[wos] cultural projects to be included in wos4

[cornelia sollfrank]

hi there,

in the following you will find a short list of projects I would like to 
see at wos4. please let me know what you think of these suggestions. 
the adequate format for these projects would be 20 min PRESENTATIONS 
which could take place on a PANEL(?)

(besides that I will make a suggestion for a WORKSHOP.)


1. PIKSEL - festival for free, libre and open source audiovisual 
software art - Gisle Frøysland
http://www.piksel.no/

the festival was initiated by Gisle Frøysland and is run by the Bergen 
Center for Electronic Arts.
the first edition of the festival took place in 2003 and was meant to 
be a gathering of software developers and artists. since then it is  
growing annully and brought together last year 50 people from all over 
the world as active participants. the edition of 2006 will take place 
october 12-15 and will expand to the field of open hardware.

this festival is an excellent 'best practice example'. therefore I 
would suggest to invite Gisle Frøysland for a presentation and include 
him in the broader discussion on 'open cultures'.


2. FLOSS MANUALS - Adam Hyde
http://flossmanuals.net/

FLOSS Manuals is a site for free manuals on free software. The manuals 
you find here are intended to introduce you to softwares that you might 
find useful, softwares that are made available under licences that 
allow you to download and use them for free. Many of these softwares 
are extremely sophisticated but the fundamentals are usually quite easy 
to grasp if you have the basic principles outlined clearly infront of 
you.

The project is run by Adam Hyde whom some of you might know from Radio 
Qualia. he is a good example of a new profile cultural producer who is 
transgressing all kind of borders in his practice: the border between 
artist and programmer, between artist and activist, between high end 
art and community based peer production. with this project Adam tries 
to close a gap between the world of hackers/programmers and potential 
users.

FLOSS Manuals is built only of Adam's voluntary work. he is currently 
looking for sponsors to finance translations into other languages and 
expand the repertoire.

The site has not been officially launched so far. maybe we could do 
that as wos?


3. Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age - Carrie 
McLaren
http://www.illegal-art.org/

Illegal Art was a show which has been put together in 2005 by Carrie 
McLaren. Carrie is a writer and the editor of the Brooklyn-based 
magazine "Stay Free!" Most recently she suggested to curate a show for 
Creative Commons USA and is working on that at the moment.

Official Statement:
"The laws governing 'intellectual property' have grown so expansive in 
recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. 
Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and 
Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If 
the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole 
genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have 
existed.

The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, 
copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas 
but is now being used to stifle it.

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the 
"degenerate art" of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes 
of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded 
lawyers; others have had to appear in court.

Loaded with gray areas, intellectual property law inevitably has a 
silencing effect, discouraging the creation of new works.

Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the 
First Amendment and "intellectual property" law collide? What is art's 
future if the current laws are allowed to stand?"


4. OPENMUTE - Simon Worrington
-- UserLand OpenMute - FLOSS culture workshop tour
http://3d.openmute.org/modules/wakka/UserLand
The OpenMute tour is a varied set of two-day workshops with an aim to 
familiarise audiences, practitioners and interested parties with the 
current concepts and practices of Free Open Source Software (or FOSS) 
as well as practical hands-on help building a website or creating a 
community project using the OpenMute toolset.
-- POD - print on demand
http://3d.openmute.org/modules/wakka/PoD
POD is a professional digital printing method that offers high quality 
black and white print bound with colour covers. In the spirit of 
knowledge sharing OpenMute offers a full range of services at budget 
prices to help especially small groups and individuals produce their 
own books at low costs.
--provision of free web publishing, space & tools
http://www.openmute.org/services/?PAGE=intro



best, cornelia