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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Updating the art world with new media
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 What is the role of museums and art centres in today's networked information society where the open-source economy and free culture are building a new reality for communication? How can artists and the public be included in this situation? And what are the real challenges of experimental art fields when opening up the black box of so-called "art pieces"?
The DIVVY/dual project, run by the international NPO, Gadago (host of the Art & Design event calendar, a TokyoArtBeat) is a long-term initiative to openly discuss the answers to these questions. The project started with a series of events consisting of an exhibition and a public symposium in Tokyo.
One of the highlights of the exhibition was Type-Trace, a software piece by artist Takumi Endo and engineer Shinya Matsuyama, showcased in a contemporary art gallery in the Ginza area of Tokyo. The piece is an interactive application that records all the keyboard strokes you make, similar to Spyware. The application plays back the writing along a timeline just like a movie; the main feature is that it reflects the delay time between each keystroke into various visual representations of the output text. For this version, the more time the writer spends before typing a word, the bigger the font size become. Using this visual translation, the viewer can visually understand the process of each person's writing experience. All the text inputs are licenced under a Creative Commons licence, and will be used for a text mash-up function that will be included in the alpha release of the software (with GPL) on the project website shortly. This is aimed at developing not only the individual piece as an end product, but also to propose a new aesthetics and custom which pays more attention to the process of production than the end result.
As a parallel event, a public discussion was held on 24 September at the NTT InterCommunication Centre, a new media art centre open since 1997 in Shinjuku, Tokyo. The author organized the event under the rather defiant title 'Is Open Source art possible?', and guests from various backgrounds attended.
First, Kiyoshi Kusumi, the former editor-in-chief of Japan's distinguished contemporary art review, "BT magazine", who is now a freelance art strategist; explained that the birth of non-proprietary art activities could be found in the Fluxus movement of the 60's in New York. Indeed, many artists who participated in the movement were freely sharing ideas and arranged massive collaborative performance works: most of all, the scores of these performance pieces were sold openly so that anyone could interpret and adapt the works of these acclaimed artists. In this case, these 'scores' can be considered the 'source' of artistic actions.
Noboru Tsubaki, an internationally acclaimed contemporary artist who has recently been mediating the art scene and the global issues with his "United Nations application" initiative, introduced his Radikal Dialogue Project where participants can submit their designs for the Israeli/Palestinian separation wall blocks. He explained why he decided to open up the creative process to the public by adopting a Creative Commons licence for the project website; insisting on the importance of open participation in order to build a base for rising political awareness and enable strong artistic expressions. Tsubaki also stressed the role of the artist as amplifier of noise and irrationality in order to constantly present alternatives to de-facto media.
Hiroo Yamagata is an advocate of hacker culture, an MIT alumni, and translator of all Lessig's books into Japanese. Yamagata raised the critical question of whether the simple proliferation of "free content" could really improve people's creativity. He quoted Claude Levi-Strauss who once wrote that creative process needs a certain obstacle as an object of resistance and that making all resources available would eventually kill the creativity of a society. However, by responding to each of the project presented by the other discussants, he also pointed out that the nature of art forms is shifting from 'installation' as an individual output to a 'platform' as a base for sharable creative process, which could nevertheless justify the employment of open-source type projects in today's artistic domain.
Following the arguments of Yochai Benkler, we may say that the plasticity of our network must be augmented by our own commitment in order to build a critical, self-defining culture. And, the role of art should be, vis-Ã -vis of the broader culture in general, a platform of recursive questioning and redefining of the social realities we are facing every day, in order not to fall into any ideological blindness. As Gilles Deleuze said, philosophers create concepts and artists forge percepts, both in the effort to propagate questions, and not answers.
For more information and feedback on the event, see the reviews in PingMag and Japan Times.
Photograph: Open Source art with the Divvy/Dual project, by Gen Kanai (Mozilla Japan), CC BY-ND 2.0
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