today?”, I’ll focus on the conceptual and technological 'rhetorics' and 'aesthetics' which are still relevant today to claims for more interdisciplinarity between art, science and new technologies. Three years ago, in their text 'Software Art', Florian Cramer and Ulrike Gabriel wrote about, “a shift of the artist’s view from displays to the creation of systems and processes themselves".^[2] This shift implies a transformation to a mode of production which traditional definitions of artistic practice no longer adequately describe. Keeping in mind the form of presenting instructions for action which has historically been so central to conceptual art, Cramer and Gabriel contest the assumption that there is a “generative code exclusive to computer programming“ [in so doing, they extend a mathematical model of computer programming from the realm of technology to that of artistic practice]. The authors take, as an example, the immateriality of the work of Fluxus artist La Monte Young titled Composition 1961, No. I, January I. In Young’s presentation of the written instructions to “draw a straight line and follow it,“ Cramer and Gabriel recognize a new, metaphysical, conceptual and epistemological tendency in art practice. They see this emerging practice as capable of transcending or moving beyond the confines of the object. Cramer and Gabriel find this tendency in other projects of historical significance such as the exhibition entitled Software – Information Technology: Its New Meaning for Art which was curated by artist and critic Jack Burnham in 1970 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Before curating this show, Jack Burnham had participated in several interdisciplinary projects at MIT. His show Software… also took place one year after the publication of Joseph Kosuth’s 'Art after Philosophy'. Burnham’s reference to Kosuth’s controversial manifesto of Conceptual Art becomes obvious in the foreword of the catalogue. Building on Kosuth’s references to structural linguistic theory, Burnham draws parallels between mathematical information theories^[3] and conceptual art. The inherent similarities between conceptual art and mathematical information theory that Burnham sees mean for him a fundamental shift in the focus of art production from the traditional art object to a cultural, social and societally overlapping system of signs, one that eventually undermines the mythical structure of modern art.

User Controlled Technology • K.Kulhavy

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 15:18:38 +0000

by Karel Kulhavy

Intent
The intent of User Controlled Technology is to provide the end-user unrestricted access to intellectual property (IP) including the tools used to create it, in perpetuity.

Detailed meaning
UCT intends to give the user control over the technology and providing opportunity to learn, create and profit. For example:
* The user may study and learn from UCT.
* The user may manufacture a product based upon UCT.
* The user may participate in development of UCT.
* The user may enhance or correct UCT.
* The user may integrate UCT into any system.

On the Differences between Open Source and Open Culture [1] • F.Stalder

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 14:09:34 +0000

by Felix Stalder

How would culture be created if artists were not locked into romantic notions of individual authorship and the associated drive to control the results of their labour was not enforced through ever expanding copyrights? What if cultural production was organized via principles of free access, collaborative creation and open adaptability of works? As such, the practices of a collective and transformative culture are not entirely new. They were characteristic for (oral) folk cultures prior to their transformation into mass culture by the respective industries during the twentieth century, and as counter-currents – the numerous avant-garde movements (dada, situationism, mail art, neoism, plagiarism, plunderphonics, etc.) which re-invented, radicalized and technologically up-graded various aspects of those. Yet, over the last decade, these issues – of open and collaborative practices – have taken on an entirely new sense of urgency. Generally, the ease with which digital information can be globally distributed and manipulated by a very large number of people makes free distribution and free adaptation technically possible and a matter of everyday practice. Everyone with a computer already uses, in one way or the other, the copy & paste function built into all editors. This is what computers are about: copying, manipulating and storing information. With access to the internet, people are able to sample a wide range of sources and make their own works available to potentially large audiences.

Recoding of Information, Knowledge and Technology • M.Corris

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:57:46 +0000

by Michael Corris

The following examines how some Conceptual art recoded, redescribed and ironized the theories that helped to drive and justify the technological revolution of the 1960s.^[1] At the outset, we should note the intense interaction during the 1950s and 1960s between the modernizing discourse of technology and all forms of culture and visual art. Indeed, the emergence during the 1960s of Conceptual art coincided with a tremendous surge in economic activity in North America and Western Europe that “seemed powered by technological revolution”.^[2] John F. Kennedy’s “new frontier” and Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” were images that were intended to denote and exploit the appeal of technological innovation in the mind of the electorate.^[3]

Meshing in the Future - The free configuration of everything and everyone with Hive Networks • A.Medosch

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:47:25 +0000

by Armin Medosch

[Note: Words or acronyms marked with an * are explained in a glossary appended to this text.]

1.Introduction
One day in spring 2005 I popped over to my friend Adam’s. In his tiny living room, which also serves as the headquarters for free2air http://www.free2air.org, I found another friend, Alexei, hunched over a small technical device. Its case had been removed and the circuitry of the board and the chips could be seen. It had a small hard drive strapped to the back of the main board. Alexei and Adam were trying to make the thing boot from the hard drive. They were so focused that I barely managed to get noticed when I said hello. Slightly daunting technical buzzwords such as ‘cross compilation’, and ‘zeroconf’ were flying through the room. Not all of this meant something to me at the time but what I could figure out was that they were on to something special. This little thing on the table represented the seed of an idea much larger than its petite techno-crab like self.