participation

Participation

Armin Medosch — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:13:02 +0200

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.

1. Eco U .
2006. The Poetics of the Open Work.
Participation. :20-41.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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)
7. 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.
8. published, in an unedited format, here Interview with Harwood / Mongrel: Between Social Software and the Poetic
9. Bürger in Citekey 585 not found

Conclusions

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:19:27 +0200

We live in an extraordinary time when the democratic cornucopia of media is very close to becoming reality and where there are hardly any technical barriers, and if there are the free software community will be capable of solving them. Yet the power elites have already found ways of either subverting that and subverting the creative impulse and the desire of the people, or they are simply moving the goalposts by reminding us that they have naked force on their side.

Regarding radio, the interesting effect is that after 100 years the medium is now in the process of dissolution. Radio can now be produced through software suites such as dyne:bolic by a 15 year old kid alone at home in Ramallah or Bangalore. The apparatic form and radio as a social imaginary signification are drifting apart again. The assemblage of studio-transmitter-receiver is, while still existing, a technically highly obsolescent model. While the technically overdeveloped countries switch to Digital Audio Broadcast (notable the absence of radio in that acronym) old fashioned radio is still relevant in underdeveloped countries and for cash poor community radio activists. However, 'radio' can now have so many different appearances, it can be sent and received on the internet as a live-stream, it can be downloaded as a podcast and listened to on an MP3 player, on the mobile phone or via digital radio in the car. In particular the ubiquituousness of mobile phones, where each mobile is actually a full blown computer plus two-way radio transceiver, and the eagerness of mobile phone companies to open new revenue streams can be expected to generate new formats of distribution of audio 'content'. The use of the word radio in this context is increasingly feeling nostalgic. However, I am not predicting the imminent death of radio either. As we all know media and art forms pronounced dead live longer. All that I am saying is that the social imaginary signification of radio is opening up and separating itself from a fixed association with any given apparatic form. What radio is or will be is completely up for grabs. It is quite unlikely that radio will be in the future like what some private commercial stations have become (and what unfortunately is imitated by public radio) -- an audio jukebox which plays a continuous stream of music. With blogging, audio blogging, live streaming projects blossoming around the world, it is also unclear if radio will have a future as a top down journalistic news medium. Through the net and the general process of convergence, corrosion and dissolution of media a lot of hybrid interactive and participative forms can be realized, in principle.

As we have reached a stage where technically everything seems possible, it is once more time for artists to formulate an utopian potential of radio which goes beyond the status quo. The big problem that we have politically is that of the technologically developed mass society which is characterised by a high dependency on large buerocratic and technological systems which can neither be easily changed nor turned off. (Marcuse 1964) Those life support systems sustain biological life now without being sustainable in the long term. However, the functioning of the system and the possibility of leading a relatively easy life for the majority of people in highly developed countries have made real politics in those countries almost impossible. Politics has been replaced by biopolitics. (Agamben 2002) Thus, the old idea that the public domain is a political battleground about people's support for competing systems is dead, as there are no competing systems (or the differences are quite marginal). Meanwhile the masses enjoy oscillations of 'individuality' along the axis of a very wide and deep reaching conformity. The idea that counter-cultural or subcultural media can alter people's consciousness and so lead out of that dilemma is not an answer anymore. What progressive artists maybe can do is to abandon that battle field that was traditionally seen as content and focus on unravelling the system from within by conducting a more rigorous analysis of those systems and finding ways of using their properties against them. While the focus on new tools and instruments that dominated the first decade of the internet was a necessary step, now it is maybe time for more radical DIY strategies which do not only focus on the advanced tools and concepts of the free software scene but on the ways those tools are socially embedded and collectively used. New 'grow your own' strategies must not approach media and communication technology in an isolated way but in connection to other systems including energy, food, learning, health and what Nick Dyer-Witheford calls in relation to the early Marx conviviality.1 Translated onto radio this could mean that it becomes even more important that artists claim the right to make their own signals and transmissions and create polymorphic as well as autonomous media structures, online, offline, cabled-bound and wireless. My personal conclusion is that I am going back to the childhood days and become again a listener to voices in the aether. I belief that one particular quality of radio which could give it longevity as a medium beyond the lifespan of its apparatic form is voice -- that what lies between the meaning of biologically having a voice and finding a political voice, the aural qualities of human voices and their relationship to mental faculties and the project of emancipation which is still waiting to be fulfilled.

1. cf. Dyer-Witheford 2006

The Internet as Democratic Media Cornucopia

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:16:22 +0200

The 20th century can be understood along the lines of a process of democratization of access to media and the means of cultural production. Things that originally were the privilege of social elites only became accessible for a much greater number of people. At the beginning of the 20th century access to education and knowledge was restricted as well as access to high culture. People from lower income classes had insufficient means of participating in the democratic process because they were either not allowed to vote or they did not have an opportunity to get an informed opinion. The socialist and social democrat movements in the 1920s tried to change that. After WWII radio facilitated free access to cultural goods, and, as this progressively increased through miniaturization and the introduction of the transistor in the 1960ies and 1970ies pop and rock radio democratized the means of cultural hedonism. In a parallel development people also started to get access to the means of cultural production1 -- starting with Super 8 film cameras, small film photography, cassette machines and the first portable video machines. However, what is eerie is that each of those steps of democratisation of access which at a different point would have meant a real revolution -- a significant change of social relationships which inevitably would have implied a political revolution and not only one of the communication media -- was always absorbed by the capitalist system. I do not propose to construct this as a rule of the form that media revolutions were only allowed to happen once society was ready to absorb them. To say that would be defeatist. But I want to point this out as a warning to those who too enthusiastically project political hopes into improvements of the configuration of the media. In the 1980ies with Subcom we thought that once we had access to the means of production we -- whereby I refer to a collective we of underground media producers -- could have a significant impact on the media landscape. We found that not to be true and that, on the contrary, we were lacking a distribution medium and on top of that accessible free spaces for cultural self-organisation were breaking away.2

In the late 1970ies, early 1980ies the home computer made its debut. Rather than just being one medium it promised to be a meta-medium, a freely programmable machine which could be used to build other 'machines' -- tools, instruments, media systems. The computer could be a printing press, a desktop typesetting studio, a graphic layout studio, a sound studio, a film/video studio and it could be combinations and crossovers of such things. Media convergence was looming. Despite the appearance of early BBS systems in the 1980ies, what was still missing was access to the means of dissemination. This arrived with the internet.
As the internet started to open up for public use in the early 1990ies it was welcomed by many people and groups from a broad spectrum who all belonged to counter- and subcultural movements who finally saw their moment coming. Distribution was what everybody had been lacking. The fanzine culture of the 1980ies, the community media groups working with radio and video, many of them saw a chance of finally getting their own channels. However, there remained a number of problems. While the internet was fairly open from 1993 onwards, bandwidth remained the bottleneck. Another problem was the software. In order to stream audio and video a codec is needed. The only available software to do that was proprietary. The 'player' software for a person to listen to an audio stream was free, but the producer software and the server cost money. Despite those limitations in the 1990ies many media activists settled on the net and a thriving culture of online forums, discussion groups, live streaming events and online magazines quickly originated. This was matched by a culture of real life meetings. It was not just enough to communicate online, it was important to meet in real space, to make friends, to learn together, to discuss strategies and projects.3

For the first time in history there existed the real possibility of a full on participatory, interactive and decentralized media paradigm to become the dominant model.4 There were problems and bottle necks but there were no more real barriers to a participatory media practice as Brecht, Benjamin and Enzensberger had imagined it. One important focal point of this energy were the Next 5 Minutes conferences in Amsterdam in 1993, 1996 and 1999.5 The decentralized, participatory and interactive media utopia had become real. However, what it could not do, was change the economic basis. On the contrary, the internet was instrumentalized to prop up an already fading neoliberalism. A strange alliance of US post-Hippie techno entrepreneurs and neoliberals drove the 'digital revolution' through media such as Wired magazine and boasted about the superior model of private enterprise, epitomised in the culture of networks of small companies financed by venture capital. By 1996, when Netscape went to the stock exchange and made billions, it was clear that a veritable boom was under way. The internet boom was ideologically and propagandistically used by the Clinton administration as evidence that the US system of a particular mix of market economy and democracy was the most inventive one in the world. US style neoliberalism became the model for social change, which was unanimously accepted to be the way to go by most countries.6

At the same time the internet became also the means of political organisation for a very scattered and fragmented opposition which included all sorts of people, from the party anarchists of Reclaim The Streets to the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to trade unionists in Latin America and the more middle class Attac people in Europe. The potential of the internet as a platform for political organisation was highlighted by two powerful protest events, by June 18 1999 in London and by 'Seattle' later that same year, which brought all those people togaether and showed that the new 'movement without leaders and an ideology' could achieve critical mass. Highly decentralized participatory grassroots organisations had found with the internet an equally decentralized and participatory medium. Another important aspect had more drirectly to do with the technology and its form of social production. Key technologies of the internet were produced through a methodology which became known as 'peer based commons production' (Stalder 2005). Since 1984 the Free Software Foundation led by Richard Stallman had been fighting what was at first a rather lonely struggle for Free Software. Believing that all software should be free, free to use, free to inspect and modify and free to give away again, the FSF had developed a licence model, the General Public Licence which enshrined those freedoms. It also set out to create a completely free operating system which it called GNU. But first it had to go through the arduous task of wrighting tools to make tools, an editor (Emacs), a compiler (gcc) and many other useful bits and pieces. So, when in 1991 the Finnish computer studend Linus Torvalds used those tools to write the operating System Linux, it was only natural for him to publish it under the GPL. The combination of the GPL, the GNU tools, Linux and the internet enabled software developers all around the world to collaborate on complex software projects without the need for a company structure or expensive computer labs. This extraordinarly successful 'bazar model' was eagerly adopted not only by the mainstream of open source developers who considered themselves to be 'apolitical' but also by hacker-activists with a politicized worldview. The licence model of the GPL helped to further a collaborative production method between equals or peers with the result of their labour becoming public goods -- which is the essence of peer based commons production.

Hackers driven by social motivations and sometimes loosely, sometimes more closely aligned with the new global opposition movement used this methodology to satisfy Benjamin's demand that 'authors' work towards the facilitation of cultural and political self expression of the general public. Illustrating the 'collective' aspect that Enzensberger has emphasised this new culture thrives around open hacklabs where people can meet, collaborate, exchange ideas. Since the 1990ies this political netculture scene has been growing and expanding. It is like a matrix from which continually exciting new projects emerge.7

The Italian computer hacker and artist Denis Jaromil Rojo is the lead developer of Dyne:bolic, a customized Linux distribution and Live CD optimized for cultural production in general and radio in particular. His initial idea was to create a 'nomadic' radio station which would move from server to server and thereby evade any attempts of control. With the Dynebolic Live CD almost any computer can be turned within minutes form a boring office machine into a net radio studio for production and dissemination. Particular attention has been given by the developers to the system being able to work on old machines with low processor speed and on bad internet connections -- the quality of the stream adapts to the quality of the internet connection.http://dyne.org/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote8_1qf7pn8">8
The processing of audio signals has been revolutionized by the software Pure Data.http://puredata.info/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote9_9orgyzz">9 Its inventor Miller Puckette has deep roots in the electroacoustic music scene. The software which he wrote consists of a graphical toolbox to model acoustic events inside the computer -- sine wave generators, oscillators, amplifications, filters and effects. Every conceivable sonic machine or instrument can be built through a combination of those simple elements. Pure Data is much more than an instrument or tool in any conventional sense, it is a meta level tool which is based on deep knowledge of electroacoustics and the science of waves. It is also open and extendable. Users of the software can swap the 'patches' they have written (tools which they constructed) while expert progranmmers can write extensions to the software, so called 'externals' in the programming language C. Those properties make Pure Data particularly popular among sound artists and radio artists such as Martin Howse/xxxxx,http://1010.co.uk/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote10_jg8sgmi">10 Yves Degoyon, Ramiro Cosentino, Tatiana De La O, and many others, who use Pure Data in very unconventional ways to create live streaming environments for radio art improvisationshttp://r23.cc/interface/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote11_nrc7qar">11 and live art.

Examples could go on almost endlessly, with content management systems of a new generation such as Drupal, which facilitates the creation of 'social media' such as online magazines, podcasts, blogs and fora, or Puredyne, which combines Dynebolic and PureData, and the free streaming media environment Shoutcast. In addition to that free software and the bazar model of creativity is also used for artistic projects such as the work of the group Mongrelhttp://www.mongrel.org.uk/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote12_1rtq01m">12 with projects like 9Nine, an internet platform for the formulation of digital subjectivity, and Telephone Trottoir, a communication system for the Congolese community in London using Voice-over-IP (Internet telephony). The exact border definition between artist and engineer become difficult when artists become engineers of social media platforms and programmers create artful tools.http://interrupt.org.uk/symposia/engineer/ last accessed August 2007." href="#footnote13_oejns2t">13

A process underpinning this development is that the capacity of communication technologies increases while at the same time they get ever cheaper. Often falsely attributed to Moore's law alone, this has to do as much with technical innovation as with the exploitation of cheap labour in China and other rapidly industrializing economies. However, the outcome is that consumers worldwide can buy cheap electronic goods with ever higher processor speeds and more memory.

Radio is making a comeback with wireless data networks. Technically that means that receiving and transmitting EM waves can now be controlled by computers in very efficient and inventive ways such as spread spectrum and frequency hopping technologies. This is the basis of a variety of wireless data network technologies for different purposes and in different bands of the EM spectrum, from Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) to 3rd Generation mobile telephony networks and protocols for short distance communication such as bluetooth. The combination of wireless transmissions and computer technologies opens up a wide variety of possibilities, both technically and socially.14 Since around 2000 a movement has started, first in cities such as London, New York, Seattle, to build wireless community networks using WLAN, an idea quickly picked up by people in Berlin, Madrid, Athens, Jakarta and many other places worldwide. These networks are created by the people in a collaborative effort without central command and control; those network infrastructures are communally owned and based on conventions of free traffic of information so that those independent network infrastructures form a Network Commons. A range of projects in London around the free network provider Free2air.org have shown the potential of free wireless infrastructures for art whereby some of those projects have been carried out in collaboration with conventional radio stations such as Resonance.fm, Radio Fro and Radio Cycle.15

While the old order controls the mass media, the oil and the weapons, so that those things are still in the hands of the enemy so to speak, the dissenting unorthodox left is not just owning the means of production, it is actually producing them and thereby shaping the course of future technological development. As Bert Brecht has imagined, this has the potential to unspin the capitalist system from within. Just as he said, the continuous, never ending production of new apparatuses (and not just proposals as to their uses) in the interest of the general public shakes up the social Basis of those apparatuses. The commons based peer production makes technologic development autonomous from the dictate of capital and puts the decision about what to produce into the hands of the programmers themselves.

Yet we need to be careful about predictions of the imminent end of capitalism. It is an interesting notion that, as Marx said, capitalism will be happy to produce the shovels needed to dig its own grave. Those shovels could well turn out to be computers and cabled bound and wireless network technologies. At the same time mass media are are keeping a corrosive grip on people's imagination. Capitalism is now promoting its own version of the participatory media paradigm. A new internet boom has started since 2 or 3 years which uses many of the tools and ideas created by the free netculture movement and sells it back to the masses as an achievement of venture capital driven innovation. So called Web 2.0 or social software platforms such as YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, are the most prominent examples of a new industry which threatens a new enclosure movement. First, in the attention economy of the mainstream media we hear a lot about those but nothing about this other world of free software which has created the conditions for those venture capital funded network platforms to grow. Secondly, also free and open source software programmers live within a capitalist economy which forces them to earn money. A process of buying up scores of key people form free software projects to work on those proprietary projects can already be observed. And last not least the copyright industry is trying to clamp down on the free exchange of information and is trying to cripple the hardware architecture of computers and the inner working of the net in order to install global copy protection schemes. Finally, the paranoid militant nation state is seeing it as its good right to install surveillance architectures to monitor the global flows of information.

1. None of these processes happened without problems. Dictatorial states and elite groups did not easily give up the privilege of education and the right to control the flow of information in the first half of the 20th century. When some industries started to produce consumer electronics other industries started to fear for their business models as tape recorders could be used to copy music at home.
2. Another way of looking at this would be to say that aesthetically we won as the subcultural media aesthetic became copied and in many ways is the dominant aesthetics now, but politically this did not further our concerns at all.
3. A lively collection of the concerns of the time can be found in the online documentation of the conference Art Servers Unlimited, London 1998. http://asu.sil.at/
4. In a way this was also the point when the subculture/mainstream dichotomy stopped making any sense. On this point compare Stalder 2005.
5. cf The Next 5 Minutes http://www.next5minutes.org/
6. In the late 1990ies 'flexible' man and the 'risk taking society' became sociological buzzwords -- both euphemisms for more precarity. cf Medosch 2007.
7. I have looked into this link more deeply in "Piratology", cf. Medosch 2003.
8. cf Dyne:bolic website, available from http://dyne.org/ last accessed August 2007.
9. cf. Pure Data website, available from http://puredata.info/ last accessed August 2007.
10. cf. xxxxx website, available from http://1010.co.uk/ last accessed August 2007.
11. cf. website of the live streaming network r23.cc, available from http://r23.cc/interface/ last accessed August 2007.
12. cf. Mongrel website available from http://www.mongrel.org.uk/ last accessed August 2007.
13. cf. the Interrupt Symposium by i-Dat, Plymouth 2003, project description available online from http://interrupt.org.uk/symposia/engineer/ last accessed August 2007.
14. I have pointed at some of those possibilities in: Society in Ad-hoc mode, Medosch 2004.
15. I give an overview of those movements in: On Free Wavelength. cf. Medosch 2006.

The Decline of the Public Sphere

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:56:37 +0200

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990) gives a historic account of the formation of the public sphere and its decline. There he argues that in the feudal system, while public events did happen, they were merely of a representational character. Everybody was present, but in a representational capacity only, there was no public discourse, no difference of opinion was allowed and all actual power was centralized in the institution of the souvereign/monarch. The events of public life followed a strict ceremonial protocol. The rise of the bourgeois as a political class was intricately linked with the emergence of a public life characterized by rational debate, the raisonnement of the educated liberal middle class man. The century of liberalism, which Habermas somehow dates between 1780 and 1880, was characterized by the high quality of rational discussion between free individuals. However, this was restricted to males of the capital owning middle class, with very few woman and people from other classes able to participate. By the beginning of the 1960ies in Western European countries class struggle had by and large subsided and been replaced by a postwar consensus that guaranteed a state of frozen peace with increasing levels of prosperity shared more equally in society. While the newspapers, in particular mass circulation daily papers were owned by 'press barons' (a figure immortalized by Citizen Kane, but one which had existed since the 1880ies and the fast rotating press and lithography) electronic media radio and TV were state regulated to prevent any form of leftwing or rightwing extremism.1 In other words, by the beginning of the 1960ies the public as presented by mass media had become representational again, a 'spectacle' as opposed to an open public sphere where a rational debate happened which would not only be critical but also relevant for actual politics. The powers to be had been able to isolate themselves from any real political debate by holding the mass of voters as a captive audience in front of a TV screen which presented a manipulated worldview -- a situation which should only deteriorate from then on till today.

Into this situation of the Frozen Peace of the early 1960ies broke the New Left, a hotchpotch mix of non-orthodox Marxist splinter groups, the free speech movement, various civil rights and minority issue movements and the Anti-Vietnam movement, culminating in the Summer of Love in San Francisco 1967 and the student revolt of May 1968. These groups advocated grassroots participatory democracy or so called self-organisation and practiced a type of media use which was equivalent to their political ideas. Everybody should in principle also be a publisher, a radio journalist, a critique, a columnist or reviewer, in short, a producer. A participatory grassroots model for electronic media was applied by community media activists such as Deedee Halleck (2002) or the student radio during the revolutionary days in Berkeley, and later by the free radio movement in Europe.2

The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger became the media theorist for this newly emerging paradigm of participatory media. Going back to Brecht and Benjamin he reitereated some of their demands, like the one that electronic media should be turned from a distribution medium into a communication medium. But he not only echoed some of the concerns of Brecht and Benjamin, he also updated them. According to Enzensberger, "the technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance." (Enzensberger 1970/1996, p. 64) He scolded the New Left for having reduced its criticism of the "development of the media to a single concept -- that of manipulation," yet agreed that "the present concept of manipulation [...] reflected the feeling of powerlessness of the Left and the objective reality that "the decisive means of production are in the enemies hands". (my emphasis) Like Benjamin and Brecht, Enzensberger believed into the emancipatory power of new media. But, shaped by the postwar experience and the rise of electronic consumer goods, he added some important qualifications. According to Enzensberger the decisive point about media was their collective structure. "For the prospect that in the future, with the aid of the media, everyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only insofar as it remains socially and therefore aesthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model of this." (Ibid, p. 70) He went on to say that this was what the market was already aiming at. Many people were already owning Super 8 cameras and tape recorders but they could become at best "amateurs, not producers."3 Even the radio amateur movement had been tamed and reduced to a "harmless inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered amateurs." (Ibid) Enzensberger's description of the chances offered by participatory media but also the danger of them becoming politically toothless by being kept within the confinement of amateurism or hobbyism were of an almost prophetic quality. Enzensberger also distanced himself from media determinism in the style of McLuhan and his many followers:

Anyone who believes that freedom for the media will be established if everyone is busy, transmitting and receiving, is the dupe of a liberalism, that, decked out in contemporary colours, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests. (Ibid)
Enzensberger stressed that this was the point where "socialist concepts part company with the neoliberal and technocratic ones." No one can expect to be "emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware." To think like that would mean to fall "victim of an obscur belief in progress." (Ibid) This thesis is distilled into the dialectical formula that the "...the media demands organisation and makes it possible..." (Ibid) Enzensberger would like to see the "socialist movements take up the struggle for their own wavelengths." They should, he continues, "build their own transmitters and relay stations."4 (Ibid, p. 70) Enzensberger bemoans the fact that the "innate Luddism of Marxism has left a vacuum into which a stream of non-Marxist hypothesis and practices has consequently flowed." According to him the 'innocent' and the 'apolitical' had made "much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the left." From Warhol's Factory to the Beatles and the Stones Enzensberger still saw an emancipatory potential in what was then underground rock culture, but also the multimedia art of the time as practiced by Pop Art.

1. For a more theoretic approach to the models of media regulation and different forms of media freedom cf. Barbrook 1995, Media Freedom.
2. According to Barbrook this was the first time that a model of media freedom emerged which matched participatory grassroots democracy or self-organisation, a model of media freedom distinctly different from prevailing models of media freedom -- the liberalist or Girondist model and the Jacobinite or state controlled model, and or a mix of the two. cf Barbrook 1995.
3. Web 2.0 platforms such as Flickr, MySpace or YouTube neutralise the potential of any submitted work through the way it is organized. Through the sheer fact that it is uploaded to those 'platforms' copyright is taken away from contributors and the platform owners reserve the right to censor content despite the alleged openness. Any artwork on MySpace competes with millions of images of supposedly individual expression which is in effect just an illustration of how relentlessly conformistic pressures have become. Myspace is actually Murdoch's space.
4. At the time when Enzensberger wrote that in Western Europe this was only possible if the state legally granted a licence to a free radio station or in underdeveloped countries such as Uruquay where the native Tupumaru tribe staged a media revolution using radio; a sort of predecessor to the Chiapas uprisal.

45 RPM / Revolutions Per Minute

Armin Medosch — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:53:30 +0200

participation

Participation

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

FLOSS is for all

Schoenberg vs Sid Vicious

Livecoding as practice and the virtue ethics

Avantgarde groups and social context

Conclusions

Conclusions

The Internet as Democratic Media Cornucopia

The Decline of the Public Sphere

45 RPM / Revolutions Per Minute

Radio Art Histories Remixed, Maxi Single Version