[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK,April 5-6, 2001)

[Anne Nigten <anne@v2.nl>]

>
>In my view, there are two opposite ways to resolve the dilemma you
>describe:
>
>1) Artists begin to code all their production software to ensure that it
>is free (...as in speech...) and controlled by themselves.
>
>This is an unlikely scenario, since most artist-programmers don't work
>in a similarly priviledged position as most Free Software programmers
>(i.e. highly paid day jobs in the industry or research institutions).

on the other hand; wouldn't it be good if we can interest these well paid 
programmers to work with us? this really could supply several people to 
publish their work open source,
profit for the artists can indirectly be obtained by assistance from these 
talented people, especially when we're referring to more general systems 
like jMax, v2 os, matrix, ultra son tracking systems and other tools, not 
only individual artists also the non profit laboratories really could use 
some help!
 >>> knip>>>

>Being such a puritan myself, I don't share the optimism of many people
>in the Free Software camp - including Bruce Perens at the CODE
>conference - that it's just a matter of time until Free Software
>provides everyone with everything they need, including functional
>equivalents of proprietary software used today. Free Software culture
>and politics can't be separated from its cultural products which
>structurally mirror the openness of the development process, while
>proprietary software achieves user-friendliness through standardization,
>i.e.: closure. It goes without saying that functional closure, at the
>expense of freedom, is helpful, necessary and inevitable in any system.
>
>To acknowledge that Free Software is a different culture whose cultural
>products are and will be different, is - in my view - to acknowledge
>that it's too early to suggest that it has resolved all problems of
>information freedom in the realm of computer software (as many
>Windows-/Mac-using speakers at CODE did). And before we move on to
>extend the Free Software/Open Source model to other cultural systems, we
>first have to acknowledge its problems and limitations.
>

i agree on the issue of timing here, some interesting initiatives really 
could have great impact on future developments. waiting and complaining 
afterwards, doesn't help us that much. like stated before the work process 
of interdisciplinary unstable media art, is something rather different from 
stable art productions here. waiting and hoping for the best to happen 
might be an option if your work requires tools which are a digital 
translation of tools like we know those in the analog reality. 
interdisciplinary unstable media is so much more connected to the 
conceptual and technical level of systems and software that these kind of 
works can really be of importance to be included in next steps of 
development...


>For the digital arts, the problem is not so much proprietary vs. open
>_authoring software_, but proprietary vs. open _data formats_. The JPEG
>image produced with Photoshop or the HTML page written with Dreamweaver
>at least is open-standard code which, unlike Macromedia Director
>projects, MAX compositions and QuickTime movies, can be displayed and
>processed with countless proprietary and open programs alike and which
>is less likely to be lost in five or ten years. (We still can read and
>process an ASCII file from a 1970s computer or a MIDI file from a 1980s
>computer whereas all digital art written in HyperCard is practically
>lost.)
>

i agree, this is actually a good example to illustrate the wide variety of 
issues being included in this discussion..

 >>> cut / knip>>
  I might be wrong, but it seems to me that
>this situation is without parallel in the history of art. Music written
>in traditional score notation, for example, is formatted according to an
>open standard available as free knowledge, and according to
>international copyright law, at least all music by composers who died
>before 1931 is in the public domain. In the case of visual art, one
>could argue that (as Duchamp and Warhol demonstrate) museums with their
>mere spaces control the definition and format of art, but at least there
>is and has been art, from Dada, Fluxus to Conceptual and Net Art, which
>evaded or subverted this control.
>
>In film, whose business models seem to anticipate the business models of
>digital information, certain companies factually controlled artworks by
>controlling certain imaging technologies, like Technicolor, Cinemascope,
>Panavision, THX and Dolby Digital, all of them based on trademarks,
>patents, intellectual property rights and revenue through licensing
>schemes.
Antoine, it would be good to have your opinion about the statement above of 
florian

Good news for you, i'm discussing with Phonk! an artists group from the 
netherlands, if we could develop an free or even open d-base with their 
material which can be used by other veejees..

><<cut>>
>...and another problem is that GNU/Linux and other Free Software
>operating systems (like Free/Net/OpenBSD) don't provide standardized
>high-level APIs for the kind of applications you develop. (I.e. no
>unified screen/printer imaging layers, different incompatible audio APIs
>all without built-in codecs, no standard GUI, no standard component
>model.) Both Macintosh and Windows are much better suited as target
>platforms for your projects.

for this last paragraph i have to read the other emails, since i'm slightly 
out of sync with the list. hope to have some time for this asap and get 
back to you
ANne


>--
>http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/
>http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
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