Sollfrank & Goldsmith
The Poetry of Archiving
2013
Kenneth Goldsmith
The Poetry of Archiving
Berlin, 1 February 2013
[00:12]
Kenneth Goldsmith: The type of writing I do is exactly the same thing that I
do on UbuWeb. And that’s the idea that nothing new needs to be written or
created. In fact, it's the archiving and the gathering and the appropriation
of preexisting materials, that is the new mode of both writing and archiving.
[00:35] So you have a system where writing and archiving have become the
identical situation today.
[00:43]
UbuWeb
[00:47]
It started in 1996, and it began as a site for visual and concrete poetry,
which was a mid-century genre of typographical poetry. I got a scanner, and I
scanned a concrete poem. And I put it up on Ubu, and on those days the images
used to come in as interlaced GIFs, every other line filling in. So really it
was an incredible thing to watch this poem kind of grow organically. [1:21]
And it looked exactly like concrete poetry had always wanted to look – a
little bit of typographical movement. [1:27] And I thought, this is perfect.
And also, because concrete poetry is so flat and modernist, when it was
illuminated from the back by the computer screen it looked beautiful and
graphic and flat and clean. [1:40] And suddenly it was like: this is the
perfect medium for concrete poetry. Which, I do worry still, is very much a
part of Ubu. [1:50] And then, a few years later real audio came, and I began
to put up sound poetry, you know, little sound files of sound poetry. So you
could look at the concrete poetry and listen to the sound poetry. [2:07] And a
few years later we had a little bit more bandwidth, and we began to put on
videos. So this is the way the site grew. [2:16] But also what happened on Ubu
was an odd thing. Because it was concrete poetry, so I put up the poems of
John Cage – the concrete mesostics of John Cage. And then I got a little bit
of sound of John Cage reading some of these things, and suddenly it was Cage
reading a mesostic with an orchestra behind him. [2:40] And I said, wait a
minute, this no longer sound poetry, this is something else. And I thought,
what is this? And I said, ah, this is avant-garde.
[2:50] And so from there, because of Cage and Cage's practice, the whole thing
became a repository and archive for the avant-garde, which it is today. So
that's how it moved from being specifically concrete poetry in 1996, to today
being all avant-garde.
[3:09]
Avantgarde
[3:15]
[3:30] And then something happened in the digital, where it seemed to... All
of that fell off. Because we already knew that. [3:42] So it was an orphan
term. It became detached from its nefarious pre-digital context. And it was an
open term. [3:51] I was like, we can actually use this term again, avant-
garde, and redefine it as a way of, you know, multi-media, impurity,
difference, all sorts of ways that it was never allowed to be used before. So
I've actually inhabited this term, and repurposed it. [4:15] So I don't really
know what avant-garde is, it's always changing. And UbuWeb is an archive that
is not pure avant-garde. You look at it and say, no, things are wrong there.
There's rock musicians, and there's performance artists, and there's
novelists. [4:33] I mean, it doesn't quite look like the avant-garde looked
before the digital. But then, everything looks different after the digital.
[4:41]
Selection / curation
[4:46]
I don't know anything. I am a poet. I'm not a historian, I'm not an academic.
I don't know anything, I've just got a sense: that might be interesting, that
sort of feels avant-garde. I mean, it is ridiculous, it's terrible: I am the
wrong person to do this. But, you know, nobody stopped me, and so I've been
doing it. You know, anybody can do it. [5:11] It's very hard to have something
on Ubu, and that's why it's so good. That's why it's not archive-type of work,
where everything can go, and there're good things there, but there is no one
working as a gatekeeper to say, actually this is better than that. [5:26] And
I think one of the problems with net culture, or the web culture, is that
we've decided to suspend judgment. We can't say that one thing is better than
another thing, because everything is equal. There's a part of me that really
likes that idea, and it creates fabulous chaos. But I think it is a sort of a
curatorial job to go in and make sense of some of that chaos. In a very small
way, that's what I try to do on UbuWeb. [5:52] You know, it's the avant-garde,
it's not a big project. It's a rather small slice of culture that one can have
a point of view. I'm not saying that's right. It's probably very wrong. But
nobody else it's doing it, so I figured, you know… [6:12] But by virtue of the
fact that there's only one UbuWeb, it's become institutional. And the reason
that there is only one UbuWeb is that UbuWeb ignores copyright. And everybody
else, of course, is afraid of copyright. There should be hundreds of UbuWebs.
It is ridiculous that there's only one. But everybody else is afraid of
copyright, so that nobody would put anything on. [6:41] We just act like
copyright doesn't exist. Copyright, what's that? Never heard of it.
[6:48]
Contents
[5:52]
I think that these artifacts that are on UbuWeb are very valuable historically
and culturally, they are very significant. But economically, I don't think
they had that type of value. And I love small labels that try to put these
things out. But they inevitably loose money by trying to put these things out.
So when somebody does put something out, sometimes things on Ubu get released
from a small label, and I take them off the site, because I want to support
those things. [7:28] But it's hard, and people are not doing it for the money.
Nobody ever got into sound poetry or orchestral avant-garde music for the
money. [7:37] So it's kind of a weird lovely grey area that we've been able to
explore, a utopia, really, that we've been able to enact. Simply because the
economics are so sketchy.
[7:55]
Copyright
[7:59]
I am not free of fear, but I've learned over 17 years, to actually have a very
good understanding of copyright. And I have a very good understating of the
way that copyright works. So I can anticipate things. I can usually negotiate
something with somebody who, you know… [8:26] There's so many stories when
copyright is being used as a battering tool. It's not real. I had one instance
when a very powerful literary agency in New York… I received a cease and
desist DMCA Takedown, which I require a proper takedown. It was for William S.
Burroughs, and the list went on for pages and pages and pages. And then, at
the end, it says, "Under the threat of perjury, I state these facts to be
true," signed such and such person. [9:05] Now, what they did, they went into
UbuWeb and they put the words "William S. Burroughs," and they came up with
every instance of William S. Burroughs. If William S. Burroughs is mentioned
in an academic paper: that's our copyright. Nick Currie Momus wrote a song "I
Love You William S. Burroughs.” Now, Nick gave UbuWeb all of his songs. I know
that Nick owns the copyright to that. [9:30] I said, you know, it's
ridiculous! And even the things that they were claiming… It was the most
ridiculous thing. [9:37] So I wrote them back. I said: Look, I get what you're
trying to do here, but you're really going about it the wrong way. It's very
irresponsible just putting his name in the search engine, cutting and pasting,
and damn you own the copyright. You don't own the copyright to almost any of
that! And as a matter of fact, under law you perjured yourself. And I can came
right back and sue you, because this is a complete lie. But I said, look, lets
work together. If there's something that you feel that you really do own and
you really don't want there, let's talk about it, but could you please be a
little bit more reasonable. [10:13] And then of course I got a letter back,
and it's an intern, the college student saying, the state of William S.
Burroughs just asked me… [10:23] I said, look, I get it but, you know… let’s
try to do it the right way and let's see what happens. And then they came back
with another DMCA Takedown, with a much shorter list. But even in that list,
most of the copyrights didn't belong to William S. Burroughs. They belonged to
journal poetry systems, many of them were orphan. [10:45] Because in media,
often if you publish in a publication, often the publisher owns the copyright,
not the artist, you know. You have to look and see where the copyright
resides. [10:59] Finally, I said, look this is getting ridiculous. I said,
please send a note on to the executor of Burroughs' estate, who is James
Grauerholz, and he's a good guy. He's a good guy. And I said, I quoted, and I
said, look Mr. Grauerholz, William S. Burroughs' poetry wants to be free. You
know, and I quoted from Burroughs. And also it's a great thing that Burroughs
said. I said, you know, we're not making any money here. I'm not going to
pirate Naked Lunch. I know where are you making your money, and I swear I
wouldn't want to touch that. That does well on its own. [11:30] But his cut-
ups, his sound collage cut-ups? I mean, came on, no. This is for education.
This is for, you know, art schools, kindergartens and post-graduates use it.
[11:40] So this was a way in which copyright is often used as a threat, that's
not true. And then, a little bit of talking, and you can actually get back to
some logic. And then after that it was fine, and there's all the William S.
Burroughs that's there that it was always there. And everybody seems to be
okay.
[11:57]
Opt-out System
[0:12]
Things get taken down all the time. People send an email saying, you know, I
don't want that there. And I try to convince them that we don't touch any
money. Ubu runs on zero money, we don't touch any. I try to tell them that is
good, it's all feeling good, positive. [12:19] But sometimes people really
don't want their work up. And if they don't want their work up, I take it
down. An opt-out system. Why should I keep their work up if they really don't
want it there? [12:30] So it's an unstable archive. What's there today may not
be there tomorrow. And I kind of like that too.
[12:38]
Permission culture
[12:42]
I understand people get nervous. They would prefer me to ask. But if I ask, I
couldn't have built this archive. Because if you ask, you start negotiations,
you make a contract, you need lawyers, you need permissions. And if something
has... a film has music in the background by the Rolling Stones, you have to
clear the right for the Rolling Stones and pay that a little bit of money. And
you know, licenses... I couldn't do that. I do this with no money. That would
take millions… [13:14] To do UbuWeb permission, the right way, correctly,
would take millions of millions of euros. And I built this whole thing from
nothing. Zero money. [13:26] So, you know... I think I'd love to be able to
ask for permission, do things the right way. It is the right way to do things.
But it wouldn't be possible to make an archive like this, that way.
[13:40]
Cornelia Sollfrank: How much does it happen that you are approached by artists
who say, please put my work down?
[13:47]
Almost never, almost never. It's usually the estates, art dealers, the
business people, you know, who are circling around an artist. But it's almost
never artists themselves. Artists, you know... I don't know, I just think
that… [14:07] For example, we have the music concrete of Jean Dubuffet on
UbuWeb. Fantastic experimental music. And it's so great that many people now
know of a composer named Jean Dubuffet, and later they hear: he's also a
painter. Which is really very beautiful. [14:33] Now, the paintings of Jean
Dubuffet, of course, sell for millions. And the copyright, you know... You can
make a T-shirt with a Jean Dubuffet painting, they're going to want a license
for that. [14:44] But the music of Jean Dubuffet, the estate doesn't quite
understand the value of it, or what to do with it. And this is also what
happened with my Warhol book. [14:56] Before I did my Warhol book, I went to
the Warhol Foundation, because it's big money, and you don't want to get in
trouble with those guys. And I said to them, I want to do a book of Andy's
interviews. I know that they don't own the copyright, I just wanted their
blessing, from them. And they were really sweet. They laughed at me. They
said, you want Warhol's words? Take them! We are so busy dealing with
forgeries, well, you know, exactly what your piece was about. And they laughed
at me. They were like, have fun, it's all yours, glad, go away. [15:32] So I
kind of feel, if you ask Jean Dubuffet, I would assume that Dubuffet
understood that his music production was as serious as his paintings. And this
is the sort of beautiful revisionism of the avant-garde. This is a perfect
example of the revisionism of the avant-garde that I'm talking about. You say,
oh, you know, he was actually as good of a composer as he was a painter.
[15:58] So, you know, this is the kind of weird thing that's happened on
UbuWeb, I think. [16:04] But what's even better, is that UbuWeb, you know... I
care about Jean Dubuffet, or I care about Art Brut, and the history of all
that. [16:14] But usually what happens is, kids come into UbuWeb and they know
nothing about the history. And they’re usually kids that are making dance
music. But they go, oh, all these weird sounds at this place, lets take them.
And so they plunder the archive. So you have Bruce Nauman, you know, "Get out
of my life!" on dance floors in São Paulo, mixed in with the beat. And that to
me is the misuse of the archive that I think is really fantastic.
[16:48]
Technical infrastructure
[16:53]
It's web 1.0. I write everything in HTML, by hand. Hand-coded like I did in
1996, the same BBEdit, the same program.
[17:04]>
C.S.: But it's searchable.
[17:06]
Yea, it's got like a dumb, you know, a little free search engine on it, but I
don't do anything. You see, this is the thing. [17:15] For many, many years
people would always come up to me and say, we'd like to put UbuWeb in a
database. And I said no. It’s working really well as it is. And, you know,
imagine if Ubu had been locked up in some sort of horrible SQL database. And
the administrator of the database walks away, the guy that knows all that
stuff walks away with the keys – which always happens. No… [17:39] This way it
is free, is open, is simple, is backwardly compatible – it always works.
[17:45] I like the simplicity of it. It's not different than it was 17 years
ago. It's really dumb, but it does what it does very well.
[17:54]
Search engines
[17:58]
I removed it from Google. Because, you know, people would have set a Google
alert. And it was mostly the agents, or the estates that would set a kind of
an alert for their artists. And they didn't understand, they think we're
selling it. And it creates a lot of correspondence. [18:20] This is a lot of
work for me. I never get paid any money. There's no money. So, there's
nothing, you know... It's my free time that I'm spending corresponding with
people. And once I took it off from Google it got much better.
[18:33]
Copyright practice
[18:37]
Nobody seemed to care until I started to put film on, and then the filmmakers
went crazy. And so, that was something. [18:47] There was a big blow-up on the
FrameWorks film list. Do you know FrameWorks? It's the biggest avant-garde
film list – Listserv. And a couple of years ago Ubu got hacked, and went down
for a little while. And there was a big celebration on the FrameWorks list.
They said, the enemy is finally gone! We can return to life as normal. So I
responded to them. [19:14] I wrote an open letter to FrameWorks (which you can
actually find on UbuWeb) challenging them, saying, actually Ubu is a friend of
yours. I'm actually promoting your work for no money. I love what you do. I'm
a fan. There's no way I'm an enemy. [19:31] And I said, by the way, if you are
celebrating Ubu being down, I think it's a perfect time for you to now built
Ubu the way it should have been. You guys have all the materials. You are the
artists, you have all the knowledge. Go ahead and do it right, that would be
great. You have my blessing, please do it... Shut them down. Nobody ever
responded. Suddenly the thread died. [20:00] Nobody wants to do anything. It's
kind of, they considered it right to complain, but when asked to... They have
the tools to do it right. I'm a poet, what do I know about avant-garde film?
They know everything. But when I told them, please, you know, nobody's going
to lift a finger. [20:18] It's easier for people to complain and hate it. But
in fact, to make something better is something that people are not going to
do. So life went on. It went up and we moved on.
[20:32]
Un/stable archives
[20:36]
If you work on something for an hour a day for 17 years – 2 hours, 3 hours –
you come up with something really substantial. [20:45] The web is very
ephemeral, and UbuWeb is just as ephemeral. It’s amazing that it's been there
for as long as it has, but tomorrow it could vanish. I could get sued. I could
get bored. Maybe I just walk away and blow it up, I don't know! Why do I need
to keep doing all this work for? [21:03] So if you find something on the
Internet that you loved, don't assume it's going to be there forever. Download
it. Always make your own archive. Don't ever assume that it's waiting there
for you, because it won't be there when you look for it.
C.S.: In the cloud…
Fuck the cloud. I hate the cloud.
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.