Free Software Art

Introduction

Software Art does not belong in a museum vault, but in a working processor, wherever that processor is located. When the artwork is removed from physical artifacts, the question of accessibility ceases to be about the audience’s access to the work, but about the work’s access to the audience’s processor.

In order to have access to its audience, the work must first be able to be run on a wide range of hardware; second, it must be able to find its audience; and finally it has to endure the passage of time, if by “audience” we don’t merely mean “audience at the time the work is created”.

Therefore, Software Artists are advised to adhere to the Free Software ethos, licencing model and methodology of software development, which fulfills the three objectives of enabling Production, Distribution and Conservation of software artworks.

Production

Most artists dealing with technology find that their first hurdle is acquisition of technical know-how, and that they often can’t find assistance outside their social circle. The communal development methods of Free Software provide Software Art practitioners with a technically-gifted community of peers and mentors.

Software Artists Ship Code

Code reuse is very important in software development, and therefore in Software Art. Artists want to express their world-view, not to reinvent the wheel. The use of Free Software allows code creators to reuse code more effectively, and to build upon the work of others not only technically, but also artistically, in a time-honoured tradition both of old masters and modern movements.

Production of Software Art is not only a technical and artistic process, but also a legal and economic one. Institutions funding software works request the assurance that they will be able to show and distribute the work they commissioni. As more and more institutions demand full freedoms for the work they paid for, software artists can help  to fund their work by using Free Software both as their technical infrastructure and their licensing model.

Working with Free Software developers and the maintainers involved in its distributions will also help artists to navigate the sea of different Free Software licenses and to understand their implications.

Distribution

These are terms that have been long understood by practitioners of more demotic arts, like the novel and cinema: as soon as access to the means of production is acquired, and the cost of building the work is met, there are three aspects to a reproducible work’s success: distribution, distribution, and… distribution.

Obscurity Is An Artist’s Worst Enemy

Licensing software artworks under Free licenses allows for their inclusion in Free Software distributions, or “distros”, By making the artworks part of their automatically installable and upgradeable repositories, distros allow any individual or institution to access the software programs for themselves or to present them to others.

The usage of free licenses is a legal guarantee of wider availability and diffusion: the technical possibility of diffusion and ease of installation is no guarantee if the works are limited by copyright law to particular geographical areas, social groups, or fields of endeavour.

The characteristics of availability of source code and its modifiability by third parties also help with distribution to other platforms: Free Software is often “translated” or “ported” to run on different hardware than the one originally used by the original author.

Conservation

An actively maintained Free Software distro’s repository is a living artifact, not a dead pile of code that once ran. Libraries are updated, and programs recompiled to adhere to new standards and run on new platforms, all without vendor troubles or time limitations.

Software Is A Process, Not A Product

The Free Software maintenance process solves the issue of conservation of Software Art works. Licensing works of Software Art under Free licenses allows for their inclusion in Free Software distros, thus making their conservation part of that process.

Software Art works require a physical substrate to survive, and that substrate, the computer, quickly becomes obsolete. A Software Art piece included in a Free Software distribution survives its original hardware and circumstances.

The fact that Free programming libraries are free to use without restriction also saves Free Software Art works from vendor obsolescence as, they are not tied to proprietary code that ceases to be available if the vendor disappears or stops renewing their software licenses. Even in the case that one particular Free Software distribution stopped being updated, all the code would still available to be picked up by another distribution.

Finally, the use of free licenses is also a guarantee of wider temporal availability and diffusion: works are no longer limited to the period of one exhibition by the owners of some of the assets, as free software is essentially available to everyone,  forever. Free Software Art works do not have to wait until they lapse into the Public Domain for an enterprising curator to revive themii.

Posterity Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow

Free Software Art

Individual artists like David Griffith (Fluxus), projects like the Open Art Network (The Great Game(boy)) and even loose networks of  hacker-activists (Carnivore) are now freeing their code in order to fulfill the promise of sharedness and open access for the practice of Software Art. Some of their works are starting to seep into Free Software distributions, again thanks to individual efforts. These individual efforts need to progress into more co-ordinated ones, a “rough consensus and running code” meta-project of artists freeing their code and Free Software distribution maintainers packaging it for ease of access and conservation.

The Free Software Art movement does not yet exist as such, but its seeds are already in both communities, especially in the handful of individuals who inhabit the intersection of both cultures.

Free Software Art: it can either mean “Software Art whose code is Free”, or an imperative call to “liberate Software Art” from obsolescence, obscurity and oblivion. Let’s do it. Let’s Free Software Art.