[-empyre-] from communities to festivals / printing printers

[marloes]

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
> 

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