[-empyre-] introducing Jason Freeman and Patrick Lichty

[Jason Freeman]

Anna,

Thanks for including me in the discussion this month, for your role in  
moderating it, and for the introduction and thoughtful questions.

Before I get to your specific questions, I just wanted to follow up  
for a moment on the more general threads that have been floating  
around the list about the idea and motivations of a networked book.  
I'm of course interested in the participatory nature of the book.  
Unlike most of the other authors, I have very little experience with  
networked writing, but I view this as a great experiment for me to see  
how I might extend my ideas about participatory artistic practice into  
my writing as well.

But even more important to me (and also a necessary precursor to that  
collaborative writing process) is the openness of the book itself.  
Most of what I write ends up in journals that are trapped behind pay  
walls, and for those not affiliated with a subscribing institution,  
access usually costs around US $30 per article. (In fact, on one  
occasion, when I needed quick access to my own article while  
traveling, I was myself forced to pay that fee to download my own  
writing!) While I don't want to shift the debate on this list into a  
question of open scholarly publishing, I do want to note that the  
access limits on most scholarly publications make it so much harder  
for the kinds of conversations and contributions surrounding this book  
to take place. Thus, one reason I am so happy to participate in this  
project is simply that the book is available to everyone. If others  
take the additional step and contribute to the text, that's just a  
wonderful bonus.

Now, on to your questions:

> I'm wondering whether you think a lack of  acknowledgment or under- 
> acknowledgment of storage as a vital aspect of the infrastructure of  
> networks has made music a territory both easily transmissable (via  
> peer-to-peer) but also open to a potential re-capture via vested  
> interests in the music industry (post-Napstar, Kazaa etc)? In other  
> words might one of the implications of your conceptual framework be:  
> we need to take basic networked infrastructure much more seriously?!

I think that we do need to pay more attention to the implications of  
the network infrastructures we use. Following from your context, for  
instance, there are some major shifts underway in digital music  
distribution, from more pay-per-track models (e.g. iTunes) to stream- 
what-you-want models (e.g. Spotify). This shift of storage from the  
local disk to the cloud, combined with the new generation of  
smartphones and fast mobile broadband, makes some cools things  
possible (e.g. my 8 GB smartphone can now access hundreds of terabytes  
of music wherever I go). But there are other implications too: just as  
we finally seem to be burying DRM, we're moving to another model where  
we don't really own the music to which we listen. If it's stored on  
the network, we still can't decide how we want to use it; e.g. burning  
to a CD or (more importantly) being able to remix/reimagine it. We  
must be vigilant about this risk as music distribution moves towards a  
streaming/subscription model. More broadly, we could think of a whole  
ecosystem of networked art "mashup" works which scour a network for  
data and reconstitute that data into the work in some way. The move of  
content to the cloud can open up new possibilities for such works, but  
if the systems are too restrictive in the ways in which that data can  
be used, the ultimate effect could be the opposite. If I may state the  
obvious: when corporations design use-case scenarios for their  
services, they don't usually have media artists in mind.

> Coming off the back of this, what are the implications of this for  
> mobile networks and media practice (I am thinking here of the  
> potentially proprietorial aspects of cloud storage/computing)?

Again, I think there are some great opportunities, but we have to be  
careful. As networked artists, we usually don't have access to tons of  
(computing/storage/bandwidth/hosting) resources to realize our work.  
As networked storage and database and hosting services multiple, there  
are some incredible opportunities to take advantage of enterprise- 
level tools at little or no cost. Bicycle Built for 2000 (discussed in  
my chapter) is a great example of that: they use Amazon's Mechanical  
Turk service to distribute the task of singing each note of the song  
to 2000 participants for a couple of hundred dollars in expenses.  
Google App Engine is another potentially transformative tool: free (to  
a limit) web app hosting and an incredible, reliable distributed  
serving and database architecture. Back in 2001, I realized an early  
mobile work of mine using a popular telephone voice-menu computing  
system; it was all free, and I even got a toll free number at which to  
host it! Because my needs are so small compared to big corporate  
applications, I'm just a little blip on the radar screen, and it's  
easier to give me these enterprise-level services for free than to  
start managing billing and accounting.

But the problem comes when the situation changes. My great voice-menu  
company ran into trouble financial times, and they decided they only  
wanted to work with customers who paid them $25,000 per year or more.  
I would have happily paid (less) for the services I had been  
receiving, but to them, I was (again) just a little blip on the radar  
screen and it wasn't profitable to deal with people like me anymore.  
Google and Amazon may at some future point make similar decisions with  
their services. And if that time comes, people like us will be stuck  
either reimplimenting our work on the next free/cheap platform or just  
giving up and shutting it down.

Maybe I'll just turn things full circle to close here with another  
thought that might bring some of these threads together: how could a  
book like (networked) get onto an e-reader? It seems like an ideal  
platform for this kind of participatory structure -- devices like the  
Kindle are already connected to the Internet all the time and they  
have little keyboards on them. I would be much more likely to engage  
in reading a long-form chapter or book and to contribute to it if that  
process unfolded while I was lying in bed rather than sitting in front  
of my computer.

But...for the moment at least, such a possibility seems pretty remote.  
Amazon is open to just about anybody publishing content on the Kindle,  
but only within the business model they have envisioned. There's no  
way to create a participatory structure on the device and no way to  
write custom software to make that possible. To Amazon, books are  
static content, and they've built a device that supports that idea to  
the exclusion of all others. In fact, there's not even an  
infrastructure in place for giving a book away for free. And I don't  
think there are any open-source e-book readers on the market...

I've got to run now, but hopefully there's some useful thinking  
somewhere in here...

--Jason