Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 Florian Cramer: I'd be very interested to hear why a punk band wouldn't want to release music under a free license. For example, because it doesn't want - for political reasons - its music to end up on Spotify, Google or similar corporate services, against which free licenses provide no means of intervention. Other than not allowing the sublicensing that these services require. Or because it wants to retain a means of preventing that work is being politically misappropriated. For example, if the punk band were the Dead Kennedys, and it would have released California Uber Alles under a truly free license, it would have no means to intervene if a Neonazi band performed the same song with no irony intended. They have no means of intervening under the standard cover license terms anyway. They may under moral rights. Which Creative Commons licenses explicitly reserve for the author. A punk band that gives either of these as reasons for not adopting a Free Culture license is ignorant of the operation of those licenses, of the distribution models that have evolved under pressure from the recording industry, and of the history of punk's antagonistic (rather than merely puritan, as you note below) relationship with the record industry. The great rock roll swindle is alive and well on Spotify: http://www.absolutepunk.net/showthread.php?t=3698956 The punk band example is relatively harmless. For software developers, any kind of free license (free according to the criteria of FSF and Debian, respectively Open Source according to the OSI criteria) gives no whatsoever means to prevent that the software/the code is used for military purposes, by secret services like the NSA (whose infrastructure is running on free software to a large degree), or for the clouds of Facebook, Google c., for racial profiling and, in the most extreme case, genocide logistics. Does the military use Free Software? Of course. It is free to do so. Do people who seek to resist the military use Free Software? Of course. They are free to do so. Who is one of the largest sponsors of Free Software? The military. The effect of this is that the military are paying to write the software that is used to oppose them. This is a feature, not a bug, of Free Software. TOR is a direct example of a military Free Software project, Red Hat's development of GNU/Linux paid for in no small part by military support contracts is a more indirect one. The activist dream of sulking the military into submission by refusing to let them use Free Software is therefore economically illiterate. Furthermore the activist dream of sulking the military into submission through licenses that refuse to allow the military to use resources that the rest of society are free to use ignores the role of the military in disaster response. If the military are free to use (e.g.) OpenStreetMap and must return improvements to the resource as a condition of using it, where state and commercial maps are lacking this leads to a virtuous circle of improvement of a Free resource. This is something that has already happened. And yes, Free Software can be used in genocide logistics. So can proprietary software, and if a state or group are considering butchering their citizens or neighbours then they're really not going to care about an anti-genocide software license either. In those circumstances, resources for defeating the ability to commit genocide either through military intervention or through the dissemination of information to at-risk individuals are vital. Free Software is a resource for frustrating the logistics of genocide that can only be diminished by reducing military contributions to it. The problem is that all these applications fall within the freedom of free software, That's correct. the right to use software for any purpose, which ultimately means freedom as in free market. If there is no other freedom it's not clear how activists are free to challenge the free market. The capitalist will after all sell you the rope you need to hang them. There are many people in the hacker community, such as Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club (also developer of dietlibc), who are now thinking critically about this aspect. I look forward to seeing the discriminatory licenses that they come up with. -, it would, under your model, be banned from all punk venues to perform. Good. That would fit hardcore punk and straight edge culture with their close cultural and historical affinities to puritanism. This is a classic example of the kind of scarce, auratic merchandise that freely licensed non-scarce digital media and live performances can drive sales of (or see their costs offset by). The license on it can't make it any less desirable to anyone who isn't at the gig than it already is. It can however give it more of the iconoclastic attitude that will make it
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
Hello jaromil, First and foremost there is a confusion between the terms art and culture, which is created already in Ozgur's open letter and oddly whipped up by Aymeric. Art production is quite different from cultural production. This is mined territory as there are no whatsoever consensus definitions of either term. Culture has a much broader meaning in the humanities and cultural studies, but is (as cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams already wrote in the 1970s) colloquially used as a synonym for the arts. Within Western institutional bureaucracies, these terms work as class distinctions: culture is the most broad and least selective term, encompassing everything from carnival in the streets to a white cube art biennial, the arts is more specific to music, literature, film, theater, performance, visual art and tends to exclude forms of popular culture outside those terms (such as the street carnival), art in the singular form is often used as a synonym of highbrow visual art. Lets focus for instance on art *production* (as in the complex relationships on which the condition for production of art stands). I would even agree that for highbrow (fine) art institutions financed by public money, a free culture provision as proposed in the manifesto would be a good challenge and political reality check. It would infinitely more honest as critical politics than the several decades of superficially critical discourse in a journal like October which have questioned everything but the institutions of art themselves. The issue, however, is that the manifesto is not directed to highbrow art institutions, but much more generally at cultural institutions of any kind. And it would be the places that are most sympathetic to free culture (like WORM in Rotterdam, among many others) where such a policy could in the end do more harm than good, because of all the reasons mentioned. To me free art just represents the refusal of it as a whole, rather than an educated proposal for a new system. In this regards free art is really a punk attitude (fluxus?) and I'm entertained to read you choosing the weakest metaphore for your arguments to fly. I guess it was intended. No, I was choosing the strongest metaphor because I'm much more interested in defending punk or Fluxus than a highbrow fine artist like, say, Liam Gillick. For me, the utility of a device like copyleft is measured by the cultural practices it will either foster or obstruct, not the other way around. Not only they cannot impose anything on artists even if they want, but they are predated by profit-making lobbies for the increasingly degraded labour they can offer. In such a scenario an artist within the 99% (which includes most students anyway) is better off circulating her/his works on PirateBay and on street walls: it will give way more chances to enter the miracle of reward for art production. All this because, as they function today, institutions are there only for the established 1% and as much as they try to open up new offers for their audience and respect the subjectivity of new artists, they will just create more demand for the 1% and de-subjectivate new artists into their own institutional decadence. The problem is that you are constructing an abstract example to prove a moral high ground, but reality is different. If you look for example at the free software projects that are being developed within the Libre Graphics network, then you see that a lot of them depend on public cultural funding, and that these funding has often raised by sympathizing cultural institutions (like Constant in Brussels, for example). Another problem with free software development is namely economical and financial. In the 1970s to the early 1990s, it took place almost exclusively at public universities: University of California at Berkeley for BSD, the MIT for GNU, the University of Helsinki for the beginnings of Linux, etc. Since the 1990s, along with the spirit of neoliberalization (that also forced public universities to commercialize and proprietarize its research), most free software development has taken place in the dotcom and IT industry: companies like IBM, Google and Red Hat. If one looks at free software development economics, then it either works as a charity, programmed in the free time of people who have other IT jobs, or as part of development of base software stacks (kernels, database and network servers) that run other, typically proprietary applications (such as the Google search engine, cloud storage, Intranets and enterprise applications etc.). Dmitry covered this in a paper as (I'm paraphrasing) niches in the industry where infrastructural technology is being developed that is shared across competitors and thus exempt from direct commercialization. These two factors, charity and infrastructural IT development, point to the issues that free software development faces if it operates outside those economic comfort
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
Great examples from Florian Cramer. Having run an indie record company and music publishing house for 32 years, I could add that punk attitude is something that extends far beyond any musical genre (punk included) and that incorporates a disdain from any representative of jurisprudence. The latter represent a world of order, when in fact the bands want chaos. A great example is the Pirate Bay guys' decidedly punk attitude towards lawyers in the AFK movie. I have through the years tried everything from putting c's in circles and paid the fees for it, to paying nothing and putting unauthorized - hospitalized on an LP label. I have as an artist put out music on indie labels up to the world's biggest label (Warner). IThe result is always the same. I (label and artist) was paid nearly nothing for ANY use of my work. My music has been used for jingles, opera, theatre plays, signature tunes to what I am told is a popular radio show in Estonia. All without permission from me, regardless of protection of my art. If you want to be radical, I found, take what money you have to spare and spend it on releasing records that you give away for free. This really irritates a lot of people (a good thing). My own favourite experience here was when I curated Roboculture, the cultural part of the 2nd (as I recall) robotic soccer world cup in 1999. Sony was a sponsor, so they also paid for the cultural event, which included modern dance, photography, and lots more, including a commissioned theme song that could definitely be used for torture. I had lots of records made and gave them away to left and right - all paid for by Sony. My experience is typical, just a little bit longer than that of most people I guess, and so we pass on the wisdom to the young of what Florian Cramer is talking about: even the nice, cool, well-meaning people will not deliver. Just get in control of your stuff any way you can, and make money any way you can. Never mind the rules, never mind the law. We have WFMU, Ubuweb, and today even a youtube full of bootleg recordings. We have lots of bands putting out vinyl and tapes, and doing OK. Things are looking good for creative people from where I stand, viz. in the trenches. Peace, M. On 14 June 2014 14:20, Florian Cramer fcra...@pleintekst.nl wrote: I'd be very interested to hear why a punk band wouldn't want to release music under a free license. For example, because it doesn't want - for political reasons - its music to end up on Spotify, Google or similar corporate services, against which free licenses provide no means of intervention. Or because it wants to retain a means of preventing that work is being politically misappropriated. For example, if the punk band were the Dead Kennedys, and it would have released California Uber Alles under a truly free license, it would have no means to intervene if a Neonazi band performed the same song with no irony intended. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions.
On 06/14/2014 02:20 PM, Florian Cramer wrote: For example, because it doesn't want - for political reasons - its music to end up on Spotify, Google or similar corporate services, against which free licenses provide no means of intervention. I agree, Google co represent a version of informational capitalism does doesn't need copyright. Patents and trade secrets are enough. So, no critique of copyright, practical or theoretical, does threaten them, on the contrary. But the strategy of restricting everyone's freedom in the hope of also constraining them, seems to do more damage than good. Rather than going backwards, we need to go forward, and think of ways that either free culture can also profit from this (i.e. my making collecting societies support, rather than fight the use of free licenses) or by developing formats that do not fit so easily into the business models of Google et al. Or because it wants to retain a means of preventing that work is being politically misappropriated. For example, if the punk band were the Dead Kennedys, and it would have released California Uber Alles under a truly free license, it would have no means to intervene if a Neonazi band performed the same song with no irony intended. Yeah, this is the example that is always cited in this case: but what about if Nazis play my music? The glib reply I tend to give in public debates is: Then don't compose music that appeals to Nazis! But to be less glib, the answer is: you cannot do anything about this, no matter what. As long as the Nazis pay the performing rights fees, the can perform your songs completely legally. Period. The point in case is the song Freiheit (Freedom) by Marius M?ller-Westernhagen. It is performed regularly by the far right NPD at rallies. M?ller-Westerhangen hates this, but as a member of GEMA he does not control his performing rights anymore. Gema does and handles them as statutory licenses. Anyone who pays the fees, including the NPD, can perform the song in public. I know from his manager, Tim Renner, who is now secretary of state (Staatssekret?r) for cultural affairs in the city of Berlin, that M?ller-Westernhagen tried to use copyright to stop the NPD from using his song, and failed. Frankly, I think it's good that he failed. We should not use copyright to stifle speech. If you want to suppress certain forms of speech, you should be very explicit and restrictive by qualifying them as hate speech (like, for example, denying the holocaust is in Germany). Felix -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
On Sat, 14 Jun 2014, Florian Cramer wrote: The punk band example is relatively harmless. For software developers, any kind of free license (free according to the criteria of FSF and Debian, respectively Open Source according to the OSI criteria) gives no whatsoever means to prevent that the software/the code is used for military purposes, by secret services like the NSA (whose infrastructure is running on free software to a large degree), or for the clouds of Facebook, Google c., for racial profiling and, in the most extreme case, genocide logistics. This is a rather weak position: believing that such restrictions for the use of digitally encoded materials can ever be enforced. You do make a beautiful point when you mention and practice the choice of distributing materials using different media supports... The problem is that all these applications fall within the freedom of free software, the right to use software for any purpose, which ultimately means freedom as in free market. There are many people in the hacker community, such as Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club (also developer of dietlibc), who are now thinking critically about this aspect. I really have my doubts this will have any effect. Smells like even more work for lawyers and I'm Not Sure who can win that game. However for the record this exists since a while http://www.egpl.info The 1st license it was born for was nonMil http://www.egpl.info/feeds/1 It was Philippe Langlois who showed me this back in 2007 I think, we had quite some discussions about it at the first hackerspace festival in /tmp/lab Paris ciao -- http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
On Sat, 14 Jun 2014, Florian Cramer wrote: The punk band example is relatively harmless. For software developers, any kind of free license (free according to the criteria of FSF and Debian, respectively Open Source according to the OSI criteria) gives no whatsoever means to prevent that the software/the code is used for military purposes, by secret services like the NSA (whose infrastructure is running on free software to a large degree), or for the clouds of Facebook, Google c., for racial profiling and, in the most extreme case, genocide logistics. This is a rather weak position: believing that such restrictions for the use of digitally encoded materials can ever be enforced. You do make a beautiful point when you mention and practice the choice of distributing materials using different media supports... The problem is that all these applications fall within the freedom of free software, the right to use software for any purpose, which ultimately means freedom as in free market. There are many people in the hacker community, such as Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club (also developer of dietlibc), who are now thinking critically about this aspect. I really have my doubts this will have any effect. Smells like even more work for lawyers and I'm Not Sure who can win that game. However for the record this exists since a while http://www.egpl.info The 1st license it was born for was nonMil http://www.egpl.info/feeds/1 It was Philippe Langlois who showed me this back in 2007 I think, we had quite some discussions about it at the first hackerspace festival in /tmp/lab Paris ciao -- http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
dear Florian, Thanks for your criticism, it helps making this discussion resonate. Yet I see some discrepancies in your reasoning. First and foremost there is a confusion between the terms art and culture, which is created already in Ozgur's open letter and oddly whipped up by Aymeric. Art production is quite different from cultural production. Bluntly put: art celebrates where culture cultivates. Feel free to demolish this dicotomy with reinvigorating examples, But I need it now to make my (labour oriented) arguments clear. Lets focus for instance on art *production* (as in the complex relationships on which the condition for production of art stands). At the entrance is a nepotist labour system sold to art students for their money. Once adulthood is granted, these official artists will face a huge gap between a few big money-making artists and the vast majority: something quickly resembling the widening gap of contemporary capitalism. The liturgic apparatus of proprietary art with its avenues and enclaves implements a sort of capitalism of attention. It is the cathedral. To me free art just represents the refusal of it as a whole, rather than an educated proposal for a new system. In this regards free art is really a punk attitude (fluxus?) and I'm entertained to read you choosing the weakest metaphore for your arguments to fly. I guess it was intended. Now lets try to look at the institutional perspective from outside of this box. Institutions today aren't what they used to. They are weak elephants and as a consequence of neo-lib policies even their memory is collapsing. Not only they cannot impose anything on artists even if they want, but they are predated by profit-making lobbies for the increasingly degraded labour they can offer. In such a scenario an artist within the 99% (which includes most students anyway) is better off circulating her/his works on PirateBay and on street walls: it will give way more chances to enter the miracle of reward for art production. All this because, as they function today, institutions are there only for the established 1% and as much as they try to open up new offers for their audience and respect the subjectivity of new artists, they will just create more demand for the 1% and de-subjectivate new artists into their own institutional decadence. Punks (lets open it up to emergent, grass-root, controversial, non-aligned art currents) are just too smart to not understand this. They'll approach the field in a transversal way and release as much as possible, free and everywhere, using anything between tapes spray cans and torrents - and the institutional badge for them is not even qualifying on their curriculum: to the contrary, it is counter-productive at the eyes of their audience. In most cases the institutional badge on certain (top 1-5%) art productions is bought by institutions with public (or lottery) money for the preservation of their own glory and is accepted by artists mainly because of the money, secondarily because of the popularity of avenues and curators. That's how the art funding world is definitely dead if confronted by the axiomatic rationalism of neo-liberism. This system is a remnance of a socialist approach to governance for an apparatus that has no more social function. Institutions today are social apparatuses reduced to an anti-social function by the neo-liberist narrative - and as such they are sliding towards reactionary and conservative behaviour. In fact the very institutions that are admittedly reactionary and conservative are the ones thriving. Said that, I agree with you that an institution should not impose any choice on the way an artist wants to circulate her/his artworks. But I do believe that such a Foucaultian statement won't solve the contemporary institutional empasse. To move forward we need to sketch the creation of new forms of institutions that promote the circulation of art, or maybe facilitate the birth of new art currents as most curators seem to try nowadays. Lets now focus on free culture. The best definition of it I believe is given by the charter of the FCForum http://fcforum.net. This definition of culture is what I've referred to in my previous answer: the condition for the *production* and *sharing* of narratives, knowledge and ultimately governance. Culture goes beyond the concept of authorship and the need to celebrate artists, culture unlocks conditions in which artists can develop their skills and circulate their artworks. The notion of free culture is the bazaar. And it is somehow also a neo-lib mirage when applied purely as a method, as Marc points out. To conclude: is there a way out for cultural institutions at the time of the necrotization of capitalism? I'm at least certain that on the mid-long term that is not the way cultural industries go, it is not the hipsteria of blinking leds on arduinos, the infantile discovery of electricity and fiddling on circuits, the mirage of a fluxus in the
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
Rob Myers said : Florian Cramer: If, for example, a punk band would decide that it is not releasing its recordings under a free license - for which it might have sound political arguments I'd be very interested to hear why a punk band wouldn't want to release music under a free license. I think that what Florian is hinting is that there is something terribly wrong in imposing a certain distribution model and copyright practice upon artists. This would put free culture in the same camp as the one they are opposing. After all, a lot of free culture supporters have been charmed by the opportunity it gives to get some control back over intellectual property mechanisms that have been already decided for them and are hardly mutable (at least not as fast as it takes to listen to a good punk song ;) And then, there is of course some practices that just cannot work with free culture licenses. Say for instance someone or group supporting illegalism or anti-copyright practices releasing something under a copyright supporting mechanism like free culture licenses, would be rather odd. It does not remove the fact that, yes, as sadly proven with all the anti-copyright works made in the past that are now copyrighted, the anti-copyright position is a difficult one to hold these days, but that does not mean one should not be able to turn that into a valid artistic statement either. To clarify: At WORM, we have fostered, (co-)hosted and co-instigated a whole range of free culture projects, such as the Hotglue and now SuperGlue web site creation system, the Libre Graphics Research Unit, the Free?! conference last fall, I attended Free?!, it was excellent. Thanks! :D There is a draft video edit of the whole evening conference. Hopefully, we can put online the final version before the end of the year. a. -- http://log.bleu255.com # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA512 Florian Cramer: I disagree with this letter since I am working for a small cultural venue (WORM in Rotterdam) myself and see a discrepancy between good intentions and not-so-good practical consequences. First of all: the release of work as free culture (according to the standards of freedomdefined.org or the FSF Free Software Definition) should be intrinsically motivated and a decision of those who created the work. It should not something forced upon by an institution/venue which would then use its institutional power to force upon modalities of distribution - i.e. you can't play/exhibit/work here if your work isn't released under a free license. It is not upon an institution to dictate ways of distribution outside that institution. If, for example, a punk band would decide that it is not releasing its recordings under a free license - for which it might have sound political arguments I'd be very interested to hear why a punk band wouldn't want to release music under a free license. -, it would, under your model, be banned from all punk venues to perform. Good. This would re-inject some much needed political attitude. This would boil down to the creation and enforcement of purity laws, the typical knee-jerk reflex of the radical left and trap into which it is running into again and again. To clarify: At WORM, we have fostered, (co-)hosted and co-instigated a whole range of free culture projects, such as the Hotglue and now SuperGlue web site creation system, the Libre Graphics Research Unit, the Free?! conference last fall, I attended Free?!, it was excellent. a number of Crypto Parties; our office computers run on GNU/Linux and our streaming server streams Ogg Vorbis. But we also don't think that it is forbidden if an underground band sells its self-made small edition LP after a concert with no whatsoever free license because it can't live from the kind of artists' fees we pay. This is a classic example of the kind of scarce, auratic merchandise that freely licensed non-scarce digital media and live performances can drive sales of (or see their costs offset by). The license on it can't make it any less desirable to anyone who isn't at the gig than it already is. It can however give it more of the iconoclastic attitude that will make it desirable to punks. - - Rob. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJTmnetAAoJECciMUAZd2dZ3foH/iGQeO5L4OyE5EkEmzNLecwe vpv0FOKi2Kk15quK8R7yXLwok1fRxEwFrdxqwpQZ4jcizR3qSUiqlWEWWPonh50y tlZJukd2nQWY5K68FwzLC6vS9fMYAKq4gjAb5aohZYxBdgCUd/WWzbQmE0E4LHha vb/gLiU5nb3ZKHC9c9wKlojEZTEWVQuI2FyAmv7E2gmeBpcog3+ON1zlumPRA/oK iUfIYtsKVOk74rs4XHTFtpUCoQDVO7mOud5hj2bQCgcbxPaqW0evtIDIAq1scqhC RckjSg2ToeTlWzA3pd2tR3u5KDvYWe5r0erzmxLkhLmMNoo5l8iphb9N8IiytdY= =vVir -END PGP SIGNATURE- # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
I disagree with this letter since I am working for a small cultural venue (WORM in Rotterdam) myself and see a discrepancy between good intentions and not-so-good practical consequences. First of all: the release of work as free culture (according to the standards of freedomdefined.org or the FSF Free Software Definition) should be intrinsically motivated and a decision of those who created the work. It should not something forced upon by an institution/venue which would then use its institutional power to force upon modalities of distribution - i.e. you can't play/exhibit/work here if your work isn't released under a free license. It is not upon an institution to dictate ways of distribution outside that institution. If, for example, a punk band would decide that it is not releasing its recordings under a free license - for which it might have sound political arguments -, it would, under your model, be banned from all punk venues to perform. This would boil down to the creation and enforcement of purity laws, the typical knee-jerk reflex of the radical left and trap into which it is running into again and again. To clarify: At WORM, we have fostered, (co-)hosted and co-instigated a whole range of free culture projects, such as the Hotglue and now SuperGlue web site creation system, the Libre Graphics Research Unit, the Free?! conference last fall, a number of Crypto Parties; our office computers run on GNU/Linux and our streaming server streams Ogg Vorbis. But we also don't think that it is forbidden if an underground band sells its self-made small edition LP after a concert with no whatsoever free license because it can't live from the kind of artists' fees we pay. Florian On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 11:17 PM, ozgur k. ozgu...@httpdot.net wrote: a free letter to cultural institutions, please do not fund/exhibit/distribute/promote any non-free cultural works.(see freedomdefined.org for the definition of free cultural works) please approach your audience as peers and give them the freedom to build on what you make them experience. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
Agreed! But I'm very surprised that you didn't quote the Free Art Licence (written in July 2000). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Art_License http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ Olivier Olivier Auber +32492050697 http://perspective-numerique.net http://twitter.com/#!/OlivierAuber 2014-06-09 23:17 GMT+02:00 ozgur k. ozgu...@httpdot.net: a free letter to cultural institutions, ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
Thanks, That's exactly what we have been up to... However, it would be lovely to get some help from the academics out there who say they are into the type of things that we do, but rarely include it in their writings. There's some heavy political stuff going on at the moment in UK - especially regarding funding and institutions affiliating themselves with 'happy-clappy' corporate hacking groups, joining together to cherry pick what they see as less critical works so to build a pseudo version of what many of us have spent most of our lives building -- this is being demolished by them right now! I'm not even sure why I'm bothering say any of this -- it feels pointless. If anyone wishes to respond and do something 'real' please email me personally. marc a free letter to cultural institutions, ... -- --- A living - breathing - thriving networked neighbourhood - proud of free culture - claiming it with others ;) Other reviews,articles,interviews http://www.furtherfield.org/reviews.php Furtherfield – online arts community, platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change. http://www.furtherfield.org Furtherfield Gallery – Finsbury Park (London). http://www.furtherfield.org/gallery Netbehaviour - Networked Artists List Community. http://www.netbehaviour.org http://identi.ca/furtherfield http://twitter.com/furtherfield # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
dear Ozgur, On Tue, 10 Jun 2014, ozgur k. wrote: a free letter to cultural institutions, please do not fund/exhibit/distribute/promote any non-free cultural works.(see freedomdefined.org for the definition of free cultural works) please approach your audience as peers and give them the freedom to build on what you make them experience. please mediate building a free/libre culture where everyone is an artist. do not promote proprietary/permission/fan culture. http://httpdot.net/txt/AFreeLetterToCulturalInstitutions.txt This is a very good mission and focus. I've been (almost literally) preaching this to public institutions in EU (cultural sector) and also NGOs (snake pits) for the past 15 years of my life. As a result: I've been included inside these very institutions (mostly at an inferior payroll because free culture...) and ultimately flushed by financial cuts after devoting more than a young decade of my life to them. Such institutions need to be able to move on to the next topic, being their final goal that of catering the masses, which justifies most means to reach them with the help of some irony and tapestry. After all, most people on earth are made consumers: they don't care if they can study re-use re-adapt re-distribute something - and the demand public sector faces is not exempt by this logic, not even academy is. Paradoxically, the best people to support free culture are the very private companies that can re-use the results, yet their tax money can't be directly related to free culture policies. Today I'm not so faithful anymore that is really possible to change existing public institutions to make the principles of free culture as part of their constituency, no matter how rational that is. You can lobby for it, sure, but that's part of the game and your higher selfless goals will consume you in there. Maybe we really need new institutions based on new forms of rationality. And while waiting for an API for that :^) free culture has been best cultivated in those private sector initiatives that have used it also to their own advantage (mostly predating it) and creating new forms of capitalism in which the very act of re-sharing is itself an asset. By criticising specifically the latter as free culture I believe Geert Loving misses the point. Yet this is the most visible outcome of it, while public institutions are weaker and weaker and they are made to serve the private interest rather than the public. My recommendation is to play free :^) and look for and help create new alliances (subjectivity, constituencies) that can operate in a transversal way across contexts and most importantly can vehicule the potential of free culture to the masses (tools, not just ideals, and direct access): the masses will eventually read the manual and know what to do with it. ciao p.s. speaking of which, this is what I'm left with these days: http://dyne.org/chest rate up those project if you can, that will help the cause :^) pity the website registration is all borked and the login with facebook app will access all your contact lists. kind of weird for a public sector initiative isn't it? -- http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime a free letter to cultural institutions
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 dear nettimers, thanks to olivier, jaromil and marc for responding to this so qucikly, which encourages me to elaborate on the issue more. i find free art license of the copyleft attiude very important since it is (AFAIK) the first and consistent implementation of the free software ideas to the field of culture. however it has been rendered invisible by the neo-liberal politics of creative commons(cc) creating a simulacr of free culture with non-commercial(nc) and non-derivative(nd) licenses. i will not go into the detail here but i have been experiencing the confusion cc created among people about the free culture in all my discussions. so thanks for referring to free art license, the politics of which is the one i appreciate most among the legal free culture licenses also listed in freedomdefined.org. even though the politics i appreciate the most is the libre commons of libre society, which is not based on law but ethical values. i have a personal experience with the work of furtherfield that showed me how valuable the support of such an institution is as a bonus encouragement for someone working on fc. i will not share it here but would like to take this opportunity to marc garret for their work and politics at furtherfield. i totally share jaromil's points, whose works and politics i also adore, and i think the problem with the common practice like you and all of us who share similar world views and trying to make a living in harmony with those views have been experiencing is because of the perception/not perception of free culture by those who are not familiar with it. and in the context of this post, those who are addressed here are the decision makers in cultural institutions who are not familiar with/not interested in the politics and ethics of free culture. unlike many people, i believe everybody in this list knows that free refers to freedom here, not the price, referring to the free software definition. i believe that free/libre culture (fc) promises the possibility of an alternative economics based on free/libre donation.* for example if there are two books i am interested in; one is a free cultural work and the other is non-free cultural one asking me to pay a predetermined price to read it while not even giving me the freedom to build on it, i choose the fc work but i also donate the author of it by hearth, double the price i would pay for the proprietary one. not because i am rich, but because i share the ethics of fc and respect the author of the fc work more. so i choose to spend willing on 1 fc work instead of paying doubtfully/unwillingly for 2 non-fc work. if i can do/afford this, a cultural institution would also, if they are aware and share the philosophy of fc. it is unfortunately true that most people working for/with cultural institutions are precarious. while spending great amounts of their funds to publicity etc, many cultural institutions employ interns without paying them, artists (no matter their work is fc or not) are not always paid etc... even though those institutions are part of the culture industry, i do not believe in that all the directors of these institutions share the ethics of profit driven capitalists. if they have funding for 2 works, they would choose to fund 1 fc work instead of 2 non-fc work, if they are aware and share the politics of fc. if i can do it, they can also do it.. if they are aware and share the politics of fc. new models can be developed; for example they can start with founding a free culture branch along with their existing infrastructure. in this branch, they would only fund/exhibit/distribute/promote fc works and donate the author at least (better double:)) what they pay for other artists. if they really want to show a work from an artist whose practice is non-fc, then they would negotiate to show it only if the artist licenses the work with a fc license (preferably donating them less than what they would donate to a fc artist:)). there are many artists who would be ok with this if they want to take a chance to work with that institution. would this also cause another precarious situation for the artist? if it does not for a free culture artist, then it wouldn't for them either. the point is, some intuitions are really powerful and they would use their power in favour of free culture instead of culture industry. not directly translatable to this situation, but richard stallman, the founder of free software movement explains the relation between power and freedom in the copyleft attitude here: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html this is just a small detail about the philosophy of free software but my experience shows me that, to understand fc, one should first understand the free software philosophy in detail. then these ideas can be translated into culture and i hope eventually they would inspire our socio-economical life in general..(if you appreciate what stallman
