Comments for creating commons

Comment on Organizational Aesthetics: Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet by Olga Goriunova by Felix

Felix — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 10:00:33 +0000

Art-Platforms: “Because their becoming relies on a combination of factors, art platforms are saturated with elements of self-organization, or triggers towards it, that appear not randomly but in a way that cannot be exactly planned. Art platforms arise if they happen to enter into relationships with elements of self-organization and develop through these energies. But these elements, these processes stream from the self-organizing fl ow of autocreativity, rather than being applied as instruments to it. It would be more precise to say that art platforms work with different kinds of organization that autocreativity may feed itself through, with self-organization included among these, and as such, art platforms operate a certain organizational aesthetics.” [41]

Many of these aspects also apply to the commons-generating projects this research is interested. And in some ways, they are even more pronounced there, since the difference between platform (organizational structure) and work of art (aka the work hosted on the platform) is reversed. I most cases, each individual work hosted in these resources is unremarkable (in the sense of pre-existing) but it is the organizational structure through which they become available that is the most innovative and radical aspect of these projects.

Comment on Organizational Aesthetics: Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet by Olga Goriunova by Felix

Felix — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 06:52:23 +0000

Speaking about FLOSS: “Software is not solely bound to objects: It is shaped by and proliferates into social and cultural relations. Breaking away from the fetishism of proprietary software may lead to the commodification of social processes layered into software production and operation, something resonant with the way the move from fixed institutional forms gives rise to a variety of institutional relationships in organizational aesthetics. ” [23] [later, she criticizes this perspective as tending towards totalizing accounts of capitalism]

Speaking about Creative Commons: “Having divorced itself from revolutionary rhetoric, the Creative Commons incarnation of FLOSS led by Lawrence Lessig, which deals not with software but ‘content’ is no longer concerned with transforming capitalist society, for instance, but with enhancing liberal democracy and the autonomy of liberal individualism by creating legal tools that offer guarantees for certain kinds of action in the form of licenses. Such freedom and autonomy, as described previously, are assumed to be naturally given in liberal society and automatically preserved if certain instruments are applied, irrespective of the systems of conditioning, subjectification, persuasion, coercion, profit, discrimination, distortion, or control that may be operative in such a society and in those dependent on it.” [24]

These issues, as both empirical dynamics as well as conceptual perspectives, are even more acute today than they were in 2012.

Comment on The notion of the „commons“ by Felix

Felix — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 10:08:50 +0000

Discussion 10.07.

On the question of non-exclusivity. If we take the Hess & Ostrom (2007) approach and differentiate between facilities (pyhsical infrastructures), artifacts (files, data etc) and ideas („coherent thoughts, mental images, creative visions, innovative information), then the artifacts are always treated as non-exclusive, the facilities are sometimes exclusive and sometimes non-exclusive and the ideas (what the project is about) are often very exclusive, in terms of being connected to an specific, personal artistic vision.