How Deep is your Source?
By Aymeric Mansoux
Introduction
Within the realm of archiving and conservation, free and open licenses
are a useful tool to make both the reuse and the preservation of digital
art more feasible.[1] Even though it is undeniable that such licenses
have an overall positive effect, they do however struggle when it comes
to defining the components, materials, and assets that have been
involved in the creation of a work. The lingo used in such licenses
stems from the world of software and despite its adaptation to cultural
works, it still hasn’t got rid of the binary nature of its origin. When
a software license requires the access to its source, it refers to the
“source code,” a well-known object in the making of software that is
easy to define and identify. While this perfectly fits a particular form
of art, in particular art that involves computational processes, it is
questionable whether this concept of source code can be literally ported
to other digital cultural expressions, such as moving or still digital
images, sounds, and by extension multimedia and rich media works.
In this paper, I argue that such works require both a media-specific as
well as a metaphorical understanding of what source code is in the
context of art, music, and design in order to make free and open
licenses valuable for conservation, archiving, and of course in-depth
study and reappropriation of the former. Behind this challenge lie the
issues of accessibility and control with free cultural expressions and
open knowledge, and how these compare with their software-centric parent
definitions.
http://texts.bleu255.com/how-deep-is-your-source/
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