[-empyre-] seeing yourself a prototype - the limits of open source

[Renate Ferro]

Thanks Cynthia for sharing.  I've been lurking this month, enjoying
Adrienne's posts and others.  I just  wanted to add  that  the new media
artist and designer Maurice Benayoun visited our Cornell Art Department
this week where he shared with our students his open source website of
ideas and projects that for him were either unusable, not possible, or too
 expensive on <the-dump.net> (google will translate the page from French
to English).  He explains that the-dump is his open source sharing space
where anyone can pick up one of his ideas freely and indeed many have
done.  The work was part of his PHD dissertation in Paris.  Right now he
is spear heading the design of an open source website for artist's to
share their images both still and moving at <theartcollider.org>

Renate

> Wow - I love the concept that we are all changing and that each of us
> an ongoing prototype for the next generation of ourselves
>
> At the CAA session on Open Source (chaired by Patrick Lichty),
> Michael Mandiberg gave a presentation arguing for giving away Design
> ideas, for making practical design concepts  "Open Source," patent
> free ideas to be shared among the industrious.  In his talk he
> presented some Open Source Design ideas developed at Eyebeam.
>
> A member of the audience who identified herself as a graduate student
> in Fine Arts at the Chicago Art Institute asked the question about
> what it the equilivant of "Open Source Design" in the Fine Arts, and
> how could Fine Arts students establish a Fine Arts Open Source
> practice.   She left before I could respond with the thought that as
> Fine Arts faculty members in art schools and art departments we are
> always giving away our ideas, our sense of how art works, what it can
> do, or what it might be in a certain situation. The very act of
> engaging in a critique session is an "Open Source" exchange of ideas.
> When students leave the room after a crit, they have no obligation to
> cite their professors as the source of their ideas, they simply take
> them and go.
>
> Of course in an academic setting Ideas are not completely free,
> because students are paying tuition, and faculty members are being
> paid.  We have a contractual agreement to share ideas, to be (nearly)
> Open Source Fine Artists.
>
> If we are all prototypes, then as individuals outside of the academic
> world,  we can share our Ideas as artists, as thinkers, as critics
> without a contractual agreement.  But isn't that what we are doing
> already in spaces such as this one - in discussion lists, in artist
> meetings, even when we show work in progress to friends and colleagues?
>
> Now the question of second order prototyping as turning to others --
> not sure that I am ready for that!  It sort of reminds me of my
> teenage years going shopping for clothes with my mother, who somehow
> poured me into dresses and pulled on one corner or another to make
> them look like they fit, even when they remained uncomfortable.
>
>
> Cynthia
>
> Cynthia Beth Rubin
> http://CBRubin.net
>
>
>
> On Mar 18, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Julian Oliver wrote:
>
>> ..on Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 03:10:01PM -0000, Johannes Birringer wrote:
>>>>> Davin wrote:>> At one point in time, discrete objects were
>>>>> things that were considered prototypes that could be thrown into
>>>>> an existing system and tested. Increasingly, it seems like the
>>>>> prototypes are geared to test individual and collective
>>>>> consciousness.  In other words, maybe we are the  prototypes?
>>>>> Being tested so that we can be effectively processed, shrink-
>>>>> wrapped, labeled, bought and sold>>
>>
>> Hmm, This statement from Davin confused me also. I thought it was
>> fairly clear
>> that any act of learning - or any 'attempt', which all action is at
>> it's root -
>> simultaneously produces the self as a prototype, even if only for
>> the duration
>> of that act. The very notion of a prototype assumes a platonic and
>> eventuating
>> objecthood, a finished thing. When are people ever so singularly
>> resolved?
>>
>> Second order prototyping is the work of other people, especially
>> aquaintances,
>> marketeers and those that resource people.
>>
>> Beast,
>>
>> --
>> Julian Oliver
>> home: New Zealand
>> based: Berlin, Germany
>> currently: Berlin, Germany
>> about: http://julianoliver.com
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>>
>
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>


Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Art
Cornell University, Tjaden Hall
Ithaca, NY  14853

Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
Website:  http://www.renateferro.net


Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/