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.