REFF RomaEuropa FakeFactory (2010) [Italian]

The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment

Romaeuropa FakeFactory is an act of artistic and technological hacking, a platform for global discussion and a performance that, beginning in 2009, has dealt with the themes of active, critical and creative innovation, confronting the management of cultural and technological policies related to these areas. The story begins with the opening of the Romaeuropa WebFactory, a digital art competition launched in 2008 by the Romaeuropa Foundation (Fondazione Romaeuropa) and Telecom Italia. Oppressive copyright conditions, such as the unilateral transfer of the rights to the works submitted and a ban on the use of techniques like mashup, cutup, remix but conversely giving the Romaeuropa Foundation and Telecom Italia the right to remix the works, inspired the creation of a Fake capable of becoming a point for multi-disciplinary analysis of the possibilities offered by freely available knowledge, contents and resources: a chance to reverse the logic of the competition and bring to light the contradictions, limits and implications of such a typical, reactionary cultural policy.

“Remix the world! Reinvent Reality!” is one of the principal themes that has inspired the REFF, from an act of détournement and cybersquatting – that brought to life the creation of a remix skills competition determining in 2009 a reversal of the Romaeuropa Foundation and Telecom Italia’s policy on the management of intellectual property rights – to the presentation of REFF’s instances and methodologies to the Cultural Commission of the Italian Senate (Commissione Cultura del Senato della Repubblica Italiana), up to the current production of the REFF book, as a global effort to create a working business model that implements the concepts and demands expressed by the RomaEuropa FakeFactory. Supporters of the REFF are found all over the world: over 80 partners among universities, artists, academies, associations, hackers, researchers, designers, journalists, politicians, magazines, networks, activitst, art critics, architects, musicians and entrepreneurs together with all the people who share a belief that art, design and new technologies can unite towards a critical, yet positive vision of a world that can create new opportunities and new ways of being, collaborating and communicating.

English version to be published soon.

Authors
Publisher (Fake Press)
Publisher (Derive Approdi)

Foreword by: Bruce Sterling
Edited and produced by FakePress and Derive&Approdi
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 Italy.

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Dmytri Kleiner: The Telekommunist Manifesto (2010)

“In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution.

Proposing ‘venture communism’ as a new model for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks.

In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License.

Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.”

The Telekommunist Manifesto is composed of texts that have been extended and reworked by Dmytri Kleiner, from texts by Joanne Richardson, Brian Wyrick and Dmytri Kleiner, 2004–2008.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, October 2010
Network Notebooks series, 3
Peer Production License. Commercial use encouraged for Independent and Collective/Commons-based users.
ISBN 9789081602129

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)

Tiqqun: Introduction to Civil War (2009/2010)

“Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides—these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms—absolute, liberal, welfare—has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire.

In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.”

Originally published in French by Éditions La Fabrique, 2009.

Translated by Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith
Publisher Semiotext(e), February 2010
Intervention series, 4
ISBN 1584350865, 9781584350866

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2017-6-26)