Open Source

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

WHO'S AFRAID OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH?

Lindsay — Sat, 03 May 2008 10:02:35 +0200

WHO IS AFRAID OF ARTISTIC RESEARCH?

Thursday 22nd May 2008 10am - 4.30pm
Dundee Contemporary Arts Seminar room

One-day symposium about the epistemology and context of practice-based research

Compared with the established epistemologies of the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, the discourse surrounding practice-based research in art and design is relatively young and includes a range of diverse approaches. What practice-based research is or is not, is highly controversial. Does it mean that the researcher investigates his/her own (visual) practice, or rather, that visual practice is a means of investigation? Other questions arise in the context of 'normal science' and the knowledge economy: what are the goals of such research?, and what is the desired outcome? What are the connecting lines between art and science, between practice and theory?
And last but not least: why would an artist want to do 'research'?

Practice-based research can be understood as a process, evolving from and changing through the practice undertaken by the individual researcher. The challenge here is that research (still) can be undertaken in releative freedom. Entering the arena of ongoing discussion, negotiation and re-adjustment, and engaging in the discourse about methodology essentially contributes to constituting this freedom.

Speakers:
Laurence Rassel, artist/curator (constantvzw.org, Brussels) Simon Sheikh, curator/critic (Copenhagen, Malmö Art Academy) Dr. Dieter Lesage, philosopher (Berlin/ Erasmushogeschool Brussel) Prof. Nigel Johnson, artist/researcher (Dundee University)
Chair: Dr. Ken Neil, artist/researcher (Glasgow School of Art)

Screening:
A portrait of the artist as a worker (rmx.), Ina Wudtke, Berlin

Organised by: Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Sollfrank

For detailed information about the programme and the speakers, please visit the Visual Research Centre website at the address below.

The event is free, but advance booking is required: 01382-909900

Dundee Contemporary Arts · Nethergate 152 · Dundee DD1 4DX

Praxi-to-taxi: An Improvisation

Armin Medosch — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 11:33:28 +0200

The experimental workshop day taxi-to-praxi at Goldsmiths started off with a positive vibe as about 35 people met in the seminar room underneath the 'squiggle' whereby this group consisted of about one third of people from Goldmiths, one third from other universities and one third of unaligned individuals working as artists or curators. After Prof Janis Jeffries, convenor of the PhD in Arts and Computation opened the session, a lively and stimulating day unfolded. In this account I try to piece together from notes and memories what were some of the main issues which emerged.

After an introduction by Adnan and me, the morning started with Jaromil prsenting the concept of solid knowledge. Describing himself as "a student for life but not subscribed to any institution" he formulated a challenge to teachers of any kind: If I learn something today, will it be useful in 20 years? Jaromil related this question to the area of software, where economic pressure drives people into dead end streets, rather than using proven tools which have been around in basic form for 40 years.

After he spoke some participants felt uneasy with the notion of 'solid' knowledge, maybe because in the digital age in which we allegedly live everything is supposed to be fluid. I thought maybe it is about knowledge which forms from the bottom-up, a type of knowledge which is connected to a skill or activity, through which an understanding of the world is gained. In the area of computing for instance I have not really learned much at all apart from two things, how to deal with problems and how to use searches and evaluate the information found. Everything else is maybe more ephemeral. Corrado added to this discussion with the keywords "sustainable, lean and robust" - as characteristics of programming languages or software. I think especially in computing some departments have used the same proven methods for years. Papers are written in Latex and reading notes are created and managed using BibTex, metadata are separated from content. However, such good practice is not found everywhere. All too often one is asked to submit a .doc, even when the topic is something open sourcy.

Lindsay Brown started out by saying that she feels that people who do practice based PhDs in fine arts are forced into directions more scientific, more commercial, whereby the university owns the copyright. She reacts to this by inventing her own tale, creating a sort of metanarration combining scientific facts and 'saucy' tales, saucy because she plans to study the wreck of the sunken ship HMS Saucy. Lindsay explained that she intended to rely on Grounded Theory, a concept which emerged in critical sociology in the 1960ies. Instead of tackling a subject through a set of existing categories, the categories emerge through the study of the subject. One of the participants from sociology pointed out that there was an existing critique of Grounded Theory, as it was impossible to have no preconceptions. I am sure we will hear more from Lindsay on this subject, who also said that she tries to weave visual ways of working into her work.

This discussion on grounded theory could be related to the discussion around hierarchical taxonomies such as those created in semantic web and the oh so popular free tagging systems used in social software applications, such as this one here. It also related to the philosophical discussion between absolut truth and total relativism, maybe. In this section I also noted down "can intuition be a methodology" and the "quagmire of opinion", both interesting phrases on which maybe someone can elaborate more.

Something else that came to my mind during this presentation is Jutta Weber's concept of situated ontology. In science studies, through the influence of poststructuralism, the universal ontologies have been dismissed. This is a good step insofar as this destroys the myth of science being about objective knowledge or laws of nature. However, the world is not just text read against other texts. Weber argues that the critique of science formulated by poststructuralism is unable to stop the juggernaut of science which is, in the 'natural' sciences still naively positivistic, mostly, from creating it's monstrosities. As a way of overcoming the shortfalls in Latour, Derrida, Luhmanm and all their apostles, Weber proposes her concept of situated ontology - an ontology nevertheless but grounded in the subject and connected to a historic reality and not timeless, universal and absolute truth.

During the lively discussion after Lindsay's presentation several voices were heard who complained about problems they encountered with their PhD. As universities try to craete additional revenue streams the notion of intellectual property seems to be widely accepted by university management. Students are encouraged to buy into IP and submit their work to professional journals which are copyrighted and whose copyright is strongly enforced. The reification of knowledge gets accepted with no further questions asked. Someone from Chelsea mentioned that only 25% of the thesis could be put online. Somebody else had experienced a ban on peer generated knowledge. This raises the question if in todays context collective epistemologies can exist -- which again raises the question of not any epistemology is collective to some degree. Other problems stemmed from a complete lack of knowledge by higher university grandes about anything digital so that one PhD candidate had to submit a definition of 'blog' to an ethics committee.

After an excellent lunch provided by a vegetarian caterer who picks his own mushrooms - very open source - Jonas Andersson talked briefly about a series of Print-on-Demand (POD) books he had created together with Adnan and published cia the OpenMute website. Last year Deptford.TV Diaries I came out, followed by a similra reader this year, which can be downloaded as a PDF, bought as a book via OpenMute or Amazon and read chapter by chapter here, with us. Lisa Haskel gave a technical presentation about combining Drupal with versioning systems such as Subversion. Mia Jankowitz talked about her experience with the Disclosures festival. What I found interesting and expected to have been researched more already but am disappointed not to see is the connection between the notion of openness as it is now adopted in the art world and the older notion of process based work which was once fashionable in the sixties and seventies which then again could be a useful link between concptual art and media art. A 'process based' art form is maybe also one which shares its methodologies and creates an 'open process'. Mia, during her work leading up to Disclosures, also encountered what she called a 'mismatch between professional organisation and the wiki way of doing things'.

Helen Sloan talked about curating as research, a notion which she has already briefly outlined here. A problem with some of those interdisciplinary collaborations between art and science which are increasingly forced on us through funding bodies such as the AHRC is that for artists it is hardly possible to maintain any level of autonomy at all. The scientists usually (maybe not always but in 99%) don't change their methodology or thinking at all. The artists can only comment on the science or, what is often expected from them, illustrate difficult to understand scientific concept - the artist as a cheap science communicator.

Lottie Child talked about her concept of street training, a way of dealing with urban spaces in a playful way and of reconquering space through behaviour. She also investigates how women navigate dangerous streets and how she deals herself with fear, by confronting it head on. Is London an 'open' city or can we open up the 'protocols' that govern behaviour in public spaces?

Peter Westenberg from Constant, Brussels, talked about the work of the group which researches ways of how open source changes their production in Graphics design, audio, video. he also mentioned the idea of having a searchable video wiki and talked about the work of the group about gender and technology. Can a server be 'feminist'?

Cel Crabeels briefly introduced his idea of 'documentary' and of using a system such as drupal to foster collaboration on art and documentary issues.

Alex McLean talked about live coding as a practice where development time and use time which are normally separated in software are folded into one. He also compared the notion of the programming language with being just a tool or a real language which has other implications.

Ismail Malik talked about his idea of howto give very talented young programmers a chance to get a university degree. In his experience young programmers are often reluctant to go to university as they already have established their practice and fear for their creativity being squashed. Some of them only years later recognise that it would be of aadvantage to them to study. Ismail also thought about the notion of the apprenticeship in this context. Could a 'free' academy combine open coursework such as provided by the MIT with an apprenticeship to get a degree?

Apologies if I have left out anyone, as my notetaking was a bit sporadic and often quite associative. We are looking still forward to other people giving their accounts and uploading images and, hopefully, the video.

Danger: Lest Taxi to Praxi be Forgotten

Lindsay — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:15:43 +0200

Over a day has passed since the Taxi to Praxi seminar at Goldsmiths University. People have discussed, moaned, laughed and tried to disseminate some kind of coherent theme that is relevant to us all whether that be for Art, PhD or a way of working that incorporates some kind of collaborative openness. We are all now back in our own countries, homes, domestic situations and some of us are probably, like myself, trying to edit and analyse the proceedings of that day.

For me, one major theme seemed to reoccur again and again, and this was one of ownership and dissemination of knowledge. From the individual researchers data collection, to projects such as Cel Crabeel’s thesis proposal that incorporated seven other participants within a theme of Documentary, the notion of who owns what and how we are all individually working around/within this, is fascinating. What came to light, was that there are no set hard and fast rules within the University system. Each institution having their own ideas over what constitutes ownership, and how much freedom that they are willing to offer the individual student with the manner in which they store, disseminate and publish their data, theories and theses.

In going back to the original introductory text of the day then, my questions now are:

Coalitions: How do we embed a collaborative open source culture into institutions that utilise a business ethos?

Technologies: How far can we make use of tools and technologies that incorporate multiple contributors, within an institutionalised system that holds copyright over individual work?

Solutions: What mechanisms, subversions and methodologies will allow us to work around and within an institution that recognises the sole author as one of its main output statistics?

My end thoughts on this initial text ramble are that

1) I hope that someone responds
2) Working within groups is the way forward
3) Lets not become institutionalised and loose sight of a potential new way of looking at or thinking about a problem.

Best wishes from a methodological meanderer.
Lindsay

Curating as practice led research

HelenSloan — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:39:22 +0200

Curating can be a form of practice led research and this is perhaps the most interesting approach. Having developed my own practice as a curator through the 1990s using ‘new media’, it has by necessity been a process of learning about technology through my practice and what it can do to enhance the presentation of content; in some cases of course the technology is the content in its own right. Learning on the job during the 1990s was the only way to develop given that artists were also experimenting with new forms and with it new ideas. In 20 years, we have gone from artists having to write their own code by necessity to artists choosing whether to use proprietary packages or to write their own code. And of course, social networking and creativity has changed the landscape as is pointed out in the introduction to Taxi to Praxi in terms of the growth of the internet.

A curator, to my mind, is not someone who provides pre-determined themes and concepts to an exhibition and is given the task of defining a field. This is very autocratic and certainly not an open source approach and yet a role that is repeatedly given to curators in the art world. To me, and central to my practice, a curator is someone who facilitates environments for development of artistic practice, inputs into concept development and assists artists to make the most of their ideas as they put them into practice. A curator becomes part of a creative team that brings an idea into fruition. Once this is achieved a curator then works with the artist(s) to define the themes of an exhibition or an event. It was and is my hope that media arts would be developed and defined by those people who choose to work in that way at any one time and not to be defined by nominated experts.

Media arts curating is open source at its best and should not at this stage be subsumed into the broader arts, as its defining ‘open source’ qualities are likely to get lost in amongst more prevalent methods of working. I have been Director of SCAN (www.scansite.org) for the last 5 years and this open source approach to curating alongside participative and collaborative working on projects is at the heart of what my organisation does. Whilst art for arts sake is not necessarily an inappropriate way of working, open source curating usually opens up debates through art that can be extended to other aspects of culture and society.

Roots Culture: Free Software Vibrations "inna Babylon"

Armin Medosch — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:33:06 +0200

The Culture of Open Sources

Armin Medosch — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 18:46:40 +0200

The Culture of Open Sources is a study of the creative methodologies of Free and Open Source Software developers who either write code for creative applications or support artistic and social goals as sysadmins. This research is based on qualitative research with about 20 developers so far with whom long biographic and interviews have been conducted. For those interviews as set of 10 questions was used which had subquestions and were about youth and early formative years, learning, motivation, contact with Linux, ideas about political software development and the possibility to have an impact on 'creative developments' of societies through writing software.

Solid Knowledge

jaromil — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 13:43:22 +0200

Solid Knowledge
As privatisation of educational structures progresses, the Academy assumes corporate and business mind-set, while we assist to a shift of the educational mission in society from inclusive to exclusive. The inﬂuential play of industries has permeated most academical disciplines, in particular regarding the adoption of technologies. The choice of educators has become biased by logics of short term proﬁt, rather than Solid Knowledge.
Notions are rapidly becoming universally available. Heuristic, maieutic and infrastructure functions provided by Academies are best satisﬁed by the global action of free software communities horizontally sharing methods, experiences, working implementations, on distributed and versioned R&D platforms.
As components can be combined and redistributed, copied and modiﬁed (GNU GPL) students learn a knowledge that is durable, free from “intellectual properties ” restricting their rights to produce and redistribute creations. This situation will provide an advantage for new generations, as it does for developing countries.

Biography
Jaromil¹ is a developer and media artist inspired by the GNU free software movement: he follows the ideal of creating FOSS for freedom of expression, to let people communicate, freed from consumerist speculations and the need for expensive hardware.
Related essays: J. Bosma on net-art² , A. Broeckmann on software art³ , N. Emmenegger on Virtual Borders and Migrant Cyber-Tactics⁴ , F. Cramer on Digital code and literary text⁵ .
Among open source software he created and maintains are: MuSE⁶ (for running a web radio), FreeJ⁷ (for vee-jay and real-time video manipulation), HasciiCam⁸ (ASCII video streaming) and dyne:bolic⁹ (eﬃcient live-CD widely employed for media production and broadcasting). These creations are redis-tributed by the Free Software Foundation¹⁰ and several other educational institutions worldwide.

Based in Amsterdam, Jaromil is currently active on FOSS R&D for the NIMK`,¹¹ , adjunct lecturer (year 2008/09) for the Media Design MA at PZwart / WDKA¹² in Rotterdam and the Digital Environment Design MA at NABA¹³ in Milano. Jaromil is a featured artist in CODeDOC II¹⁴ (Whitney Museum Artport), Read_Me 2.3¹⁵ (runme.org¹⁶ software art), negotiations 2003¹⁷ (Toronto CA), I LOVE YOU¹⁸ (MAK Frankfurt), Netarts¹⁹ (Machida Tokyo), Rhizome²⁰ , Data Browser 02²¹ (engineering culture), Crosstalks²² (Vrĳe Universiteit Brussel) and in several other publications²³

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Jaromil
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/public_sphere_s/media_spaces/
http://runtimeart.mi2.hr/TextAndreasBroeckmann
http://www.republicart.net/art/concept/airerev_en.htm
http://cramer.plaintext.cc/essays/digital_code_and_literary_text/digital_code_and_literary_text.pdf
http://muse.dyne.org
http://freej.dyne.org
http://ascii.dyne.org
http://dynebolic.org
http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.nimk.nl
http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/mdma/staﬀ/
http://www.master-naba-d3d.net/
http://www.aec.at/en/festival/programm/codedoc.asp
http://www.m-cult.org/read_me
http://www.runme.org/feature/read/+forkbombsh/+47/
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/8978
http://www.digitalcraft.org/iloveyou/
http://www.netarts.org/mcmogatk/2003/
http://rhizome.org/query.rhiz?words=jaromil&submit.x=0&submit.y=0
http://www.data-browser.net/02/
http://crosstalks.vub.ac.be/
http://books.google.com/books?q=jaromil+dyne

Almost Documentary: Celcrabeels' introduction to taxi-to-praxi

celcrabeels — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:49:06 +0200

Dear all, I have thought about the questions put to us by Taxi to Praxi. I will elaborate a bit.

How do you define practice-led artistic research?

One has to look at the context, the Bologna Process aims to create a European Higher Education Area by 2010. Due to this process the Belgian Academy’s and University’s recently are merging into one structure. This evolution has created a need for 'PhD candidate researchers in Fine Art ' in the Belgian. academic world.

To me research is an essential part of my artistic practice, although my definition of ‘research’ will presumably be different from the one used in a academic environments. I have a interest in interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts. I see practice-led artistic research in the first place as broadening and intensifying of my artistic practice. It is an opportunity to explore different contexts of artistic production. Conducting a practice-led artistic research embedded In the University of Leuven will hopefully be a opportunity to spend a lot of time and efforts at my inquiry into the use and importance of artistic documentary strategies. Next to this it is a challenge to become a team player.

How do you view your research fitting into the larger picture of academia or open-source culture?

My research project* will involve the participation of several people who will together produce and contribute a larger amount of data, text, audio, video, documents… In the classical PhD setup of the University of Leuven a researcher is expected to process all this material into a PhD paper. I’m not in favour off this condensation and reduction of ideas, actions, relations and materials. I’m not rejecting a ‘theoretical’ discourse as inquiry in to the subject of my research but I would like to suggest another format in which the results of this theoretical part of the research should be processed and represented.
The use of open-source platforms (e.g. the deptford.tv) probably is a valid and more appropriate alternative for a PhD paper.

*Almost Documentary, an inquiry into the use and importance of artistic documentary strategies. AD is a documentary research project embedded in a PhD (Doctoraat in de Kunsten) at the University of Leuven, Belgium. http://associatie.kuleuven.be/ivok/ivokeng/index.htm

Abstract about the A.D. research project

The research is concerned with Artists who are sampling images, sounds, documents, films, video footage and newly produced content from its original narrative contexts to generate fresh ideas meanings and relevance. These artists are using documentary strategies and improvisations creatively and subversively as an integral part of their artistic process. The process by which artistic 'documentation' becomes 'circulation’ takes an important place in their artistic practice. This project aims to chart how contemporary audio-visual artists creatively and subversively employ these documentary strategies and how they deal with the problematics of using pre-existing content. I will (re)examine notions such as found footage, re-enactment, traumatic realism, faction, transmediality, documentary improvisations, and how these notions interfere with creation, authorship, objectivity and originality.

A number of artists will be invited to participate and contribute at this research project. Several case studies and collaborations will be set up. The above mentioned artistic practices will be examined from an inside point of view. During the course of this research the content generated by the participants could be archived and made accessible by making use of open and collaborative (FLOSS) methodologies. We are aiming for a collaborative documentary production process.

In this project we will be looking at documentary strategies, not from the ‘documentary makers’ point of view but from the position of the artist. It will be different from “traditional” projects because artists are in many ways operating ‘outside the box’ They are on the verge of the new and the subversive. Artists are constantly challenging knew formats of storytelling, factuality, fiction and representation of reality. It will be interesting to follow up how these formats are being treated by a group of upcoming and leading contemporary artists.

Cel Crabeels was artist/researcher at the Fine Art department of the Jan van Eyck Academie from 1997 to 1999. He is conducting a PhD (Doctoraat in de Kunsten) at the University of Leuven. He exhibited in many museums throughout Europe (Museum Ludwig-Forum Fur Internationale Kunst, Aachen, MuHKA, Antwerp, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Witte De With, Rotterdam, MIT visual arts center, Boston). Crabeels has lectured at Leeds Metropolitan University, Academy of the Arts, Reykjavik, Sint-Lukas Academie, Brussels, Sint-Lukas Academie of Antwerp, Brussels, HISK Antwerp,Ghent, KASK Ghent and Post-Sint Joost, Breda.

Cel Crabeels makes use of the aesthetic strategies of contemporary audio-visual media to explore the phenomena of identification, documentation, historyfication and the artistic use of them. At the same time the artist propagates a critical, self-reflective distance towards this issues. The videos, audio-visual installations, documentary projects and photographs of Cel Crabeels reveal a fascination for obscuring the divisions between representation and reality, fiction and documentary, private and public, critical observation and autobiography. Early works revolved around the existence and persistence of unspoken rules and codes, imposing, obeying or violating limits and norms.

Apropos Open Source Methodologies

Armin Medosch — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:30:51 +0200

When we first started to circulate the call for taxi-to-praxi some of the reactions which I got in private email were of the kind "open source methodology, what's that supposed to be?" - "there is no such things", " etc. Since that moment I thought aha, we are on to something and I should write something about it. This is now not the all conclusive article, but a forum posting, improvised and unfinished.

It would be easy now to come up with references to the so called "hacker ethics". you can get the basic idea from this wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic
However, although there is an overlap, the hacker ethics and open source methodologies are quite different things. By using the term open source methodologies I imply that this is something that goes beyong the narrow confines of computer software development, that these are methodologies (I quite deliberately use the plural here) which can be applied in reesearch as well as creative processes. It is maybe more closely connected to 'peer based commons production' a term coined by Yochai Benkler (cf. The Wealth of Networks) than hacking per se

Thus, without trying to be normative, nor prescriptive, nor complete, I would say an open source methodology can be something where

* you would lay open the assumptions which go into the formulation of your thesis or research subject as much as you are aware that there are assumptions

* you would rather than making references because you have to or because you feel you are supposed to be quite happy to reference anything that informs your work, people who helped you, ideas and influences, work done by others, etc.

* you would be happy to discuss your work in suitable public fora without fear of your ideas being stolen (because you trust that you can realise your idea still and if somebody share an interest maybe you can work together)

* you, despite the fervour with which you defend your thesis, are keeping an open mind to the possibility that you are wrong and have to start completely afresh and maybe turn around your mind 180 degrees, you are not just waiting for that person to show up but actively try to assume that other viewpoint

Whereas those points so far have something to do with opennness, I think there are other aspects which have more to do with freedom and autonomy. An open source methodology can also mean that you are seeking to

* preserve an open working space which implies a certain ethical behaviour in relation to the tools that you use and the ways that you communicate what you do;

*choose tools which allow your work to be accessed by as many people as possible

* publish your work in such a way that it does not get locked into some proprietary structrue which takes it away from public scrutiny

And while you are doing all that you would try to answer questions, read the fine manuals, stay economic with words, and be measured with your paprika when you cook open source gulash.