This text was originally published in [The
Funambulist](https://thefunambulist.net/) - Issue 17, May-June 2018
"Weaponized Infrastructure".
__
In 2003 artist Jackie Summell started a correspondence with Herman Wallace,
who at the time was serving a life sentence in solitary confinement in the
Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, by asking him “What kind of a house
does a man who has lived in a 6′ x 9′ cell for over thirty years dream of?”
(1) The Louisiana State Penitentiary, the largest maximum-security prison in
the US, besides inmate quarters and among other facilities includes a prison
plantation, Prison View Golf Course, and Angola Airstrip. The nickname Angola
comes from the former slave plantation purchased for a prison after the end of
the Civil War – and where Herman Wallace became a prisoner in 1971 upon
charges of armed robbery. He became politically active in the prison's chapter
of the Black Panther and campaigned for better conditions in Angola,
organizing petitions and hunger strikes against segregation, rape, and
violence. In 1973, together with Albert Woodfox, he was convicted of murder of
a prison guard and both were put in solitary confinement. Together with Robert
King, Wallace and Woodfox would become known as the Angola 3, the three prison
inmates who served the longest period in solitary confinement – 29, 41, and 43
years respectively. The House that Herman Built, Herman's virtual and
eventually physical dream house in his birth city of New Orleans grew from the
correspondence between Jackie and Herman. At one point, Jackie asked Herman to
make a list of the books he would have on the book shelf in his dream house,
the books which influenced his political awakening. At the time Jackie was a
fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, which supported acquisition
of the books and became the foundation of Herman's physical library on its
premises, waiting for his dream home to be built to relocate.
In 2013 the conviction against Herman Wallace was thrown out and he was
released from jail. Three days later he passed away. He never saw his dream
house built, nor took a book from a shelf in his library in Solitude, which
remained accessible to fellows and visitors until 2014. In 2014 Public
Library/Memory of the World (2) digitized Herman's library to place it online
thus making it permanently accessible to everyone with an Internet
connection(3). The spirit of Herman Wallace continued to live through the
collection shaping him – works by Marxists, revolutionaries, anarchists,
abolitionists, and civil rights activists, some of whom were also prisoners
during their lifetime. Many books from Herman's library would not be
accessible to those serving time, as access to knowledge for the inmate
population in the US is increasingly being regulated. A peak into the list of
banned books, which at one point included Michelle Alexander's The New Jim
Crow (The New Press, 2010), reveals the incentive of the ban was to prevent
access to knowledge that would allow inmates to understand their position in
society and the workings of the prison-industrial complex. It is becoming
increasingly difficult for inmates to have chance encounters with a book that
could change their lives; given access to knowledge they could see their
position in life from another perspective; they could have a moment of
revelation like the one Cle Sloan had. Sloan, a member of the Los Angeles gang
Bloods encountered his neighborhood Athens Park on a 1972 Los Angeles Police
Department 'Gang Territories' map in Mike Davis' book City of Quartz, which
made him understand gang violence in L.A. was a product of institutional
violence, structural racism, and systemic dispersal of community support
networks put in place by the Black Panther Party.
The books in Herman's library can be seen as a toolbox of “really useful
knowledge” for someone who has to conceive the notion of freedom. The term
“really useful knowledge” originated with workers' awareness of the need for
self-education in the early-19th century, describing a body of 'unpractical'
knowledge such as politics, economics, and philosophy, workers needed to
understand and change their position in society, and opposed 'useful
knowledge' – knowledge of 'practical' skills which would make them useful to
the employer. Like in the 19th century, sustaining the system relies on
continued exploitation of a population prevented from accessing, producing and
sharing knowledges needed to start to understand the system that is made to
oppress and to articulate a position from which they can act. Who controls the
networks of production and distribution to knowledge is an important issue, as
it determines which books are made accessible. Self-help and coloring books
are allowed and accessible to inmates so as to continue oppression and pacify
resistance. The crisis of access persists outside the prison walls with a
continuous decline in the number of public libraries and the books they offer
due to the double assault of austerity measures and a growing monopoly of the
corporate publishing industry.
Digital networks have incredible power to widely distribute content, and once
the (digital) content is out there it is relatively easy to share and access.
Digital networks can provide a solution for enclosure of knowledge and for the
oppressed, easier access to channels of distribution. At least that was the
promise – the Internet would enable a democratization of access. However,
digital networks have a significant capacity to centralize and control within
the realm of knowledge distribution, one look at the oligopoly of academic
publishing and its impact on access and independent production shows its
contrary.
In June 2015 Elsiver won an injunction against Library Genesis and its
subsidiary platform sci-hub.org, making it inaccessible in some countries and
via some commercial internet providers. Run by anonymous scientists mostly
from Eastern Europe, these voluntary and non-commercial projects are the
largest illegal repository of electronic books, journals, and articles on the
web (4). Most of the scientific articles collected in the repository bypassed
the paywalls of academic publishers using the solidary network of access
provided by those associated with universities rich enough to pay the
exuberant subscription fees. The only person named in the court case was
Alexandra Elbakyan, who revealed her identity as the creator of sci-hub.org,
and explained she was motivated by the lack of access: “When I was working on
my research project, I found out that all research papers I needed for work
were paywalled. I was a student in Kazakhstan at the time and our university
was not subscribed to anything.”(5) The creation of sci-hub.org made
scientific knowledge accessible to anyone, not just to members of wealthy
academic institutions. The act of acknowledging responsibility for sci-hub
transformed what was seen as the act of illegality (piracy) into the act of
civil disobedience. In the context of sci-hub and Library Genesis, both
projects from the periphery of knowledge production, “copyright infringement
opens on to larger questions about the legitimacy of the historic compromise –
if indeed there ever even was one – between the labor that produces culture
and knowledge and its commodification as codified in existing copyright
regulations.”(6) Here, disobedience and piracy have an equalizing effect on
the asymmetries of access to knowledge.
In 2008, programmer and hacktivist Aaron Swartz published Guerilla Open
Access Manifesto triggered by the enclosure of scientific knowledge production
of the past, often already part of public domain, via digitization. “The
world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in
books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful
private corporations […] We need to download scientific journals and upload
them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”(7)
On January 6, 2011, the MIT police and the US Secret Service arrested Aaron
Swartz on charges of having downloaded a large number of scientific articles
from one of the most used and paywalled database. The federal prosecution
decided to show the increasingly nervous publishing industry the lengths they
are willing to go to protect them by indicting Swartz on 13 criminal counts.
With a threat of 50 years in prison and US$1 million fine, Aaron committed
suicide on January 11, 2013. But he left us with an assignment – if you have
access, you have a responsibility to share with those who do not; “with enough
of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the
privatization of knowledge — we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join
us?” (8) He pointed to an important issue – every new cycle of technological
development (in this case the move from paper to digital) brings a new threat
of enclosure of the knowledge in the public domain.
While “the core and the periphery adopt different strategies of opposition to
the inequalities and exclusions [digital] technologies start to reproduce”
some technologies used by corporations to enclose can be used to liberate
knowledge and make it accessible. The existence of projects such as Library
Genesis, sci-hub, Public Library/Memory of the World, aaaarg.org, monoskop,
and ubuweb, commonly known as shadow libraries, show how building
infrastructure for storing, indexing, and access, as well as supporting
digitization, can not only be put to use by the periphery, but used as a
challenge to the normalization of enclosure offered by the core. The people
building alternative networks of distribution also build networks of support
and solidarity. Those on the peripheries need to 'steal' the knowledge behind
paywalls in order to fight the asymmetries paywalls enforce – peripheries
“steal” in order to advance. Depending on the vantage point, digitization of a
book can be stealing, or liberating it to return the knowledge (from the dusty
library closed stacks) back into circulation. “Old” knowledge can teach new
tricksters a handful of tricks.
In 2015 I realized none of the architecture students of the major European
architecture schools can have a chance encounter with Architecture and
Feminisms or Sexuality and Space, nor with many books on similar topics
because they were typically located in the library’s closed stacks. Both books
were formative and in 2005, as a student I went to great lengths to gain
access to them. The library at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, was
starved of books due to permanent financial crisis, and even bestsellers such
as Rem Koolhaas' S, M, L, XL were not available, let alone books that were
focused on feminism and architecture. At the time, the Internet could inform
that edited volumes such as Architecture and Feminism and Sexuality and Space
existed but nothing more. To satisfy my curiosity, and help me write a paper,
a friend sent – via another friend – her copies from London to Belgrade, which
I photocopied, and returned. With time, I graduated to buying my own second
hand copies of both books, which I digitized upon realizing access to them
still relied on access to a well-stocked specialist library. They became the
basis for my growing collection on feminism/gender/space I maintain as an
amateur librarian, tactically digitizing books to contribute to the growing
struggle to make architecture more equitable as both a profession and an
effect in space.
At the end, a confession, and an anecdote – since 2015, I have tried to
digitize a book a week and every year, I manage to digitize around 20 books,
so one can say I am not particularly good at meeting my goals. The books I do
digitize are related to feminism, space, race, urban riots, and struggle, and
I choose them for their (un)availability and urgency. Most of them are
published in the 1970s and 1980s, though some were published in the 1960s and
1990s. Some I bought as former library books, digitized on a DIY book scanner,
and uploaded to the usual digital repositories. It takes two to four hours to
make a neat and searchable PDF scan of a book. As a PDF, knowledge production
usually under the radar or long out of print becomes more accessible. One of
the first books I digitized was Robert Goodman's After the Planners, a
critique of urban planning and the limits of alternate initiatives in cities
written in the late 1960s. A few years after I scanned it, online photos from
a conference drew my attention –the important, white male professor was
showing the front page of After the Planners on his slide. I realized fast the
image had a light signature of the scanner I had used. While I do not know if
this act of digitization made a dent or was co-opted, seeing the image was a
small proof that digitization can bring books back into circulation and access
to them might make a difference – or that access to knowledge can be a weapon.
[Dubravka Sekulic](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/sekulic/) writes
about the production of space. She is an amateur-librarian at Public
Library/Memory of the World, where she maintains feminist, and space/race
collections. During Making Futures School, Dubravka will be figuring out the
future of education (on all things spatial) together with [Elise
Hunchuck](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/hunchuck/), [Jonathan
Solomon](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/solomon/) and [Valentina
Karga](https://www.making-futures.com/contributor/karga/).
__
This text was originally published in The Funambulist - Issue 17, May-June
2018 "Weaponized Infrastrucuture". [A pdf version of it can be downloaded
here.](https://www.making-futures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05
/Dubravka_Sekulic-On_Knowledge_and_Stealing.pdf)
__
Notes:
(1) For more on the project Herman’s House. Accessed 6 April 2018.
(2) Public Library is a project which has been since 2012 developing and
publicly supporting scenarios for massive disobedience against the current
regulation of production and circulation of knowlde and culture in the digital
realm. See: ‘Memory of the World’. Accessed 7 April 2018.
(3) Herman's library can be accessed at[
http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/](http://herman.memoryoftheworld.org/) More
on the context of digitization see: ‘Herman’s Library’. Memory of the World
(blog), 28 October 2014.
/hermans-library/>, and ‘Public Library. Rethinking the Infrastructures of
Knowledge Production’. Memory of the World (blog), 30 October 2014.
the-infrastructures-of-knowledge-production/.>
(4) For more on shadow libraries and library genesis see: Bodo, Balazs.
‘Libraries in the Post-Scarcity Era’. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY:
Social Science Research Network, 10 June 2015.
(5) ‘Sci-Hub Tears Down Academia’s “Illegal” Copyright Paywalls’. TorrentFreak
(blog), 27 June 2015.
illegal-copyright-paywalls-150627/.>
(6) For the schizophrenia of the current model of the corporate enclosure of
the scientific knowledge see: Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of
a Takedown, forthcoming, 2018
(7) Aaron Swartz. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Accessed 7 April 2018.[
http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.](http://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto.)
(8) Ibid.
(9) Mars, Marcell and Tomislav Medak, The System of a Takedown, forthcoming,
2018.
(10) See ‘In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub’.
http://custodians.online. Accessed 7 April 2018.
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.