In 48 hours I will be landing in Linz to attend Ars Electronica. It’s been a last minute decision, but how could I miss it on the year when the topic is A New Cultural Economy: The limits of Intellectual Property? It will be lovely to hang out with old friends and also make new ones. Feel free to approach for a chat, especially about Free Software Art. I look like this.
Shiralee Saul invited me today to participate on the Editorial Board of a new academic journal, ‘Second Nature; The International Journal of Creative Media’. This is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal auspiced by RMIT’s School of Creative Media, and I am glad to take on the job. Sez the blurb:
Second Nature explores the distinctive particulars of and interconnections between textual, visual, aural and interactive creative research and practices. Three thematic online issues per year are planned from which will be selected content for an annual printed publication. Second Nature will also publish a range of creative projects to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by Internet publication (non-linear, interactive, multiple media, etc).
One of the aspects that most interest me about this journal is that not only calls for papers, but for projects as well. Theorists are welcome, but practitioners can also submit projects that showcase their ideas and reflections on the topics of the Journal. Lester Bangs said it best. He loved writing, but sometimes he found that:
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
The official deadline for the first issue was August 30 2008, but papers and projects arriving no later than the 12th of September can still make the cut.
Next Sunday (31 Sept) I will be presenting freesoftwareart.org at Dorkbot Melbourne. The time and place are as usual: Level 1, 124a Johnston St, Fitzroy. Narinda Reeders will also talk about her Help Your Self (an ATM-alike that dispenses life advice). After the session some of us will go for drinks, join us if you want.
A couple of days ago, Ollie Bown commented over coffee that “all art is about politics”. At the time it seemed to me a nice parallel to Von Clausevitz’s much misunderstood maxim that “war is a continuation of politics by other means”, but I was not sure whether Ollie’s line was pithy or merely witty. Today it’s occurred to me that, if it were true, then Free and Open Source Art would be largely about Political Economy. We know that “Free” means “as in speech” and not “as in beer”, but nevertheless broad permissions to copy and disseminate cultural artifacts produce shockwaves in the economic processes around cultural practices.
Freedom to copy, modify and disseminate alters the exchange ratios of many intangible values: the balances of attention to talent, of exclusivity to cachet, of geographic centrality to prestige, of availability to value, and many other social and psychological factors that influence appreciation of artworks. In the lightcone of the Free Software event, nobody can escape this transformation, and curators, critics and art historians are no exception.
As a working statement, I would propose that “all Free Artforms are about the Political Economy of Status”, and leave it at that, at least for now.
In 2005 I presented a paper at the Readme 100 Software Art Conference titled Towards a Permanently Temporary Software Art Factory (Notes for the Sustainability of Software Artifacts).
The thesis of the paper is that works of Software Art face the challenges of production, distribution and especially conservation, and that Free and Open Source licenses can help artists, curators, institutions, historians and archivers tackle these problems in a timely, efficient and affordable way.
Three years later, I realise that my paper was directly addressed to practitioners of Software Art, and almost exclusively concerned with explaining to them the consequences of the Free Software development model. However Free Software Art can be examined from the points of view of at least two more audiences:
The writings in this site are a breadcrumb trail of my efforts to understand and explain the practice, the aesthetics, and the political economy of Free Software Art from the perspective of artists, Free Software hackers, the artistic establishment and the audience at large.