sorry for the delay, i'm just very busy, more will
come up later..
Antoine, if I understand your point about the concept of Free art
licenses well, you’re referring to stable media / art mainly, (static or
dynamic media /art which has a final or a predefined form). This reminds
me a lot on the publications of Joost Smiers, who made several strong
points in his plea to leave copyrights out of the arts and cultural
practice.
There’s more similarity among these theories / concepts, both leave me
puzzled at the point where it becomes interesting (for me): how does this
all relate to current movements and attempts in the interdisciplinary
code based art practice? What happens to the income of the artists when
copy rights are left out?
So far at the V2 lab we’ve been working with existing licenses, mainly
GPL and for an upcoming project we’re looking at GNU copyleft. The choice
of the most suitable licenses depends a lot on the project and the
intentions of the artist, our preference for existing licences is an
attempt to stay open for collaboration with the outside world. For sure
these licenses are not written for art or scientific purposes per se, but
turned out to be useful anyway. It would be good to know why people come
up with alternatives. Do you all plan at all to make a match or
connection to the software based licenses at all, or do you think that
the world of artists and software designers should really be kept apart?
It can be foreseen a connection between your ideas and the situation will
make sense in the near future, here I’m referring to the remark in my
former mail about the mixed situation where ‘tools’ and code based work
are being mixed up among artists/researchers/technicians etc.
In his posting Antoine mentions it impossible to change the world in one
day, the way I read it now it will take us in a reverse time travel… In
this context you should also look at the mails of martin, in which it is
indicated that things are about to change soon.
About the other similarity: what happens with the income of the artist
when copyrights are left? There was somebody who suggested something from
a different angle, according to his theory about free software Richard
Stallman presented his idea of free contribution. At the Wizards of OS in
1999 Richard presented these ideas, and due to his very emotional way of
lecturing I didn't get to discuss these ideas up there neither did I
during CODE. I have the impression that these days ( almost ) nobody will
ever pay for art / cultural content on line. Besides this, there is a
hippie flavor to the idea, which really reminds me to street musicians
with a hat collecting money. After several talks and discussions
with artists about this idea, it turns out not to be meeting the profile
of contemporary artists/researchers/programmers etc. For sure this is in
no way a statement from the art world or well worked out survey, but an
indication from our environment. So this made me think about other
possibilities of income for artists using open source and / or copyleft.
The services based model which is being used by companies to earn form
open source (like Red hat as the most clear example) is not really
suitable for art practices it looks like. Our so-called ‘core business’
is creativity, art Research & Development, content and
interdisciplinary collaboration. Some ideas for marketing creativity,
aRt&D, content, interdisciplinary collaboration etc., without leaving
our mission could be established by acknowledgment of art research and
development as an interesting and important addition to scientific
research e.g. by means of inclusion of aRt&D in the research programs
(international, European, national). Other options I see are workshops
for corporate business, demonstrations and our daily work
environment could be real interesting as testbeds for scientific
research, education etc. etc. just to name a few.
Back to CODE (and my notes)
Some other food for thought popped up in my mind during the CODE
conference which was held in Cambridge, the UK. For two days we discussed
real interesting issues related to openness, sharing, free this and free
that while being in a country where gay people are NOT free to express
their feelings in public due to clause 28 ….. we might need to work on
some reverse engineering here!!