English

Electromagnetic Movie

Armin Medosch — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:32:53 +0200

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Pokémon Masters vs Pakman

doll_yoko — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:09:52 +0200

Collect, train, battle.

In a Japanese franchised fantasy game, players capture cute wild creatures called Pokémon, and train them to become members of powerful fighting teams. If a Pokémon cannot escape the confines of the multi-function Poké Ball, it is considered owned by the Trainer. Volition goes out the window, and it must now obey all commands.

The interior of the spherical Poké Ball is designed to make the enslaved Pokémon feel comfortable, but there are no guarantees that this will happen. It's a world of tough luck and tough love.

Pokémon Trainers desire that their team of fighting Pocket Monsters beat all others.

Thus the superlative Trainer will become the Pokémon Master.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Losing myself in games with textual others has long been a favoured altered reality experience.

My immaterial body was born in a place of the dead in 1994. Late one night two of us— sharing a keyboard, crappy dial-up connection and inhabiting one generic avatar—engaged with a dyslexic vampire, the_Unborne.

We were in a morgue in an online world.
LambdaMOO—the Mother of all MOOs.

Life, in all its real virtuality, became amplified, splendid in its splinterings.
Far from being second life, it was first and thirsty life, queer and unquenchable.

LambdaMOO catapulted me back to sensations firs experienced in pre-teen pastimes of make believe and “let's pretend”.

Games like Nightclubs, where 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye spiced our mise-en-scene. We take turns in playing the dancer on a makeshift stage, wearing a silver satin flock dress, gauzy veil, and very little else. The stripper hoochy koochies her customer, her yearning trick.

And then we switch.

Reading Coldness and Cruelty (Deleuze meets Sacher-Masoch) inspired my crafting of the Puppet Mistress, aka Gashgirl. A persona who would engage with the quirky, erotic fantasies of strangers, improvising pleasure scenarios on secret micro-stages.

The poet Laure writes to Bataille as she is dying:

The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, 'communication' experienced as nakedness. It is self-violation. Baring, communication to others of a reason for living, and this reason for living 'shifts.'”

Social relations in the Realm of the Puppet Mistress were more Last Tango in Paris than One Night in Paris.

Whilst real life identities would remain anonymous behind the screens, players could log their online interactions, for auto-replay. Occasionally, intimate revels in forever puppet peepshows would materialise as words in more public realms. Kind of porn, and kind of art. And definitely fun.

“Every child player wins a prize!” promise the laughing clowns, mouths wide open.

The Pokémon Master is driven by his competitive desire. He is the face of capital, with a capital C, determined to exploit the living labour of the subjugated pokemon—his flexible fighting flunky workforce.

By contrast, although clearly no angel, the Puppet Mistress was driven by desire for connection rather than acquisition.

She could succeed only through creative communication and co-operation.
It takes at least two to last-tango, to mutually generate play that both replicates and mutates.

Irigarary's words resonate:

Exchange? Everything is exchanged, yet there are no transactions. Between us, there are no proprietors, no purchasers, no determinable objects, no prices. Our bodies are nourished by our mutual pleasure, our abundance is inexhaustible: it knows neither want nor plenty.

I suspect that if the Puppet Mistress ascribed to a political position, it would be a flavour of autonomist Marxism. She, I, always did have a soft spot for anarchic Italians.

Anarchia.
Without ruler.
A belief in the common good of humanity, in the possibilities of self-organisation.

Worlds away from the neo-conned nightmares, from the society of control, and control orders.

Which brings me to Pac-Man.....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pac-Man was a Japanese video arcade game which quickly became a worldwide phenomenon following its launch in 1980.

In this game, the player guides the dot-eating pac-man through a maze, avoiding the touch of four hungry ghosts. Translated from the Japanese, the ghost names are Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle, and Stupid.

When Pac-Man gets the chance to eat energising glowing dots, it gets the ability to eat ghosts. The ghosts turn blue and end up in a ghost pen while they regenerate.

And so it goes, level after level, a game of pursuit and evasion, of consumption and transformation.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But I want to speak tonight of another Pak man, and another set of spooks...

My point of departure is the judgement by Justice Adams handed down on the
fifth of November 2007, in the New South Wales Supreme Court.

It's a lengthy document, some 22,000 words.

Reading this stuff is how I squander my online time now, far from the pleasures of the Puppet Quarters. I should be working on my thesis but somehow these courtroom transcripts, police interviews and legal judgements are so much more rivetting than the books on informational capitalism and political philosophy stacking up.

Both offer pathways into understanding, or at least reflecting upon, the machinations of power. The legal stuff is more engaging because I suppose it reveals clearly the nature of my homeland, that sunburnt country of dispossessed (again) aboriginals, obedient working families, dole bludgers, corporate crims, hoardes of refugees, and other riff raff.

There's no time for detail, or fancy word play.

Just some rapid gleanings, and the vague hope it will be the start of something. Writing as an archeology of the present. Or perhaps prophesy - picking through the entrails to forecast the future.

Whatever, it's hard for me to read this stuff without feeling a mix of emotions and physical sensations. Reading the varying accounts of the protagonists reminds me of Kurosawa's film RAN, where a rape and murder is recounted from the perspectives of all involved.

The judgement is divided into sections, the sub-headings like acts of a play:

Act 1. ASIO officers meet the accused

Act 2. The accused is taken to his home

Act 3. The veracity of B15 and the accused

Act 4. The legal effect of the ASIO officers’ conduct

Act 5. The interview of 7 November 2003 with AFP

Act 6. The admissibility of the interviews of 7 and 12 November

Act 7. The interview of 12 November 2003

Act 8. The meeting with AFP officers at the accused’s home

Act 9. The interview of 9 January 2004

Tonight there is only time to speak of the first 2 Acts. And the judge's decision.

Izhar Ul-Haque is a young medical student living with his family in Sydney. In early 2003 he trains in Pakistan with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organisation supporting the independence of Kashmir. After three weeks he decides it's not for him and heads home.

Returning to Australia, Ul-Haque is questioned by customs and allowed re-entry. It is not until late 2003 that Lashkar-e-Taiba becomes a proscribed terrorist organisation under Australian law.

It is his family connection with terrorism suspect Faheem Lodhi that brings him to the fresh attention of the government.

On the evening of 6 November 2003 ASIO officers accost him at the Blacktown Railway Station:

The accused, Ul-Haque, says:

“As I was walking to the car park, two men approached me and one of them said, "I'm an ASIO officer" and showed me a badge.

I was really shocked. Mr [B15] said, "You're in serious trouble", and he was just a few breaths away from me. He said, "We are doing a very serious terrorism related investigation and we require your full cooperation and it's in your own benefit to talk to us."

I was really frightened. I didn't know what was happening.

On his orders I got into the car and they said, "We are taking you somewhere to have a private discussion."

At that time really I didn't know where I was being taken. In my mind a lot of things were going on, you know, am I being taken to a secret location or some secret ASIO interrogation rooms. I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and then they took me to a park near[by].

In his account, ASIO Agent B15 recalls drawing a figure ‘Y’ in the gravel with his foot. He says to Ul-Haque:

‘This is a Y. We are here.’
At that point I was gesturing towards the intersection of the ‘Y’.

‘We’ve got two choices. We can go down the difficult path or a less difficult path.

The difficult path would mean that we stand here putting these questions to you like this, having you tell us things which we know to be untrue, and having to demonstrate to you that we know these things are untrue before you give us a truthful answer.

Or, we can take a less difficult path which would involve you co-operating and proving truthful answers to our questions.’

Interestingly B15 notes that neither he nor Agent B16 took any notes during the 40 minutes conversation.

The agents then announced that Ul-Haque's family home was being raided.

On the way to the house they declare that this issue has gone to the highest levels of government.

“If you don't cooperate, we have other sources of extracting information,” they tell Ul-Haque.

The Judge asks Ul-Haque if he believed he had any choice in talking to the agents.

Not really, no.... I believed I was under arrest and that if I did not comply with whatever they asked me that they will either use physical violence or take me to a more sinister place to interrogate me or, you know, do something to my family or deport me.

The judge asks Agent B15 :

And was there a reason given for taking him to a park rather than taking him to an office where the matter could be formally dealt with, where it might have been tape-recorded, where there would have been records about the time that he was taken into – well, if not custody, into your company and the time and an official recording as to when it ended?

B15: I don’t recall, your Honour.”

Recollection is a strange bird.

In the transcripts the judge's frustration and disbelief is palpable. Later the media would report his judgement as being “scathing” and “damming”.

The judge says:

The very mode of questioning was intimidating. It is scarcely surprising that he hung his head. A later report by B15 says that [the accused] did not know what they were talking about. This is reminiscent of Kafka.

Act Two takes place in the family home, although Izhar Ul-Haque's teenage brother Izaz is still hanging about alone at the Blacktown train station in Izhar's car he couldn't drive.

When Ul-Haque arrives with three ASIO officers between twenty-five and thirty officers were in the process of executing the search warrant.

Ul-Haque reports being shocked and frightened at the “immense nature of the operation”.

During the next few hours the ASIO agents take him again to the train station car park and question him.

They then take him home, and question him in his parents' bedroom. The agents keep him in a state of incommunicado, insisting that other family members keep out.

An AFP officer is present during this extensive interrogation which continues until 3.45am, in time to prepare for morning prayers.
There is much more to this story, but we will end here, Mr Marvin. And so I wont even begin to go into the agents' attempts to recruit the young medical student as an informant.

The Judge concludes that by assuming unlawful powers of direction, control and detention Agents “B15 and B16 committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping...”

The Judge is really pissed off, saying “It was a gross interference by the agents of the state with the accused’s legal rights as a citizen, rights which he still has whether he be suspected of criminal conduct or not and whether he is a Muslim or not.”

Well, that's spelling it out isn't it!

So the conclusion is that all the records of interview are inadmissible.

And the result of this is that the case does not proceeed to trial, because there is no evidence.

Of anything.

And so ends, for now, the latest version of Pak Man.

In this game there were three spooks, but if you recall, in the original there were four:

Chaser.
Ambusher.
Fickle.
And Stupid.

U-Bahn

Lindsay — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 09:09:21 +0200

A one stop journey on the U-Bahn recorded with a low frequency EM sniffer (amplifier) and solid-state recorder.

Meerkat Economies and Bare Markets

doll_yoko — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:22:20 +0200

thoughts to come...

Rewriting of History - Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

Armin Medosch — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:16:25 +0200

Thanks to Doll Yoko for making us aware of Caliban and the Witch - Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici looks at the transition from feudalism to capitalism from the point of view of 'women, the body and primitive accumulation'. Her key thesis is that the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century were instrumental to establishing a new capitalist order through 'the development of a 'new sexual division of labour subjugating women's labour and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the workforce.' Yet by telling the story also from Caliban's point of view, symbol of the 'trans-Atlantic' proleterian, Federici achieves what she claims: to transcend the dichotomy between "gender" and "class". This book is also a brilliant description of the process of primitive accumulation, in particular the enclosures of the common land starting at the end of the middle age and the various forms of resistance to that by renegade women and the 'motley crowd' of the working classes.

In Caliban and the witch¹ Federici looks at the 'development of capitalism from a feminist viewpoint while at the same time avoiding the limits of a "women's history" separated from that of the male part of the working class'. (Introduction, p 11) This is reflected in the title "Caliban and the Witch" inspired by the Shakespeare play The Tempest. In Federici's interpretation Caliban is not only the symbol of anti-colonial resistance, but also for the world proletariat and, "more specifically, for the proletarian body as a terrain and instrument of resistance to the logic of capitalism."

Federici puts Sycorax, the mother of Caliban and a powerful 'witch', center stage of the narration. Federici's main thesis is that the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th century were not just some strange and tragic quirk of history during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, but central to the formation of the new capitalist order. The power of women had to be broken in order for capitalism to succeed. Sycorax, the witch, is the "embodiment of a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeha woman who poisoned the master's food and inspired the slaves to revolt."

Federici rethinks the process of primitive accumulation, which is so central to Marx, as it is 'treated by Marx as a foundational process, revealing the structural conditions for the existence of capitalist society.' (p 12) She states that where she differs from Marx is that while he considers it more or less exclusively from the viewpoint of male waged proletariat, Federici examines it 'from the viewpoint of the changes it introduced in the social position of women and the production of labor power.' (p. 12) In her account she highlights 'the development of a 'new sexual division of labour subjugating women's labour and women's reproductive function to the reproduction of the workforce,' [...] 'the construction of a new patriarchal order based upon the exclusion of women from waged work and their subordination to men' [...] and 'the transformation of the female body into a machine for the production of new workers.'

Federici places the witchhunts of the 16th and 17th century at the center of her analysis of 'primitive accumulation' claiming that 'the persecution of the witches in Europe as in the New World, was as important as colonization and the expropriation of the European peasantry from its land were for the development of capitalism.' ( all quotes p. 12) Federici argues that 'primitive accumulation did not just happen in the past but was an ongoing process with new enclosures of common world on a massive scale and even the reappearance of witch hunts, which was part of the motivation for her to write this book.

Federici connects with traditions of feminist scholars who established a convincing framework regarding an explanation of the witch hunt according to which it served to 'destroy the control that women had exercised over their reproductive function and paved the way for the development of a more reppressive patriarchal regime' (p 14). Federici posits that her work goes beyond this general point -- which has been widely acknowledged -- and investigates the 'specific historical circumstances under which the persecution of the witches was unleashed and the reasons why the rise of capitalism demanded a genocidal attack on women.' (p. 14) Federici claims that her analysis allows to transcend the dichotomoy between 'gender' and 'class'; she argues that gender is not merely a cultural construct, as postmodernists have claimed, since (paraphrasing now) 'in capitalist society "femininity" has been constituted as a work-function, masking the production of the work force under the cover of a biologic destiny. If this is true then "women's" history is "class history" and 'therefore "women" is a legitimate category of analysis and the activities associated with "reproduction" remain a crucial battle ground for women now as they were in the 1970ies.' (page 14) Federici's introduction ends with a convincing critique of Focault's concept of 'bio-power' and the analysis he puts forward in his History of Sexuality (Focault 1978) as "gender-blind" (pages 15 - 16).

Heavy Theory Artillery

So far this is all quite convincing allthough Federici sounds sometimes a bit heavy handed on the theoretic side. When 'the logic of capitalism' in its foundational phase demanded an attack on women on a genocidal scale, which may be true, then still it is necessary to ask who is behind this, who is the historical actor? Are there identifiable people, groups, a class who perpetrated those crimes for specific interests or is there no specific historic actor as such, is it rather just the 'logic of capitalism' which is at work here? This is an important question on the metalevel of any historic explanation. Who are the players here, concrete identifiable people or historic 'forces', 'logics', 'mechanisms', 'demons'??? I am asking a bit heretically here, does the hunt for an explanation of the witch hunt produce another 'demon' in the shape of the logic of capitalism? Or 'primitive accumulation'? I think Federici is well aware of this problem of agency in historic explanation and at crucial moments in her book she admits that her evidence is sometimes 'circumstantial'. She also writes in the Introduction that more research is necessary to clarify the connections that she is making.

But luckily Federici's book is not just a theory book but primarily a history book and as such it is full of well researched facts which can be disputed or disproved or found true, but the main thing, the research is there, on the shelf, to be examined, savoured or, yes, read in one go, as in my case. There are so many interesting points of departure in this book for further research, I can hardly name them all. First of all, besides the main witch hunt thesis, the book contains a wealth of facts about the enclosures of the commons during the phase of primitive accumulation, as a necessary step to what follows.

The first chapter, "All the World Needs a Jolt" talks about Social Movements and Political Crisis in medieval Europe. I was aware of quite a bit of the heresy and more official religious madness going on at that time but not what extent that had had and particularly how this could be re-examined from a viewpoint of class struggle, resistance, uprisals and revolts which runs totally 'contrary to the schoolbook portrait of feudal society as a static world, in which each estate accepted its designated place in the social order.' (page 26) I had also not been aware that women in many areas were more 'liberated' in the middle age, in particular through access to land which allowed them a level of self-subsitency. This connects to more well known things such as that there were types of traditional knowledge about herbs and their properties which were passed on along the female line. I was particularly unaware of the fact that ion the late middle ages as women migrated to the cities they gained access to many jobs that were later considered 'male' such as 'smiths, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, hat-makers, ale-brewers, wool-carders and retailers,' (p 31), that female employment during that era between the 13 hundreds and 15 hundreds was was on a very high level and that in some places, such as for instance Frankfurt women participated in app. 200 occupations and were also members of most of the guilds (paraphrased from page 31).

However, when Federici states that during the era of the witch hunts women generally suffered a worsening of their social positions, she does not imply that during the middle ages it was all a merry may pole dance. The christian church had a long history of trying to control sexual behaviour and reducing the seductive sexual power that women have over men (paraphrased, page 37). Women played in important role in the heretic movements, some of which celebrated "free love" which could at once have been 'a male ploy designed to gain easy access to women's sexual favors' or a result of the demonisation of sexuality by the church so that women joined heretic movements because they would enjoy a better status and more freedom among them (p. 39).

Voices of anti-colonial resistance

It is a particular strength of Federici's analysis that despite the feminist viewpoint she does not separate 'women' issues from 'class' issues and narrates the stories of various forms of resistance and class struggle from a viewpoint that joins those issues together so that it becomes clear that male and femal 'underclasses' were often united in those struggles. In this regard, I am reading Caliban and the Witch together with The Many Headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic². The two books are referencing each other, so one can assume the authors have been aware of each others work for a bit. In sum, those books impress because of the never ending spirit of resistence that combines classes, genders and ethnicities in the 'anti-globalisation' struggles of a past which continues till today.³

In this regard, I am interested in digging deeper to find more specific voices. The play The Tempest is one good starting point in this regard, while Ben Jonson seems to be the more interesting dramatician, and the ruthlessness of Francis Bacon is another important thread. Federici does also treat the /fn> subject matter of the 'onset' (in my interpretation) of the scientific mindset through Descartes and the formation of the scientific spirit amidst the most deadly century, from about 1580 to 1680, when wars, disease the loss of common land and colonialisation pressure led to the witch hunts. The interest in anatomic theatres and dissections of the body are further ingredients to be considered when reflecting the formation of the new 'modern' subjectivities. This relationship between science, white magic and the burning< What I have read so far only confirms that those alternative histories are not yet fully told. The colonial mindset permeating even the structuring of the sciences themselves long made impossible such a consideration of an account of globalisation from below. This is an area which I will do more follow-up work on, to develop the 'voices' thread of my PhD research. I will investigate anti-colonial struggle in music, from Mento to Choro and Samba, and other 'proto' forms of modern styles such as Ska, Reggae, Funk, etc.

Federici S.
2004. Caliban and the Witch.
:285.
Linebaugh P, Rediker MB.
2000. The many-headed hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic.
This leads Federici to a particular damning criticism of the bourgeoisie. 'While we are often told that the rise of democracy is due to a heroic struggle of the middle class against feudal aristocracy', Federici shows that 'already in the middle ages the bourgeoisie sacrificed their cherished political autonomy' and collaborated with the aristocracy to hold down the restive proletariat.' (page 50)

ONE LOVE: How FLOSS Can Make True All the Promises of the Avantgarde (yet would kill 'art' by doing so)

Armin Medosch — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:41:50 +0200

In his essay All problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses, Simon Yuill claims that the emergent practice of livecoding 'most directly embodies the key principles of FLOSS production into the creation and experience of the work itself.' Unfortunately this claim is supportet by an argumentation which is elitist, draws on the criterium of virtuosity and thereby stands in stark contrast to the culture of particpation that FLOSS has engendered. While his central argument is not supported, the piece offers enough food for thought to be considered interesting reading.

On re-reading Umberto Eco on the openness of artworks¹ and while thinking about the problem of the relationship between media art and Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) as I had it outlined in my original text The Next Layer it suddenly became clear to me that FLOSS makes true all the promises of the avantgarde yet kills art by doing so.

FLOSS has already realised some of the most important demands of the avant-garde of high modernity: it killed the author, or better, replaced him or her with a collaborative model of collective authorship - thereby making true the utopian demand by Isidore Ducasse and the Surrealists that 'poetry should be made by all'; it realised the demand by Walter Benjamin, who was himself inspired by the Russian Productivist Tretiakov, that the author should create the conditions for others to become authors as well, by creating a culture of particpation on a massive scale. (please note the difference between 'participation on massive scale' and 'the masses'; this is not about the 'masses', a derogatory term used by the bourgeoisie, but about the people.)

Seen from any possible angle FLOSS comes close to ideally representing key demands that have been raised about the ideal of artistic production by avant-garde movements in high modernity and the 1960ies. Yet at the same time the vast majority of the output of the FLOSS community is not art. The FLOSS community does not reference its products as art. FLOSS production is not linked to the canon of modern and contemporary art as it emerged from the artistic movements of high modernity; it is not part of the art system of museums and festivals. (On a more philosophical level I postulate that the full realisation of the demand of the avant-garde that 'poetry should be made by all' would automatically spell the end of art as we know it. More about that towards the end of the article.)

In recent years a small part of the art world tries to find ways to enlist FLOSS into the service of fine arts. Usually they get it very wrong as there are unresolvable differences between the ways FLOSS communities think and work and how the art world thinks and functions. Sometimes seemingly more convincing arguments are made about connections between FLOSS and art.

One such example has been the award winning essay All problems of Notation Will be Solved by the Masses by Simon Yuill. Although it is generally a very knowledgeable piece which contains some very important insights about both FLOSS and art, Yuill gets it all wrong in one central point: he bases his argument on elitism and virtuosity. As I will show, although FLOSS culture contains elements of both, elitism and virtuosity, those criteria stand in stark contrast to the central tenets of FLOSS culture: to foster a culture of enabling, facilitation and participation on a massive scale.

Under paragraph one of his text Yuill states:

"Of all the artforms supported and enabled through FLOSS, ‘livecoding’ has emerged as the one which most directly embodies the key principles of FLOSS production into the creation and experience of the work itself." (page 2)

Livecoding is an emergent practice whereby performers on stage type code into a computer which gets executed as they type it and produces sound and / or images. Main proponents of the practice are the group with, among others, Alex McLean, Amy Alexander and xxxxx. It is a very interesting practice and I have a lot of respect for the skill of the artists involved. It may also be true that livecoding shares some characteristics with forms of avant-garde music involving improvisation and open notation schemes. But what I find highly disagreeable is that livecoding ideally embodies the key characteristics of FLOSS and the way that this argument is made.

Simon Yuill places livecoding within a context of Post-Webernian avantgarde music, from Berio to Stockhausen and others (the same artists who are quoted by Eco), African American avant-garde music of the 1960ies ('Free Jazz') and MIT hacker culture exemplified by the educational software project LOGO for children which was promoted by Seymour Papart, also in the 1960ies. Yuill gets mixed up between the character of lifecoding as an 'open' artwork in the sense of Umberto Eco and the participatory character of FLOSS. If Yuill is right that livecoding indeed shares important properties with avant-garde music both from the Western European and the African American tradition and the MIT hacker culture as well, then it is by definition one of the most elitist activities that can be thought of. This elitism stands in stark contrast to the mass participatory culture which FLOSS has facilitated. Moreover, although Yuill states that livecoding embodies the principles of FLOSS, he relies on a definition of art which in an unquestioning way continues a typification of art which is based on the old paradigm of genius and virtuosity. If FLOSS practice can be art, then the definition of art must change significantly as well.

FLOSS is for all

FLOSS is the product of often widespread collaborations between geographically dispersed individuals and communities who use the internet and certain communication tools such as versioning systems, forums, wikis and mailinglists to coordinate their efforts and produce works of huge complexity. Although in those collaborations the individual does not vanish and the projects often have decision making and organising structures which are neither flat nor decentralized but on the contrary, sometimes highly centralized (such as the 'benevolent dictatorship' allegedly exercised by Linus Torvalds over the Linux project), FLOSS nevertheless stretches the concept of authorship until it breaks. Free Software projects such as the Debian distribution have thousands of authors and maybe, if all the contributed 'packages' are counted, even millions. The number of 'participants' rises even further if we also take into account the people who use the software and write bug reports and who populate the forums and exchange tips about installation and usage.

If we consider different levels of engagement, from master/expert to average programmer to someone who can tweak a few lines of existing code to, finally, the 'end user', the boundaries between producer and consumer are not simply blurred but the dichotomy is wholly replaced by a field of relationships. Last not least, all those various types of production happen in a vast gift economy whereby the code, following the 'law' of the GPL is exchanged freely just as if communism had been realised within the heart of the capitalist high-tech industry. Classically only art had the status of a non-commodity (loosely following Bordieu on this subject matter who stated that the field of cultural production constituted a non-economy because all the laws of the economy proper had been reversed). Now software has acquired that status too. Such similarities should not mislead us about the profound differences. I would go even so far to propose that there is a fundamental incommensurability (in the sense of Paul Feyerabend) between FLOSS and art.

Simon Yuill claims that 'the fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs.[footnote 64]' 2 However, in FLOSS culture code is not just shared between 'friends'. FLOSS has spawned a mass participatory culture which is based on a very clear set of rules embodied in the GPL. The central tenet of FLOSS, if there is such a thing, is that code is not just shared between friends but between millions of strangers who in the vast majority never ever meet face-to-face. The main motivation for sharing is not friendship but a whole set of different motivations which are in the majority non-altruistic³

Schoenberg vs Sid Vicious

Another area in which Yuill's thesis leads itself ad absurdum is that he links livecoding with virtuosity. Indeed, when I heard first about this practice some years ago, I found just the thought of it intimitating. Programming is something very difficult, to do it live on stage and generate aesthetically interesting results surely is something that only a small minority of elite hackers can do. Drawing on Paulo Virno, Yuill states that 'improvisation exemplifies virtuosity'.⁴ Yet virtuosity is generally linked with an obsolete bourgeois concept of art. The key characteristic of emancipatory forms of art and culture in the 20th century has not been the focus on virtuosity but on the contrary, on the inspired dilettante: from Duchamp's signing of industrially produced objects to Warhol's reproduction of mass media images to the three chords of Punk music. The same with hacking. You can enter hacker culture at all levels as I have shown above. It is something that does not just benefit and give gratification to the virtuoso but also to the bloodiest newbie struggling to install Ubuntu⁵

At the core of Yuill's thesis is the idea that software is a form of notation (which is something that itself can be disputed, but maybe at another time). He places livecoding in the proximity of Post-Webernian composers who use 'open' notation schemes. In those works the notation does not determine the final output, it leaves a lot of space for interpretation. I am not saying this in any denunciatory way, it is a matter of factly statement that at the time when those experimental techniques first came up, they were recognized, practiced and appreciated by an elite only. They came from a background of 'serious' music in the Western tradition. This sort of elitism is deeply embedded in the Eurocentric system of art. In his text Yuill offers the best (or worst) example of what happens when aesthetic avantgarde-elitism becomes politicised. His most important British example is the Scratch Orchestra founded by Cornelius Cardew. Yuill writes:

"It was through the Scratch Orchestra that Cardew was to acquire a profound political self-awareness, applying an explicit Maoist perspective to his own practice, and leading to his involvement in founding the Revolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). "
(Yuill 2008, page 9)

By 1970 (when Cardew got so politicised) the horrors of Stalinism and Maoism were well known in Britain. It is unfortunate that, following his elitist instinct, Cardew would openly associated himself with politicians who promoted and practiced the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' (i.e. genocide of peasants and workers) whereby with proletariat they did not refer to 'the people' but to the party. The sad end of the Scratch Orchestra as told by Simon Yuill is just another illustration what an elitist mindset leads to.(pages 13, 14, 15)

Yuill gets himself even deeper into an elitist quagmire by slightly misquoting Adorno when he writes:

"The performance may simply become the regurgitation of old cliches and formulas like that of the amateur jazz musician described by Adorno, unable to stray from the existing models to which he has adapted and subordinated himself.[53]"⁶

In the passage that Yuill refers to Adorno does not talk about an 'amateur' jazz musician but dismisses the whole genre of Jazz because it was, in his understanding, tainted by the fact that it emerged from a commercial culture industry and therefore engendered a fetishisation of music accompanied by a regression of listening. Adorno's critique of Jazz can at best be considerd that of a Eurocentric art snob, yet actually it may be outright racist. I can only utter surprise by seeing Adorno being quoted in this way. The economic conditions of the creation of an art form do not necessarily determine the artistic qualities of an art form.

Livecoding as practice and the virtue ethics

If everything until so far sounds like I am out to do a hatchet job on Yuill's essay I must clearly state this is not my intention. It is really unfortunate that he gets it wrong in that most central point regarding elitism and vistuosity. There are also some very good points. What Yuill says about the practice of livecoding can be extended to a statement about many participatory practices:

"The notion of practice that they exhibit is one which is consciously linked to, and helps define, particular practitioner communities. They are groups defined not by a common aesthetic, style, nor even in some cases common collection of cultural references, but significantly by commitments to shared practices." (page 8)

I also find very useful for my own FLOSS research and can subscribe to the notion of the virtue-ethic:

"In contrast to an ethics of duty based on obligation to a set of external standards to which the individual must aspire, virtue ethics arise from and are directed towards forms of practice. They are defined and realised through action rather than regulation or law and aim towards a general ethic of self-actualisation.[footnote 61] " (page 9)

It is really unfortunate that, rather than following those clues about practice and a 'virtue ethic', Yuill falls into the trap of various elitisms.⁷

Avantgarde groups and social context

Sometimes the references in Yuill's essay just do not go together well, maybe because everything is explained from a viewpoint of artistic immanence and not via sober and cool social analysis. An example: The proposed proximity between the Sun Ra Arkestra and MIT hackerdom in the 1960ies, is a very doubtful connection, as by all means Sun Ra's 'science' was a caricature of and directed against Pentagon supported Yankee WASP egg-head culture. Yet Yuill uses the trick of writing about those without any separation of paragraph, through this stylistic trick implying they are closely related practices. The free jazz of John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Ornette Colemen and other was/is important not just because of the use of dissonant tonalities and the method of free improvisation but also because of the social context of black consciousness and the radicalisation of the civil rights movement. It was also the first time that African American jazz musicians started their own labels and created independent distribution channels. The virtuosity of free improvisation alone without black consciousness and empowerment can create really dire results. I have been exposed to so many 'free improvisation sessions' in my student yeras in the late 1970ies and early 1980ies, that this drove me directly into the arms of punk, disco, rap and reggae. To claim any similarity between livecoding and the high point of free jazz is a bit far fetched indeed. What the world maybe needs is not to find the next John Coltrane of FLOSS (or more clones of RSM) but rather a Bob Marley of Open Source.

Another good point in Simon Yuill's essay is the recognition that FLOSS is an 'endless' project:

"Whereas commercial software production emphasises the creation of distinct software products, hacking emphasises code as part of a ongoing dialogue between practitioners."

and

"Free Software is an ‘activity-without-end-product’ not in the sense of having no output, but rather in the sense of constantly creating the capacity for production elsewhere." (both quotations page 11)

This relates to Umberto Eco's definitions of openness about the never ending art work. While the notion of the artwork as a somehow open, aleatory and auto-poietic system, a work which keeps being recreated and recreated and thereby changes, is a beautiful one, the reality is that this does not go well with the current art market. The success of the commercial art market as exemplified by the growth of art fairs in recent years has been based on a regression towards ever more commercial forms of art placed firmly on the notion of the sellable object with discrete forms.

At the same time digital artists have a more fundamental and philosophic al problem exactly because of the openendedness of the world of FLOSS. Any work based on FLOSS by its very nature has no beginning and no end and no single author. This becomes most obvious in the case of internet based artworks, such as the participatory work 9Nine by Mongrel/Harwood. "How can you cope with a situation where nothing every stays the same," the artist Harwood sighed in an interview with me⁸, where, paraphrasing him now, everything changes all the time and nothing is ever fixed? This is the world of FLOSS and how would anyone claim that this has anything to do with art as we know it? The artist can at best ride on a wave created by the multitude of FLOSS developers and make comments on the current state of the art and society, but this is not art as we knew it, based on a clear distinction between the 'work' and the 'author'.

Conclusions

The demand that 'poetry should be made by all' is in the process of being realised by open source culture. The desire of the most interesting elements within the Western art world that art should leave behind the bourgeois phase of aestheticism and become part of the praxis of life (Bürger 1974), that art should become radically democratic, that the barriers between producers and consumers should be removed and that all humans should have the chance to fully realize their potential by being engaged in creating beauty has never been come closer to than at the beginning of the 21st century with the rise of a huge wave of participatory cultures in music, in writing, in software, in hardware. Within those areas, FLOSS is in my opinion a priviliged area as it is not only another form of expression but also an enabler of DIY cultures. The fear that this gets turned into a 'spectacle of participation' through Web 2.0 is justified. However, the mass media success of venture capital supported 'social software' platforms should not obscure the fact that there is still a thriving and rapidly growing FLOSS culture which exists separately from that and which gives millions of people a chance to learn and educate and express themselves. As Simon Yuill rightly says in his opening remarks, there has been a disillusionment regarding 'openness' but not with Open Source Culture but the way some parts of the art system have tried to claim it and recuperate for an artistic praxis which adheres to bourgeois values. Yuill writes:

"Not all artists working with FLOSS and livecoding necessarily share the politics of the hacklabs scene, nor do all hacklab participants necessarily look upon their own activities as art-related, and some are, sometimes rightly, sceptical of artistic involvement in what they do."

Unfortunately he does not elaborate on those differences because that would lead to a very fundamental aporia. Artists who now claim to be working on the basis of FLOSS principles do so within an art system which works inside the capitalist system. Their success as artists and the economic viability of their careers is based on them gathering symbolic capital as individual artist geniuses. If the demand that poetry should be made by all would be fully realised that would mean almost by necessity that all people would have to be freed from the slavery of work to be able to fully devote themselves to the making of art. However, only a utopian society can support such a situation where everybody truly 'is an artist' and in such a society the word 'art' has no separate meaning anymore. Until that society is realised we will always be partly unfree and areas of freedom such as FLOSS will have to exist as islands - however vast and growing - in an ocean of unfreedom. Under current conditions, if FLOSS realises the demand that poetry is produced by all, it does so by an act of devaluation says Peter Bürger⁹p 52. Bürger then suggests to step back from the avantgardistic demand that art should become part of the praxis of life and stay 'autonomous' in the classical sense - as a distinct system within the existing society with its own values. This sudden turn is hard to follow. Instead, if we still believe in any form of progress, then we can join FLOSS with a non-elitist ethos of art. One Love.

Eco U.
2006. The Poetics of the Open Work.
Participation. :20-41.
page 9 quoting Richard Stallman in: Richard Stallman, ‘The GNU Manifesto’, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd edition, GNU Press: Boston, 2004, p.35.
this has been well researched and evidenced by magazines such as First Monday; cf for instance Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? The structure of motivation in Open Source software by Andrea Bonaccorsi and Cristina Rossi. First Monday, volume 9, number 1 (January 2004), URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_1/bonaccorsi/index.html.
page 10 quote from: Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson, Semiotext(e): Los Angeles, 2004.
a Linux based operating system which is said to be very easy to install). Part of the attraction is that there are seemingly no rules and that you can start through try and error.
page 7 misquoted from Theodor Adorno, ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Cuture, edited by J.M. Bernstein, London: Routledge, 1991, p. 48. I am not exactly sure what Yuill refers to on page 48, but those pages belong to the most problematic what Adorno has written; for instance: "mass music [...] not only turned them away from important music but confirmed them in neurotic stupidity" page 47. it goes on and on inn that style)
To an extent, that same criticism can be applied to one of Simon's own works, Spring Alpha. Although in principle, conceptually and aesthetically, thjs is a perfect FLOSS art work, a game whose rules can be changed by the players, it limits participation to people who can code in PHP. If participation is so technically defined, it becomes the opposite, a method of exclusion. The audience can only stand in awe about the virtuosity of the live-coders whose performance turns into a spectacle.
published, in an unedited format, here Interview with Harwood / Mongrel: Between Social Software and the Poetic
Bürger in Citekey 585 not found

TNL Howto

Lindsay — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:57:26 +0200

After reading Armin's post about books, I thought it might be a good idea to start another one on the subject of a howto for users. I know that Armin has been thinking about this for a wee while and has perhaps got some notes already? However I thought I would add a couple of notes from advice I sent to another contributer. They might come in handy for a basic howto book in the future. By starting a book, we can all add our advice notes that can be collated/edited at a later date, this way advice for all abilities can be added.

Forum Topics

To create a new forum topic go into 'create content' on the left hand side bar on the home page, then click on forum topics. Its pretty straight forward from there as regards the subject and the language options*. The forum topics are limited, but if you wanted to add another category eg copyright, then you would click onto content management on the black bar at the top of the home page, click categories, then click add term on the forums. This gives a few options such as the parent category, which you may want to put under the term 'site building' for example.

Back to creating a forum topic. if you look at menu settings, here you can link the forum to other topics. Therefore for example if you want to link your forum into the taxi to praxi main menu, you select the parent category as Taxi to Praxi from the list and your forum topic will become a child of that parent. Another setting is the publishing options; if you want your post to go to the front page, you tick the box under that says 'promote to front page'. To add a comment to an existing forum, just click 'add comment' at the bottom of the main forum posting.

Language

It is very easy to add a language. Once you have signed in go to the black bar at the top of the home page. Select 'site configuration' then 'localisation'. you will then see 'manage languages'. Click on 'add language' then you will see a drop down list of languages. After you have added a language go back to 'manage languages' then click 'enable'.

To add the language to the menu category (the choice list you see when you go into create content), simply go to 'content management' on the black bar at the top of the home page and click 'categories'. You will then see the list for languages where you can add a term.

“A while ago i created a new image gallery by doing the same thing in image galleries (ie site configuration ect) but I forgot to link it to the main image menu that appears on the right hand navigation bar on the home page. Today I linked it into that main menu so that it appears in the gallery list. To do this I went to the black navigation bar at the top, clicked on 'site building' then 'menus'. I then went to 'add menu item'. In here it asked for the title, which in my case was 'Electronica' as that was the gallery that I'd created. It then asked for the path. This is the URL that the menu wants to link to and was the address for 'electronica'. To find this I had to click on the gallery and copy the address from the bar which was http://www.thenextlayer.org/image/tid/275
It then asks for a parent, and in this case the parent menu item I wanted to link to was 'image galleries' which could be found in the drop down list.”

Howto create structured research documents with 'Books' (revised)

Armin Medosch — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:31:38 +0200

In the past few months TNL has gone through significant changes. Although many of those are not visible on the surface straight away, they constitute great improvements of the site. Key changes have been made especially in regard to this forum topic about books and bibliographic references.

If you go to create content -- book page http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/add/book
you can create a new book page either on the top level of navigation or under some existing second layer such as 'Documentation' or 'Readers' or 'Waves and Code' which are at the time of writing the three top level links for books.

A book page is nothing else than a static page which is linked in a hierarchical structure to other static pages. You give it a title, select one of the categories and / or create a new one under the 'topic' vocabulary and then put your actual content in the body of the book page. Here take care to select the right Input format. For a beginning, filtered html will just do fine.

If it is your first page, the 'weight' pop-up menu can be kept at 0. Later this will take on a crucial function.

if you want to add an image or a 'related link' then just do so. You can also ignore those menu options. scroll to the bottom, the only menu option you should look at is 'publishing options'. Here you can decide if your book page should be published on the front page or not. If you are certain that you want to share your page with the wider public, then go ahead. Otherwise un-tick the 'published to front page' option. Then choose preview or submit and here you go, you have created a book page.

Once you have created your first page, you can scroll to the bottom of it and simply click on 'add child page'. You will get a menu which is exactly the same as the one you got via create content -- add book page. If you add now a second page, this page will automatically show up in a navigation menu below the first page.

However, if you have a more complex structure with nested hierarchies between pages, you will have to consider the weighting. by selecting a weight from -15 to +15 you select where the page shows up in the navigation. if you have a lot of pages which need organising this will probably take some trial and error. However, in principle this is easy and you cant break anything which cant be repaired equally quickly.

So far we have just used the built in book function. Part of the fun is that you can invite other people to edit your book pages for collaborative writing projects. If you make significant edits to a page, either your own page or the page of somebody else, select 'create new revision' at the bottom menu under 'publishing options'. This will later allow you two things: to move backward in time through revisions of the page, and to 'diff' revisions. Diff means that you can compare changes between the last two versions, which comes in handy if you do some collaborative text editing.

If you are used to complex text editing programs such as MS Word or Open Office, you will probably enjoy the Footnote and Biblio functions. In your text in a book page, you can us the fn tag <fn>and what you write in between the tags will appear as an automatically numbered footnote, but don't forget the end tag </fn>

Almost analogue to that works the bib tag. If you want to refer from within your text to a bibliographic reference, use
<bib> and </bib> whereby in between the tags you have to put the citekey. You can only use bib if your reference exists in the biblio reference database of tnl. To do that, go to create content -- biblio and add a reference, which can be anything from book to article to journal, etc. Once you have entered your reference a citekey will automatically be generated (you could also enter one by hand). the automatically generated citekey is just a number. Put this number between bib tags and it will again create an automatically numbered endnote which will contain your reference.

Enjoy your footnotes and bibs, admin 26.06.2008

-------------------------starts old entry-----------------------------------

well, this is the question, innit? I am not sure to have the answer yet but I would like to develop it collaboratively with you.

I suggest to use the module 'books' in drupal to create structured research areas with agreed hierarchies between terms so that all of us can identify with those structures and feel comfortable in using them.

But when i started to think about an actual structure for 'books' i cam immedeately across taxonomical problems.

I would like to take it slowly and discuss those hierarchies with you.

For now I have added the term 'documentation' thinking it would be good to have some very high level terminology. continuing like this you could have

documentations
manuals
research
novels
etc.

continuing with this logic the first entry "waves and code" is wrong as it would have to come under research. then also waves and code have to be separated as obviously this way of putting it together is a pet book
idea of me but not a generic structure for research .

this could be a possible structure

research
    projects
    publications
        notes
        papers
        books

in this hierarchy my "waves and code" could be a 'project' or I could
file the actual text 45rpm under 'papers'. which other categories could
there be? a 'study' or 'research reports'?

but the basic question:

is it feasible or necessary at all to have so many hierarchies, or
is it okay to have just one layer of actual research projects? if we
have layers, then how many?

and the multi-hierarchy problem: 'notes' could relate to publications as
well as projects

should we add a category 'materials' which refers to images and
audiovisual means of documentation relating to a research project?

Creative City Discourse: Amsterdam as New Babylon

Armin Medosch — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:18:16 +0200

Interesting piece about creative city policy in Amsterdam in Variant by Merijn Oudenampsen
http://www.variant.randomstate.org/31texts/issue31.html#L6

The following quotes are from "Back to the Future of the Creative City
An Archaeological Approach to Amsterdam’s Creative Redevelopment" by Merijn Oudenampsen in Variant, issue 31, Spring 2008

"Constant Nieuwenhuys envisaged a society where automation had realised the liberation of humanity from the toils of industrial work, replacing labour with a nomadic life of creative play outside of the economic domain and in disregard of any considerations of functionality. “Contrary to what the functionalists think, culture is situated at the point where usefulness ends”, was one of Constant’s more provocative statements." Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘Opkomst en Ondergang van de Avant-Garde’. In: Randstad 8 (1964), pp 6-35.

The work of Constant thus combined an aversion for modernist functionalism with an intense appreciation of the emancipatory potentials of new technology. Mechanisation would result in the arrival of a “mass culture of creativity” that would revolt against the superstructure of bourgeois society, destroying it completely and taking the privileged position of the artist down with it.

Together with the consolidation of consumption as a leisure activity, the expansion of labour time has led to an unprecedented amount of human activity being directly or indirectly incorporated into the sphere of economic transactions through a process Marx would have called ‘real subsumption’, or the extension of capitalism onto the field of ontology, of lived social practice.

NodeL Dummy Article

admin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:17:10 +0200

dummy article

In Spring 2008, NODE.London is calling a seasonal gathering of media art, showing how London is budding with fresh exhibitions, discussions, musical events and participatory projects.¹

This website will soon be filling with an ongoing programme from Spring 2008. Until then, you can browse the archive of the first NODE.London² season of media arts in March 2006.

NODE.London is open to any person or group who wants to help spread media art and related activity around London and beyond! If you would like to get involved, please check the NODE.London wiki and come to one of our regular meetings and introduce yourself.

Federici Silvia.
1995. Enduring Western civilization : the construction of the concept of Western civilization and its "others".
Node.London in 2006 was an eqully succesful blah