I want to begin this talk at the end -- by which I mean the end of property - at least according to
the cyber-utopian account of things, where digital file sharing and online communication liberate
culture from corporations and their drive for profit. This is just one of the promised forms of
emancipation -- property, in a sense, was undone. People, on a massive scale, used their
computers and their internet connections to share digitized versions of their objects with each
other, quickly producing a different, common form of ownership. The crisis that this provoked is
well-known -- it could be described in one word: Napster. What is less recognized - because it is
still very much in process - is the subsequent undoing of property, of both the private and common
kind. What follows is one story of "the cloud" -- the post-dot-com bubble techno-super-entity -which sucks up property, labor, and free time.
Object, Interface
It's debated whether the growing automation of production leads to global structural
unemployment or not -- Karl Marx wrote that "the self-expansion of capital by means of machinery
is thenceforward directly proportional to the number of the workpeople, whose means of
livelihood have been destroyed by that machinery" - but the promise is, of course, that when
robots do the work, we humans are free to be creative. Karl Kautsky predicted that increasing
automation would actually lead, not to a mass surplus population or widespread creativity, but
something much more mundane: the growth of clerks and bookkeepers, and the expansion of
unproductive sectors like "the banking system, the credit system, insurance empires and
advertising."
Marx was analyzing the number of people employed by some of the new industries in the middle
of the 19th century: "gas-works, telegraphy, photography, steam navigation, and railways." The
facts were that these industries were incredibly important, expansive and growing, highly
mechanized.. and employed a very small number of people. It is difficult not to read his study of
these technologies of connection and communication - against the background of our present
moment, in which the rise of the Internet has been accompanied by the deindustrialization of
cities, increased migrant and mobile labor, and jobs made obsolete by computation.
There are obvious examples of the impact of computation on the workplace: at factories and
distribution centers, robots engineered with computer-vision can replace a handful of workers,
with a savings of millions of dollars per robot over the life of the system. And there are less
apparent examples as well, like algorithms determining when and where to hire people and for
how long, according to fluctuating conditions.
Both examples have parallels within computer programming, namely reuse and garbage
collection. Code reuse refers to the practice of writing software in such a way that the code can be
used again later, in another program, to perform the same task. It is considered wasteful to give the
same time, attention, and energy to a function, because the development environment is not an
assembly line - a programmer shouldn't repeat. Such repetition then gives way to copy-andpasting (or merely calling). The analogy here is to the robot, to the replacement of human labor
with technology.
Now, when a program is in the midst of being executed, the computer's memory fills with data -but some of that is obsolete, no longer necessary for that program to run. If left alone, the memory
would become clogged, the program would crash, the computer might crash. It is the role of the
garbage collector to free up memory, deleting what is no longer in use. And here, I'm making the
analogy with flexible labor, workers being made redundant, and so on.
In Object-Oriented Programming, a programmer designs the software that she is writing around
“objects,” where each object is conceptually divided into “public” and “private” parts. The public
parts are accessible to other objects, but the private ones are hidden to the world outside the
boundaries of that object. It's a “black box” - a thing that can be known through its inputs and
outputs - even in total ignorance of its internal mechanisms. What difference does it make if the
code is written in one way versus an other .. if it behaves the same? As William James wrote, “If no
practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing,
and all dispute is idle.”
By merely having a public interface, an object is already a social entity. It makes no sense to even
provide access to the outside if there are no potential objects with which to interact! So to
understand the object-oriented program, we must scale up - not by increasing the size or
complexity of the object, but instead by increasing the number and types of objects such that their
relations become more dense. The result is an intricate machine with an on and an off state, rather
than a beginning and an end. Its parts are interchangeable -- provided that they reliably produce
the same behavior, the same inputs and outputs. Furthermore, this machine can be modified:
objects can be added and removed, changing but not destroying the machine; and it might be,
using Gerald Raunig’s appropriate term, “concatenated” with other machines.
Inevitably, this paradigm for describing the relationship between software objects spread outwards,
subsuming more of the universe outside of the immediate code. External programs, powerful
computers, banking institutions, people, and satellites have all been “encapsulated” and
“abstracted” into objects with inputs and outputs. Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness
and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people,
institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to
the demands of networked computation.. and the expanding field of objects are exactly those
entities integrated into such a network.
Consider a simple example of decentralized file-sharing: its diagram might represent an objectoriented piece of software, but here each object is a person-computer, shown in potential relation
to every other person-computer. Files might be sent or received at any point in this machine,
which seems particularly oriented towards circulation and movement. Much remains private, but a
collection of files from every person is made public and opened up to the network. Taken as a
whole, the entire collection of all files - which on the one hand exceeds the storage capacity of
any one person’s technical hardware, is on the other hand entirely available to every personcomputer. If the files were books.. then this collective collection would be a public library.
In order for a system like this to work, for the inputs and the outputs to actually engage with one
another to produce action or transmit data, there needs to be something in place already to enable
meaningful couplings. Before there is any interaction or any relationship, there must be some
common ground in place that allows heterogenous objects to ‘talk to each other’ (to use a phrase
from the business casual language of the Californian Ideology). The term used for such a common
ground - especially on the Internet - is platform, a word for that which enables and anticipates
future action without directly producing it. A platform provides tools and resources to the objects
that run “on top” of the platform so that those objects don't need to have their own tools and
resources. In this sense, the platform offers itself as a way for objects to externalize (and reuse)
labor. Communication between objects is one of the most significant actions that a platform can
provide, but it requires that the objects conform some amount of their inputs and outputs to the
specifications dictated by the platform.
But haven’t I only introduced another coupling, instead of between two objects, this time between
the object and the platform? What I'm talking about with "couplings" is the meeting point between
things - in other words, an “interface.” In the terms of OOP, the interface is an abstraction that
defines what kinds of interaction are possible with an object. It maps out the public face of the
object in a way that is legible and accessible to other objects. Similarly, computer interfaces like
screens and keyboards are designed to meet with human interfaces like fingers and eyes, allowing
for a specific form of interaction between person and machine. Any coupling between objects
passes through some interface and every interface obscures as much as it reveals - it establishes
the boundary between what is public and what is private, what is visible and what is not. The
dominant aesthetic values of user interface design actually privilege such concealment as “good
design,” appealing to principles of simplicity, cleanliness, and clarity.
Cloud, Access
One practical outcome of this has been that there can be tectonic shifts behind the interface where entire systems are restructured or revolutionized - without any interruption, as long as the
interface itself remains essentially unchanged. In Pragmatism’s terms, a successful interface keeps
any difference (in back) from making a difference (in front). Using books again as an example: for
consumers to become accustomed to the initial discomfort of purchasing a product online instead
of from a shop, the interface needs to make it so that “buying a book” is something that could be
interchangeably accomplished either by a traditional bookstore or the online "marketplace"
equivalent. But behind the interface is Amazon, which through low prices and wide selection is
the most visible platform for buying books and uses that position to push retailers and publishers
both to, at best, the bare minimum of profitability.
In addition to selling things to people and collecting data about its users (what they look at and
what they buy) to personalize product recommendations, Amazon has also made an effort to be a
platform for the technical and logistical parts of other retailers. Ultimately collecting data from
them as well, Amazon realizes a competitive advantage from having a comprehensive, up-to-theminute perspective on market trends and inventories. This volume of data is so vast and valuable
that warehouses packed with computers are constructed to store it, protect it, and make it readily
available to algorithms. Data centers, such as these, organize how commodities circulate (they run
business applications, store data about retail, manage fulfillment) but also - increasingly - they
hold the commodity itself - for example, the book. Digital book sales started the millennium very
slowly but by 2010 had overtaken hardcover sales.
Amazon’s store of digital books (or Apple’s or Google’s, for that matter) is a distorted reflection of
the collection circulating within the file-sharing network, displaced from personal computers to
corporate data centers. Here are two regimes of digital property: the swarm and the cloud. For
swarms (a reference to swarm downloading where a single file can be downloaded in parallel
from multiple sources) property is held in common between peers -- however, property is
positioned out of reach, on the cloud, accessible only through an interface that has absorbed legal
and business requirements.
It's just half of the story, however, to associate the cloud with mammoth data centers; the other
half is to be found in our hands and laps. Thin computing, including tablets and e-readers, iPads
and Kindles, and mobile phones have co-evolved with data centers, offering powerful, lightweight
computing precisely because so much processing and storage has been externalized.
In this technical configuration of the cloud, the thin computer and the fat data center meet through
an interface, inevitably clean and simple, that manages access to the remote resources. Typically,
a person needs to agree to certain “terms of service,” have a unique, measurable account, and
provide payment information; in return, access is granted. This access is not ownership in the
conventional sense of a book, or even the digital sense of a file, but rather a license that gives the
person a “non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy… solely for your personal and noncommercial use,” contradicting the First Sale Doctrine, which gives the “owner” the right to sell,
lease, or rent their copy to anyone they choose at any price they choose. The doctrine,
established within America's legal system in 1908, separated the rights of reproduction, from
distribution, as a way to "exhaust" the copyright holder's control over the commodities that people
purchased.. legitimizing institutions like used book stores and public libraries. Computer software
famously attempted to bypass the First Sale Doctrine with its "shrink wrap" licenses that restricted
the rights of the buyer once she broke through the plastic packaging to open the product. This
practice has only evolved and become ubiquitous over the last three decades as software began
being distributed digitally through networks rather than as physical objects in stores. Such
contradictions are symptoms of the shift in property regimes, or what Jeremy Rifkin called “the age
of access.” He writes that “property continues to exist but is far less likely to be exchanged in
markets. Instead, suppliers hold on to property in the new economy and lease, rent, or charge an
admission fee, subscription, or membership dues for its short-term use.”
Thinking again of books, Rifkin’s description gives the image of a paid library emerging as the
synthesis of the public library and the marketplace for commodity exchange. Considering how, on
the one side, traditional public libraries are having their collections deaccessioned, hours of
operation cut, and are in some cases being closed down entirely, and on the other side, the
traditional publishing industry finds its stores, books, and profits dematerialized, the image is
perhaps appropriate. Server racks, in photographs inside data centers, strike an eerie resemblance
to library stacks - - while e-readers are consciously designed to look and feel something like a
book. Yet, when one peers down into the screen of the device, one sees both the book - and the
library.
Like a Facebook account, which must uniquely correspond to a real person, the e-reader is an
individualizing device. It is the object that establishes trusted access with books stored in the cloud
and ensures that each and every person purchases their own rights to read each book. The only
transfer that is allowed is of the device itself, which is the thing that a person actually does own.
But even then, such an act must be reported back to the cloud: the hardware needs to be deregistered and then re-registered with credit card and authentication details about the new owner.
This is no library - or it's only a library in the most impoverished sense of the word. It is a new
enclosure, and it is a familiar story: things in the world (from letters, to photographs, to albums, to
books) are digitized (as emails, JPEGs, MP3s, and PDFs) and subsequently migrate to a remote
location or service (Gmail, Facebook, iTunes, Kindle Store). The middle phase is the biggest
disruption, when the interface does the poorest job concealing the material transformations taking
place, when the work involved in creating those transformations is most apparent, often because
the person themselves is deeply involved in the process (of ripping vinyl, for instance). In the third
phase, the user interface becomes easier, more “frictionless,” and what appears to be just another
application or folder on one’s computer is an engorged, property-and-energy-hungry warehouse a
thousand miles away.
Capture, Loss
Intellectual property's enclosure is easy enough to imagine in warehouses of remote, secure hard
drives. But the cloud internalizes processing as well as storage, capturing the new forms of cooperation and collaboration characterizing the new economy and its immaterial labor. Social
relations are transmuted into database relations on the "social web," which absorbs selforganization as well. Because of this, the cloud impacts as strongly on the production of
publications, as on their consumption, in the tradition sense.
Storage, applications, and services offered in the cloud are marketed for consumption by authors
and publishers alike. Document editing, project management, and accounting are peeled slowly
away from the office staff and personal computers into the data centers; interfaces are established
into various publication channels from print on demand to digital book platforms. In the fully
realized vision of cloud publishing, the entire technical and logistical apparatus is externalized,
leaving only the human labor.. and their thin devices remaining. Little distinguishes the authorobject from the editor-object from the reader-object. All of them.. maintain their position in the
network by paying for lightweight computers and their updates, cloud services, and broadband
internet connections.
On the production side of the book, the promise of the cloud is a recovery of the profits “lost” to
file-sharing, as all that exchange is disciplined, standardized and measured. Consumers are finally
promised the access to the history of human knowledge that they had already improvised by
themselves, but now without the omnipresent threat of legal prosecution. One has the sneaking
suspicion though.. that such a compromise is as hollow.. as the promises to a desperate city of the
jobs that will be created in a new constructed data center - - and that pitting “food on the table”
against “access to knowledge” is both a distraction from and a legitimation of the forms of power
emerging in the cloud. It's a distraction because it's by policing access to knowledge that the
middle-man platform can extract value from publication, both on the writing and reading sides of
the book; and it's a legitimation because the platform poses itself as the only entity that can resolve
the contradiction between the two sides.
When the platform recedes behind the interface, these two sides are the the most visible
antagonism - in a tug-of-war with each other - - yet neither the “producers” nor the “consumers” of
publications are becoming more wealthy, or working less to survive. If we turn the picture
sideways, however, a new contradiction emerges, between the indebted, living labor - of authors,
editors, translators, and readers - on one side, and on the other.. data centers, semiconductors,
mobile technology, expropriated software, power companies, and intellectual property.
The talk in the data center industry of the “industrialization” of the cloud refers to the scientific
approach to improving design, efficiency, and performance. But the term also recalls the basic
narrative of the Industrial Revolution: the movement from home-based manufacturing by hand to
large-scale production in factories. As desktop computers pass into obsolescence, we shift from a
networked, but small-scale, relationship to computation (think of “home publishing”) to a
reorganized form of production that puts the accumulated energy of millions to work through
these cloud companies and their modernized data centers.
What kind of buildings are these blank superstructures? Factories for the 21st century? An engineer
named Ken Patchett described the Facebook data center that way in a television interview, “This is
a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory than you might be used to.” Those factories that we’re
“used to,” continue to exist (at Foxconn, for instance) producing the infrastructure, under
recognizably exploitative conditions, for a “different kind of factory,” - a factory that extends far
beyond the walls of the data center.
But the idea of the factory is only part of the picture - this building is also a mine.. and the
dispersed workforce devote most of their waking hours to mining-in-reverse, packing it full of data,
under the expectation that someone - soon - will figure out how to pull out something valuable.
Both metaphors rely on the image of a mass of workers (dispersed as it may be) and leave a darker
and more difficult possibility: the data center is like the hydroelectric plant, damming up property,
sociality, creativity and knowledge, while engineers and financiers look for the algorithms to
release the accumulated cultural and social resources on demand, as profit.
This returns us to the interface, site of the struggles over the management and control of access to
property and infrastructure. Previously, these struggles were situated within the computer-object
and the implied freedom provided by its computation, storage, and possibilities for connection
with others. Now, however, the eviscerated device is more interface than object, and it is exactly
here at the interface that the new technological enclosures have taken form (for example, see
Apple's iOS products, Google's search box, and Amazon's "marketplace"). Control over the
interface is guaranteed by control over the entire techno-business stack: the distributed hardware
devices, centralized data centers, and the software that mediates the space between. Every major
technology corporation must now operate on all levels to protect against any loss.
There is a centripetal force to the cloud and this essay has been written in its irresistible pull. In
spite of the sheer mass of capital that is organized to produce this gravity and the seeming
insurmountability of it all, there is no chance that the system will absolutely manage and control
the noise within it. Riots break out on the factory floor; algorithmic trading wreaks havoc on the
stock market in an instant; data centers go offline; 100 million Facebook accounts are discovered
to be fake; the list will go on. These cracks in the interface don't point to any possible future, or
any desirable one, but they do draw attention to openings that might circumvent the logic of
access.
"What happens from there is another question." This is where I left things off in the text when I
finished it a year ago. It's a disappointing ending: we just have to invent ways of occupying the
destruction, violence and collapse that emerge out of economic inequality, global warming,
dismantled social welfare, and so on. And there's not much that's happened since then to make us
very optimistic - maybe here I only have to mention the NSA. But as I began with an ending, I
really should end at a beginning.
I think we were obliged to adopt a negative, critical position in response the cyber-utopianism of
the last almost 20 years, whether in its naive or cynical forms. We had to identify and theorize the
darker side of things. But it can become habitual, and when the dark side materializes, as it has
over the past few years - so that everyone knows the truth - then the obligation flips around,
doesn't it? To break out of habitual criticism as the tacit, defeated acceptance of what is. But, what
could be? Where do we find new political imaginaries? Not to ask what is the bright side, or what
can we do to cope, but what are the genuinely emancipatory possibilities that are somehow still
latent, buried under the present - or emerging within those ruptures in it? - - - I can't make it all
the way to a happy ending, to a happy beginning, but at least it's a beginning and not the end.
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.