‘Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ If a single sentence can represent the entire book, it must be this one. For one, it’s great writing. Precise, condensed, clear. Shirky’s book is full of it. It shifts attention to the right level, away from the tools and to what people do with them. It also contains the dilemma that the entire book grapples with: how to write about technology once that technology has become mundane? Lastly, it leaves a lot of things out. How do technologies become mundane? Which ones are legitimate and which ones are not? Why are some providers of ‘boring technologies’ worth billions (e.g. YouTube) while others subject to high-pressure litigation (e.g. ThePirateBay)? But Shirky doesn’t want to go there, he prefers to keep the message safe and positive.

But let’s start at the beginning. Shirky’s core argument is a riff on an old theme. There are limits to the scale particular forms of organisation can handle efficiently. Ever since the publication of Roland Coase’s seminal article ‘The Nature of the Firm’ in 1937, economists and organisational theorists have been analysing the ‘Coasian ceiling’. It indicates the maximum size an organisation can grow to before the costs of managing its internal complexity rise beyond the gains the increased size can offer. At that point, it becomes more efficient to acquire a resource externally (e.g. to buy it) than to produce it internally. This has to do with the relative transaction costs generated by each way of securing that resource. If these costs decline in general (e.g. due to new communication technologies and management techniques) two things can take place. On the one hand, the ceiling rises, meaning large firms can grow even larger without becoming inefficient. On the other hand, small firms are becoming more competitive because they can handle the complexities of larger markets. This decline in transaction costs is a key element in the organisational transformations of the last three decades, creating today’s environment where very large global players and relatively small companies can compete in global markets. Yet, a moderate decline does not affect the basic structure of production as being organised through firms and markets.

In 2002, Yochai Benkler was the first to argue that production was no longer bound to the old dichotomy between firms and markets. Rather, a third mode of production had emerged which he called ‘commons-based peer production’.1 Here, the central mode of coordination was neither command (as it is inside the firm) nor price (as it is in the market) but self-assigned volunteer contributions to a common pool of resources. This new mode of production, Benkler points out, relies on the dramatic decline in transaction costs made possible by the internet. Shirky develops this idea into a different direction, by introducing the concept of the ‘Coasian floor’. Organised efforts underneath this floor are, as Shirky writes, ‘valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing’.

Until recently, life underneath that floor was necessarily small scale because scaling up required building up an organisation and this was prohibitively expensive. Now, and this is Shirky’s central claim, even large group efforts are no longer dependent on the existence of a formal organisation with its overheads. Or, as he memorably puts it, ‘we are used to a world where little things happen for love, and big things happen for money. … Now, though, we can do big things for love’.

The technologies that allow love to scale are relatively old and even the newer ones are technologically mundane by now (from a user perspective): email, web forums, blogs, wikis and open publication platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. But that is precisely the point. Only now that they are well understood and can be taken for granted are they beginning to unfold their full social potential. For Shirky, what distinguishes Web2.0 from Web1.0 is not functionality but accessibility. What only geeks could do 10-15 years ago, (nearly) everybody can do today. The empowering potential of these tools is being felt now, precisely because they allow everyone – or more precisely – every (latent) group to organise itself without running into limits of scale. These newly organisable groups create ‘post-managerial organizations’ based on ad-hoc coordination of a potentially large number of volunteers with very low overheads. Thus Shirky claims, without really substantiating it, we are seeing the erosion of the power differential between formally and informally organised interests.

For Shirky organising without organisations has become much easier for three main reasons, all connected to the internet. First, failure is cheap. If all it takes is five minutes to start a new blog, there is little risk involved in setting one up. Indeed, it’s often easier to try something out than to evaluate it beforehand. This invites experimentations which sometimes pay off. If a project does take off, there is no hard limit to how large in can grow. There is little difference between a blog read by 10 or 10,000 people. Second, since everyone can publish their own stuff, it’s comparatively easy for people with common interests to find and trust each other. Perhaps most importantly, it takes only a relatively small number of highly committed people to create a context where large number of people who care only a little can act efficiently, be it that they file a single bug report, do a small edit on a wiki, or donate a small sum to the project.

So far so good. For those who followed Web2.0 discussions there is not terribly much new here, though Shirky’s talent for crisp writing brings many aspects into sharper relief than they were before. All of this makes it probably the best Web2.0 book published so far. Yet, being just a book about Web2.0 is also its greatest weakness. Despite pronouncing that technology has become boring, it remains squarely focused on it. Beyond technology, we get not much more than a number of journalistic case studies, some of them well known (Wikipedia, open source software) others more interesting. For example, the Bishop of Boston could more or less ignore the paedophilia cases in 1992, but not in 2002. The reason, Shirky explains, is that the early ’90s the Bishop still controlled the means of organisation, the church institutions, so he could make it hard for the outraged parishioners to act. Ten years later the Bishop no longer had a monopoly on the means of organisation. Now, the parishioners could organise outside the institution with ease and their protest, instead of fizzling out quickly, gathered force and changed the church.

For a book that claims to analyse a revolution that ‘cannot be contained in the institutional structure of society’. we get extremely little on politics or power. But, if we are witnessing the largest increase in expressive capabilities in human history, can it really be that the main consequence is an explosion of disjointed volunteer projects? This lack of depth is the result of the single most problematic aspect of the book. It focuses almost exclusively on aspects that are entirely uncontroversial. Parishioners organising against the cover-up of priestly paedophilia? Who could be against that! Sharing photos of the Mermaid Parade on Flickr? How cute!

Yet, there are a lot of things that are less cute about the newly boring technologies which Shirky chooses to ignore. Shirky stresses the decentralised, ad-hoc mode of new organisations, yet they are based on very complex infrastructures that are highly centralised and that create near infinite potential to manipulate the social interactions that take place through them. These are not neutral enabling devices. For example, Flickr recently deleted a picture by the Dutch photographer Maartin Dors that showed a Romanian street kid . Why? Because it violated a previously unknown, unpublished rule against depicting children smoking! What’s the rational of this rule? As a spokesperson explained, Flickr and Yahoo! ‘must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities’. Jonathan Zittrain points out that the ‘ever-increasing usability [of Web 2.0]has been accompanied by the deliberalising of user rights’.2 Of course, users can revolt against overt manipulation as they did when the aggregation site digg.com tried to suppress postings with the code to crack HD DVD encryption in May 2007. The management had to reverse its policy, though I wonder if they would have had they been a subsidiary of a large conglomerate.3

Thus, there is a tension at the core of the Web2.0 phenomenon created by the uneasy (mis)match of the commercial interests of the companies and social interests of their users. All this social interaction takes place within privately owned spaces so that users are basically faced with a take-it-or-leave-it decision that few of them are really aware of. There is a structural imbalance between the service providers who have a tangible incentive to expand their manipulative capacities and the average users who will barely notice what’s going on, since it would require a lot of effort to find out. To believe that competitive pressures will lead providers to offer more freedoms is like expecting the commercialisation of news to improve the quality of reporting.

This tension between commercial and social interests points to another dimension of Web2.0 that is completely missing from Shirky’s book: the new division of labour, this time between paid and unpaid. He rightly points out that we are witnessing a ‘mass amateurisation’, and explains this by way of an example. Racing car driving is difficult, so we have professionals for whom driving is not a means but an end. However, driving a normal car is so easy that amateurs can do it while trying to achieve other things (like arriving at work on time). So, through a combination of new technological tools and new cooperative strategies certain professions – photography, publishing, journalism, etc. – are becoming amateurised and their professional products find themselves in competition with ‘user generated content’. Is this pointing the way to a ‘post-capitalist’ society, as envisioned by the Oekonux project? You might think so, given the total absence of economic dimensions in this book. But, I suspect that Shirky would laugh at such a notion all the way to be bank. As a consultant to many media companies he must be keenly aware of the strategies to extract, concentrate and appropriate value from all this user generated content. I would love to hear more about it – and I’m sure Shirky knows a lot about it but, unfortunately, he is not telling us.

If he were to, he might have to mention another aspect that is deeply troubling, even though he’d say that this is inevitable (and I would probably agree): the loss of privacy. Or, to be more precise, the gathering of a lot of data on individual actions and interactions in the hands of a very small number of old school organisations which can process and turn it into actionable knowledge. What kind of activities they are going to derive from the data we don’t know. Commercial manipulation (the shaping of services to be more advertiser-friendly) is a given. Strong interest from governments’ security apparatus should be expected, as should all kinds of random abuses. Frequent scandals about lost data, strategic leaks and corporate snooping indicate the tip of an iceberg.

Depending how the current tussle over copyright evolves, we can expect much more, and more repressive use of all of this information.Viacom recently managed to force Google to hand over all user data relating to all the videos ever published on YouTube. Tussle over copyright? Reading Shirky, you wouldn’t know there is one. This is probably the most glaring absence. Number of entries for copyright in the index of the book? 0! In my view, this is inexcusable because it cuts right to the core of why ‘boring technologies’ are currently so ‘socially interesting’. File sharing, in particular, demonstrates most clearly the power of ‘organizing without organization’ so radical that, for the moment, nobody knows how to contain it within current institutional structures. Number of entries on p2p or file sharing in the index? Again, 0!

Of course, Shirky knows about it, so the omission must be deliberate. To me, this is an indication of how constrained discourse has become, particularly in the US and particularly for the set of activist academics who like to think of themselves as progressives yet covet their positions as consultants to conservative business and government. To them, p2p poses an ugly challenge. It is clearly one of the most potent mass movements driving the deep transformation of the media industry and contributing considerably to the fabled increase in individuals’ expressive capacities. But coming out against file sharing makes you sound like a dork on the payroll of the mafia. Very unprogressive. Yet, the media conglomerates and their surrogates have succeeded in establishing such a climate of copyright maximalism that even appearing in favour of copyright infringement removes you from the mainstream. Thus, if you want to play it both ways – be part of the revolution and earn money as a consultant – you better avoid the whole issue. That, at least, would explain why neither Shirky nor anyone else in the US mainstream even dares to talk about file sharing anymore, with the exception of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Self-censorship at work.

The total absence of controversial issues creates the narrow scope typical of books written by consultants. This is unfortunate since Shirky is clearly very bright. If you want to glean some of his many insights, you could do worse than simply watching his lecture on the book’s main themes.4 In just 42 minutes you get a good sense of what he has to offer.

Felix Stalder is lecturer in theory of the media society at the Zurich University of the Arts and one of the moderators of the mailing list nettime. He lives in Vienna, travels abroad and archives his public output at http://felix.openflows.com.

Info

Clay Shirky. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, New York: Penguin Press, February, 2008

Footnotes

1. Yochai Benkler, ‘Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm’, Yale Law Journal. No. 112, 2002, http://www.benkler.com

2. http://reason.com/blog/show/127444.html

3. http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqU

[posted on Mute]

Brian Holmes’ response on nettime:

Felix Stalder wrote:

> In 2002, Yochai Benkler was the first to argue that production was no
> longer bound to the old dichotomy between firms and markets.

I am surprised! The notion of “commons based peer production” is certainly new with Benkler, but networked production is not. Do neither Benkler or Shirky devote even a footnote to one of the most famous papers ever to be written about the organization of production, with an explicit reference to Coase in the title? I’m talking about Walter Powell’s “Neither Market not Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization,” published way back in 1990.

http://www.stanford.edu/~woodyp/papers/powell_neither.pdf

> For a book that claims to analyse a revolution that “cannot be
> contained in the institutional structure of society”. we get extremely
> little on politics or power. But, if we are witnessing the largest
> increase in expressive capabilities in human history, can it really be
> that the main consequence is an explosion of disjointed volunteer
> projects? This lack of depth is the result of the single most problematic aspect of the book.

I’ve not read Powell’s text in a long time, but as I recall it has little to say about the scaling-up of love (wonderful theme by the way), and an awful lot about networking for power and profit. Undoubtedly that’s because of the early successes of Italian and Japanese firms in building up informal productive networks where cooperation is based on reciprocal advantage. So I’d agree with Felix that there’s some shirking of an issue going on. If people wanna understand networked society, the only way to spot what’s really new - such as massively distributed volunteer collaboration - is to contrast it to existing formats of production. And politically, I’d say that analysis without analysis is exactly what we’re expected to produce with Web 2.0…

best, BH

Geert Lovink’s response on nettime:

Thanks, Felix, for this insightful, and clear review.

I have not finished Shirky’s book yet but read a great deal. What stroke me is that, imho, Clay Shirky and his team of editors and agents have made the wrong choice concerning the content. In my view,
Shirky should have brought together his online work of the past 10-15 years so that we can finally read his Power Laws in book form. Over the years, Clay Shirky has proven to be sharp observer and critic
of Internet culture, and social networking in particular. Felix’s review doesn’t stress that, and he doesn’t need to, because he is reviewing the book. And this book is particularly uncritical. Despite
(or should we say, inspite) all the worthy examples, it is pitched to the business/consultancy community.

Now, to come back to Felix’s specific critique, namely the absence of copyright/intellectual property controversies in Shirky’s book. This is indeed striking, but as a matter of fact, I got used it. Shirky is not a reporter, he is an ideologue, a preacher and so-called visionary, this time not from the US Westcoast but from New York. He doesn’t see it as his task to investigate and go through issues.

There might be another explanation, and I found it in a recent, truefully commercial book on the history of Web 2.0, written by the Businessweek columnist and Sillicon Valley reporter Sarah Lacy. It is called Once You’re Lucky. Twice You’re Good. She does write about p2p as it forms the technological rational behind big Web 2.0 players like Skype. She notices that the two greatest influences that laid the foundation for Web 2.0 economics “were a couple of underground movements called open source software and peer-to-peer files sharing. And ironically, both were mostly born in stodgy old Europe, not in the Valley.”

It might very well be that Clay Shirky has a similar opinion. It is a known trick of the US consultancy class to project projects with a different agenda onto the Old Continent. It is a rhetorical trick, as we know that the inventors of the Web and Linux are Europeans, and the leaders of free software and open source are US-American citizens. Nonetheless, at times, it can be practical to just push distruptive and potentially subversive ideas into a corner and marginalize it as ‘European’.

Geert

‘You can’t use it without my permission … I’m gonna sue your ass!’ shouts Disney’s Little Mermaid with the angry voice of a copyright lawyer in the video Gimme the Mermaid (4:49 min., 2000). The video by Negativland and Tim Maloney is one of twenty eight works included in Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System: Art in the Age of Intellectual Property, an exhibition presented by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV). It is part of Work 2.0 – Copyright and Creative Work in the Digital Age. In the framework of Work 2.0, HMKV – together with the Berlin-based collaborative partner iRights.info/mikro e.V. – explores the relationships between creative work, intellectual property law, and technology.

How does the changing notion of (creative) work relate to ‚intellectual property’? Today we live in a post-industrial society where the goods being produced are no longer material (like steel, coal, etc.), but immaterial. The Ruhr Area, with its vast deindustrialised landscape, paradigmatically stands for this transition from the Industrial Age to the information or knowledge society. However, there is a significant difference: Immaterial goods such as knowledge and information can be reproduced without loss. Therefore, in order to function in a value-added chain, the distribution of these immaterial goods has to be restricted. This is effectuated with the aid of intellectual property (IP) law, namely copyrighting, patenting, and trademarking.

David Rice’s perfidious short story ‘Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System’ – from which curators Inke Arns and Francis Hunger have borrowed the exhibition title – deals with the concept of intellectual property: In 2067 stars – such as ex-tennis player Anna Kournikova – have their ‘brand’ protected by a satellite-based system that identifies unlicensed look-alikes and eliminates them via a strong laser beam. During a trip to the Pacific Rim, not officially cleared, the ‘real’ Anna Kournikova is identified as an imitation of herself and is consequently eliminated by the system.

The exhibition in the PHOENIX Halle, measuring 2,200 square metres and located on the grounds of the former steelworks Phoenix-West, puts forward the thesis that the increasingly strict application of intellectual property law hampers the development of culture as a whole. It proves increasingly difficult to impart this culture by employing images, logos, or soundbites of this very culture.

The artists represented in this exhibition explore the question of art in the age of mechanical reproduction positioning itself differently in a post-Fordist era permeated with digital networks than in Fordist, analogue times to which Walter Benjamin has referred. Artistic techniques like cut-up, sampling, détournement, appropriation, copying, remixing, plagiarism, and repetition are employed.

Participating artists:
AGENCY (BE)
Daniel Garcia Andújar (ES)
Walter Benjamin (US)
Christian von Borries (DE)
Christophe Bruno (FR)
Claire Chanel & Scary Sherman (US)
Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ)
Ramon & Pedro (CH)
Fred Froehlich (DE)
Nate Harrison (US)
John Heartfield (DE)
Michael Iber (DE)
Laibach/Novi kolektivizem (SI)
Kembrew McLeod (US)
Sebastian Luetgert (DE)
Monochrom (AT)
Negativland and Tim Maloney (US)
Der Plan (DE)
David Rice (US)
Ines Schaber (DE)
Alexei Shulgin & Aristarkh Chernyshev (Electroboutique) (RU)
Cornelia Sollfrank (DE)
Stay Free (US)
Jason Torchinsky (US)
Lizvlx & Hans Bernhard (UBERMORGEN.COM)
& Alessandro Ludovico
& Paolo Cirio (CH/AT/IT)

Curated by:
Inke Arns
Francis Hunger

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.” Rex Bruce, director of the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, will be screening a video he directed that uses public domain imagery from the US Military (also playing at the Centre Pompidou).

Holly Willis, Director of Academic Programs at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, will be presenting on art in Second Life, focusing on creators who are cognizant of the formal and ideological implications of virtual worlds.

Jack Lerner, Acting Director at the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic, will give a talk on research he has been conducting in relation to music sampling that looks at defects in the market and proposes changes.

Finally, we will be joined by multimedia designers Chris Weisbart and Michael Wilson who will explain how they are using open source technology in museums and will give a live demonstration of a holographic projection system they’ve recently built into an interactive exhibit.

All the presenters of course will touch upon the interaction their various topics play with CC licensing. So come out and join us for what is bound to be an eye opening night, and yes, there will be free (as in beer) drinks.

Disclosures is a multi-faceted project that looks at the manifestations of Open Source methodologies in fields of cultural production outside of the Internet. Openness – or its technological underpinning, Open Source – here refers to situations in which the viewer, reader, listener or Internet user becomes emancipated through egalitarian participation, collaborative authorship and/or the breaking down of hierarchical and social boundaries.

If openness is found in varied cultural practices, it matches certain systems and economies (internet-based or media practices) better than others (the artworld or the film and music industries). Issues around Intellectual Property and copyright – and the question of whether or not diffuse authorship and unrestrictive distribution are financially viable – come immediately to mind. Meanwhile, assessing the socio-economic, political and cultural conditions for openness is a necessary step.

A second reading of openness revolves around the idea of transparency and of availability of information. Of relevance here are practices which are committed to releasing public information and resources that have been out of civic reach for political, economic, historic or bureaucratic reasons. Disclosures will address histories and genealogies that inscribe themselves outside of the rigid bonds of ‘monopolistic’ versus ‘alternative’ social and cultural activity.

A range of practitioners, from tactical media practitioners, to cultural theorists, music producers and artists, will help identify and discuss references and strategies that have been common to two interrelated areas of practice: critical media practice and socially-collaborative work in the expanded visual art field. The various facets of the project will attempt to find a common language and to set up the basis for improved understanding and greater collaboration between the two fields.

LAUNCH

Date: Thursday 27 March 2008, 20.00–01.00
Location: Mother/333
Participants: Oliver Ressler | Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive)

SEMINAR

Dates: Saturday 29 - Sunday 30 March 2008, 10.30–19.30
Location: Toynbee Hall (Saturday 29th) and Middlesex Street Estate (Sunday 30th)
Participants: Electronest | Critical Practice | Ilze Black | Tim Jones | Saul Albert | Marina Vishmidt | The MicroPolitics Research Group | Nenad Romic | Simon Sheikh | Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre | Neil Kenlock | Marysia Lewandowska | Toni Prug | Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran | Adnan Hadzi | Harold Offeh | The People Speak | Emily Druiff | Tony Nwachukwu and Gavin Alexander | Matthew Fuller | Usman Haque | Tsila Hassine | Goldin+ Senneby | agency | Mai Abu ElDahab | Francis McKee | Rodrigo Nunes

FILM AND READING LIBRARY

Dates: Preview on Thursday 10 April, runs till Sunday 18 May. Open Wed-Sun, 12.00–18.00
Location: Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 5RH
Films by: Shaina Anand | Amy Balkin | Neil Cummings, Marysia Lewandowska, Eileen Simpson, Ben White | Carles Guerra | Nicoline von Harskamp | Tsila Hassine | Abhishek Hazra | Kurator | The League of Noble Peers | Oliver Ressler | Ashok Sukumaran

FLOATING EVENTS

Date: Thursday 10 April, 18.30-19.30
Location: Gasworks
Event: Deleted Swedish stories. A performative lecture by artist Petra Bauer to launch the library.

Date: Friday 11 April, 19.00-21.00
Location: Gasworks
Screening: Lavorare con Lentezza - Radio Alice 100.6 Mhz (2004) dir. Guido Chiesa, scriptwriters: Guido Chiesa and Wu Ming (duration 111 min); followed by a discussion with artist Petra Bauer and philosopher Rodrigo Nunes.

Date: Monday 21 April, 11.00-16.00
Location: Ben Pimlott Building, Seminar Room, Digital Studios, Goldsmiths University of London, New Cross SE14 6NW
Workshop: Taxi to Praxi (and back again): the next layer research day, a collaboration between Armin Medosch and Adnan Hadzi to address and discuss some of the generic, rather than discipline-specific, challenges of undertaking practice-based research within academia.

Date: Sunday 18 May, 12.00-20.00
Location: Gasworks
Screening: La Commune (1999) dir. Peter Watkins (duration 345 min). Includes breaks with refreshments, food and discussions. This event will mark the closing of the library.

Disclosures is supported by Arts Council England, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Henry Moore Foundation and the Austrian Cultural Forum, London. Disclosures is part of NODE.London Spring ‘08.

About Gasworks: Founded in 1994, Gasworks is an art organisation based in South London, housing twelve artists’ studios and proposing a programme of exhibitions and events, artists’ residencies, international fellowships and educational projects. Gasworks focuses on visual arts practice in its broadest sense, working discursively with UK-based and international artists to facilitate the development of their work. Gasworks’ programme is committed to providing a responsive context for the work of emerging and mid-career artists, and to disseminating critical practices to a wider audience. Gasworks is part of Triangle Arts Trust, an international network of artists and organisations.

A wide range of actors around the globe is currently involved in the creation of unprecedentedly rich and invaluable audiovisual cultural and knowledge resources on the internet. These range from national audiovisual archives, broadcasters, professional cultural producers and institutions to civic and p2p file sharing initiatives.

De Balie in Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, in collaboration with Knowledgeland, Images for the Future, and Virtual Platform, organise a two-day international public working conference on the economies, sustainability, and opportunities for creative reuse of these public audiovisual resources and archives.

While the level of activity and investment in this area is enormous, the question of the longer-term sustainability of these audiovisual resources remains wide open. Continued massive public investment is one obvious solution, with equally obvious drawbacks. The conference intends to question which alternative economic models exist, or could be developed that can sustain invaluable public resources. Paradoxically, we may have to ask: What is a sustainable business model for the digital commons?

The Economies of the Commons conference will focus on three core issues: strategies for sustainability, new modes of value creation, and the potentials for creative reuse around the digital commons. Our main questions are:

- What kind of strategies are available to facilitate the growth of these emerging public knowledge resources, and guarantee their longer- term sustainability?
- How is value created around the emerging digital commons, and how can this value be capitalised on for the public good?
- How can these resources be activated as a creative productive force for contemporary culture, and how can the reuse of these enormously rich resources be facilitated and stimulated?

These questions will be related to current projects, such as Images of the Future (the largest digitisation project of audiovisual heritage in the Netherlands), P2P Fusion (European research project on audio and video sharing), BBC Creative Archives, Prelinger Archives, Smithsonian Global Sound and UbuWeb.

The conference brings together a highly international group of specialists, including Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Rick Prelinger (prelinger Archives), Roei Amit (INA), Kenneth Goldsmith (UbuWeb), Anthony McCann (Hallam University), Hubert Best (Best & Soames / FOCAL), Lucy Guibault (University of Amsterdam), Florian Schneider (Kein.tv) and many others. Economies of the Commons creates spaces of discussion in which perspectives of mainstream audiovisual archives are mixed with those of market players as well as public domain and non-legal exchange networks (p2p). The program comprises a variety of formats, such as public keynote lectures, interdisciplinary workshops for the exchange of ideas, experiences and the formulation of strategies, as well as targeted seminars addressing very specific problems relevant to specialists, cultural and media producers, policy makers, and decision makers in public and private organisations.

The Economies of the Commons conference addresses a range of target groups that do not regularly meet each other. These include: (broadcast) media professionals, representatives from cultural heritage organisations, internet entrepreneurs, ethnomusicologists, musicians and representatives of the music industry, media activists, researchers in the domains of internet law, economy, information science, p2p file sharing activists, policy makers, and professionals from the field of art and culture.

Special public evening programs will introduce the topics of the conference to a wider audience and present best practice examples.

A one-day seminar at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, on Intellectual Property Rights issues in the digital audiovisual domain, precedes the conference on Thursday April 10, the results of which will feed into the conference program.

A web dossier has been set up that provides further information on the conference program and side events, program updates, and information on speakers and highlighted case studies, as well as general background and research materials. This dossier can be found at: www.ecommons.eu

Enquiries about the conference program and registration can be directed at:

Eric Kluitenberg
De Balie
Kleine Gartmanplantsoen 10
1017 RR Amsterdam

The researchers leading the work at the University of Maryland are NEIL FRAISTAT (Professor of English and Director, MITH), MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM (Associate Professor of English and Associate Director, MITH), and KARI KRAUS (Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies and English).

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games, interactive fiction, and shared realtime virtual spaces. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games and electronic literature, as well as Second Life, the popular and influential multi-user online world. According to Fraistat, “This grant from the Library of Congress places MITH and its grant partners at the forefront of those addressing a range of increasingly urgent questions involving the preservation of creative works that are “born digital”–from interactive electronic literature, to digital games, to virtual worlds such as Second Life. We are especially pleased to have as an industry partner, Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life itself.”

In addition to contributing to the work on Second Life, Maryland will take the lead on interactive fiction/electronic literature as a sub-domain of the project, and will be occupied with all aspects of scoping, metadata, intellectual property, evaluation, and archiving of these materials. We will initially focus on a small number of targeted works of recognized cultural and literary significance, including former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1984 interactive novel Mindwheel, Will Crowther’s ADVENTURE (written in 1975 and widely considered the earliest interactive text of its kind), and selected items from a large private collection of 1980s-era hardware and software recently gifted to MITH. The international Electronic Literature Organization will also extend its support and in kind contributions to our work here at Maryland.

The project begins in January 2008. Notice of other recent Preserving Creative America NDIIPP awards is available here.

In the area of software development copyleft has proved to be a tremendously effective means of creating an information commons which broadly benefits all those whose production depends on it. However, many artists, musicians, writers, film-makers and other information producers remain sceptical that a copyleft based system where anyone is free to reproduce their work, can earn them a living. Copyleft licenses guarantee intellectual property freedom by requiring that reuse and redistribution of information be governed by ‘the four freedoms,’ the freedom to use, study, modify and redistribute.” Continue reading Copyfarleft and Copyjustright by Dmytri Kleiner, Mute magazine. Also see Rhizome Adds Creative Commons Licenses.

Shortly before most of my fellow aesthetically challenged comrades arrived in Dubrovnik, whilst the keener iCommoners soaked up the Adriatic sun, a handful of artists in residence were toiling away to produce and curate an exhibition for our benefit. The low level of engagement from practising artists in fields beyond electronica music, academic writing and journalism is a problem familiar to any meeting of free culture communities. So it was a wonderful surprise to sit through a discussion between the artists in residence nominally set-up to discuss their engagment with the ‘copyfight’ and strategies to build sustainability for peer produced free culture, Less surprising was the theme of the presentations and subsequent conversations; their interest in, and engagement with, the ‘commons-based peer production’ ideology was varied and complex.
Nathaniel Stern, having been involved last year in Rio, has been trying to build upon that experience to explore how certain ‘commons’ values might be expressed through participatory sculpture that creates performances. He found a tension between those curated participants who held his frames and members of the public (largely kids) who interacted with the created space, and watching the spontaneity of this interaction certainly made physical and concrete some aspects of peer based production. Quite an irony, trying to replicate a form of production that is itself an abstraction from the concrete production he was engaging in! Or at least that is my interpretation of his work anyway. Nathanel - feel free to comment to the effect that this is a load of tosh!

One comment stood out for me. Joy Garnett, speaking about her experience with the (infamous?) Joywar episode, radically reconceptualised the copyfight. It’s not about money, she suggested, it’s a battle over meaning. The photojournalist who wanted to obstruct her work was insisting that the meaning of her photograph was intimitely connected to its context - the revolutionary struggle in Nicuragua - and so Joy’s painting decontextualised the photo, stripping it of its meaning and artistic integrity. For Joy, the meaning of the work is inherently contextual, i.e. it will depend upon where it is exhibited, how it is exhibited, how it is reinterpreted and transformed by the audience or fellow artist. To constrain art by refusing others the right to recontextualise particular works is completely antithetical to her approach, and arguably to the history of both fine art and culture broadly defined.

In other words, the fight that exploded around that painting wasn’t about one copyright owner trying to defend a particular financial interest, nor about a straightforward desire to control her work. It was a battle of critical theory and of aesthetics. Joy became interested in copyright because a key motivation of her work is transgression, and ‘permission culture’ copyright is one barrier that she finds herself transgressing in a desire to bring forgotten images to the public eye in new forms. She’d face the same barrier if she came across a Creative Commons licensed work that required permission to be sought for commercial use.

This sense that Joy’s motivations and approach towards copyright was quite different to the standard Creative Commons discourse ran throughout each presentation. Nathaniel summed it up quite neatly when responding to a question about commercialising Creative Commonc licenses: it’s not about using CC licenses to make money, it’s about how those licenses relate to and facilitate different artistic practices; where they offer, or assist, a means of making money then so much the better. Ana Husman was refreshingly willing to recognise the public value of her work, and her civic responsibility to share her work freely when she received public funding. Kathryn Smith and Jaka ÂŽeleznikar recognised that the general ethic of the commons was a natural fit with much of their work. There’s a connection, certainly, but CC could hardly be put forward as a central part of their practise.

Too often we can start to view culture (and what a broad term that is!) through the lens of copyright, Creative Commons or even the free software community’s norms. When we do this we lose sight of the intense diversity of artistic practice out there, and forget the true import and relevance of our work, so it was really significant to have a space where practising full time artists could discuss their thoughts with their fellow commonistas. [posted by tchance on iCommons iSummit]

The Art Happens Here

[Image: Nathaniel Stern's Sentimental Construction #1, part of The Wireframe Series site-specific, publicly performed “spaces,” made of rope (2007). Performers / documentarians / collaborators: JC Bukenya, Tomislav Domis, Joy Garnett, Ana Husman, Kathryn Smith, Tim Whidden (MTAA) and Jaka Zeleznikar.] The Art Happens Here :: Opens 15 June @ 21h30, Croatian time :: iCommons Summit 2007, Lazareti Art Workshop, Dubrovnik Croatia :: Simulcast to Annenberg Island in SL, 12h30 PDT, Second Life.

The Art Happens Here is a contemporary art exhibition and presentation at the iCommons Summit 2007, resulting from an ongoing artist in residence programme. Six international artists and a critic were invited to produce physical and virtual work that engages with fair use, copyright, re-mixing, piracy and/or collaboration on some level - whether directly or indirectly.

Works on show will include, but not be limited to, art books, murals, net.art, sculpture, public performance, video and installation — all conceptually linked by their engagement with the Commons, by the artists’ time spent in Dubrovnik. Participants include: Joy Garnett (USA), Ana Husman (Croatia), Kathryn Smith (South Africa), Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa), MTAA (Mike Sarff & Tim Whidden, USA), Jaka Zeleznikar (Slovenia) and blog-critic Paddy Johnson (of artfagcity, USA). There will also be a special appearance in the SL exhibition by Patrick Lichty, aka Man Michinaga (USA).

Artist Discussion Panel on Creative Commons and its potential uses and effects in professional arts practice will be a part of the iCommons main programme in Dubrovnik, 15h00 Croatian time.