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Art and Free Software (was: Re: [ox-en] Re: Oekonux workshop at KLab9)



Hi Raoul and all!

This is of course meant as an invitation to join in :-) .

4 days ago Raoul wrote:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007, you wrote:

Today I at least checked what we have so far. Fortunately it is not so
bad. I'd say I'll try to prepare a presentation of 20-30 minutes
meaning 7-10 slides. I'd probably prepare one half for
"Selbstentfaltung" and the other half for "Authorship in Free
Software". Hmm... may be a one or two fundamental slides about Oekonux
would also be useful.

Well, did you change your mind since your initial proposal ?
You had said:
"For this I'd think it would make sense to have two parts: In the first
part we explain some central Oekonux ideas. I think this is necessary
because only then we can assume some common understanding among the
participants. In a second part we then discuss how these ideas can relate to
art."

(http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/StefanMerten/KLab9Worksheet)

My original proposal was tailored for an hour of presentation and
three hours of workshop. Now that we have only two hours of workshop
in total we need to cut further. Question is where to cut.

I thought it would make more sense for our own Selbstentfaltung ;-) to
discuss with the audience and therefore reduce presentation. On the
other hand too much reduction gives too little to dicuss :-/ . We need
to find a balance somewhere.

You seem to see reduced the part dedicated to Oekonux (a third small half?)
I thought that your idea to begin by taking the necessary time to introduce
Oekonux central ideas was good... and I still think it is. KLab is supposed
to be a place gathering people looking for ways and means to overcome
capitalism. They should be naturally interested by the Oekonux idea that the
free software spirit/practices are germs (also active germs) of a
non-capitalist society.

True.

I think it would be useful, for example, to use the
Stefan Meretz's image of the three "shells" of the onion: software, culture
and societal material production, where the new (non capitalist) forms of
production, after developing within the first shell (software), are
developing into the second one, culture.

Good idea. However, from the top of my head I have no idea how the
reasoning goes here.

@StefanMz: Could you help me? [...browsing...] Ah, I think I got the
reference. From
http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ImpressionsWOS4#impressions-by-stefan-meretz:

  If one imagines this as a model of an "onion" consisting of
  "shells", then with free culture we reached the second "shell" after
  the first "shell" (or core) being free software. The third "shell"
  of the onion - witch had become clear at different points - will be
  the core of societal production, following my rampant thesis :-) .

May be we could put some more meat to this thesis? For instance: Is it
possible to make a point that it starts with software and then
continues to culture to later reach societal production?

Art is part of culture, and indeed, in some domains of art (music, videos,
photos, literature, etc) we see clear and accelerated expansion of
non-market practices (creating art products for own and others pleasure and
not for wage and sell/profit).

Yeah that's true. Probably most (visible) in Brazil but also refer to
the Jamendo project mentioned on
http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ImpressionsWOS4#panel-business-and-the-commons

But if you follow Lawrence Lessig as StefanMz referred to above and I
refer to at
http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/ImpressionsWOS4#talk-the-read-write-society
then creation of culture for others always has been a common activity
- especially for music I guess.

This reality concerns, for the moment, mostly
digital goods produced mostly with digital means. ("Internet art", "Software
art", "Browser out", game design, etc.)

But hasn't been playing music for the sake of a good concert, for the
fans always been a big motivator? Beyond money which for most amateur
bands is not worth saying? Well, now I'm probably in the realm of art
being *directly* done for the own Selbstentfaltung as well as for
others Selbstentfaltung. Music is the best example I can think of.
Other examples?

But it may expand (partially) into
material goods since Free Software may be used to drive tools, machines. If
designing cars can be considered as containing some artistic aspects, the
case of Oscar is an example.

This would be probably something like industrial design or so.
Certainly this has aspects of "useful art".

In any case, I think it would be worth to take sufficient time for the
presentation of Oekonux's dynamic way to see things and situate art in this
dynamic. But, after all, maybe this can be done with one or two slides...

May be we should gather points and then check what seems most
important.

On [ox-de] some time ago we had some debates on that topic - also with
artists. I should check the archive for these threads. What I remember
was a strong wish to keep the work "untouched". I know this feeling
from programming, too, though nowadays something like code ownership
vanishes more and more - especially as it seems to me in Free Software
projects.

For digital goods, you can always keep an "untouched" version of the
original product. This may not be the case for material products... But we
know that all the possibilities with digital goods cannot be found with
material goods. Nevertheless, the irreversible process of introduction of
"digital substance" into almost all forms of artistic creation should also
have an influence in the way "artists" see their activity and the
"untouchability" of their products...

Well, aren't many artworks most of all information? At least in our
age where they can be reproduced and copied easily? Isn't a song much
more than information which needs to be performed? Isn't a text
anything else than information?

As I remember the problem was indeed with songs which should not be
changes - regardless whether the "original" keeps intact or not.

When comparing it to Free Software it is important to be precise on what
we
are talking about, especially concerning the question of "fine arts" and
"useful" arts...

Though I guess the expectable audience will have a rather unified
notion here this is certainly a useful clarification. Also it
highlights a nice connection between fine arts and - as
says - crafts.

The question of the definition of art has so many subjective aspects that I
would not be surprised if the expectable unified notion of the audience
proves not to be.

We'll hopefully find out ;-) .

In that context, preparing us to answer the question: "Is writing software
an artistic activity?" may be relevant.

As a software guy: Not in all cases but it certainly can be. If you
code down a stupid thing then it is rather mechanic. But if for
instance you architect a software system you try to build it in an
elegant, sound way. This has certainly artistic elements. Certainly
the elegance of the outcome is not visible for everyone - but as I
said: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And peer software guys are
able to see the beauty in a design.

One of the main watersheds about the notion of art is "usefulness": pure art
is not practically useful; another is "rationality": pure art communicates
by emotions, intuitions and aesthetic feelings, not through rational
approaches.

Often I think that emotions, intuitions and aesthetic feelings are
mostly some condensed experience. The classical story is in
Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Back" where in one chapter the aesthetic
feeling of one of the proponents for Bach's music is decoded as
"feeling" the mathematics in Bach's music - and thus a lot of
rationality.

In software I also often have the feeling that elegant solutions
contain a lot of "common wisdom" / more or less explicit rules.
Finding them beautiful is only a reflection of this common wisdom,
then.

The limits of usefulness and rationality are difficult to draw
up. Religious art, for example, (probably the most prevalent form of art
before capitalism), (which is undoubtedly "art" since dealing with
emotions/feelings - one of the foundations of religions), has also very
"practical" goals: giving protection from bad spirits or devils, attracting
rains, fertilizing the land, trading with gods, etc.

Yes.

In addition, many very
practical goods may have an important artistic aspect, especially in the
riches' practical world: houses, furniture, clothes, cars...

Yes. Though beauty of practical things is often not much of a matter
of material expensiveness but of beautiful design.

In any case, we need a definition, and for the sake of simplicity IMHO we
could stick to: the most specific characteristic of artistic activity is the
research of producing aesthetic/emotional feelings.

I'm tempted to add "positive" to the feelings - however, today this is
probably no longer true since art often has some provocative element.

From that point of view one could say, in an almost tautological way, that
writing software is an artistic activity as far as the purpose of the
software is artistic. Programming is not "per se" art, but it can be.

No, the purpose of the software is completely irrelevant here. The
design for the most boring business application can be very artistic /
beautiful. It is not the purpose of the software but the purpose of
the creator.

In case of software and other useful goods which may have embedded
beauty there are two purposes: Making them useful *and* making them
beautiful at the same time. Indeed a useful good where the design
prevents its use is as bad as an useful but ugly good. Fine/pure art
is then such art where the useful aspect simply is not present. Ok,
this makes sense to me :-) .

May be we can link the notion of Selbstentfaltung in here somehow?

Two remarks about that.

In the case of Free Software, the fact that the users (and the creators) may
have the feeling/emotion of escaping capitalist logic (even if for a while
and in a very small measure) may give to programming an artistic aspect.

Sorry, but I can not share this view. There *is* beauty in the
technology though it is directly visible by an average user.

There is another dimension which makes writing software and art close. The
word art comes from Latin "ars" which related essentially to the skill to
produce something, material or not, but requiring special skills. An
artisan, a craftsman is first of all somebody who has and develops skills to
produce something. The development of these skills may some times become a
goal "per se" and the source of goods inducing aesthetic/emotional feelings
as witnesses of human capacities/potential. Artists are first of all
artisans, craftsmen. (Only few modern and provocative notions of art deny
the use and development of specific skill as a characteristic of art.)

The programmer is also, first of all, an artisan, a craftsman, and he often
feels so. "In fact many programmers perceived themselves as craftspeople",
says Steven Weber in his "Success of open source" (chapter on "The early
story of open source"). In that sense, writing software, "elegant" software
may be a source of aesthetic feelings for other programmers, and, as such,
contain, by itself, an artistic aspect, in the specific world of people able
to understand programs.

Yes. Had I read your mail completely before replying I could have
saved a lot of digital breath ;-) .

Of course, I don't think we should enter into all these aspects in the
introduction, but it may help for the discussions.

It is certainly useful if we find the common denominator - which IMHO
is Selbstentfaltung. If we could express this well then I think we
accomplished a lot.

---

An idea that IMHO might be present in the presentation (but I don't know
exactly where: Authorship or Selbsentfaltung? since we abandoned the
Ownership topic) is that Free Software spirit/practices, together with the
ITC, are allowing artists, for the first time in history, to begin to
emancipate from wizards/sorcerers/priests', riches' (sponsors) or state
bureaucrats power, in order to spread and disseminate their works.

Is this so? Remembering Lawrence Lessig's RW society this is not the
case.

There *is*, however, a case that the means of production for creating
art in the form of software are cheap today. Time, however, and
education is still expensive.

---

On the topic on Authorship, we could say that FS spirit should bring into
art a new capacity to create art in a much more collective way. But that
seems implicit in what you say about that topic in your mails.

That is probably one of the most interesting points. It is also the
question what "collective" exactly means here. If you think of a
maintainer in an art project then I'd think of an art school rather
than an collective endeavor - though the comparison is not really
valid.

Some thoughts. Hope they help.
...

Certainly. My cent added I hope others join in.


						Grüße

						Stefan

_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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