Adema
Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the underground movement of (pirated) theory text sharing
2009
# Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of
(pirated) theory text sharing
_“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment:
what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to
the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and
BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would
the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived,
communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?”_
Gary Hall – [Digitize this
book!](http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/H/hall_digitize.html) (2008)
Ubu
web was founded in 1996 by poet [Kenneth
Goldsmith](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Goldsmith "Kenneth Goldsmith")
and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound
poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its
parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As
[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UbuWeb) states, Ubu is non-commercial
and operates on a gift economy. All the same - by forming an amazing resource
and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these
works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however:
‘ _should something return to print, we will remove it from our site
immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb
without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of
the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and
displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from
existing artists on site_.’
Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and
pop music the [Piratebay](http://thepiratebay.org/) and other download sites
(or p2p networks) like [Mininova](http://www.mininova.org/) are being sued and
charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a
blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer
digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from books to
documentaries.
This is and has not always been the case: in 2002 [Sebastian
Lütgert](http://www.wizards-of-
os.org/archiv/wos_3/sprecher/l_p/sebastian_luetgert.html) from Berlin/New York
was sued by the "Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur"
for putting online two downloadable texts from Theodor W. Adorno on his
website [textz.com](http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/artist/textz-
com/biography/), an underground archive for Literature. According to
[this](http://de.indymedia.org/2004/03/76975.shtml) Indymedia interview with
Lütgert, textz.com was referred to as ‘the Napster for books’ offering about
700 titles, focusing on, as Lütgert states _‘Theorie, Romane, Science-Fiction,
Situationisten, Kino, Franzosen, Douglas Adams, Kritische Theorie, Netzkritik
usw’._
The interview becomes even more interesting when Lütgert remarks that one can
still easily download both Adorno texts without much ado if one wants to. This
leads to the bigger question of the real reasons underlying the charge against
textz.com; why was textz.com sued? As Lütgert says in the interview: “ _Das
kann man sowieso_ [when referring to the still available Adorno texts] _._
_Aber es gibt schon lange einen klaren Unterschied zwischen offener
Verfügbarkeit und dem Untergrund. Man kann die freie Verbreitung von Inhalten
nicht unterbinden, aber man scheint verhindern zu wollen dass dies allzu offen
und selbstverständlich geschieht. Das ist es was sie stört.”
_
__
But how can something be truly underground in an online environment whilst
still trying to spread or disseminate texts as widely as possible? This seems
to be the paradox of many - not quite legal and/or copyright protected -
resource sharing and collecting communities and platforms nowadays. However,
multiple scenario’s are available to evade this dilemma: by being frankly open
about the ‘status’ of the content on offer, as Ubu does, or by using little
‘tricks’ like an easy website registration, classifying oneself as a reading
group, or by relieving oneself from responsibility by stating that one is only
aggregating sources from elsewhere (linking) and not hosting the content on
its own website or blog. One can also state the offered texts or multimedia
files form a special issue or collection of resources, emphasizing their
educational and not-for-profit value.
Most of the ‘underground’ text and content sharing communities seem to follow
the concept of (the inevitability of) ‘[information wants to be
free](https://openreflections.wordpress.com/tag/information-wants-to-be-
free/)’, especially on the Internet. As Lütgert States: “ _Und vor allem sind
die über Walter Benjamin nicht im Bilde, der das gleiche Problem der
Reproduzierbarkeit von Werken aller Art schon zu Beginn des letzten
Jahrhunderts vor sich hatte und erkannt hat: die Massen haben das Recht, sich
das alles wieder anzueignen. Sie haben das Recht zu kopieren, und das Recht,
kopiert zu werden. Jedenfalls ist das eine ganz schön ungemütliche Situation,
dass dessen Nachlass jetzt von solch einem Bürokraten verwaltet wird._ _A:
Glaubst Du es ist überhaupt legitim intellektuellen Inhalt zu "besitzen"? Oder
__Eigentümer davon zu sein?_ _S: Es ist *unmöglich*. "Geistiges" Irgendwas
verbreitet sich immer weiter. Reemtsmas Vorfahren wären nie von den Bäumen
runtergekommen oder aus dem Morast rausgekrochen, wenn sich "geistiges"
Irgendwas nicht verbreitet hätte.”_
What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that
one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and
other file sharing community’s (the true
[Darknet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_\(file_sharing\)) in a way) –
more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and
books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs,
or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their
domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and
dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content
has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’
text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google
Books (and accompanying Google Books [download
tools](http://www.codeplex.com/GoogleBookDownloader)) accompanied by the
appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of
‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and
‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.
The direct harm (to both the producers and their publishers) of the free
online availability of (in copyright) texts is also maybe less clear than for
instance with music and films. Many feel texts and books will still be
preferred to be read in print, making the online and free availability of text
nothing more than a marketing tool for the sales of the printed version. Once
discovered, those truly interested will find and buy the print book. Also more
than with music and film, it is felt essential to share information, as a
cultural good and right, to prevent censorship and to improve society.
This is one of the reasons the [Open
Access](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_\(publishing\)) movement for
scientific research has been initiated. But where the amount of people and
institutions supportive of this movement is gradually growing (especially
where it concerns articles and journals in the Sciences), the spread
concerning Open Access (or even digital availability) of monographs in the
Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the majority of the resources on
offer in the underground text sharing communities consists) has only just
started.
This has lead to a situation in which some have decided that change is not
coming fast enough. Instead of waiting for this utopian Open Access future to
come gradually about, they are actively spreading, copying, scanning and
pirating scholarly texts/monographs online. Although many times accompanied by
lengthy disclaimers about why they are violating copyright (to make the
content more widely accessible for one), many state they will take down the
content if asked. Following the
[copyleft](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft) movement, what has in a way
thus arisen is a more ‘progressive’ or radical branch of the Open Access
movement. The people who spread these texts deem it inevitable they will be
online eventually, they are just speeding up the process. As Lütgert states: ‘
_The desire of an increasingly larger section of the population to 100-percent
of information is irreversible. The only way there can be slowed down in the
worst case, but not be stopped._
Still we have not yet answered the question of why publishers (and their
pirated authors) are not more upset about these kinds of websites and
platforms. It is not a simple question of them not being aware that these kind
of textual disseminations are occurring. As mentioned before, the harm to
producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences
mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their
main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model:
free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content
and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook,
so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not
certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the
authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe
in royalties) from the online availability. Perhaps some publishers also see
the Open Access movement as something inevitably growing and they thus don’t
see the urge to step up or organize a collaborative effort against scholarly
text piracy (where most of the presses also lack the scale to initiate this).
Whereas there has been some more upsurge and worries about _[textbook
piracy](http://bookseller-association.blogspot.com/2008/07/textbook-
piracy.html)_ (since this is of course the area where individual consumers –
students – do directly buy the material) and websites like
[Scribd](http://www.scribd.com/), this mostly has to do with the fact that
these kind of platforms also host non-scholarly content and actively promote
the uploading of texts (where many of the text ‘sharing’ platforms merely
offer downloading facilities). In the case of Scribd the size of the platform
(or the amount of content available on the platform) also has caused concerns
and much [media coverage](http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/04/scribd-youtube-
for-pirated-ebooks-but.html).
All of this gives a lot of potential power to text sharing communities, and I
guess they know this. Only authors might be directly upset (especially famous
ones gathering a lot of royalties on their work) or in the case of Lütgert,
their beneficiaries, who still do see a lot of money coming directly from
individual customers.
Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is
feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological
commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and
political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to
knowledge production and dissemination.
As Adrian Johns states in his
[article](http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/345/348)
_Piracy as a business force_ , ‘today’s pirate philosophy is a moral
philosophy through and through’. As Jonas Andersson
[states](http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/346/359), the
idea of piracy has mostly lost its negative connotations in these communities
and is seen as a positive development, where these movements ‘have begun to
appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a
proactive one (‘setting the rules’). Rather than complain about the
conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new,
alternative ones.’ Although Andersson states this kind of activism is mostly
_occasional_ , it can be seen expressed clearly in the texts accompanying the
text sharing sites and blogs. However, copyright is perhaps so much _an issue_
on most of these sites (where it is on some of them), as it is something that
seems to be simply ignored for the larger good of aggregating and sharing
resources on the web. As is stated clearly for instance in an
[interview](http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/08/four-dialogues-2-on-aaaarg/) with
Sean Dockray, who maintains AAAARG:
_" The project wasn’t about criticizing institutions, copyright, authority,
and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This wasn’t as general as it
sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge between various individuals
and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t
necessarily in correspondence with each other."_
Back to Lütgert. The files from textz.com have been saved and are still
[accessible](http://web.archive.org/web/20031208043421/textz.gnutenberg.net/index.php3?enhanced_version=http://textz.com/index.php3)
via [The Internet Archive Wayback
Machine](http://web.archive.org/collections/web.html). In the case of
textz.com, these files contain ’typed out text’, so no scanned contents or
PDF’s. Textz.com (or better said its shadow or mirror) offers an amazing
collection of texts, including artists statements/manifestos and screenplays
from for instance David Lynch.
The text sharing community has evolved and now knows many players. Two other
large members in this kind of ‘pirate theory base network’ (although – and I
have to make that clear! – they offer many (and even mostly) legal and out of
copyright texts), still active today, are
[Monoskop/Burundi](http://burundi.sk/monoskop/log/) and
[AAAARG.ORG](http://a.aaaarg.org/). These kinds of platforms all seem to
disseminate (often even on a titular level) similar content, focusing mostly
on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Literary
Theory, The Frankfurter Schule, Sociology/Social Theory, Psychology,
Anthropology and Ethnography, Media Art and Studies, Music Theory, and
critical and avant-garde writers like Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, Joyce,
Baudrillard, etc.etc.
[Monoskop](http://www.burundi.sk/monoskop/index.php/Main_Page) is, as they
state, a collaborative wiki research on the social history of media art or a
‘living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology’. At the
sitemap of their log, or under the categories section, you can browse their
resources on genre: book, journal, e-zine, report, pamphlet etc. As I found
[here](http://www.slovakia.culturalprofiles.net/?id=7958), Burundi originated
in 2003 as a (Slovakian) media lab working between the arts, science and
technologies, which spread out to a European city based cultural network; They
even functioned as a press, publishing the Anthology of New Media Literature
(in Slovak) in 2006, and they hosted media events and curated festivals. It
dissolved in June 2005 although the
[Monoskop](http://www.slovakia.culturalprofiles.net/?id=7964) research wiki on
media art, has continued to run since the dissolving of Burundi.
As
is stated on their website, AAAARG is a conversation platform, or
alternatively, a school, reading group or journal, maintained by Los Angeles
artist[ Sean Dockray](http://www.design.ucla.edu/people/faculty.php?ID=64
"Sean Dockray"). In the true spirit of Critical Theory, its aim is to ‘develop
critical discourse outside of an institutional framework’. Or even more
beautiful said, it operates in the spaces in between: ‘ _But rather than
thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto
existing buildings and creates new architectures between them_.’ To be able to
access the texts and resources that are being ‘discussed’ at AAAARG, you need
to register, after which you will be able to browse the
[library](http://a.aaaarg.org/library). From this library, you can download
resources, but you can also upload content. You can subscribe to their
[feed](http://aaaarg.org/feed) (RSS/XML) and [like
Monoskop](http://twitter.com/monoskop), AAAARG.org also maintains a [Twitter
account](http://twitter.com/aaaarg) on which updates are posted. The most
interesting part though is the ‘extra’ functions the platform offers: after
you have made an account, you can make your own collections, aggregations or
issues out of the texts in the library or the texts you add. This offers an
alternative (thematically ordered) way into the texts archived on the site.
You also have the possibility to make comments or start a discussion on the
texts. See for instance their elaborate [discussion
lists](http://a.aaaarg.org/discussions). The AAAARG community thus serves both
as a sharing and feedback community and in this way operates in a true p2p
fashion, in a way like p2p seemed originally intended. The difference being
that AAAARG is not based on a distributed network of computers, but is based
on one platform, to which registered users are able to upload a file (which is
not the case on Monoskop for instance – only downloading here).
Via[
mercurunionhall](http://mercerunionhall.blogspot.com/2009/06/aaaargorg.html),
I found the image underneath which depicts AAAARG.ORG's article index
organized as a visual map, showing the connections between the different
texts. This map was created and posted by AAAARG user john, according to
mercurunionhall.
Where AAAArg.org focuses again on the text itself - typed out versions of
books - Monoskop works with more modern versions of textual distribution:
scanned versions or full ebooks/pdf’s with all the possibilities they offer,
taking a lot of content from Google books or (Open Access) publishers’
websites. Monoskop also links back to the publishers’ websites or Google
Books, for information about the books or texts (which again proves that the
publishers should know about their activities). To download the text however,
Monoskop links to [Sharebee](http://www.sharebee.com/), keeping the actual
text and the real downloading activity away from its platform.
Another part of the text sharing content consists of platforms offering
documentaries and lectures (so multi-media content) online. One example of the
last is the [Discourse Notebook Archive](http://www.discoursenotebook.com/),
which describes itself as an effort which has as its main goal ‘to make
available lectures in contemporary continental philosophy’ and is maintained
by Todd Kesselman, a PhD Student at The New School for Social Research. Here
you can find lectures from Badiou, Kristeva and Zizek (both audio and video)
and lectures aggregated from the European Graduate School. Kesselman also
links to resources on the web dealing with contemporary continental
philosophy.
Society of Control is a website maintained by [Stephan
Dillemuth](http://www.kopenhagen.dk/fileadmin/oldsite/interviews/solmennesker.htm),
an artist living and working in Munich, Germany, offering amongst others an
overview of his work and scientific research. According to
[this](http://www2.khib.no/~hovedfag/akademiet_05/tekster/interview.html)
interview conducted by Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter his work is a
response to the increased influence of the neo-liberal world order on
education, creating a culture industry that is more than often driven by
commercial interests. He asks the question ‘How can dissidence grow in the
blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself?’ His website,
the [Society of Control](http://www.societyofcontrol.com/disclaimer1.htm) is,
as he states, ‘an independent organization whose profits are entirely devoted
to research into truth and meaning.’
Society of Control has a [library
section](http://www.societyofcontrol.com/library/) which contains works from
some of the biggest thinkers of the twentieth century: Baudrillard, Adorno,
Debord, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Habermas, Sloterdijk und so weiter, and so much
more, a lot in German, and all ‘typed out’ texts. The library section offers a
direct search function, a category function and a a-z browse function.
Dillemuth states that he offers this material under fair use, focusing on not
for profit, freedom of information and the maintenance of freedom of speech
and information and making information accessible to all:
_“The Societyofcontrol website site contains information gathered from many
different sources. We see the internet as public domain necessary for the free
flow and exchange of information. However, some of these materials contained
in this site maybe claimed to be copyrighted by various unknown persons. They
will be removed at the copyright holder 's request within a reasonable period
of time upon receipt of such a request at the email address below. It is not
the intent of the Societyofcontrol to have violated or infringed upon any
copyrights.”_
Important in this respect is
that he put the responsibility of reading/using/downloading the texts on his
site with the viewers, and not with himself: _“Anyone reading or looking at
copyright material from this site does so at his/her own peril, we disclaim
any participation or liability in such actions.”_
Fark Yaraları = [Scars of Différance](http://farkyaralari.blogspot.com/) and
[Multitude of blogs](http://multitudeofblogs.blogspot.com/) are maintained by
the same author, Renc-u-ana, a philosophy and sociology student from Istanbul.
The first is his personal blog (with also many links to downloadable texts),
focusing on ‘creating an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and
Bourdieuan sociology’ on which he writes ‘market-created inequalities must be
overthrown in order to close knowledge gap.’ The second site has a clear
aggregating function with the aim ‘to give united feedback for e-book
publishing sites so that tracing and finding may become easier.’ And a call
for similar blogs or websites offering free ebook content. The blog is
accompanied by a nice picture of a woman warning to keep quiet, very
paradoxically appropriate to the context. Here again, a statement from the
host on possible copyright infringement _: ‘None of the PDFs are my own
productions. I 've collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist
bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing._’ The same goes for
[pdflibrary](http://pdflibrary.wordpress.com/) (which seems to be from the
same author), offering texts from Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze and the likes:
_‘_ _None of the PDFs you find here are productions of this blog. They are
collected from different places in the web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, all
socialist bros, cross-x, …). The only work done here is thematizing and
tagging.’_
[](http://multitudeofblogs.blogspot.com/)Our
student from Istanbul lists many text sharing sites on Multitude of blogs,
including [Inishark](http://danetch.blogspot.com/) (amongst others Badiou,
Zizek and Derrida), [Revelation](http://revelation-online.blogspot.com/2009/02
/keeping-ten-commandments.html) (a lot of history and bible study), [Museum of
accidents](http://museumofaccidents.blogspot.com/) (many resources relating to
again, critical theory, political theory and continental philhosophy) and
[Makeworlds](http://makeworlds.net/) (initiated from the [make world
festival](http://www.makeworlds.org/1/index.html) 2001).
[Mariborchan](http://mariborchan.wordpress.com/) is mainly a Zizek resource
site (also Badiou and Lacan) and offers next to ebooks also video and audio
(lectures and documentaries) and text files, all via links to file sharing
platforms.
What is clear is that the text sharing network described above (I am sure
there are many more related to other fields and subjects) is also formed and
maintained by the fact that the blogs and resource sites link to each other in
their blog rolls, which is what in the end makes up the network of text
sharing, only enhanced by RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, holding together
direct communication streams with the rest of the community. That there has
not been one major platform or aggregation site linking them together and
uploading all the texts is logical if we take into account the text sharing
history described before and this can thus be seen as a clear tactic: it is
fear, fear for what happened to textz.com and fear for the issue of scale and
fear of no longer operating at the borders, on the outside or at the fringes.
Because a larger scale means they might really get noticed. The idea of
secrecy and exclusivity which makes for the idea of the underground is very
practically combined with the idea that in this way the texts are available in
a multitude of places and can thus not be withdrawn or disappear so easily.
This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed
(widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of
time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the
texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed
as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this
balance of openly dispersed subversivity.
Update 25 November 2005: Another interesting resource site came to my
attention recently: [Bedeutung](http://http://www.bedeutung.co.uk/index.php),
a philosophical and artistic initiative consisting of three projects:
[Bedeutung
Magazine](http://www.bedeutung.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=3),
[Bedeutung
Collective](http://www.bedeutung.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67&Itemid=4)
and [Bedeutung Blog](http://bedeutung.wordpress.com/), hosts a
[library](http://www.bedeutung.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=85&Itemid=45)
section which links to freely downloadable online e-books, articles, audio
recordings and videos.
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### 17 comments on " Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the
‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing"
1. Pingback: [Humanism at the fringe « Snarkmarket](http://snarkmarket.com/2009/3428)
2. Pingback: [Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the 'underground movement' of (pirated) theory text sharing « Mariborchan](http://mariborchan.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-underground-movement-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/)
hi there, I'm the owner of the Scars of Différance blog, I'm grateful for your
reading which nurtures self-reflexivity.
text-sharers phylum is a Tardean phenomena, it works through imitation and
differences differentiate styles and archives. my question was inherited from
aby warburg who is perhaps the first kantian librarian (not books, but the
nomenclatura of books must be thought!), I shape up a library where books
speak to each other, each time fragmentary.
you are right about the "fear", that's why I don't reupload books that are
deleted from mediafire. blog is one of the ways, for ex there are e-mail
groups where chain-sharings happen and there are forums where people ask each
other from different parts of the world, to scan a book that can't be found in
their library/country. I understand publishers' qualms (I also work in a
turkish publishing house and make translations). but they miss a point, it was
the very movement which made book a medium that de-posits "book" (in the
Blanchotian sense): these blogs do indeed a very important service, they save
books from the databanks. I'm not going to make a easy rider argument and
decry technology.what I mean is this: these books are the very bricks which
make up resistance -they are not compost-, it is a sharing "partage" and these
fragmentary impartations (the act in which 'we' emancipate books from the
proper names they bear: author, editor, publisher, queen,…) make words blare.
our work: to disenfranchise.
to get larger, to expand: these are too ambitious terms, one must learn to
stay small, remain finite. a blog can not supplant the non-place of the
friendships we make up around books.
the epigraph at the top of my blog reads: "what/who exorbitates mutates into
its opposite" from a Turkish poet Cahit Zarifoğlu. and this logic is what
generates the slithering of the word. we must save books from its own ends.
Thanks for the link, good article, agree with the contents, especially like
the part 'Could, for instance, the considerable resources that might be
allocated to protecting, policing and, ultimately, sanctioning online file-
sharing not be used for rendering it less financially damaging for the
creative sector?'
I like this kind of pragmatic reasoning, and I know more people do.
By the way, checked Bedeutung, great journal, and love your
[library](http://www.bedeutung.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=86&Itemid=46)
section! Will add it to the main article.
10. Pingback: [Mariborchan » Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the 'underground movement' of (pirated) theory text sharing](http://mariborchan.com/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-underground-movement-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/)
This is Nick, the author of the JJPS project; thanks for the tweet! I actually
came across this blog post while doing background research for the project and
looking for discussions about AAAARG; found out about a lot of projects that I
didn't already know about. One thing that I haven't been able to articulate
very well is that I think there's an interesting relationship between, say,
Kenneth Goldsmith's own poetry and his founding of Ubu Web; a collation and
reconfiguration of the detritus of culture (forgotten works of the avant-
gardes locked up behind pay walls of their own, or daily minutiae destined to
be forgotten), which is something that I was trying to do, in a more
circumscribed space, in JJPS Radio. But the question of distribution of
digital works is something I find fascinating, as there are all sorts of
avenues that we could be investigating but we are not. The issue, as it often
is, is one of technical ability, and that's why one of the future directions
of JJPS is to make some of the techniques I used easier to use. Those who want
to can always look into the code, which is of course freely available, but
that cannot and should not be a prerequisite.
Hi Nick, thanks for your comment. I love the JJPS and it would be great if the
technology you mention would be easily re-usable. What I find fascinating is
how you use another medium (radio) to translate/re-mediate and in a way also
unlock textual material. I see you also have an Open Access and a Cut-up hour.
I am very much interested in using different media to communicate scholarly
research and even more in remixing and re-mediating textual scholarship. I
think your project(s) is a very valuable exploration of these themes while at
the same time being a (performative) critique of the current system. I am in
awe.
14. Pingback: [Text-sharing "in the paradise of too many books" – SLOTHROP](http://slothrop.com/2012/11/16/text-sharing-in-the-paradise-of-too-many-books/)
Interesting topic, but also odd in some respects. Not translating the German
quotes is very unthoughtful and maybe even arrogant. If you are interested in
open access accessibility needs to be your top priority. I can read German,
but many of my friends (and most of the world) can't. It take a little effort
to just fix this, but you can do it.
Dockray
Openings and Closings
2013
Militarization of campuses
Early, on a recent November morning, 400 Military Police with tear gas and helicopters arrested 72 people, almost all students of the University of Sao Paulo. Those people were occupying the Rectory in response to an other arrest – of 3 fellow students – which was itself a consequence of the contract that the university administration signed with the MP, an agreement inviting the police back onto campus after decades in which this presence was essentially prohibited. University “autonomy” had been established by Article 207 of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution to close a chapter on Brazil’s military rule, during which time the Military Police enforced a series of decrees aimed at eliminating opposition to the dictatorship, including the local articulation of the 1960’s student movement. The 1964 Suplicy de Lacerda law forbade student organizations from engaging in politics; in 1968, Institutional Act No. 5 did away with the writ of habeus corpus; and Decree 477 a year later gave university and education authorities the right to expel students and professors involved in protests. A similar provision of “university asylum” restricted the access of policemen onto Greece’s campuses for 35 years. Like Brazil, this measure was adopted after the fall of a military regime that had violently crushed student uprisings and, like Brazil, this prohibition on police incursions into campuses collapsed in 2011. Greek politicians abolished the law in order to more effectively implement austerity measures imposed by European financial interests. Ten days after the raid at the University of Sao Paulo, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis ordered police to clear a handful of tents from a campus quadrangle. Because the peaceful demonstration was planned in solidarity with other actions on UC campuses drawing inspiration from the “occupy movement,” police force swiftly and forcefully dismantled the encampment. Students were pepper-‐sprayed at close range by a well-‐armored policeman wearing little concern. Such examples of the militarization of university campuses have become more common, especially in the context of growing social unrest. In California, they demonstrate the continued influence of Ronald Reagan, not simply for implementing neoliberal policies that have slashed public programs, produced a trillion dollars in US student loan debt and contracted the middle class; but also for campaigning in 1966 for governor of California on a promise to crack down on campus activists, making partnerships with conservative school officials and the FBI in order to “clean out left-‐wing elements” from the University of California. Linda Katehi – that UC Davis chancellor – was also an author of a 2011 report that recommended terminating university asylum to the Greek government. The report noted that “the politicization of students… represents a beyond-‐reasonable involvement in the political process,” continuing on to state that “Greek University campuses are not secure” because of “elements that seek political instability.”
Mobilization of books
After the Military Police operation in Sao Paulo, the rector appeared on television to accuse the students of preparing Molotov cocktails; independent media, on the other hand, described the students carrying left-‐wing books. Even more recently at UC Riverside, a contingent faculty member holding a cardboard shield that was painted to look like the cover of Figures of the Thinkable, by Cornelius Castoriadis, was dragged across the pavement by police and charged with a felony, “assault with a deadly weapon.” In Berkeley, students covered a plaza in books, open and facedown, after their tent occupation was broken up. Many of the crests and seals of universities feature a book, no doubt drawing on the book as both a symbol of knowledge and an actual repository for it. And by extension, books have been mobilized at various moments in recent occupations and protests to make material reference to education and the metastasizing knowledge economy. No doubt the use of radical theory literalizes an attempt to bridge theory and practice, while evoking a utopian imaginary, or simply taking Deleuze’s words at face value: “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” Against a background of library closures and cutbacks, as well as the concomitant demands for the humanities and social sciences to justify themselves in economic terms, it is as if books have come into view, desperately, like a rat in daylight. There is almost nowhere for them to go – the space in the remaining libraries is being given over to audio-‐visual material, computer terminals, public programming, and cafes, while publishers are shifting to digital distribution models that are designed to circumvent libraries entirely. So books have come out onto the street. Militarization of Books When knowledge does escape the jurisdiction of both the state and the market, it’s often at the hands of students (both the officially enrolled and the autodidacts). For example, returning to Brazil, the average cost of required reading material for a freshman is more than six months of minimum wage pay, with up to half of the texts not available in Brazil or simply out of print. Unsurprisingly, a system of copy shops provides on-‐demand chapters, course readers, and other texts; but the Brazilian Association of Reprographic Rights has been particularly hostile to the practice. One year before Sao Paulo, at the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, seven armed police officers in three cars (accompanied by the Chief of the Delegation for the Repression of Immaterial Property Crimes) raided the Xerox room of the School of Social Work, arresting the operator of the machines and confiscating all illegitimate copies. Similar shows of force have proliferated ever since Brazilian copyright law was amended in 1998 to eliminate the exceptions that had previously afforded the right to copy books for educational purposes. This act of reproduction, felt by students and faculty to be inextricably linked to university autonomy and the right to education, coalesced into a movement by 2006, Copiar Livro é Direito! (Copying Books is a Right!) Illicit copies, when confiscated, usually are destroyed. In this sense, it is worthwhile to understand such an event as a contemporary form of censorship, certainly not out of any ideological disapproval of the publication’s actual content, but rather an objection to the manner of its circulation. Many books banned (and burned) during the dictatorship were obviously a matter of content – those that could “destroy society’s moral base” might “put into practice a subversive plan that places national security in danger.” Even if explicit sexuality, crime, and drug use within literature are generally tolerated today (not everywhere, of course) the rhetoric contained within the 1970 decree that instituted censorship is still alive in matters of circulation. During negotiations for the multi-‐national Anti-‐Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the Bush and Obama administrations denied the public information, stating that it was “properly classified in the interest of national security.” Certain parts of the negotiations became known through Wikileaks and ACTA was revealed as a vehicle for exporting American intellectual property enforcement. Protecting intellectual property is essential, politicians claim, to maintaining the American “way of life,” although today this has less to do with the moral base of the country than the economic base – workers and corporations. America, Obama said in reference to ACTA, would use the “full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses.” Universities, those institutions for the production of knowledge, are deeply embedded in struggles over intellectual property, and moreover deployed as instruments of national security. The National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, which includes (surprise) Linda Katehi, brings together select university presidents and chancellors with the FBI, CIA, and other agencies several times per year. Developed to address intellectual property at the level of cyber-‐theft (preventing sensitive research from falling into the hands of terrorists) the congenial relationship between university administrations and the FBI raises the spectre of US government spying on student activists in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. Financialization of publishing To the side of such partnerships with the state, the forces of financialization have been absorbed into universities, again with the welcome of administrations. Towering US student loan debt is one very clear index; another, less apparent, but growing, is the highly controlled circulation of academic publishing, especially journals and textbooks. Although apparently marginal (or niche) in topic, the vertical structure of the corporations behind most journals is surprisingly large. The Dutch company Elsevier, for example, publishes 250,000 articles per year, and earned $1.6 billion (a profit margin of 36%) in 2010. Texts are written, peer reviewed, and edited on a voluntary basis (usually labor costs are externalized, for example to the state or university). They are sold back to university libraries at extraordinarily high prices, and the libraries are obliged to pay because their constituency relies on access to research as a material for further research. When the website library.nu was taken-‐down recently for providing access to over 400,000 digital texts, it was not the major “commercial” publishers that were behind the action, but a coalition of 17 educational publishers, including Elsevier, Springer, Taylor and Francis, the Cambridge University Press, and Macmillan. On the heels of FBI raids on prominent torrent sites, and with a similar level of coordination, this publishers’ alliance hired private investigators to deploy software “specifically developed by IT experts” to secure evidence. In order to expand their profitability, corporate academic publishers exploit and reinforce entrenched hierarchies within the academia. Compensation comes in the forms of CV lines and disciplinary visibility; and it is that very validation that individuals need to find and secure employment at research institutions. “Publish or die” is not anything new, but as employment grows increasingly temporary and managerial systems for assessment and quantifying productivity proliferate, it has grown more ominous. Beyond intensifying internal hierarchies, this publishing situation has widened the gap between the university and the rest of the world (even as it subjects the exchange of knowledge to the logic of the stock market); publications are meant for current students and faculty only, and their legitimacy is regularly checked against ID cards, passwords, and other credentials. One without such legitimacy finds themselves on the wrong side of a paywall. Here, we discover the quotidian dimension to the militarization of the university, in the inconveniences of proximity cards, accounts, and login screens. If our contemporary forms of censorship are focused on the manner of a thing’s circulation, then systems of control would be oriented towards policing access. Reprographic machines and file-‐sharing software are obvious targets but, with the advent of tablet computers (such as Apple’s iPad, marketed heavily towards students), so are actual textbooks. The practice of reselling textbooks, a yearly student money-‐saving ritual that is perfectly legal under the first-‐sale doctrine, has long represented lost revenue to publishers. So many, including MacMillan and McGraw-‐Hill, have moved strongly into the e-‐textbook market, which allows them to shut the door on the secondary market because students are no longer buying the things themselves, but only temporary access to the things.
Opening of Access
Open Access publishing articulates an alternative, in order to circumvent the entire parasitical apparatus and ultimately deliver texts to readers and researchers for free. In large part, its success depends on whether or not researchers choose to publish their work with OA journals or with pay-‐for-‐access ones. If many have chosen the latter, it is because of factors like reputation and the interrelation between publishing and departmental structures of advancement and power. Interestingly, it is institutions with the strongest reputations that are also pushing for more ‘openness.’ Princeton University formally adopted an open-‐access policy in 2011 (the sixth Ivy League school to do so) in order to discourage the “fruits of [their] scholarship” from languishing “artificially behind a pay wall.” MIT has long promoted openness of its materials, from OpenCourseWare (2002) to its own Open Access policy (2009), to a new online learning infrastructure, MITx. Why is it that elite, private schools are so motivated to open themselves to the world? Would this not dilute their status? The answer is obvious: opening up their research gives their faculty more exposure; it produces a positive image of an institution that is generous and genuinely interested in generating knowledge; and ultimately it builds the university’s brand. They are not giving away degrees and certainly not research positions – rather they are mobilizing their intellectual capital to attract publicity, students, donations, and contracts. We can guess what ‘opening up the university’ means for the institution and the faculty, but what about for the students, including those who may not have the proper title, those learners not enrolled? MITx is an adaptation of the common practice of distance learning, which has a century-‐and-‐a-‐half long history, beginning with the University of London’s External Programme. There are populist overtones (Charles Dickens called the External Programme the “People’s University”) to distance learning that coincide with the promises of public education more generally, namely making higher education available to those traditionally without means for it. History has provided us with less than desirable motivations for distance education – the Free University of Iran was said to have been desirable to the Shah’s regime because the students would never gather – but current western programs are influenced by other concerns. Beyond publicity and social conscience, many of these online learning programs are driven by economics. At the University of California, the Board of Regents launched a pilot program as part of a plan to close a 4.7 billion dollar budget gap, with the projection that such a program could add 25,000 students at 1.1% of the normal cost. Aside from MITx’s free component (it brings in revenue as well if people want to actually get “credit”) most of these distance-‐learning offerings are immaterial commodities. UCLA Extension is developing curricula and courses for Encore Career Institute, a for-‐profit venture bringing together Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and a chairwoman of the UC Regents, whose goal is to “deliver some of the fantastic intellectual property that UC has.” And even MITx is not without its restricted-‐access bedfellows; its pilot online course requires a textbook, which is owned by Elsevier. Students are here conceived of truly as consumers of product, and education has become a subgenre of publication. The classroom and library are seen as inefficient mechanisms for delivering education to the masses or, for that matter, for the delivering the masses to creditors, advertisers, and content providers. Clearly, classrooms will continue to exist, especially in the centers for the reproduction of the elite, such as those proponents of Open Access previously mentioned. But everywhere else, post-‐ classroom (and post-‐library) education is exploding. Students do not gather here and they certainly don’t sit-‐in or take over buildings; they don’t argue outside during a break, over a cigarette, nor do they pass books between themselves. I am not, however, a fatalist on this point – these may be networks of access managed by capital and policed by the state, but new collective forms and subjectivities are already emerging, exploiting or evading the logic of accounts, passwords, and access. They find each other across borders and across disciplines.
Negating Access
After the capitalist restructuring of the 1970s and 1980s, how do we understand the scenes of people clashing with police formations; the revival of campus occupations as a tactic; the disappearance of university autonomy; the withdrawal of learning into the disciplined walls of the academy; in short, how do we understand a situation that appears quite like before? One way – the theme of this essay – would be through the notion of “access.” If access has moved from a question of rights (who has access?) to a matter of legality and economics (what are the terms and price for access, for a particular person?) then over the past few decades we have witnessed access being turned inside-‐out, in a manner reminiscent of Marx’s “double freedom” of the proletariat: having access to academic resources while not being able to access each other. Library cards, passwords, and keys are assigned to individuals; and so are contracts, degrees, loans, and grades. Students (and faculty) are individuated at every turn, perhaps no more clearly than in online learning where each body collapses into their own profile. Access is not so much a passage into a space as it is an apparatus enclosing the individual. (In this sense, Open Access is one configuration of this apparatus). Two projects that I have worked within over the past 7 years – a file-‐sharing website for texts, AAAARG.ORG, and a proposal-‐based learning platform, The Public School – are ongoing efforts in escaping this regime of access in order to create some room to actually understand all of these conditions, their connection to larger processes, and the possibilities for future action. The Public School has no curriculum, no degrees, and nothing to do with the public school system. It is simply a framework within which people propose ideas for things they want to learn about with others; a rotating committee might organize this proposal into an actual class, bringing together a group of strangers and friends who find a way to teach each other. AAAARG.ORG is a collective library comprised of scans, excerpts, and exports that members of its public have found important enough to share with each other. They are premised, in part, on the proposition that making these kinds of spaces is an active, contingent process requiring the coordination, invention, and self-‐ reflection of many people over time. The creation of these kinds of spaces involves a negation of access, often bringing conflict to the surface. What this means is that the spaces are not territories on which pedagogy happens, but rather that the collective activity of making and defending these spaces is pedagogical.
In the militarized raids of campus occupations and knowledge-‐sharing assemblages, the state is acting to both produce and defend a structure that generates wealth from the process of education. While there are occasional clashes over content, usually any content is acceptable that circulates through this structure, and the very failure to circulate (to attract grant funding, attention, or feedback) becomes the operative, soft form of suppression. A resistant pedagogy should look for openings – and if they don’t exist, break them open – where space grows from a refusal of access and circulation, borders and disciplines; from an improvised diffusion that generates its own laws and dynamics. But a cautionary note – any time new social relations are born out of such an opening in space and time, a confrontation with power is not far behind.
Sollfrank & Snelting
Performing Graphic Design Practice
2014
Femke Snelting
Performing Graphic Design Practice
Leipzig, 7 April 2014
[00:12]
What is Libre Graphics?
[00:16]
Libre Graphics is quite a large ecosystem of software tools, of people –
people that develop these tools, but also people that use these tools;
practices, like how do you then work with them, not just how you make things
quickly and in an impressive way, but also these tools might change your
practice and the cultural artefacts that result from it. So it’s all these
elements that come together, and we call Libre Graphics. [00:53] The term
“Libre” is chosen deliberately. It’s slightly more mysterious that the term
“free”, especially when it turns up in the English language. It sort of hints
that there’s something different, that there’s something done on purpose.
[01:16] And it is a group of people that are inspired by free software
culture, by free culture, by thinking about how to share both their tools,
their recipes and the outcomes of all this. [01:31] So Libre Graphics is quite
wild, it goes in many directions, but it’s an interesting context to work in,
that for me it has been quite inspiring for a few years now.
[01:46]
The context of Libre Graphics
[01:50]
The context of Libre Graphics is multiple. I think that’s part of why I’m
excited about it, and also part of why it’s sometimes difficult to describe it
in a short sentence. [02:04] The context is design – so people that are
interested in design, in creating visuals, in creating animations, videos,
typography. And that is already a multiple context, because each of these
disciplines have their own histories, and their own sort of types of people
that get touched by them. [02:23] Then there is software, people that are
interested in the digital material – so, let’s say, excited about raw bits and
the way a vector gets produced. So that’s a very, almost formal interest in
how graphics are made. [02:47] Then there’s people that do software, so they
are interested in programming, in programming languages, in thinking about
interfaces and thinking about ways software can become a tool. And then
there’s people that are interested in free software, so how can you make
digital tools that can be shared, but also how can you produce processes that
can be shared. [03:11] So there you have from free software activists to
people that are interested in developing specific tools for sharing design and
software development processes, like Git or [Apache] Subversion, or those
kinds of things. So I think that multiple context is really special and rich
in Libre Graphics.
[03:34]
Free software culture
[03:38]
Free software culture… And I use the term culture because I’m more interested
in, let’s say, the cultural aspect of it, and this includes software, for me
software is a cultural object – but I think it’s important to emphasise this,
because it's easily turned into a very technocentric approach which I think is
important to stay away from. [04:01] So free software culture is the thinking
that, when you develop technology – and I’m using technology in the sense that
is cultural as well, to me, deeply cultural – you need to take care of sharing
the recipes for how this technology has been developed as well. [04:28] And
this produces many different other tools, ways of working, ways of speaking,
vocabularies, because it changes radically the way we make and the way we
produce hierarchies. [04:49] So it means, for example, if you produce a
graphic design artefact, for example, that you share all the source files that
were necessary to make it. But you also share, as much as you can,
descriptions and narrations of how it came to be, which does include, maybe,
how much was paid for it, what difficulties were in negotiating with the
printer, and what elements were included – because the graphic design object
is usually a compilation of different elements –, what software was used to
make it and where it might have resisted. [05:34] So the consequences of
taking free software culture seriously in a graphic design or a design
context, means that you care about all these different layers of the work, all
the different conditions that actually make the work happen.
[05:50]
Free culture
[05:54]
The relationship from Libre Graphics to free culture is not always that
explicit. For some people it’s enough to work with tools that are released
under GPL (GNU General Public License), or like an open content license, and
there it stops. So even their work would be released under proprietary
licenses. [06:18] For others it’s important to make the full circle and to
think about what the legal status is of the work they release. So that’s the
more general one. [06:34] Then free culture – we can use that very loosely, as
in everything that is circulating under conditions that it can be reused and
remade, that would be my position – free culture, of course, also refers to
the very specific idea of how that would work, namely Creative Commons.
[06:56] For myself, Creative Commons is problematic, although I value the fact
that it exists and has really created a broader discussion around licenses in
creative practices, so I value that. [07:11] For me, the distinction Creative
Commons makes, almost for all the licenses they promote, between commercial
and non-commercial work, and as a consequence between professional and amateur
work – I find that very problematic, because I think one of the most important
elements of free software culture, for me, is the possibility of people from
different backgrounds, with different skill sets, to actually engage the
digital artefacts they are surrounded with. [07:47] And so by making this
quite lazy separation between commercial and non-commercial, which, especially
in the context of the web as it is right now, since it’s not very easy to hold
up, seems really problematic, because it creates an illusion of clarity that I
think actually makes more trouble than clarity. [08:15] So I use free culture
licenses, I use licenses that are more explicit about the fact that anyone can
use whatever I produce, in any context, because I think that’s where the real
power is of free software culture. [08:31] For me, free software licenses and
all the licenses around them – because I think there are many different types,
and that’s interesting – is that they have a viral power built in. So if you
apply a free software license to, for example, a typeface, it means that
someone else, even someone else you don’t know, has the permission, and
doesn’t have to ask for the permission to reuse the typeface, to change it, to
mix it with something else, to distribute it and to sell it. [09:08] That’s
one part that is already very powerful. But the real secret of such a license
is that once this person re-releases a typeface, it means that they need to
keep the same license. So it means that it propagates across the network, and
that is where it’s really powerful.
[09:31]
Free tools
[09:35]
It’s important to have tools that are released under conditions that allow me
to look further than its surface, for many reasons. There is an ethical
reason. It’s very problematic, I think, to, as a friend explained last week,
to feel like you are renting a room in a hotel – because that is often the way
practitioners nowadays relate to their tools, they have no right to remove the
furniture, they’ve no right to invite friends to their hotel room, they have
to check out at 11, etc. So it’s a very sterile relationship to your tools. So
that’s one part. [10:24] The other is that there is little way of coming into
contact with the cultural aspects of the tools. Something that I suspected
before I started to use free software tools for my practice, but has been
already for almost ten years continuously exciting, is the whole… let’s say,
all the other elements around it: the way people organise themselves in
conferences, mailing lists, the fact that the kinds of communications that
happens, the vocabularies, the histories, the connections between different
disciplines. [11:07] And all that is available to look at, to work with, to
come into contact with, even to speak to people that do these tools and ask
them, why is like this and not like that. And so to me it seems obvious that
artists want to have that kind of, let’s say, layered relation with their
tools, and not just accept whatever comes out of the next-door shop. [11:36] I
have a very different, almost different physical experience of these tools,
because I can enter on many levels. And that makes them part of my practice
and not just means to an end, I really can take them into my practice, and
that I find interesting as an artist and as a designer.
[11:56] Artefacts
[12:00] The outcomes of this type of practice are different, or at least the
kind of work I make, try to make, and the people I like to work with. There’s
obviously also a group of people that would like to do Hollywood movies with
those tools. And, you know, that’s kind of interesting too, that that happens.
[12:21] For me, somehow the technological context or conditions that made the
work possible will always occur in the final result. So that’s one part.
[12:38] And the other is that the, let’s say, the product is never the end. So
it means that because, in whatever way, source materials would be released,
would be made available, it means that the product is always the beginning of
another project or product, either by me or by other people. [13:02] So I
think that’s two things that you can always see in the kind of works we make
when we do Libre Graphics – my style.
[13:15] Libre Fonts
[13:18] A very exciting part of Libre Graphics is the Libre Font movement,
which is strong, and has been strong for a long time. Fonts are the basic
building block of how a graphic comes to life. I mean, when you type
something, it’s there. [13:40] And the fact that that part of the work is free
is important in many levels. Things that you often don’t think about when we
speak English and we stay within a limited character set, is that when you
live in, let’s say, India, the language you speak is not available as a
digital typeface, meaning that when you want to produce book in the tools that
are available, or publish it online, your language has no way of expressing
itself. [14:26] And so it’s important, and that has to do with commercial
interests, laws, ways that the technical infrastructure has been built. And so
by understanding that it’s important that you can express yourself in the
language and with the characters you need, it’s also obvious that that part
needs to be free. [14:53] Fonts are also interesting because they exist on
many levels. They exist on your system. They are almost software, because they
are quite complicated objects. They appear in your screen, when you print a
document – they are there all the time. [15:17] But at the same time it’s the
alphabet. It’s the most, let’s say… we consider it as a totally accessible,
available and universal right, to have the alphabet at our disposal. [15:29]
So I think, politically and, let’s say, from a sort of interest in that kind
of practice that is very technical but at the same time also very basic, in
the sense that is about “freeing an A,” that’s quite a beautiful energy – I
think that that has made the Libre Font movement very strong.
[15:55] Free artefacts / open standards
[15:59] It took me a while to figure out myself – that for me it was so
obvious that if you do free software, that you would produce free artefacts, I
mean, it seems kind of obvious, but that is not at all the case. [16:12] There
is full-fledged commercial production happening with these tools. But one
thing that sort of keeps the results, the outcomes of these projects, freer
than most commercial tools is that there is really an emphasis on open
document formats. [16:34] And that is extremely important because, first of
all, through this sort of free software thinking it’s very obvious that the
documents that you produce with the tool should not belong to the software
vendor, they are yours. [16:49] And to be able to own your own documents you
need to be able to look, to inspect how they are produced. I know many tragic
stories of designers that with several upgrades of “their” tool set lost
documents, because they could never open them again. [17:12] So there’s really
an emphasis and a lot of work in making sure that the documents produced from
these tools remain inspectable, are documented, so that either you can open
them in another tool, or could develop a tool to open them in, to have these
files available for you. [17:38] So it’s really part and parcel of free
software culture, it’s that you care about that what generates your artefact,
but also about the materiality of your artefact. And so there, open standards
are extremely important – or maybe, let’s say, that file formats are
documented and can be understood. [18:04] And what’s interesting to see is
that in this whole Libre Graphics world there is also a very strong group of
reverse engineers, that are document formants, document activists, I would
say. [18:19] And I think that’s really interesting. They claim, they say,
documents need to be free, and so we would go against… let’s say, we would
risk breaking the law to be able to understand how non-free documents actually
are constructed. [18:37] So they are really working to be able to understand
non-free documents, to be able to read them, and to be able to develop tools
for them, so that they can be reused and remade. [18:54] So the difference
between a free and a non-free document is that, for example, an InDesign file,
which is the result of a commercial product, there’s no documentation
available to how this file works. [19:10] This means that the only way to open
the file is with that particular program. So there is a connection between
that what you’ve made and the software you’ve used to produce it. [19:24] It
also means that if the software updates, or the license runs out, you will not
have access to your own file. It means it’s fixed, you can never change it,
and you can never allow anyone else to change it. [19:39] And open document
format has documentation. That means that not only the software that created
it is available, and so that way you can understand how it was made, but also
there’s independent documentation available. [19:55] So that whenever a
project, like a software, doesn’t work anymore or it’s too old to be run, or
you don’t have it available, you have other ways of understanding the document
and being able to open it, and reuse and remake it. [20:11] Examples of open
document formats are, for example, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), ODT (Open
Document Text format), or OGG, a format for video that allows you to look at
all the elements that are packed into the video format. [20:31] What’s
important is that, around these open formats, you see a whole ecosystem exists
of tools to inspect, to create, to read, to change, to manipulate these
formats. And I think it’s very easy to see how around InDesign files this
culture does not exist at all.
[20:55] Getting started
[20:59] If you would be interested to start using Libre Graphics, you can
enter it in different levels. There’s well-developed tools that look a bit
like commercial photo manipulation tools, or layout tools. [21:19] There’s
something called Gimp, which is a well-developed software for treating photos.
There’s Blender, which is a fast-developing animation software, that’s being
used by thousands of thousands of people, and even it’s being used in
commercial productions, Pixar-style stuff. [21:43] These tools can be
installed on any system, so you don’t have to run a Linux system to be able to
use them. You can install them on a Macintosh or on a Windows, for example. Of
course, they are usually more powerful when you run them on a system that
recognises that power.
[22:09] Sharing practice / re-learn
[22:14] This way of working changes the way you learn, and also therefore the
way you teach. And so, as many of us have understood the relation between
learning and practice, we’ve all been somehow involved in education, many of
us are teaching in formal design or art education. [22:43] And it’s very clear
how those traditional schools are really not fit for the type of learning and
teaching that needs to happen around Libre Graphics. [22:57] So one of the
problems that we run into is the fact that art academies are traditionally
really organised on many levels – so that the validation systems are really
geared towards judging individuals. And our type of practice is always
multiple, it’s always about, let’s say, things that happen with many people.
[23:17] And it’s really difficult to inspire students to work that way, and at
the same time know that at the end of the day, they will be judged on their
own, what they produce as an individual. So that’s one part. [23:31] In
traditional education there’s always like a separation between teaching
technology and practice. So you have, in different ways, let’s say, you have
the studio practice and then you have the workshops. And it’s very difficult
to make conceptual connections between the two, so we end up trying to make
that happen but it’s clearly not made for that. [24:02] And then there is the
problematics of the hierarchies between tutors and students, that are hard to
break in formal education, just because the set up is – even when it’s a very
informal situation – that someone comes to teach and someone else comes to be
taught. [24:28] And there’s no way to truly break that hierarchy because
that’s the way the school works. So since a year we’ve been starting to think
about how to do… Well, no, for years we’ve been thinking about how to do
teaching differently, or how to do learning differently. [24:48] And so last
year for the first time we organised a summer school, just as a kind of
experiment to see if we could learn and teach differently. And the title, the
name of the school is Relearn, because the sort of relearning, for yourself
but also to others, through teaching-learning, has became really a good
methodology, it seems.
[25:15] Affiliations
[25:19] If I say “we”, that’s always a bit uncomfortable, because I like to be
clear about who that is, but when I’m speaking here there’s many “we” in my
mind. So there’s a group of designers called OSP (Opens Source Publishing).
They started in 2006 with the simple decision to not use any proprietary
software anymore for their work. And from that this whole set of questions,
and practices and methods developed. [25:51] So right now that’s about twelve
people working in Brussels having a design practice. And I’m lucky to be an
honorary member of this group, and so I’m in close contact with them, but I’m
not actively working with the design group. [20:11] Another “we”, and
overlapping “we”, is Constant, an association for art and media active in
Brussels since 1996, 1997 maybe. Our interest is more in mixing copyleft
thinking, free software thinking and feminism. And in many ways that
intersects with OSP, but they might phrase it in a different way. [26:42]
Another “we” is the Libre Graphics community, which is even a more
uncomfortable “we” because it includes engineers that would like to conquer
the world, and small hyper-intelligent developers that creep out of their
corner to talk about the very strange world they are creating, or typographers
that care about universal typefaces. [27:16] I mean, there’s many different
people that are involved in that world. So I think, in this conversation the
“we” are Contant, OSP and Libre Graphics community, whatever that is.
[27:34] We worked on a Code of Conduct – which is something that seems to
appear in free software or tech conferences more and more, it comes a bit from
the U.S. context – where we have started to understand that the fact that free
software is free doesn’t mean that everyone feels welcome. [28:02] For long
there still are large problems with diversity in this community. The
excitement about freedom has led people to think that people that were no
there would probably not want to be there, and therefore had no role to be
there. [28:26] And so if you think, for example, the fact that there is very
little, that there’s not a lot of women active in free software, a lot less
than in proprietary software, which is quite painful if you think about it.
[28:41] That has to do with this sort of cyclical effects of: because women
are not there they would probably be not interested, and because they are not
interested they might not be capable, or feel capable of being active, and
they feel they might not belong. So that’s one part. [29:07] The other part is
that there’s a very brutal culture of harassment, of racist and sexist
language, of using imagery that is, let’s say, unacceptable. And that needs to
be dealt with. [29:26] Over the last two years, I think, the documents like
the Code of Conduct have started to come out from feminists active in this
world, like Geek Feminism or the Ada Initiative, as a way to deal with this.
And what it does is it describes, in a bit… let’s say, it’s slightly pompous
in the sense that you describe your values. [29:56] But it is a way to
acknowledge the fact that this communities have a problem with harassment,
first; that they explicitly say, we want diversity, which is important; that
it gives very clear and practical guidelines for what someone that feels
harassed can do, who he or she can speak to, and what will be the
consequences. [30:31] Meaning that it takes away the burden from, well, at
least as much as possible, from someone who is harassed to defend, actually,
the gravity of the case.
[30:43] Art as integrative concept
[30:47] For me, calling myself an artist is useful, it’s very useful. I’m not
so busy, let’s say, with the institutional art context – that doesn’t help me
at all. [31:03] But what does help me is the figure of the artist, the kinds
of intelligences that I sort of project on myself, and I use from others, from
my colleagues (before and contemporary), because it allows me to not have too
many… to be able to define my own context and concepts without forgetting
practice. [31:37] And I think art is one of the rare places that allows this.
Not only it allows it, but actually it rigorously asks for it. It’s really
wanting me to be explicit about my historical connections, my way of making,
my references, my choices, that are part of the situation I build. [32:11] So
the figure of the artist is a very useful toolbox in itself. And I think I use
it more than I would have thought, because it allows me to make these cross-
connections in a productive way.