 Last year's annual Free Culture, Science and Technology festival held in Zagreb dealt with the proprietarisation of knowledge in medicine, agriculture and science through patents and copyrights ' and looked at counter-projects aimed at creating a "knowledge commons". This year's festival, which starts today and ends on 27 January, will focus on the 'spectrum' commons, open communication technologies and citizen media. But why is this topic an important one to discuss?
Ever since the early days of radio technology, the spectrum has been subject to government regulation and allocation, based on the premise that the spectrum was a 'scarce resource' and that allowing everyone to broadcast would create too much interference and technology would be of no use altogether. While this might have held true in the early days when the technologically exploitable range was very small ' between 3 and 30 MHz - technological developments in recent years has now brought this claim into question. Yet the regulation, which initially favoured big technological oligopolies and later with the rise of broadcasting, favoured big mass media incumbents, has held fast to the present day. The result has been a stifling of technological innovation and amateur media creation of late.
And there has been no lack of protesting voices. In 1926 Bertolt Brecht wrote:
"Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers."
The desire to overturn the firm grip of state control and media hegemonies over production and distribution of information and, in turn, over the public life, was not only expressed in written words. The history of radio is swarming with heroic illegal acts which saw radio activists going underground, taking to the sea, or hitting the streets to get their voice out over their free/pirate/micro radio or street TV sets, to reclaim the spectrum. The development of communication technologies has made Brecht's wireless utopia possible. The technological development and increase in capacity of wireless networks, interlacing and digitization, has allowed a much better maximization of spectrum use without interference compared to what the fixed allocation system would allow.
This topic will be explored in more depth at this year's festival, lectures, screenings, workshops and lectures will all deal with various practices of reclaiming the spectrum for citizen use, both historically and within a contemporary setting. Amateur radio, pirate radio, telestreet and wireless will be on display and on airwaves.
Yochai Benkler, of Coase's Penguin notoriety, will kick off the event with a talk on 'Social Production, Open Systems and Freedom'. Italian telestreet activists Insu^TV and Candida TV will set up and broadcast from a DIY TV studio, there will be lectures on wireless, HAM radio and pirate radio to attend, workshops on podcasting and wireless networking to participate in, as well as screenings of must-see big-media-busting films.
As in the years before, the festival will feature concerts by free culture creators from countries in the region including Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Serbia. A total of 25 live acts and VJs are planned, with the participation of three music labels - EGOBOO.bits, Monteparadiso netlabel and Oscilator.
The festival should provide some valuable discussion on this topic, or at least it allows us to imagine a world of unlimited broadcasting. Can you imagine what could be achieved if the unlicenced part of the spectrum wasn't reduced to the microwave frequency? Or can you imagine a free unlicenced use of the spectrum that could extend to other frequencies? Frequencies better fit for long-range transmissions or better exploitable for creating larger networks. Imagine if we could challenge the control of the airwaves and migrate from a one-to-many model of broadcasting to a many-to-many model of citizen access to radio waves? Imagine... Imagine the unimaginable. A true radio democracy.
As Kraftwerk sing in their 1974 track titled 'Antenna':
'I'm the antenna catching vibration
You're the transmitter give information
I'm the transmitter I give information
You're the antenna catching vibration'
For more information on the events, take a look at the festival's site.
Photograph: Stairway to radio waves, by Rolf, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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