<nettime> Josephine Berry, Bare Code (excerpt)

["Steve Dietz" <sub@yproductions.com>]

Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement
Josephine Berry

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In this essay, which is presented as part of Open_Source_Art_Hack, Josephine
Berry examines seminal net art projects such as Rachel Baker's TM Clubcard,
0100101110101101.org's plagiarisms, I/O/D's Web Stalker and others in
relation to the free software movement.

The entire essay is readable at:
http://netartcommons.walkerart.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/08/0615215&mode=thre
ad
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In September 1999, the GNU/Linux operating system was awarded a prize by the
jury of the art and technology festival Ars Electronica. This award--for the
".net" category--converted a computer operating system, developed through
open collaboration, into an artwork.

Setting aside the question of the jury's Duchampian gesture of nominating a
tool of production as a work of art, the event could be said to signal the
popularization of the analogy, now frequently drawn, between avant-garde art
practice and free software production. This analogy insists upon the
recognition that the activities of making art and software are both defined
by the necessarily collective nature of creative and intellectual
production.

On the one hand, the individual genius is recognized as eclipsing the
dialogic nature of cultural production behind the emblem of personal style
or innovation, which in turn casts the nonartist as creatively defunct. On
the other, closed or proprietary models of commercial software production
can be said to ring-fence innovation by unfairly claiming individual or
corporate authorship of the latest spin-off of a radically collective
history of software production in the computer sciences. Copyrighting and
closing the source code of a piece of software also artificially narrows its
potential future adaptations and condemns it to the stifling monotony of a
fixed identity (product), altered only by the strictly controlled
modifications that will lead to its release as an upgrade: the illusion of
innovation and difference in a regime of unwavering homogeneity.

The rigid controls imposed by intellectual property rights--dependent on the
demonstrable origination and hence ownership of ideas--bury the "code"
(artistic or technical) away from the scrutiny of potential collaborators
and "defends" against the fecund chaos of uncontrolled invention. Whereas
the coders slaving away at Microsoft are cut off and largely motivated by
economic remuneration, the enthusiasts working in the free software
community enjoy the benefits of the potlatch or gift economy where "given
enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."[1] Likewise, where the artist locked
into life on the gallery circuit is condemned to the permutation of a
signature style that resembles the assembly-line production of software
upgrades, the plagiarist artist, released from the burden of individual
identity, surfs the riotous waves of ownerless creation into the unknown.

So the comparison between avant-garde art and free software does more than
point out the collective nature of cultural production; it also points to
the revolutionary effects this realization may have when the consumer and
the producer become indistinguishable. This same dream of indistinctness
also underpins the avant-garde wish to dissolve art into life or, better, to
realize art as a practice of life. The division of (artistic) labor--the
enemy of such indistinctness--is a crucial starting point for avant-garde
engagement when conceptualizing a revolution in culture or beyond. To
transpose a Marxist analysis of the means and relations of production onto
culture: The individual artist has sometimes been compared to the capitalist
who harnesses and thus alienates proletarian labor power into surplus value
that can, as accumulated product or "oeuvre," be used to perpetuate the
exploitation of the many by the few. The genius-artist, true to the "winner
takes all" model of capitalism, is able to obscure the heteronomy of
culture's production behind the singular expression or possession of a
sovereign intellect and imagination. A radical realization of art, then,
would be the deposition of the sovereign producer and a return of the shared
wealth of creativity to its true owners: the multitude. For this reason, a
reappropriation and transformation of the artistic means of production comes
to the fore--an opening up of cultural source codes to an undetermined end.

An early articulation of this idea, and one that used the same language of
political economy, was the German writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin's
1934 speech to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, titled "The Author as
Producer." Combating the contemporary consensus among leftist thinkers that
the work of art should express the correct political "tendency" in its
content, Benjamin argued that the revolutionary author should move beyond
the limited concern with the product to effect the transformation of the
"apparatus of production." In order for the writer's work to have an
"organizing function," he insisted,
it is also necessary for the writer to have a teacher's attitude. And today
this more than ever is an essential demand. A writer who does not teach
other writers teaches nobody. The crucial point, therefore, is that a
writer's production must have the character of a model: it must be able to
instruct other writers in their production and, secondly, it must be able to
place an improved apparatus at their disposal. The apparatus will be the
better the more consumers it brings in contact with the production
process--in short, the more readers or spectators it turns into
collaborators.[*]
Although to the contemporary reader the notion of culture's didactic
function might seem overly doctrinaire, the insight into the cultural
product as a tool or apparatus that invites a collaborative appropriation
and transformation seems remarkably modern. Where, in the case of writing,
the apparatus and the product are indistinguishable--or only distinguishable
as discrete functions of the continuous fabric of language--in the case of
digital culture and, specifically for our purposes here, net art, the
software that is used to produce the artwork is not similarly continuous or
transparent. Using proprietary software for the production of an artwork
when its source code is closed means either that the model character of the
work must be understood as functioning otherwise or not at all. Or,
alternatively, this idea can be formulated as the more open question: What
is the model character of net art? If, as is largely the case, net artists
use proprietary software to produce their work, to what extent can they be
said to be transforming the apparatus of production?

[Bare Code continued at
http://www.netartcommons.net/article.pl?sid=02/05/08/0615215&mode=thread]

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Commissioned by Gallery9/Walker Art Center: http://gallery9.walkerart.org
Josephine Berry is deputy editor of the culture and technology magazine Mute
(http://www.metamute.org/)
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Steve Dietz
Curator New Media, Walker Art Center
gallery9.walkerart.org
www.netartcommons.net
www.mnartists.org
www.mnartists.org

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