Ruth's Script and Slides

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[edit] What did Openness mean to NODELondon?

(the script for the presentation documented on video here http://wiki.nodel.org/index.php/Subscriber_Meeting_#Ruth_Catlow )

[edit] Intro - Networks and Openness are hardwired into NODE.London

  • it's in the name: Networked, Open, Distributed, Events in London (thanks Kelli Dipple!)
  • also the shared obsessions of many individuals that worked together towards the Season of Media Arts in March 2006.

This presentation attempts to:-

  • show how different ideas and approaches to Openness manifested themselves in the NODELondon season.
  • make some judgements about where these were fruitful and where they caused problems.

[edit] Three Cups of Tea: Three Cultures

Drinking a cup of tea together suggests a base level openness to:-

  • Converse
  • Be convivial
  • Recognise the possible mutual benefit of an ongoing relationship

NODELondon contributors/participants are drawn from 3 Cultures (Stalder)

  • Art
  • Engineering (software development)
  • Activism (for social change)

Openness has very different connotations in each of these cultures and the most interesting things happen where these overlap – controversies, tensions . I’ll come back to these and give some examples soon but first …

[edit] NODELondon Participants shared a Common interest in Networks

Social networks are a useful way:-

  • To reroute and share information, knowledge, resources and opportunities across the ordinary boundaries of groups, institutions and class.

Digital communication networks:-

  • Can support social networking by providing infrastructure for speedy, easy efficient exchange across distances.
  • Can operate as the site for both the production of media files, and computer programmes as well as a means of distribution and exchange for both.

NODELondon was inspired by the scale free networks of the Internet. (illustrated by the combination of distributed and decentralized networks of the slide) http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420/fig1.GIF

Network science says (Barabosi): networks maintain levels of connectivity regardless of size:-

  • By linking small clusters of locally networked hubs to more massively linked hubs which are in turn connected to each other.
  • Move from one small, local hub to another, distant, small hub by taking a couple of steps through the big hubs.
  • Creating the small world phenomenon.

AND NETWORKS ARE OPEN: in that you can always add a new node

[edit] What does Open mean to the Three cultures of NODELondon?

[edit] Openness in Art

is associated with ideas of:-

  • Accessibility of art to diverse (always growing) audiences
  • Equality of opportunity for practitioners
  • A conceptual approach to work that moves away from the unique art-object and associated commodity value.

eg Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970 at the Tate- international artists who radically rethought the object of art in the late 1960s and 1970s connecting with the ‘urgent political developments of the day’. Included work by artists like Martha Rosler and Hans Hacke http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/opensystems/

[edit] Openness in Activism

is associated with:-

  • The influence of social movements of anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements like the G8 summits in Genoa and Geneva who used the virtues of networked organisation to their advantage.
  • Models for Open Organisation – are intended to support collective action, shared responsibility and transparent decision making that does not privilege an elite group. Also organisational learning.

[edit] Openness in Engineering (specifically software development)

Idea of Openness comes from the Free and Open Source Software movement.

  • open collaborative process became tied up with progressive ethical stances
  • Success of the Openness is particularly dramatic in this context.

To create OS software, developers collaborate with each other on the code that makes the software work. It is particularly successful because:-

  • Software development is modular.
  • There exist objective, widely accepted criteria to assess the value of a new bit of code.
  • Evaluation is efficient as developers use the same tools to evaluate as to produce the code.
  • OS software development often comes with its own model of economic sustainability:-
    • developers are often already working for academic or commercial institutions
    • by sharing their work they raise the profile of these institutions

However the actual openness of the process is more limited than is usually understood.

  • not everyone can contribute- you need to have the opportunity to develop the skills
  • development is often controlled very tightly by a central manager

BUT it DOES work as a means of production, organisation and distribution.

[edit] Intersections

[edit] Art and Activism

Fluxus stylee, critical engagement with artmarkets and institutions, socially engaged practice etc

[edit] Activism and Engineering/Software development

Raising global consciousness and organising across distances using distributed media. Eg Indimedia

[edit] Art and Engineering/Software development

critiques and explorations of technologically inspired structures, metaphors, relations; new tools for production distribution and participation. Distributed composition offered by wikis

[edit] Art, Engineering and Activism

  • Distribution offered by peer to peer networks (File sharing software such as Bittorrent and Gnutella)
  • suggest a possible model for other kinds of organisation. Felix Stalder of Open Flows identifies key elements as
  • communal management
  • open access to informational resources for production
  • openness to contributions from a diverse range of users and producers
  • flat hierarchies (or perhaps heterarchies)
  • fluid organisational structure

[edit] Events, Organisation, Infrastructure:Where Openness intersected for NODELondon

[edit] EVENTS:

NODELondon took place over two main seasons:-

  • Critical discussion and conferences in Open Season, October 2005
  • Season of Media Arts in March 2006.

Here openness meant:-

  • an exploration of the parallels and crossovers between FLOSS and Open culture (through talks, presentations, participatory art events, exhibitions, performances, by artists, programmers, theorists, activists)
  • Open season of media arts on the model of open-exhibition or open-studio event, not centrally curated but facilitated by a group of voluntary organisers.

[edit] ORGANISATION

The organisation was loosely modelled on the organisational principles of movements for social change (although this was never openly acknowledged or reevalutated), claiming to run by consensual decision making.

  • Structure of organisational openness as inspired by scale-free networks of the Internet.
  • The fluidity of this approach gave rise to dramatic benefits and pitfalls, discussed at length evaluation processes.

The most important questions remain around:-

  • Power and transparency (who makes decisions and how) - where does control and responsibility lie within the organisation.
  • Wastefulness of inefficient organisational processes and insufficient planning; means only those with lots of free time can afford to contribute/benefit

[edit] INFRASTRUCTURE:

The vision was for an open social network, supported by web-based tool that would

  • allow communities to connect and share resources (printers, sofas, spaces, technical know-how etc),
  • provide an event calendar-come-catalogue for conferences and media arts events in London.

Though the original open software architecture was never realised as intended, the deep discussions about the use-cases of various stakeholders of the NODELondon community led to the development of a bespoke tool/website in PHP and MySQL. This enabled:-

  • Participating media arts practitioners to submit details of their projects and exhibitions in their own words.
  • NODELondon to print a catalogue of all participating projects with a very short lead-time.
  • Audiences to navigate the events, projects and people of NODELondon and to plan their visits to different venues during March '06

[edit] Three Cups of Tea: When tea-time is over

Back to those three cups of tea

When we’re drinking our cups of tea together, we look towards each other to see how we can be together and what we can achieve but these three cultures are easily drawn apart, and become antagonistic. Many individual participants of NODELondon straddle the three cultures and therefore experience the tensions between them internally.

There are various tensions that act on collaborators across these cultures. Engineers, artists and activists have different models of the world, approaches to life and different modes of survival available to them. These differences impact on their free time, values and priorities, which in turn give rise to some tensions in how they view each other:-

[edit] For the Engineers/Software Developers:-

  • artists and activists do not fully appreciate their work because they do not fully understand what it involves. They are often unable to find out about enough about the technology to avoid having unrealistic expectations make unreasonable demands.
  • many artists appear ill informed and superficial in their approach to technology- they use tools without any critical engagement or understanding of their applications or they develop ill-conceived technologically inspired metaphors.

[edit] For the engineers and activists:-

  • artists may appear selfish; concerned primarily with their personal profiles and ownership of IP.
  • all art is associated with the suspect cultivation of rare commodity through the dark arts of marketing, spectacle and art market speculation.
  • the value of art appears arbitrary and corrupt: assigned by the market in collaboration with cultural imperialist institutions (galleries and public funders) and career academics.

[edit] For the activists:-

  • art may appear superficial and to have no positive social or political function
  • artists and engineers appear to lack urgency in response to social and political crises

[edit] For the activists and artists:-

  • engineers are sometimes unable or unwilling to communicate enough about the issues they are dealing with for to facilitate deep collaboration

[edit] For the artists:-

  • activists may appear to be strident and self-righteous ideologues.
  • engineers and activists may appear over-instrumental, rigid and intolerant in their approaches to collaboration.
  • engineers’ and activists’ assumptions about what motivates artists can be unexpected and puzzling, especially to those artists who have long been involved with alternative, participative (non-object based) art practice.

On the whole these antagonisms were surprisingly productive for the events and infrastructure of both NODELondon Seasons but still, a year on, we still have a big black ditch lying in front of us, created by the rigid but undefined relationships between ideas of organisational Openness and NODELondon’s Organisation (noun and verb!). The legacy of NODELondon March ‘06 is a fab, flat, social network of organisations and people who now know and value each other’s work. However they currently have no effective way to make decisions and organise efficiently, collaborate, build on and learn from previous work.

[edit] References and Resources

Stalder, F., On the Differences between Open Source and Open Culture. Available from http://publication.nodel.org/On-the-Differences

NODELondon, 2006a, Evaluation Report, published July 2006 with the support of LCACE. Presented at ICA Visioning Meeting and submitted to ACE. http://dav.nodel.org/evaluation/node_london_evaluation_report.doc

NODE.London, , Minutes from Meetings of Voluntary Organisers and Subscribers March 2005- July 2006, http://smal.omweb.org/modules/wakka/SmalMeetings

NODE.London, 2006b, NODE.London Timeline-A history written by its participants collaboratively as a timeline http://smal.omweb.org/modules/wakka/NodeLondonTimeline

NODE.London, 2006e, NODE.London Organisational Structure - minutes of working group meeting, September 2006 http://dav.nodel.org/working%20groups/organisational%20structure

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