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

[Florian Cramer <paragram@gmx.net>]

Hi Anne,

you wrote:
 
> Did it ever occur to you using Linux can be looked upon as a luxury?
> A privilege to people being able to either work with the tools provided or
> with the knowledge / time to maintain and adjust their system. A luxury I

and:

> 1.      Tools; the artists we've been working with can live without msword,
> or msexcell but are in need of tools for interactive pieces, they like to
> work with applications like Nato, video editing programs, Max, MMdirector
> etc. mostly these are not available in an open source variant or still in a
> beta phase.

Yes, I agree, and you're doing great work by supporting the development
of jMAX, V2_OS, etc. . But I hope your view came also in my review as
well, namely in the paragraph where I wrote that "the Free Software
available obviously doesn't cut it for many people, artists in
particular [...]". 

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).


2) Artist' get more politically aware of the software they use, at the
likely expense of having to choose lo-tech instead of hi-tech solutions
(ruling out all proprietary and patented data formats and audio/video
codecs - for example - if information freedom is an issue for them). 

Both choices are painful, because they achieve freedom by limiting the
technical possibilities of expression; a software puritanism where you
don't allow yourself to play with contagious toys. 

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.



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.)

It's important to make people more aware that digital art in proprietary
formats is, as a matter of fact, owned and controlled by the company
which created the matching authoring software. In many cases, spreading
codecs and formats is a commercial scheme to lock in those who settle
(and then depend) on them. 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. 

> free software movement. So far the achievements have been impressive but
> mainly emphasizing development of an open reliable system and the struggle
> against Microsoft, which is why we have Linux today. Concerning software
> applications so far office related and some applications for stable media
> art have been developed and made available. In the V2 Lab and other art
> related institutes (like EncART) attempts have been made to contribute and
> to initiate new developments, but so far this has been quite isolated from
> the global open source / free software developers movement. There's a lot

...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. 

Greetings,

Florian


-- 
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