[-empyre-] Olive Oil

Tue Mar 30 06:06:57 EST 2010

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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