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 Jamie King

Preface
In this essay, originally produced for Mute magazine http://www.metamute.org in 2004, I was attempting to answer some specific problems. During this period, I had been very involved in the ‘anti-capitalist’ or ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, and had noted the intense excitement and expectation accruing around the organisational idea of ‘openness’. We in the social movements, we told ourselves and others, were ‘open’; we used all the virtues of networked organisation to our advantage, and we didn’t need ‘their’ closed-ness, just as we didn’t need ‘their’ proprietary attitudes.

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 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 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.

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.

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]

by Marina Vishmidt

The conjuncture of debates around knowledge production, mediation and distribution of cultural activity, information politics and constructions of visibility for a self-positing ‘media arts’ scene in London was never going to be easy. Generating a discursive and reflective counterpoint to the instantiations of these debates on the ground in the form of events, workshops and symposia is also a task that falls willy nilly, mutatis mutandis, into Beckett’s famed note to self: “fail. fail again. fail better”.