[wos] cultural projects to be included in wos4

[Saul Albert]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 12:57:53PM +0200, cornelia sollfrank wrote:
> 1. PIKSEL - festival for free, libre and open source audiovisual 
> software art - Gisle Frøysland
> http://www.piksel.no/
> 2. FLOSS MANUALS - Adam Hyde
> http://flossmanuals.net/
> 3. Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age - Carrie 
> McLaren
> http://www.illegal-art.org/
> 4. OPENMUTE - Simon Worrington
> -- UserLand OpenMute - FLOSS culture workshop tour

Hi Cornelia - 

I agree with all these choices, and taking a somewhat myopic and partial
look around the London Free Culture ghetto, I'd recommend the following:

- Node London: http://nodel.org Networked Open Distributed Events, London

NODE.London was an experiment many of us in London participated in,
starting in October 2005 with 'Open Season': http://nodel.org/october.php
which brought together lots of different openesque scenes:
commercial/artistic/theoretical/political and technical in three events
at the Science Museum (future wireless
http://cybersalon.org/futurewireless/), the Tate Britain (Open Congress
http://opencongress.omweb.org) and WSFII (the World Summit on Free
Information Infrastructures http://wsfii.org). You could invite someone
from each of these groups actually... These events and their critical
context formed the basis for a reader: http://publication.nodel.org
edited by Marina Vishmidt. NODE.London was also accompanied by a whole
process of software development, resulting (so far) in the
http://nodel.org website, but intending to create a free infrastructure
for the disemmination and promotion of cultural activities in the city
using wireless networks and an open-and-as-yet-unfinished semantic web
software infrastructure: http://map.nodel.org/docs/.

Then in March the voluntary organiser group brought together over 150
events, exhibitions, talks, screenings and performances in 30 days. Not
all of these were reliant on 'free' and 'open' themes, but their
organisational aspirations evinced the problematics of open systems,
mixed economies of voluntary and professional labour and information
politics.

I'd recommend inviting someone from NODE.London by mailing the voluntary
organisers about it, and maybe cherrypick some of the more relevant
constituent projects (see the nodel website). From where I was sitting
(admittedly intertwined with it) this was one of the most rigorous,
problematic and interesting attempt to try and transpose principles of
Free Software development and their attendant
political/organisational/labour metaphors into the cultural domain.

- OpenLab London : http://pawful.org/openlab

This group has been consistent in championing FLOSS approaches to music
/ performance / visuals and graphic experimentation. I don't know a lot
about it, but I'm impressed so far. 

- Dorkbot (Berlin? worldwide?) - http://dorkbot.org

Berlin has its own dorkbot (unfortunately only coming to life when
Transmediale comes around).. but the Dorkbot network is an international
association of 'People doing strange things with electricity' with
meetings in over 50 countries around the world... not just W. Europe and
the States either.

In my experience it's dominated by an engineering culture of knowledge
sharing that mostly relies on free/open tools (people sometimes get
heckled if they don't share their sources!).

- Free Culture UK: http://freeculture.org.uk  / Open Knowledge
  Foundation : http://okfn.org

A UK branch of the 'free culture' movement. I'm not sure how much this
has to do with the Free Culture crowd in the US. I've met quite a few of
the people involved in this network and been impressed by the relative
sophistication of their approach to mapping FLOSS strategies on to
cultural activities, via concepts and practices such as 'Open Knowledge'.

I'll stop there.. and send more if/when they come to mind. I know of lots
of individuals I'd recommend - artists whose understanding of the point
and economies of 'Free Culture' are profound... and who could speak about
it from a more personal point of view - which is important I think.
Over-arching attempts to define or group together disparate practices
under these kinds of banners do tend towards opennesss soup..

I'll put together a list anyway.

Some of the examples I've mentioned above aren't exclusively or
explicitly to do with 'Open' or 'Free'. I think that it's important to be
quite expansive when looking at cultural re-mappings of these principles
because so much has to change during that transposition of software
development methodologies to cultural practice. The thing that changes
most in my opinion is the economy of production - Programmers have
scarce, high value labour, and can often support themselves without
working full time, freeing themselves and the surplus value they have to
share. Artists tend to have low value labour in a saturated art market,
with few opportunities for gainful employment, and therefore can't
generate the kind of surplus of wealth necessary to support an economy
without scarcity. This situation makes it harder to encapsulate or
definite what constitutes an 'open' or 'libre' approach to culture...
when the process of value exchange is so volatile and contingent on
context... though some are trying (http://freedomdefined.org /
http://www.okfn.org/okd/)! Maybe invite them too!

One more project/group that is working on this economic aspect of 'open'
cultures in a very rigorous way is the Belgian group Constant -
http://www.constantvzw.com/.  Their project 'Cuisine Interne Keuken'
http://www.constantvzw.com/cn_core/cuisine/sessionindexNL.php is a
database of interviews with cultural practitioners from a wide range of
disciplines, who are all floating on the seas of openness in one way or
another. Constant's concern which comes (as I understand it) from a
feminist approach to the labour issues of open culture, seeks to document
these people's survival strategies. How do they pay their bills? What
kinds of tools do they use to make their work... etc.  Needless to say,
Constant are also developing this practice into a set of free software
tools and techniques to open up the process and technology so that other
people can contribute Cuisine Interne interviews.

Cheers,

Saul.