Re: [-empyre-] upgrading downtime?

[Kenneth Newby <knewby@sfu.ca>]

On 19-Nov-05, at 6:59 PM, elizabeth day wrote:

> Working on related security issues about doing a work where it cant be 
> seen
> by my peers...  Liz

Thanks Liz, this just tweaked my own experience so directly!  The 
issues you describe, falling, if I understand correctly, out of the 
need for security in a prison context are alive and unwell in the 
everyday world of the technopoly:

I worked for two "interesting" years in the computer game industry in 
the late '90s.  On the first day of work myself and several other new 
workers were required to sit down with a company lawyer to discuss and 
sign-off on the company's intellectual property rights.  Beyond the 
usual non-disclosure agreements that most high-tech companies constrain 
their employees with we were informed that pretty much anything we did 
on our free time, that the company might find useful in their pursuit 
of profit, would be considered company property.  This only 
strengthened my resolve to make my tenure there a temporary one for 
personal research and development purposes.

But the NDA issue has continued to bother me given the overlap in my 
own personal practice in software as art medium with some of the work I 
developed at the game company, particularly given that my practice 
preceded my relationship with the company and, of course, has continued 
after.  As a teacher in the university for the past five or six years 
I've often felt conflicted around sharing my own work with students and 
research peers due to that corporate commodification of my own 
practice.  This has also come up for some of our graduate students who 
come from professional careers in that industry who want to move into a 
more creative relationship with media practice.  Given that they are, 
for all intents and purposes, owned by the company they work for, their 
ability to conduct research is severely compromised by the fact that 
their core knowledge base is inaccessible to not only their peers but 
themselves as researchers.

What a strange and unhealthy world is this corporate one!

Kenneth.