Re: <nettime> Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK, April 5-6, 2001)

[Anne Nigten <anne@v2.nl>]

Florian, thanks for your report
Below you'll find some of my notes on CODE partly as a reaction on your
posting, partly overlapping, and some other issues I think of importance to
mention in this context.

Did it ever occur to you using Linux can be looked upon as a luxury?
A privilege to people being able to either work with the tools provided or
with the knowledge / time to maintain and adjust their system. A luxury I
really would like to be available for artists and which we publicize
strongly in the V2 Lab. Let's just be realistic since most artist do
experience (so far) too many obstacles to work with Linux. In order to ge
more insight why this doesn't happen I think it's relevant to state that
art practices like we're involved, are using their system in two ways: 1.
in a instrumental fashion, as a toolbox to create work and 2. to create /
develop 'code based' art. For sure these area's are quite often overlapping 
or being mixed up, but using this distinction can provide us with more info.

1.      Tools; the artists we've been working with can live without msword,
or msexcell but are in need of tools for interactive pieces, they like to
work with applications like Nato, video editing programs, Max, MMdirector
etc. mostly these are not available in an open source variant or still in a
beta phase.

2.      code based art work, this group of artist seems to have more
insight in the technology and programming languages etc. This group could
be looked upon as a mixture of artists and developers where several tasks
are quite often united in one person. For these people Linux is much easier
to handle, since they are less dependent on the tools provided, the code
being produced is (part off) their art work, and the advantages of being
able to adjust the os are obvious for code based art works.

Spending a lot of time to install and maintain your applications / machine
is something most of us are used to by working with Windows or Mac for some
decades, but this always requires a lot of motivation. This motivation to
migrate to Linux is still lacking for the group of artists looking for
tools to create their work. Until a certain extend we're trying to supply
them with some tools, but it really needs a lot more for migration. I hope
this could be an interesting shift of paradigm in the Linux / open source /
free software movement. So far the achievements have been impressive but
mainly emphasizing development of an open reliable system and the struggle
against Microsoft, which is why we have Linux today. Concerning software
applications so far office related and some applications for stable media
art have been developed and made available. In the V2 Lab and other art
related institutes (like EncART) attempts have been made to contribute and
to initiate new developments, but so far this has been quite isolated from
the global open source / free software developers movement. There's a lot
of reasons I can list here why this is hard to achieve, but one I think of
relevance to mention also occurred again during CODE.  Everybody seems to
prefer to stay in their familiar environment, pleased by what they do and
planning their own scenarios using good ideas from other sectors. This has
been reflected in the free art license by Antoine Moreau, but also by the
announcement of James Boyle, who told us that a new series of licenses are
being designed for different purposes for artists, scientists, researchers
etc. Although I understand the different needs arise from different
disciplines I think we have to be aware not to exclude the opportunity open
source / free software could provide us when it comes to interdisciplinary
collaboration. After CODE I'm cooking up some ideas to bring development
and scenarios together (European, international). These kind of postings /
discussions could bring us some more ideas which direction it could go..

ANne
(my occupations: media artist, using tools, manager V2 Lab, content manager

encart, technician)
www.v2.nl
www.encart.org

ps antoine i just saw your email coming in: reaction is not yet included

At 15:19 13-4-01 +0200, you wrote:
>(The following review was commissed by MUTE and will appear in the
>forthcoming MUTE issue, see <http://www.metamute.com>. Josephine Berry has
>my cordial thanks for editing the text into proper English. The MUTE
>people were so kind to let me speak about literature and systems theory on
>a panel with Robert Coover and Jeff Noon at Tate Modern. See
><http://www.metamute.com/events/mutetate08042001.htm> for the details.
>-FC)

<...>

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