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OPEN SCORES. How to Program the Commons. Exhibition catalogue

The exhibition OPEN SCORES brought together a series of practices through which artists articulate their specific forms of digital commons. From online archives to digital tools/ infrastructure and educational formats, the projects envision a (post-)digital culture in which notions of collaboration, free access to knowledge, sustainable use of shared resources, and data privacy are central. For the exhibition, each of the projects created a unique score to present their practice.

Participants:
Dušan Barok (monoskop.org), Marcell Mars & Tomislav Medak (memoryoftheworld.org), Sebastian Lütgert & Jan Gerber (0xdb.org), Kenneth Goldsmith (ubu.com), Sean Dockray (AAAAARG), Zeljko
Blace (#QUEERingNETWORKing), Ruth Catlow & Marc Garrett (furtherfield.org), Laurence Rassel (erg.be), Marek Tuszynski (Tactical Tech), Michael Murtaugh, Femke Snelting & Peter Westenberg (Constant), Stefanie Wuschitz (Mz* Baltazar’s Lab), Panayotis Antoniadis
(nethood.org), Alessandro Ludovico (neural.it), Eva Weinmayr (andpublishing.org), spideralex, Sakrowski (curatingyoutube.net), Creating Commons.
Curated by Creating Commons
(Shusha Niederberger, Cornelia Sollfrank, Felix Stalder)

OPEN SCORES exhibition catalogDownload
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Unlearning Copyright in Artistic Practice

Lecture by Shusha Niederberger at Zurich University of the Arts, MFA Symposium „HOW TO: Copy Paste and Rights“, 20.11.2019

Copyright addresses the artwork as property, but as works of art it belongs as well to the cultural sphere, which has since the Renaissance become to be seen as a public good. And indeed, the role of copyright has been for a long time to balance these two interests. The digital has challenged a basic assumption about the nature of goods: digital goods are not scarce anymore, because they can be copied without difference to the original. This has changed a lot for both the cultural sphere, where cultural goods circulate with a speed and reach unknown before, but also for copyright, which is turning to hard- and software in consumer electronics to keep the digital goods controllable, all the while new powerful cultural industries of networked services are reorganizing the ways we access and consume digital cultural goods.

How do artists deal with these dynamics? In my talk, I will discuss digital and digitally informed artistic practises dealing with this two-sided nature of cultural production and distribution, and explore the aesthetic consequences of these strategies.

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Institutional Practice: Interview with Peter Westenberg

Peter Westenberg is an artist and a member of Constant, an artist-run organization in Brussels, active in art and technology.

In this interview, Peter discusses the possibilities of licensing in artistic contexts to think about the future context of one’s work. He explains the format of situations, a way of working collaboratively across disciplines Constant has been developing over the years. How do institutional practices like organizing events and developing formats relate to artistic practice and aesthetics? And how can that practice be situated in the discourse about the commons?

Transcript of the interviewDownload

Interview conducted by Felix Stalder, 4 March 2018, HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel).

 
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For any other use please contact us.
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Z. Blace

~% Zagreb/Berlin-Stuttgart/Brussels-Ghent

Z. Blace is (in+)consistently working (in-)between fields of contemporary culture and arts, digital technology and media, community sports and activism – by cross-pollinating queer perspectives and methodologies with social and political practices.

Z. Blace co-founded and curated media projects and exhibitions at the Multimedia Institute/MaMa and LABinary in Croatia (1999 – 2008), and Silent*Observers at UCSD in 2006.
He instigated the sport-culture-activism initiatives qSPORT/QueerSport.info in Croatia and ccSPORT.link in Berlin/Germany. His engagements from 2014 to 2017 include: Pop-up Rainbow with ToolsForAction.net, Kickertables with TimeLab.org, Entorse.org & Recommerce/Bains.be.

Sources:

www.zeljko.blace.name
https://www.ccsport.link

Josephine Bosma: „contesting/contexting SPORT 2016: Interview with Zeljko Blace“, 2016, https://www.furtherfield.org/contestingcontexting-sport-2016-interview-with-zeljko-blace/

Interview

Networking Institutions. Interview with Z. Blace
Conducted by Felix Stalder, 3 March 2018

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furtherfield, London

Furtherfield is an artist run space founded in 1996 by Ruth Catlow and Marc Garret in London. It features a broad range of activites about art, technology and media, both in its space and online. Its program includes exhibitions, workshops and a variety of events, different communication channels and distributing content in diverse forms – from online posts, interviews to books.

At the heart of Furtherfield is a concern for exchange and community and they are incorporation this concern in everything they do.

Self-description:

“Furtherfield connects people to new ideas, critical thinking and imaginative possibilities for art, technology and the world around us. Through artworks, labs and debate people from all walks of life explore today’s important questions”

Sources:

Ruth Catlow: Situating the Digital Commons, https://ruthcatlow.net/?works=situating-the-digital-commons

Penny Travlou: Ethnographies of Co-Creation and Collaboration as Models of Creativity, https://elmcip.net/critical-writing/ethnographies-co-creation-and-collaboration-models-creativity

furtherfield: “Do It With Others (DIWO). Participatory Media in the Furtherfield Neighbourhood”. Di Rimini, Francesca (Eds.): A Handbook of Coding Cultures. Sidney: d/Lux/MediaArts and Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2007, p. 21–28.

www.furtherfield.org

Interview

Negotiating Space in Culture and Technology. Interview with Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 15 September 2018

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constant, Brussels

Constant is an artist-run organisation founded 1997 in Brussels. It is working in collaborative situations of groups of artists and researchers working together for defined periods of time. Often these settings are collaborations with other institutions, and take part at other places. This is only partly due to the absence of permanent place, but also reflects some of the core practices of the organisation, which could be described in an interest in collaboration, translation, negotiations, explanations and the care of shared resources. Constant is thus not a space, it is an organisation.

It features different formats of working together (cyclic exhibition projects, reading groups, publishing, exploration of open source tools, research, workshop, education and all kind of inventive formats that go between and beyond).

Constant’s program is concerned with media, technology and artistic practice.

self-declaration:
„Constant is a non-profit, artist-run organisation based in Brussels since 1997 and active in the fields of art, media and technology.

Constant develops, investigates and experiments. Constant departs from feminisms, copyleft, Free/Libre + Open Source Software. Constant loves collective digital artistic practices. Constant organises transdisciplinary worksessions. Constant creates installations, publications and exchanges. Constant collaborates with artists, activists, programmers, academics, designers. Constant is active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations, counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, extitutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.“

Sources:

Laurence Rassel: Notes from Field-Workers, in: Art & Research, a Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Vol. 2, Nr. 2, Spring 2009

https://www.constantvzw.org/

Interviews

Experimenting with Institutional Formats. Interview with Laurence Rassel
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 4 March 2018

Institutional Practice. Interview with Peter Westenberg
Conducted by Felix Stalder, 4 March 2018

Forms of Ongoingness. Interview with Femke Snelting and spideralex
Conducted by Cornelia Sollfrank, 16 September 2018

Ecosystems of Writing. Interview with Michael Murtaugh
Conducted by Shusha Niederberger, 15 September 2018

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Ubu

General Description

Ubu is a web repository for avant-garde art, founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996. It is making available cultural resources, which are out of print, or “absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure“. It is „a distribution center for hard-to-find, out-of-print and obscure materials, transferred digitally to the web.“

Ubu has been starting from a repository of visual and concrete poetry, later sound poetry, growing in diverse directions, and it is constantly evolving.
Its understanding of what counts as avant-garde art and therefore can be included in Ubu is very open and apparently based on a broad interest and on opportunities.

It is difficult, and maybe inappropriate, to find a precise terminology of the nature of Ubu. It has aspects of a collection (its curated nature), but also hosts complete archives (Aspen Multimedia Magazine (1965-1971), provides space for projects (365 days project with obscure findings in aural recordings), and sections to other otherwise overlooked aspects (electronic music resources, featuring documents about methods and techniques of electronic and experimental sound – not aesthetics).

It also features curated sections by scholars and researchers in the field (ubu /editions), and offers anthological perspectives.

The content is not presented in a consistent taxonomy model, and cross-section links are offered or not.

In its diversity, it is like a negative space of traditional institution’s work. What is gone missing by public and private archives and libraries (whatever the cause) – can be found here.

See also:
The Poetry of Archiving, Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith
Nothing New Needs to be Created – Kenneth Goldsmith’s Claim to Uncreativity.

ubu.com