The aim of this text is to build a theoretical framework within which a creative and critical engagement with information technologies and their associated "new media" can produce a transformative practice. The phrase "transformative practice" is derived from Walter Benjamin's discussion of Brecht's "functional transformation" in the Author as Producer speech of 1934 (*1) . I understand it to mean a practice that brings into question the material and social relations within which it is constructed, and potentially changes those relations. Throughout this text I will use this definition of transformation as a yardstick for measuring the success of a practice
I will look at Brecht's engagement with new the (old) new media of film and radio to show how the instrumental use of information technology and new media can determine social relations, and how a critical engagement with new media can therefore transform those relations.
I will then examine the mechanisms by which information technologies (from the printing press to the personal computer) mediate social relations, and how corporate control of those technologies can undermine the possibility of transformation. To contextualise new media practice in contemporary society, I will look at the failure of Conceptualism's use of information as a medium to remain transformative in the current phase of the information economy(*2).
Finally, I will look at successful contemporary new media practices and in doing so will try to explore some of the specific transformative tactics that they employ. I will describe briefly the two most important of these here, so that they can be referred to in the ensuing examination of new media and transformation.
The first is a computer operating system(*3) called Linux. In 1999 the prestigious Ars Electronica award was awarded to the thousands of collaborating programmers that are still developing Linux as an alternative to commercial, copyrighted software. The second practice I will refer to is that of the Swedish art group etoy. They are actively engaged with information technology and their practice resides primarily on the Web. etoy recently made legal history when they won a court battle with the U.S. e-commerce giant eToys.com (a toy retailer) over the ownership of their domain name (www.etoy.com). This has set a legal precedent for many other battles over web space between corporations and small organisations.
The transformative potential of Linux hinges on its ability to avoid corporate ownership and copyrighting (with an ingenious "copyleft"(*4) which prohibits the use of Linux for copyrighted commercial products), and to encourage users to modify and change it according to their needs. In the section entitled Open Source I will explore Linux further, describe the programming techniques that make it possible, and show how those techniques work transformatively. I will also show how etoy use many of Linux's techniques in another cultural context to similarly transformative effect. However, before any further discussion of these practices can take place, this basic question must be asked: "what is new media, and how does it become transformative?" To answer this, it is necessary to return to Benjamin, and his discussion of Brecht as a transformative producer.
Walter Benjamin's speech, The Author as Producer(*5) delivered using the (then) new technology of radio, is often employed as a theoretical justification for the fatuous use of any new media. His enthusiasm for and use of radio is often misunderstood to mean that any new technology must have intrinsic transformative potential. While the initial novelty and unfamiliarity of a technology might offer some opportunity for a temporary destabilisation of the social relations with which it interacts, it is quickly normatized, and often the pioneering, transformative uses of new technologies are themselves assimilated as strategies and used to the opposite effect. Benjamin used the new technology of radio to deliver his speech, but rather than advocating the use of new technology, he emphasised "technique", and when characterising "transformative practice", he chose the example of Brecht's epic theatre.
Richard Wright describes how Brecht used techniques of montage derived from the contextual jumble of tuning a radio or splicing film(*6) . Benjamin saw this practice as transformative because it used the perceptual montage techniques of new media to destabilise social relations by necessitating a dialectical reception(*7) .
By revealing these tensions as expressed on stage, Brecht presents the opportunity for a dialectical understanding of the work, its subjects, the situations of the viewers and actors and of the media it involves. In What is Epic Theatre, Benjamin shows how Brecht promotes this dialectical, questioning attitude.
"Like the pictures in a film, epic theatre moves in spurts. Its basic form is that of the shock with which the single, well-defined situations of the play collide". (*8)
Benjamin discusses the use of contextual montage, emphasising that it is the revealing of the multiple contexts in which actors and their characters simultaneously exist that shocks the audience, rather than any emotive content to the play. He makes the link to a new medium, showing how Brecht uses the contextual and visual juxtapositions inherent in edited film as dramatic techniques. He also shows interruption to be one of Brecht's vital strategies:
"ŠIntervals which, if anything, impair the illusion of the audience and paralyse its readiness for empathy. These intervals are reserved for the spectators' critical reaction - to the actions of the players and to the way in which they are presented."
First using techniques that emulate audience reaction to film, Brecht then uses interruption to collapse the illusory effect, calling into question the role of the audience as well as the actions and portrayal of the actors. This had the effect of revealing the contradictions and implicit hierarchies propagated on stage and screen, and therefore causing the subsequent watching of actual film to collapse in the same way.
This practice can be seen to be transformative as it links the production and reception of epic theatre to the production and reception of the associated new media of film and radio. Brecht's theatre was empowered by association with these mass media that were themselves in turn transformed by this association in both reception and production(*9) .
It is important to stress the link with production because until now only reception has been mentioned here. After initial fame in Weimar Germany, Brecht and other radical German cultural producers in political exile constituted an influential cultural force in wartime, and then post-war America. Brecht's work fed back into the production of new media forms, even though he himself was working with stagecraft. The transformative potential of Brecht's engagement with new media such as radio was dependent on the potential of the medium to determine social relations.
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan argues that radio was a defining cultural force in the early 20th Century and gives the example of Hitler's use of that medium.
"[The reason] Hitler came into political existence at all is directly owing to radio and public address systems."(*10)
McLuhan expands on this by examining the relationship between radio and the printed word. He describes the ability of radio, by escaping the "cool"(*11) visual organisation of text, to "Turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber"(*12) . He sees the sudden possibility of communicating to a huge public but in an intimate setting, as producing some kind of "primal" and "explosive" response, almost irrespective of the content of what is being said. The sudden institution of draconian broadcasting controls in 1920s Britain are testament to the importance of radio as a method of controlling public opinion during the two world wars. In 1919 a non-regulated radio broadcast infrastructure included 250,000 amateur enthusiasts. This was reduced considerably by the introduction of licence fees and restrictions in 1920 and in 1926 a European convention outlawed all non-governmental public broadcasting. (*13)
When Brecht used techniques derived from radio, he used interruption and montage to necessitate a dialectical reception of both his plays, and of the war time propaganda that used the persuasive power of radio. Noam Chomsky has shown that powerful elites such as government and corporations continue to use "old" new media such as radio or newspaper as well as newer ones such as television, to retain power, preventing the transformation of social relations through what he terms "manufacturing consent". In order to look at the transformative potential of new media, it is necessary to refer to Chomsky's theories briefly.
"Manufacturing Consent" is the practice of repressive social elites using mass media to create and control "public opinion" and thereby maintain hegemony in supposedly "democratic" non-violent (or non-explicitly violent) governmental systems(*14) . By contesting the new media that were vital to the manufacture of consent, Brecht's practice became transformative. His approach, adopting techniques of new media rather than the media themselves, could be seen as a pragmatic and tactical response to the government clamping down on access to these channels of communication to the newly created "listeners".
"In a democratic political order, there is always the danger that independent thought might be translated into political action, so it is important to eliminate the threat at its root." (*15)
The "root" of independent thinking as Chomsky figures it is the well-informed individual. He argues that by suppressing potentially disturbing information, and continually repeating inanities, the mass media create apathy and a taste for triviality in their consumers. He shows how the possibility of transformativity is suppressed by the premise of brevity in corporate controlled mass media. His argument is that if you can only have three minutes "on air" (a situation necessitated by the short attention span cultivated by mass-media in consumers) it is impossible to say anything contrary to established beliefs, because this might require explanation and proof. Following this logic, transformative use of mass media is impossible where the agenda is set by corporate sponsorship.
In the 1993 film Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky places his hopes in the "alternative" media, and focuses on the independent "Z" magazine (now Znet) as a potentially transformative cultural entity. He also talks about listener-directed radio stations as potential sites for the cultivation of "independent thought", the key to producing transformative political action. As Z magazine puts it "our product is our magazine, not our readers"(*16) . They do not sell their readership to corporate interests as advertising statistics. It is in this way that non-corporate owned computer software such as Linux can be seen as part of this "independent" media. In order to establish the transformative potential of an independent use of contemporary new (computer and Internet based) media, it is first necessary to see how these media are being used to manufacture consent.
In an interview with Corporate Watch, an independent media "watchdog on the net", Chomsky reiterates his arguments about the manufacture of consent with regards to corporate use of Internet(*17) based media. He again states his hopes for the 'independent' producers that use these media for distribution and collective organisation. Chomsky disregards the simplistic view of technological determinists whereby the Internet, a distributed telecommunications infrastructure designed by the military, could not, due to its heritage have the potential to transform the hierarchy from which it emerged. He argues that that despite its military heritage, the Internet was built using public funds (in universities and government research facilities) and therefore does not have the interests of corporate capital so firmly built into it as to prevent any transformative use. Once this is understood, the problem with ascribing a transformative potential to the use of the Internet arises when one looks at the software facilitating its public use. From the "web browser" to the word processor, to the computer operating system itself, the production and reception of electronic media, 'independent' or not, passes through the mill of software. The vast majority of this software is produced by corporations and funded by the nefarious capital interests that Chomsky exposes. Not only is software primarily engineered by these interests, it is never even legally relinquished to the consumer. Most proprietary software is "licensed" or "leased" to the user rather than actually sold . (*18)
When the interviewer asks Chomsky's opinion on the fact
"ŠThat software, as a way of doing things carries cultural values, and impacts language and perception. " (*19)
He states that the effects of such manipulative potential will depend on whose agenda is being served. He predicts that the nefarious use of software will work in similar ways to that of mass media, to manufacture consent by the promotion of consumer products and diversion and the selective exclusion of certain information.
Chomsky concentrates on the reception of information delivered via the Internet. He disregards the fact that the flow of information in computer and Internet based media is two-way. The production (as well as the reception) of computer or Internet-based information is, in the main, contingent on the use of software that has been designed and funded by corporate capital. This not only produces the possibility of manufacturing consent, but also of effectively eradicating dissent, by controlling the means by which information is processed, produced and published.
This line of inquiry would seem to be pertinent to Chomsky's analyses of the manufacture of consent, as both his training, and the point of departure of his investigation was in linguistics, and it is in that domain that the manipulative use of software is revealed. In order to explore the transformative potential of software-reliant media, it is necessary to examine the mechanisms by which software "denies dissent". For this purpose some empirical research must be conducted.
Writing this I am constantly reminded of the manipulations of software. The word processor underlines(*20) words and grammatical constructions it has not been programmed to recognise in red and green. This may seem innocuous, even useful, but the corrections it suggests are often non-sensical distortions, or stylistic alternatives rather than necessary corrections. The question may then be asked who is making the stylistic decisions about the writing?(*21) This question becomes worrying when underlying ideological imperatives are detected in the proper names which the spelling dictionary recognises or fails to recognise(*22). Among those that are immediately underlined in red are Engels, (the spell check suggests Angels), Heidegger (the spell check suggests headgear) and Che Guevara, (He Guava). However, the spell check has no problem accepting the name of every American president from Clinton to Taylor(*23) . Again, this seems to be a trivial geographical and political bias, which hardly constitutes a threat to individual thought. However, the way in which "independent" thoughts are mediated in their external expression can influence strongly the way in which those thoughts are formed internally.
George Orwell's dystopian vision of 1984(*24) contains a very relevant example of such a divisive use of technology. In the first scene of the book the protagonist Winston Smith finds himself unable to pen down his own thoughts in a diary. He is physically unable to write due to his habitual reliance on the futuristic "speakwrite" to which he must dictate all his administrative writing at the "Ministry of Truth". Most importantly, he is also unable to structure his dissident thoughts, hardly even able to recognise or articulate his dissent. Although Orwell's dystopian vision was based on 1940's Stalinist Russia, his "speakwrite" is concretised in contemporary software. The way the "speakwrite" functions to inhibit Winston Smith's ability to think independently can be examined by looking back to earlier forms of information technology, such as the printing press. Although a thorough semantic-cultural analysis of the effects of printing technologies on Renaissance society is beyond the scope of the current text, a brief outline of how information technology can be used to shape thought through language is vital to the construction of a transformative use of this technology.
"At this point an older primary oral world is dying out in a certain sense within consciousness and a new visual-verbal world is gaining credibilityŠIn the noetic economy, purportedly inert 'facts' rather than intrinsically evanescent sayings will have the ascendancy as never before." (*25)
Walter Ong's writing about the Renaissance and the shift from script to print can be transposed easily onto the current shift from print to electronic storage. He shows how the rationalising force of printing technologies superseded the oral noetic tradition of "sayings" or indigenously transmitted "wisdom". While it fuelled the educational expansion of the Enlightenment and introduced mass literacy for the first time, Ong shows how indigenous cultures and languages were steadily marginalised and eradicated by increasing standardisation and colonisation.(*26)
The first printing and wide dissemination of "correct" linguistic construction manuals and copybooks called "Commonplaces" were a feature of the Renaissance, and they can be compared in function to the current dissemination of software. These "commonplaces" contained the necessary formulas required for participation in society. They included exemplary letters ranging from how to address the butcher when paying a bill to how to invite guests to a meal or how to write to a clergyman. This model of standardised communications is repeated in the "templates" offered by word processors: a fax, a professional resume, a formal letter, all of which are necessary tools for contemporary social participation. The problem is not that these forms are necessary, but that the use of software promotes a passive acceptance of them as a norm rather than a dialectical engagement with them as a tool and an understanding of their implicit cultural values.
Other mechanisms of the printing press relate very clearly to the ways in which software functions to standardise language. Prior to print, scholars would read aloud, because the visual disarray of hand written script and the non-standardised, phonetic spelling of words prevented the visual formation of meaning. Meaning was created in the utterance of the words, usually in a hushed mumble. Ong states that it was the visual formation of meaning that caused language to become a "controlled and closed field" in which written 'fact' rather than the indigenous 'saying' holds power to constitute truth. This bias not only sets up an intrinsic conservatism in written and taught language(*27) , it forms the basis of linguistic power structures and has wider implications for the way that thought and memory are constructed.
"The effects on the accumulation, storage, and retrieval of knowledge will be vast, as will the effects on the kind of knowledge to which the mind shapes itself." (*28)
The visual organisation of text on a page led to "units" of verbalised thought being "pinned down" with newly invented typographic systems. The most important effect of this ability to reliably repeat the visual organisation of information was the invention of the index. Prior to printing technology, one hundred copies of a book would require one hundred indices. The new ease with which indices of knowledge were being created in print changed methods of information retrieval, and also those of information classification. The term "index" is an abbreviation of the earlier "index locorum communium" (the index of common places). This means that:
"The elements into which an index breaks down a book are, basically, 'places' in the text and simultaneously 'places' (topoi, loci) in the mind " (*29)
The fixing of 'topics' in the regimen of the printed index had the effect of standardising and territorialising the 'common places' not only of language but also of thought. The effects of this standardisation on Renaissance thinking contributed to a trend for the highly regimented systems of thought that emerged in humanist philosophy. An example of this is Peter Ramus'(*30) use of "Solon's Law" (the social/architectural theory by which classical Athens was built (*31)) when he produced his "dichotomised diagrams" which broke down 'topics' of thought into sections and sub-sections that could be applied universally. Ramus' hierarchical visualisation of thought processes bears comparison to the "Jackson diagram" flowcharts used to plan the design of computer programs. In cases where the computer program is a closed, imposed system, it can have the same effect of limiting and defining the "kind of knowledge to which the mind shapes itself" as Ong ascribes to the institution of print.
This 16th Century revolution in information technology facilitated the process of the standardisation of knowledge and thought, therefore enabling the divisive use of these technologies to maintain power. The subsequent acceleration and development of information technologies in the early 20th Century has also contributed to this process.
"From 'New Vision,' 'New Typography,' 'New Architecture' of the 1920's we move to new media of the 1990's from cinema the technology of seeing, to a computer the technology of memory: from Śdefamiliarisation' to information design."
In ŚAvant Garde as Software' Lev Manovich argues that the destabilising use of new media and typesetting techniques of Russian and European Modernists were co-opted by mainstream corporate media and finally normatized by their use in software interface design. The aesthetic shock tactics of the Bauhaus were de-politicised and then resurrected as the didactic visual infrastructure of software. The clarity of informational layout that typified Bauhaus design [see figure 1 in illustrations] combined with the dynamic juxtaposition of visual-contextual montage can be seen in the everyday workings of the computer operating system [see figures 2 and 3]. Manovich re-phrases the title of Abigail Solomon Godeaux's essay on the capitalist co-option of modernism 'From weapon to style' into 'From weapon to style to instrument of labour'.
Understanding the computer as the "technology of memory", means that it is not only the visual, but also the structural organisation of thought and memory that is subject to the standardising effects of information technology (just as the invention of the index was in the case of print). The systematic organisation of memory is an integral function of the computer operating system. The ways in which memory is stored and retrieved are therefore also subject to the manipulations of the corporate interests that produce most operating system software (not, of course in the case of non-proprietary operating systems such as Linux).
In their ontological analysis of organisational systems, (with specific reference to data structures in computer systems) Joel Slayton and Geri Wittig describe the computational representation of a "folder" that contains "files" as an autocatalytic system(*32) . They show that the existence of one "folder" anticipates the existence of other folders, and thus prescribes the trajectories along which the growth of a computer memory system can take place. This again, points to the directive potential of software operating systems to control the computationally abstracted function of memory. As Chomsky pointed out earlier, this is not necessarily problematic, but it depends on "whose interests are being served".
Perhaps the most worrying trend in the computer industry is the resurgence of orality under the regimen of software. Increasingly the keyboard is becoming obsolete. Speech controlled systems are already in place on telephone exchanges, and speech operated human-computer interfaces have become plausible replacements for the keyboard/mouse model. This is problematic because once the user must rely on software to interpret and transcribe speech, a grammatical construction or word that is not recognised by that software gets edited out or replaced with an "acceptable" version. Orwell's "speakwrite" is already on the market.
Having summarised the mechanisms by which information technology (when owned by corporate interests) can undermine the possibility of transformativity, it is now necessary to contextualise these findings in order to discuss how a contemporary engagement with these technologies can become transformative. It is in the context of the so-called "Information Economy"(*33) that information technology assumes a potential for power comparable to that of radio in the 1920's. Rather than attempting an economic and historical analysis of the onset of the "Information Economy" I will outline the meaning of the term and then look at its implications for the once-transformative conceptual arts practices of the 1970's that used information as their primary material.
In Necessary Illusions Chomsky traces the paradigm shift from power as presence, (the enforcing of despotic will on a people through violence) to power as information, (the manufacture of consent through control of the dissemination of information). He places the final stage of the ascendancy of an information paradigm in the increasing shift of the U.S. economy from wealth based on the "real economy" of manufacturing industries and material goods, to an "information economy" based on financial manipulation and speculation(*34) . He historically contextualises the completion of this shift in the dismantling of the international trade restrictions of the Bretton Woods(*35) system by the Nixon administration, and the sudden expansion of the telecommunications industry (the infrastructure of this economy), in the 1970's.
The primacy of information as an economic medium produced wild fluctuations in the monetary value of material goods as they were subjected to the manipulations of the stock exchanges. This highlighted the correspondent fluctuations in the value of artistic products, similarly based on the information available on their provenance and perceived cultural value. Artists working with information as a cultural medium were therefore able to take advantage of the initial transformative potential of this framework to resist the commodifying force of the culture industry.
"For conceptual artists of the 60's and 70's the information economy had not yet become a reality, and hence ideas and information could remain sites of resistance to commodification so long as they remained unreified" . (*36)
Josephine Berry argues that artists of the time recognised the immanent primacy of information and embraced it as a site of inherent potential transformativity. The resistance to commodification was seen as the prerequisite of transformativity because by preventing the monetary valuing and exchange of a work of art, the artist would question rather than re-enforce perceived notions of cultural value, and thus pose a threat to the culture industry . (*37)
"Art is treated as a fetish; and as the fetish, the work's social rating (misinterpreted as its artistic status) becomes its use value. " (*38)
Horkeimer and Adorno show how the fetishised modernist art object (to which conceptualism reacted) works in the interests of the culture industry to re-enforce and perpetuate existing social relations. They state that art has always been a commodity, but that in it's mass dissemination through the culture industry, its function became synonymous with that of advertising; the maintenance of social and political norms.
Conceptual art used banal and ephemeral media to dematerialise the art object and posit the site of artistic meaning in the unreified concept (*39). This was successful in various ways; the new portability of the conceptual artwork fostered an artist-led internationalism, unfettered by accountability to commercial gallerists and other cultural exporters. It also proved to be a hindrance to assimilation by the established commercial art world that still dealt solely in the material art object. However, as Berry says, Conceptual art's ability to escape commodification and remain transformative relied on its remaining unreified. By examining how this project failed, it is possible to build the framework of the information economy within which to contextualise contemporary transformative practice.
"We have become foot soldiers in our own movement, answerable to officers in funding agencies and local government recreation departments. " (*40)
In 1973 The Arts Council of England's "New Activities Committee" set out to investigate what they referred to as "Community Arts "(*41) and to budget for it. In Community Arts and The State Owen Kelly describes how the "Baldry Commission" set out to define this movement in terms that the Arts Council's accountants could understand and act upon. Kelly argues that in its eagerness to obtain government funding for the movement, the commission fudged the report, excluding the radical elements and contentious practices of the "Community" artists and defining the movement instead as one which "Worked with children" and "disadvantaged elements of society".
These definitions not only reified the value of conceptual art in terms of social services, education, recreation and welfare (the budgets with which it was then funded,) it also ossified these definitions into inflexible boundaries beyond which the movement could not grow without losing its funding. This financial leverage forced artists to define their work in terms that could be understood and paid for, either with government "social services" funding, or in commercial terms.
In the recent show "Live in Your Head" at the Whitechapel Gallery, the ephemeral remains of 60's and 70's performance and conceptual art works are enclosed behind glass, or watched by invigilators who paradoxically prevent the public from interacting with them. The Conceptualists were forced to dismantle their radical agenda and calculate the value of their work in terms of "services", or produce saleable material goods (if only as "documentation", a sly compromise) in order to obtain funding and/or exposure. This has allowed the eventual reification of the concept as fetishised art object, imbued with the conservative values of the culture industry(*42) .
However, the dematerialization of labour and its reification as "services" was a wider cultural trend in rich industrialised countries. The quantification of the value of "services" and "concepts" was a primary feature of the development of consumer culture. The fact that this was enacted upon conceptual art is hardly surprising given the tremendous boom of the U.S. economy service sector during the 60's and 70's.
"The simulation of a packet of noodles has become the true concept and the one who packages the product, commodity, or work of art has become the philosopher, conceptual persona, or artist." (*43)
As Deleuze and Guattari complain in What is Philosophy? The rise of the service and consumer industries has re-defined the word "concept". "Concepting" is now what advertising agents do in the initial phases of a project. The creation of a brand name, the "concept" of a product has become the primary economic determinant in Western economies. Once materials and manufacture are "globalised", they can be purchased cheaply from developing countries (often with no need for expenses such as human rights or accountability). The primary function, then, of the Western economies that consume these goods is to add the "services" that justify high prices. From 1929 to 1978 the section of the U.S. economy devoted to "services"(*44) grew from 54 per cent to 66 per cent. In 1999 it constituted 82 per cent of the U.S. gross national product . (*45)
When Berry says that for the Conceptualists the information economy had not yet become a "reality", she means that information based labour, primarily in the form of customer services (including brand and need production i.e. advertising) had not yet become the mainstay of developed economies. Most importantly, the value of these information-based services had not yet become the very basis for financial manipulation and speculation.
While financial trading still based its investment on material goods, the conceptualists found some transformative potential in dematerialization. In today's financial markets "dot coms", intangible web-based companies using untested business ideas and relying for visibility on words themselves (as web domain names)(*46) are the most highly valued and wildly fluctuating stocks. The information economy has become a reality in that both its basis of wealth - (in "services" and information products) and their stock market valuation system have become even further divorced from material reality . (*47)
The owners of the telecommunications infrastructure of this economy have been the first to reap the financial rewards of this paradigm shift. The self-applied name of the financiers and owners of this infrastructure: "The Communications Industry" reveals the imperative to own and control human communication. The rush for convergence shown most recently by the merger of Time Warner (an established culture industry giant) and America On Line (A.O.L.- the largest commercial web software distributors)(*48) shows how the culture industry is positioning itself to have a large stake in the software mechanisms of computer mediated communications. As further mergers of this sort take place, the means of cultural dissemination and production (as software and as mass media) will become increasingly owned and shaped by the interests of corporations, except, of course, you are using Linux.
Having examined the ways that software, new media and information technology can be used to prevent transformation and contextualised these findings in the information economy, it is now possible to discuss Linux in more depth. Linux is just one example of software produced using as set of techniques called "Open Source". In order to extract the techniques of "Open Source" that enable Linux to work transformatively, and then to examine contemporary practices that use new media, (or like Brecht the techniques of new media,) to effect transformation, a definition of Open Source is necessary.
"Open Source" (OS) is a term used to describe a collaborative, practice of software engineering and development. At first most software was developed in this way, saved on a shared computer along with a file containing its pre-compiled code (*49), plus the software tools and the information necessary to use and change it. The members of the development group could use the latest version of the software, determine its deficiencies and amend them before saving the new version in its updated form along with a note of what they had done.
This method was in use in labs and universities at a stage when timesharing of expensive computer facilities was necessary, long before the introduction of personal computers or proprietary software. As the first PCs came onto the market there was a rush to privatise software by territorialising it under copyright law. The practice of "closed source" copyright protected software produced within corporations became the norm. In non-commercial contexts, or within institutional boundaries, the practices of OS continued to develop. However, it was with the international expansion of the Internet that OS programming has become a transformative force within the otherwise commercially 'closed' software industry. The academic-scientific culture that produced the Internet was accustomed to the practices of sharing research and peer-review and so despite it's military heritage, the infrastructure of the Internet has developed to facilitate those practices (*50). Several non-commercial OS projects have grown to rival equivalent commercial software in quality and popularity, and have diversified by reacting to needs (linguistic or specialised) in areas not covered by commercial software. Now thousands of open source projects constitute a complex system of non-monetary value exchange(*51) that works as an alternative to proprietary, corporate models of software development.
The fact that Linux won the Prix Ars Electronica can therefore be read in two ways. It could be seen as a Duchampian gesture on the part of the Judges, positioning themselves as the finders of Linux as a readymade. This seems unlikely as it makes their position as judges untenable, and shows the very idea of "competition" and "prize" to be irrelevant in this context. It is more likely that the judges recognised the way that OS strategies bring Benjamin's conception of transformativity into the information economy through their production of a dialectical engagement with computer and Internet based media, and the prevention of corporate manipulation and ownership of those media. The judgement was not an incitement for artists to use Linux, rather it suggested OS as a framework for thinking about cultural practice that could function transformatively within the information economy. etoy's landmark legal victory over eToys is a compelling example of successful transformative practice, and so to enable a discussion of their use of OS I will offer a brief case history.
The Zurich-based art group etoy also won the Prix Ars Electronica in 1996 for their on-line promotion campaign "The Digital Hijack" in which users of search engines were falsely directed to their website [see figures 6 and 6.1]. Their work has always manipulated notions of value in the information economy. For example, a 1997-8 piece, etoy.SHARES consisted of their floatation on the stock market, and the simultaneous circulation of those shares in the art market, playing the two speculation games off against each other. Since then, their practice has been based on consistent attempts to raise the value of www.etoy.com in both the e-commerce-dominated stock market, and the international Śnew media' art market.
When 20,000 visitors started arriving at etoy's site every day having typoed their way into www.etoy.com while looking for eToys (the American e-commerce toy retailer: www.etoys.com), etoy was only too pleased with the chance to reach a new and unsuspecting public. eToys, however, were concerned that their users might be exposed to art by mistake and offered etoy over thirty thousand pounds to sell their domain name. etoy, whose entire share value had been built around www.etoy.com, refused to sell. eToys then filed a lawsuit against etoy for "brand dilution" and "trade mark violation". Even though the domain www.etoy.com had been registered three years before eToys' own domain www.etoys.com, the artists had not registered "etoy" as a trademark until 1997. On this spurious legal basis, eToys attempted to terrorise etoy into relinquishing their domain name by incurring huge legal fees (up to $40,000) and filing an injunction to get their domain blocked before the expected Christmas shopping rush. Network Solutions Inc.(*52) (NSI) blocked the domain www.etoy.com almost immediately. As a further aggressive measure to prevent any recourse to the public or sympathetic media from etoy, eToys persuaded NSI to block all e-mail to etoy, as well as suspend their other domains (such as http://broadcast.etoy.com, hardly a likely typo from www.etoys.com).
In response to this, etoy declared "toywar", they developed a collaborative on-line "game" at www.toywar.com the aim of which was to wage an "information war" on eToys, where all weapons, strategies, and casualties were information based. The functions of the toy-weapons were to devalue eToys' share price and simultaneously elevate that of etoy. The eventual success of the "toywar" hinged on one crucial "toy-weapon" developed by agent.Nasdaq (a.k.a. Reinhold Grether). Nasdaq had just finished a study of the NASDAQ stock exchange (on which eToys was valued), and had determined that eToys was about to drop substantially in share value due to general market trends. The agent then organised a campaign during which agents would sit in investors web site forums, predicting a drop in eToys' share price as a result of negative publicity from the "toywar". When, as predicted by agent.Nasdaq, the share price did fall, the media coverage was deafening, and eToys withdrew their lawsuit almost immediately and paid etoy's $40,000 legal fees. When the domain name was not immediately reinstated, etoy "command-centre" ordered a salvo of complaint e-mails to eToys from the 1400 strong toy-army. The following day, the domain was reinstated.
The methods by which etoy harnessed the enthusiasm and action of thousands of participating "toy-soldiers" at www.toywar.com bear much resemblance to OS strategies of collaboration. In the following sections, I will discuss vital techniques of OS and show how they feature in several contemporary transformative practices, including etoy's.
"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing ." (*53)
One of the most effective Open Source strategies is its de-centring of authorship. Work is never produced by a single person but is constantly undergoing a process of development by all those involved in its use. However, authorship is still vitally important in the production of an open source product, each open source product is distributed with a text file documenting the contribution of each author. There are varying degrees of authorial status expressed in the document, according to how much effort and effect is perceived to have been made on the part of each person.
"The dominance of the author/artist is first questioned when we recognise that all art is collectively produced" (*54)
In her Barthes-inspired essay The Death of the Author, Janet Woolf dispels the notion of individual creativity by acknowledging the many processes that premise the production of the artwork (such as the manufacture of materials or the development of techniques and tools).
"The de-centring of the subject must not be made equivalent to its disappearance" (*55)
By quoting Giddens Woolf re-assesses Barthes' Death of the Author to propose a more flexible definition of the term "author". Rather than being annihilated, the author is seen as being dynamically constructed by social and ideological factors. The work can have varying levels of de-centred authorial privilege; the death of the author is not an absolute.
By substituting "author" with "authors" the privilege is distributed as in an OS model. The reputation derived from the individual contribution can be maintained, but the work is never assigned a finite subject. Each user is offered the opportunity to contribute on an equal footing, and to further understand the work by changing it. This produces the hybrid position of the user/author, a position that invites a dialectical understanding of, and response to, the work
" A text's unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination" (*56)
Barthes' reversal of the modernist trope of looking through the artwork to the fetishised author can be seen as a reactive and political action directed against the culture industries' infrastructure for the production, evaluation and reception of art. By combining the positions of user and author, the conventional flow of meaning (author > work > viewer) and Barthes' inverse of that (viewer > work > author) both disintegrate. What is left is a mutually productive dialectical relationship: user/author <> work. The work becomes a site for development and dialogue between people of equal standing.
"The AAA develops as a non-hierarchical network of like-minded groups around the world dedicated to local, community-based space exploration programs... There is no centralised leader and there are no membership requirements. Anyone can get involved - and that means you!"(*57) - The Association of Autonomous Astronauts, 1999
The AAA employs the strategy of de-centred authorship that they call "collective phantoms"(*58) without eradicating the notion of the author as such.
"Individuals can adopt the collective identity of the AAA whilst also maintaining a specific identity within the network." (*59)
The members of the group maintain an identity and are credited for each piece of work. This facilitates the entry of a "viewer" into the AAA as a productive collaborator, on a potentially equal footing, depending on the work subsequently undertaken. The reaction engendered by this strategy is one of dialectical and productive engagement with a work in progress rather than the reinforcing of hierarchies engendered by the culture industry's model; the "closed" exposure of a signed and sealed product.
etoy also practice de-centred authorship. They wear identical costumes and hairstyles, and share the forename "etoy", while using "handles" such as etoy.ZAI or etoy.GRAMMAZIO, which are associated with unique skills, so each retains an identity within the group. [See figure 4]
"The pop-star is the coder is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy. 24h" (*60)
etoy.SHAREHOLDERS are not only expected to give money, they are called in to make creative decisions about the future of etoy, and are legally bound to collaborate (in proportion to their investment) in the artistic workings of etoy. During my experience of the "toywar" I became very much involved as a collaborator, rather than as a viewer. To show how the de-centring of authorship functioned transformatively in the "toywar", I will write a brief account of my experience.
I was sent an email from a friend recruiting me to the "toywar". I followed the link to www.toywar.com where I was confronted at the "recruitment-desk" with a series of tasks to perform and questions to answer within a limited period of time. I managed to pass the trials and was initiated into the toywar "battlefield". I was asked to choose what sort of toy-soldier I wanted to be: a lawyer-toy, a banker-toy, a spy-toy, a coder-toy, a media-toy, a DJ-toy or a toy-bomb(*61) . The site contained information on a variety of "missions" in which toys could to use their skills against eToys. These "missions" included such activities as writing "toy-bomb" letters to eToys customer relations, and scanning the eToys catalogue for illegal or morally dubious marketing ploys, and then exposing them in the media or to industry regulators.(*62) (See Figure 7) Success on a mission was rewarded with etoy.points, which could be exchanged for energy (to continue using the etoy-battlefield) and even merchandise (T-shirts, CD's etc.). Finally, the points of surviving toy.soldiers were converted to etoy.SHARES that constituted 10% of etoy's share value, and this allowed "rich" share-holding toywar-soldiers to become etoy-members, attend meetings and vote on artistic and management decisions. [See figure 8] In this way both the AAA and etoy become transformative in that by encouraging the position of the user/author in one setting (community-based space exploration or groundbreaking legal battles) they empower those people involved in other cultural contexts. This refers back to Benjamin, Adorno and Horkeimer's concept of the continuation and feedback of cinematic, mediated cultural experience into "real" life.
The AAA makes active use of slogans to convey their intentions. Two especially show how they intend to prevent the ossification of the AAA into a "show piece", a formula to be repeated, or a limited, single "history".
The AAA slogan "act locally, think intergalactically"(*63) , reclaims the buzz-phrase, "think global, act local", from corporations with aspirations to globalisation. Another one: "Autonomous Astronauts of the world; move in several directions at once!" Reconfigures the Marxist slogan "Workers of the world unite!" Both of these slogans in their original forms express the aspirations of ideologies (socialist or capitalist) to a universal significance. Both slogans advocate the spreading of a single, unitary ideology or product, and the creation of a market or a need for that unity. The AAA encourages a diversity of uses for the group's "collective phantom", and rather than trying to advocate a single image of the AAA, it actively encourages contradictory historification.
"Autonomous Astronauts will develop their own self-historification projects, and the emerging contradictions will ensure that the AAA will not be reduced to any single mythology". (*64)
This tactic, of maintaining mutability by accepting divergent and even contradictory aims and intentions, frustrates the attempts of the culture industry to historify and define the work of the AAA. It also allows an engagement with and participation in their work that does not necessitate a familiarity with any specific body of knowledge or cultural context. This strategy works in the opposite ways to those of ideology and multinational corporations, both of which seek to "educate" a locality into accepting the one ideology or product. The mutability and heterogeneity of OS can be seen by looking at how languages that are not catered for by software giants such as Microsoft can be programmed into OS software as and when they are needed. Rather than one corporate monopoly having to create a universal need for one product, many small companies and individuals can adapt the tools they need and trade them on a local level. (*65)
In an interview with Wired magazine, etoy.ZAI expressed etoy's intentions to keep changing projects and group members even through they had achieved spectacular success and notoriety with "toywar". The journalist notes that during interviews with members of etoy, the identically clad group members constantly swap over without warning, and continue each other's interviews along different lines, often without anyone noticing.
The fluidity of practices that work in this way not only opens up the opportunity for their own transformation by encompassing tangential, divergent trajectories; it prevents thier ossification into inflexible formulae or fixed sets of agendas and personalities. This is part of what enables collaboration and encourages participation with such a practice, because there is always space for input of any kind.
As Chomsky has shown, the transformativity of a practice depends on its ability to avoid being processed by corporate controlled media. This constitutes a major problem for practices that rely on those media for promotion (through advertising), evaluation (by critics and journalists), and distribution (hoping that people might be persuaded to find out about the practice).
The Infocentre, a curatorial experiment by Danish artists Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobssen, manages its promotion, evaluation and distribution without any recourse to corporate controlled media. They told friends and acquaintances about the Infocentre, and relied on those who saw and liked it to tell others they thought would be interested.
" We are looking for a quality of viewer, rather than wasting our time and money on a PR campaign" . (*66)
As soon as I arrived at the Infocentre (on the recommendation of a friend) I telephoned three more people to invite them to come along. In the end they were unimpressed after my excitement on the phone, so the word of mouth promotion stopped there, but it could have continued to grow exponentially. In the end, the Infocentre was very favourably and sensitively reviewed in Time Out, Artforum and Blueprint, so this campaign must have worked very well, as Jakob told me he had not sent out a single press release.
Jakob had prepared a two-minute tour of the Infocentre that he gave to each visitor, and then he told them that if they wanted to talk about the Infocentre or ask any questions, he and Henriette were available. They lived in the space throughout the show, and this worked to open up the work further. While there was no boundary set up between public, private, artist and viewer, exchange in the form of conversation was encouraged. The collaborations that took place were mostly low-key, in the form of debate, but some expanded into fully-fledged working collaboration. For example, the AAA were unknown to Henriette and Jakob before the Infocentre started, but through contact made when visiting the Infocentre, the AAA arranged to show propaganda and documentation there during the Space 1999 Intergalactic festival. In fact, Jakob and Henriette formed a new branch: the AAA Copenhagen. This example of a cross fertilisation between these practices shows how they used the same "open" structures.
Because the Infocentre relied on interpersonal networks to spread word about the show, there was no reliance on critics or reviewers to publicise it. This freed the Infocentre from the need to provide "press" views and brand name alcohol(*67) and to print glossy fliers to create the impression of corporate ratification and approval. There was no dependence on a publicised evaluation of the work by the culture industry that would seek to use it to reinforce notions of what is possible, acceptable or valuable. Instead the valuation of the Infocentre was performed by the people who visited it, and in such a way that the experience was one of productive collaboration rather than subjection. etoy are similarly free from dependence on corporate support, as they consider themselves to be on a level with any corporation:
"We are not anti-corporate. That's something people don't understand. We are an overdrive corporation with surreal goals." - etoy.ZAI, Wired. 2/2/2000. (*68)
The way in which they handle their public promotion works similarly to that of the Infocentre, without relying on dissemination through mass media, they sent out e-mails to friends and colleagues requesting that they recruit trustworthy toy-soldiers. The building of the etoy-community was done entirely using these methods. However, in their interactions on a corporate or politico-legal level, etoy are grandiose. The press coverage generated for the purposes of the toywar was a tactical deployment of the mass media to bring about a drop in eToys share value. The repercussions of the case have already been huge. Another similar brand dilution case by the software corporation Autodesk against www.the3dstudio.com was dropped in the same week as the eToys case after nothing more than a warning letter from toywar. Also, several other organisations have taken similar measures to etoy's in order to defend their domain names from aggressive corporations . (*69)
Through their independence from and then manipulation of the mass media, etoy have managed to extend the transformative potential of their practice. etoy's work has set a legal precedent in a highly contended cultural context - the struggle for public, rather than corporate ownership and control of the Internet and new media, which, as Chomsky has shown, is the only way in which its use can become or remain transformative.
The practices described above have managed to surpass any transformative potential that might be attained through the mediation and approval of the corporate-funded art world. They achieved this by allowing anyone with enthusiasm to participate, by remaining open to change and divergence and by avoiding reliance on mediation. In summary, it is possible to say that Open Source practice, (and the tactics of de-centred authorship, mutability and heterogeneity, and autonomy of distribution, promotion and evaluation) functions successfully as a framework for developing transformative practice in the information economy.
Saul Albert
05/03/2000
Open Source has been misleadingly referred to as "Free" software. It has also been associated with anthropological theories of "gift cultures"(*70). This has led to the misconception that open source practitioners contribute code to a project without any self-interest. It has been shown, however, that the open source model is a very efficient way of regulating collective labour within a scarcity economy(*71) that is based on information goods. It can also be economically efficient for programmers who develop programs for their own use to release source code for no monetary charge, because the resultant activities of many co-developers can improve the standard of the program very quickly. Also, because of the informational nature of their products, exchange is impossible since if an informational product is duplicated, the giver loses nothing. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh has shown how reputation gained in an informational gift economy can translate into currency. The following is reproduced from his essay "Cooking Pot Markets". (*72)
Suppose you live in a world where people trade chicken and grain and cloth -a very basic economy indeed! Suddenly one day some strangers appear, and offer to sell you a car; you want it, but "Sorry," says one of the strangers, "we don't take payment in chicken; gold, greenbacks or plastic only." What do you do? It's not hard to figure out that you have to find some way to convert your chicken into the sort of commodities acceptable to car dealers. You have to find someone willing to give you gold for your chicken, or someone who'll give you something you can trade in yet again for gold, and so on. As long as your chicken is, directly or indirectly, convertible into gold, you can buy that car.
What holds for chicken in a primitive barter economy holds also for intangibles such as ideas and reputation in the part of the economy that operates on the Internet [16]. And some of these intangibles, in the right circumstances, can certainly be converted into the sort of money that buys cars, leave alone pizzas to keep hunger away. This may not apply to your reputation as a cat enthusiast, though; it may not apply to all software developers all the time, either.
In the primitive barter economy, trade is limited to basic commodities with only the occasional car thrown in, Not everyone will want to buy cars, however rich they may be in grain and cloth. Much of their earnings will go back into buying more basic commodities; only some of it will be converted into car-buying things like gold. Then again, only some people at some times will be able to find the right sequences of trades to convert chicken into gold, which may depend on context and the general demand for such unusual things in the economy.
On the Internet - indeed in any knowledge economy - it is not necessary for everything to be immediately traded into "real world" money. If a significant part of your needs are for information products themselves, you do not need to trade in your intangible earnings from the products you create for hard cash, because you can use those intangibles to "buy" the information you want. So you don't have to worry about converting the warm feelings you get from visits to your cat Web page into dollars, because for your information needs, and your activities on the Net, the "reputation capital" you make will probably do.
"The cyberspace 'earnings' I get from Linux," says Torvalds, "come in the format of having a network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return. And that kind of network of trust comes in very handy not only in cyberspace." As for converting intangible earnings from the Net, he notes that "the good thing about reputations ... is that you still have them even though you traded them in. Have your cake and eat it too!"