[-empyre-] Olive Oil

Thu Apr 1 00:51:22 EST 2010

Kim,

I think the comparison between big budget films and cathedrals is
fitting.  I also think it is fitting that we'd build hundreds of such
cathedrals a year financed off of ticket sales and popcorn for
one-shot viewing.  In most cases, a film is like a disposable
cathedral.  Yet, this is what many people want.

Conversely, I have a number of friends who are involved in Waldorf
education....  there you will find a community that centers around
live performance, hand-made materials, and strong writing skills.
What they miss in technological modes of production, they seem to have
made up for in participation and creation.  And, for what it is worth,
most of the kids I know who have grown up in this culture are smart,
open-minded, and incredibly good at making stuff.  And it is great to
see people, especially children, who are enthusiastic about the arts.
I don't think "Waldorf" is the answer to these questions, because you
also see similar creativity and empowerment coming out of
circuit-bending workshops and community centered art programs.  But I
think the key element is the way in which these approaches involve
people.  I don't know that you can cultivate new modes of production
without also cultivating new modes of readership.  People need to be
encouraged to explore unfamiliar spaces.

In the work that I have done with electronic literature, I have found
that it is not enough to simply identify and read good works.  It's
easy enough to find great work.  It's easy enough to say something
clever about it.  But if people are unprepared to get comfortable
banging around within a work, wrenching on things, asking questions,
and thinking about the work less as something to consume and more as
something to own (in the way that many people feel a sense of
ownership over a particularly meaningful song or place).  Hence, I
find myself called to teach electronic literature rather than simply
writing about it.  It's harder and more tedious sometimes, but the
payoff is that you get to see someone else have THEIR OWN
experience....  whereas as a critic, there is a temptation to want
readers to have MY experience.

I don't know how this would translate into a decentralized practice of
film-making. Maybe localities need to create their own film-making
workshops, talent, stories, and screening spaces.  This is the utopian
model sketched out in the film Be Kind, Rewind, where local people
reinvent their community through art.  It's a movie worth watching.

Peace!

Davin

On Mon, Mar 29, 2010 at 3:06 PM, kim collmer <kcollmer at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I get my olive oil once a year in a small hut from a farmer in Croatia. It
> is wonderful!
> But this illustrates a problem discussed in the new thread- centralized
> versus de-centralized. People making things for themselves or for large
> "organizations". How do independent creators whose work is centered around a
> private mode of working fit into the new 2.0 world? I was deeply struck by
> this question when listening to a lecture about the film project "Swarm of
> Angels". Cut from their website it is described as:
> A Swarm of Angels is an open source feature film, and participatory
> filmmaking community. A new kind of film process and movement pioneering
> extreme collaboration & digitally-native cinema.  With members now in the
> four figures...
> What if you don't want to work in this model? Where does one fit? I suppose
> we are building cathedrals now and no longer singular works of art. But who
> owns the digital cathedrals and what is their ultimate purpose? I am a
> "computer person" but I find myself feeling trapped by the new forms of
> social creativity as much as I am freed by them. I knew of computer
> programmers who wrote out code by hand (they had to use a shared computer).
> I appreciate projects like the Swarm and am curious to see where it will
> lead, but what happens to the independent creators and the structures that
> have existed to support them (sort of) and showcase their work? Do their
> ideas now get filtered into the big ideas? I felt like the Swarm project
> could either result in dictatorial piece of art or something utopian (of
> which I am suspect, can't imagine it working like this, please prove me
> wrong!). Perhaps for coders this is not a concern, but for filmmakers I
> wonder.
> -Kim
> ________________________________
> From: christopher sullivan <csulli at saic.edu>
> To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>; marloes
> <marloes at goto10.org>
> Cc: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Sent: Mon, March 29, 2010 8:09:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Olive Oil
>
>
> for my own part, I take on the olive oil corporate conglomerate,
> which tries to control my salads, humus,  and bruechetta,
> in the framework of what they think Olive Oil should taste like.
> I have begun growing my own Olive trees, and in 2113 expect to.
> harvest my own Olive Oil, and share it with my community.
> then I will be able to think clearly. Chris.
>
>
>
>
> Quoting marloes <marloes at goto10.org>:
>
>> Thanks for the introduction Gabriel! And hello empyreans!
>>
>> A past edition of make art festival, "what the fork?!", examined the
>> forking of code, and we would have loved for Adrian Bowyer to come and
>> talk about the RepRap project, as this is a project that sparks ideas
>> about the ultimate decentralisation of production (unfortunately he
>> was not able to come, but there is your crossover).
>>
>> After reading the posts the past month, I was most fascinated
>> (sometimes shocked) by the ideas surrounding this "debugging in the wild".
>>
>> On the one hand amateurs and professionals alike spend countless hours
>> of unremunerated work crafting, writing, sharing, commenting,
>> debugging. This cornucopia of energy and ideas is something amazing.
>> We are so rich, we can move mountains in our spare time.
>>
>> But since web 2.0 corporations use this enthusiasm, harvesting this
>> voluntarily disclosed information, not only personal data but also
>> expertise, by letting the masses solve their problems.
>>
>> Of course not many feel exploited, it is fun and done out of free
>> will, but why do we massively choose to do these things under the
>> terms of corporations instead of our own?
>>
>> And now we are prosumers, producing consumers, it's not a "move from
>> workshop to factory back to workshop" (as mentioned in "delivered in
>> beta"), it is a move from exploitation in the workshop, to
>> exploitation in the factory, to exploitation at home, in the workshop
>> and in the factory.
>>
>> Making an led blink is not a victory over the powerlessness we all
>> feel towards the increasingly obscure technology embedded into
>> everything surrounding us. It is fun. It is also fun to open up
>> devices to try and figure out how they work, even if it is just to see
>> how f%cking huge the tip of your soldering iron looks on a
>> contemporary circuit board.
>>
>> There are things happening that could provide alternatives though.
>> Peer to peer, decentralised ways of working together, where it is not
>> the rule to always feed your output back into a central repository,
>> where you can fork (without breaking the law or feeling like you've
>> been conspiring against the greater good). This is visualised on
>> platforms such as (not always FLOSS) github, bitbucket, gitorious.
>>
>> The jungle of licenses you can publish your work under totally ruins
>> this idea, but I'm an optimist and believe artists will one day win
>> the war against lawyers :)
>>
>> Ok those are some of my thoughts, looking forward to this weeks
>> discussions!
>>
>> Best wishes,
>> Marloes
>>
>>
>> Gabriel Menotti wrote:
>> > Dear empyreans:
>> >
>> > Thanks again Alexandra for the extreme generosity of sharing your
>> > research material with us! Now that we are now approaching the end of
>> > discussion, our attentions will move back to more literal cases of
>> > prototyping. One of our guest for the week is the previously announced
>> > Marloes de Valk, part of GOTO10 collective, and responsible for the
>> > production of both software systems and art events. She will be joined
>> > by Adrian Bowyer, founder of the RepRap project, a fast prototyping
>> > machine that aims for self-replication. Are there similarities between
>> > the methods of development of these different "products"? Or maybe
>> > crossovers?
>> >
>> > Here is Adrian's bio:
>> >
>> > Adrian Bowyer (UK)
>> > In the early 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical
>> > engineering at Imperial College, and then researched a PhD in
>> > tribology there.  In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Maths
>> > Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry.  He
>> > then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran
>> > that for four years.  After that he took up a lectureship in
>> > manufacturing in Bath's Engineering Department, where he is now a
>> > senior lecturer. His current areas of research are geometric modelling
>> > and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the
>> > Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of
>> > computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics.  His main work in
>> > biomimetics is on self-copying machines.
>> >
>> > Welcome both of you! =)
>> >
>> > Best!
>> > Menotti
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > empyre forum
>> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>> >
>>
>> --
>> http://no.systmz.goto10.org
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
>
> Christopher Sullivan
> Dept. of Film/Video/New Media
> School of the Art Institute of Chicago
> 112 so michigan
> Chicago Ill 60603
> csulli at saic.edu
> 312-345-3802
> _______________________________________________
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>
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