This is just a quick post to thank the indefatigable Régine Débatty for giving me a chance to rant against the French and exploitive media art festivals over at we-make-money-not-art. I probably said a few things that will come back to haunt me, but what the hell. At least I was able to discuss a little where I’m going with my current research, and to make yet another plug for Processing and explain why it is good for art schools (as if you haven’t heard by now).
[Link]
I’m getting swamped with Spam, and the WordPress filters can’t seem to stop it anymore. So I’m changing the rules for posting comments. I don’t want to close comments, and I don’t want to moderate everything, so if you’ve already posted a comment, you’ll pass automatically. But if you haven’t, you’ll have to wait for moderation. Sorry, but as anyone who has a blog knows, there’s a lot of spam. It’s insane.
One thing I have say about spam though, is that I’ve been reading it for years and I find it more and more poetic. Here are some recent examples:
“He went into the street and hailed a cab. He told the driver to go to stalker to fall into the meatgrinder and live. He was lucky. The fool…”
“Brendan said he was going to teach me how to be a judge someday. God help the boy, interjected Mrs. Cooper. That man dresses like a peacock flowering to mate. You may go into our room and watch television, overrode Marie quickly. But only for a half hour — Aww!”
Sometimes, it’s almost a simple haiku:
“in letitia see formaldehyde it place try istanbul , medford try caracas it breadfruit on goldwater the petrify or prince not merlin , stormbound try monsieur not tum”
Let’s try formatting that for a little more style:
in letitia
see formaldehyde
it place
try istanbul ,
medford
try caracas
it breadfruit
on goldwater
the petrify
or prince
not merlin ,
stormbound
try monsieur
not tum
It’s only a matter of time before some smart-ass contemporary artist strikes gold with this powerful new world of spam. If you’ve ever lived in North America, you know that spam has been a viable medium for years — long before it discovered the Internet. In fact the american economy, it might be argued, depends on it. It’s not going away anytime soon.
Whatever the case, we’ve got to get Jean-Pierre Balpe involved. He could finally have a forum for his brilliant poetic generators, and could probably teach a thing or two to these two-bit automatic poets.
I’m participating in a minor debate with some friends over at Metazimut (great name by the way). There are several points we’re debating, all surrounding the political, artistic and ontological nature of blogs. It started with one of the best French web-theoreticians, Etienne Cliquet (an even better name ;-) reacting to some militant positions I had recently taken with respect to standards and web aggregators over at CEDAR. Here is his original post with our comments: Feed me, feed me!!!.
Since Etienne and I are quite clearly squaring off around the role of pingbacks, I thought I would give him a tip of the hat over here with a ….pingback. He really does set himself up when he claims that in a popular blog pingbacks can be shut off whereas comments cannot. He obviously hasn’t been attacked by blog spam yet. While technically he might be right, the power of blogs comes from their links and not from their comments, which are the domain of forums by the way. In fact, many blogs have shown exactly the opposite logic. Régine Débatty was at our art school the other day and spoke about her politics concerning comments. Her blog has obviously become a force through pingbacks, links, trackbacks, call them what you will — and not through the comments which are heavily moderated. It was the inter-blog linking by the way that got her where she is now. In fact, we call it a blogosphere because of the links, not because of the comments. Many blogs even get their “voice” from the choice of links they prepare every day which acts as a proxy for commentary, especially when connected up into a network of interrelated links.
Back to Etienne’s post, I can see three major points of disagreement:
In an eye-opening accusation, Etienne claimed in his original post that my positions on web-standards were in fact apolitical. Woah. I was expecting quite a few reactions but not that one. I suppose I’ll never win over here: I’ve been accused of being apolitical for years, and when I finally do take some obvious political positions I’m told they’re apolitical. Ho hum. But more seriously, I think the problem here is assuming that we chose to move into open-source and open standards for merely technical reasons, and not political or critical ones. Even worse, that we did not have artistic motives, merely technical ones. I have been teaching in a fine arts school and not a technical trade school precisely because I am interested in a critical exploration of technology, avoiding above all instrumentalization. The common french argument against technology is that people use it without a critical eye. Resistance is everything for the French — it’s in fact what I love about them. But being unable to identify the resistance of others is a common French problem.
A more interesting debate surrounds the use of previous media models to define the medium itself. Etienne claims that blogs are subject to the ideology of “audience”, inherited from television, and to a lesser degree the press. While I agree with the press idea, his original emphasis was on a televisual model. My main opposition to this idea surrounded the distinction between synchronus flux (television) and asynchronus flux (press). Blogs, like newspapers, are dated. But blogs go further and add the minute itself of the post, which is what sometimes confuses it with a synchronus medium. During disasters where traditional communications go down, blogs are nowadays the first to get the news out. But the web, and all TCP/IP based communication, is fundamentally asynchronus and therefore needs to be distinguished from the television’s need to eternally populate its flux with rumor in the Heideggerian sense. RSS is fundamentally a publication medium, and was designed as such. It even works with media that wasn’t originally designed to be archived, searched, or aggregated. In Bruce Mau’s Life Style, he states:
“Postscript’s principal innovation was the invention of a “page description language” used to describe any point on the surface, whether it was text or image. There is no longer any distinction between text and non-text, image and non-image. The entire surface is now described in one language. Everything is now image.” – Bruce Mau, Life Style, p.65.
What I find interesting about RSS is how it reverses this logic : anything can be trapped into an RSS feed, even a synchronus flux. This ultimately re-textifies media objects, transforming them into discrete, modular, exchangeable and archivable entities. This is why the web, and blogs, can “watch” television, feed off of it, and then use to make new feeds, as is currently happening with You Tube.
The final point of dispute is the problem of creating a face-off between “content” and “presentation”. I knew this would create a debate in my original post (my web classes are based on this separation), precisely because so much French thinking is based on Foucauldian and Deleuzian theories that precsiely identify this kind distinction as an ideological trap. So I wasn’t suprised when people accused me of falling into it. But what amazed me was that precisely those who inspired me in this move, were those those that missed the point. So many local teachers (and many usability-fascists, by the way) think that CSS has become the new dogma, a new æsthetic imposed onto us like yet another politically-correct way-to-behave. Many who have recently questioned us on our move to Processing have the same misconception. The hilarous thing about this complaint is how far off target it is. In fact, the idea of moving over to CSS was precisely a strategy for putting behind us obsessions over presentation, and espousing — elegantly — the vanilla flavor logic of the web.
A case in point. Here is a recent post on this blog, entitled Diagram, Procedure, Algorithm that you can see in all its abstractmachine regala; I’ve chosen the background, the font family, the links colors and so on. Now go look for the same post, over on the vanilla-flavored processing blogs. Notice any difference? It’s presented using the default interface for WordPress, which is actually pretty close to my presentation, but obviously could be much much different; for example if I was reading it in a feed reader, or reading it in a terminal.
So for me, espousing the use of XHTML and CSS was less of an issue of making fancy webpages with my students (we don’t, ours suck) and getting them to focus on the logic of aggregators, and recontextualizers of all sorts currently taking over the web.
Oh, and focusing on this issue was — ahem — a politically motivated shift.
Ok, let it hearby be known that if one more person cites Picasso’s “Je ne cherche pas, je trouve”, they will be shot.
So I ended up speaking last Thursday at the Assises Nationales des Écoles d’Art. If you don’t know what that is, here is a post from a few days back (Assises Nationales des Écoles d’Art). Ohmygod, who the f##k came up with the idea of locking into a large conference hall a couple hundred french artists and intellectuals!@#¡¿? Actually, I found the whole experience pretty comical, and in the end damn cool to see how firey the whole thing could get and — gasp — passionate. But, as with many things French, the passionate side reveals a darker intrigue, mainly what in French is called le brassage de l’air, i.e. waving your arms about and making lots of noise in order to merely displace the oxygen in the room. Usually one displaces air in order hide an ulterior motive, namely to maintain the status quo. For there was sheer terror that could be felt in that room, sheer terror at the very idea of … change.
In our section of the Assises, we were supposed to be discussing research, and the official introduction and defense of research within our art schools. It might be worthwhile to contextualize that, for the introduction of this debate on “research in the context of art schools” is highly charged politically. There are several versions of the story on why we’re discussing research at this particular juncture, but I see three.
The first is simple : Europe has just introduced a new diploma standardization (that’s what Europe does : standards) requiring all higher education to enter into the logic of “Licence, Master, Doctorat”, 3/5/8, or “LMD”. And in order to meet this standard, curiculum has to be defined and credits have to be assigned according to concrete teaching-hours. Since what is actually taught in an art school is so experimental, and some would say (although we should be careful with this) obscure, French art school teachers are terrified and running around “ with their hair on fire®™ ”. The mere idea of writing down what they teach is for them the ultimate insult, as they see it as a judgement on the quality and quantity of their teaching. Recent fallacious accusations from idiots in our local city government would actually justify this fear, as would the official reasons cited by the mayor of Perpignan in his recent decision to close that city’s art school. Arists/professors also see it as the first step in the standardization of the subject-matter itself, followed by the sectioning-up of French art schools into various niches, i.e. instrumentalized art trade schools.
Leading us to the second reason I see for the current debate on ”research in art schools”. And this one is interesting for me because I can go either way on this issue, depending on how you frame the debate. On one side, when French politicians speak of more ”visibility” for French art schools, they mean more “applied” activity, populist, and “closer to the people”. It‘s demagogy, and of course bullshit. What they want is to instrumentalize art schools, and in their dreams at least, pander to the voters’ desire for immediate and short-term satisfaction. The result would be catastrophic and implode, but it’s what they desire, because they don’t understand long-term thinking. But that said, there is some truth to the idea that art schools should interface better with the larger community, and I would even say, the growing socio-economic context of the new millenium.
The final issue, a positive one, is the possible collaboration between art schools, universities, research labs, cultural groups, and private industry in the context of “new media”, i.e. digital media culture. This one is a no-brainer, because everybody wins. It’s also not a new idea (except for the French, of course). Industry discovers new ideas and unimagined publics; Art Schools find new sources for funding and even new technological artefacts, methodologies, and collaborators; and universities get their hands dirty with a pragmatic just-do-it (or production-based) approach that only an art school can provide. It is also a dangerous proposition, of course, hence the need to debate this issue seriously and develop strong protections for the smallest link — art schools — but a fascinating one, a constructive debate if you will. I have rejected publicly, and on several occasions, the idea of “interdisciplinary” art-science research. It’s a top-down model, and totally misunderstands the pragmatic and productive nature of artistic activity. But I debate this issue, as well as the problem of industrial forms of instrumentalization (we’re sandwiched between political and industrial desires to instrumentalize us), as a “chance” for art schools, and a possible new form of interfacing art production of the emerging digital culture. And nothing says that we have to interface only with industry when we get out of the education/museum context. We could work with political groups, foundations, etc., and develop art-technology projects with them. The “chance”, which can also been seen as an “excuse”, is the accident that happened to art with the introduction of computers and modular networked machines into its pratice. In other words, we are, thanks to the strange new artifacts before us, being offered an excuse to ask questions that we are not usually asking, and to collaborate with people we would have normally avoided. The desire for legitimzation is temporarily held at bay, just the time required to allow a new field to emerge.
This is of course already the freedom of art schools, and it is truly the beauty of the system; I have seen it in Aix : the patience they afford me to experiment with new questions, just the time required to develop a new field for the atelier, just as we have done with Antonin Fourneau with Gameboys or Pierre-Erick Lefebvre with our strange version of Rock n’ Roll. How then could this model be opened up for political groups, industrial partners, university and scientific researchers, without at the same time instrumentalizing the art school, politically and/or economically?
This is the question I tried to ask at the Assises Nationales des Écoles d’Art. I even asked these very questions at the round-table they invited me to, dedicated to the question of “déplacements”, or the displacements of art schools into foreign territories. And what response did I get? None. A Big Fat Silence. In fact, the forum quickly knee-jerked itself, and fell back to the brassage de l’air that had caracterized the two round-tables before it : art schools are great, we like things the way they are, we don’t need the LMD because we’re art schools damn it and to hell with you if you want to understand whatever it is we do. In fact, it even got worse : it was suggested during my round-table, as had been suggested earlier, that universities are looking to swallow whole the French art schools (perhaps, I have no data either way), even that Nicolas Sarkozy wants to shut down the entire Ministry of Culture itself, and that the big bad enemy is not only the Ministry of Culture but the Universities that would like to eat our budgets (a joke if you actually saw our budgets). Don’t get me wrong, I think there is some truth to these fears, and we have to remain lucid about their possible reality — but I am now convinced just as strongly that maintaining the status quo is precisely the best way to make these conspiracy theories a reality. Obsessing about the university system is perhaps the fastest route to bringing it upon ourselves. If we spend our time screaming that the sky is falling, someone might indeed profit from our distraction and eat our lunch. This is not the way to take an issue head-on.
The frightening thing about this detour from the debate-at-hand was the momentum it built up within the Assises, and resounded as a sort of intellectual mantra at all levels our discussion, squelching anything else. Frightening, because it was proposed by representatives of the university system, but terrifying above all because the force of their arguments were built precisely using the force of the University Verb. Arguments, screaming matches, ironic jokes, and off-colored remarks made by artists were mostly that of the manifeste, a certain political stance or artistic ethical position. The university intellectuals, on the other hand, were more sophisticated and used to their advantage their institutional superiority at manipulating the verb, the citation, and the dialectical structure. Hence it was via influence that they tainted our discussions, and led us ironically into a tautological closed-circuit argument on why it was we should avoid the institutions that formed them. This had the effect of a tornado where calm could only be found at its eye, staying close to the mantra (“confiding in the university is like giving your car keys to someone who wants to do you harm”) for fear of being pulverized by anything outside of this central core.
I also spoke of recent difficulties we’ve encountered trying to find out how to negotiate with industrial partners. Open source? Patents? Restricted use? Public domain? Sure, we can negotiate these issues one by one with our partners. But what sort of political platform exists to protect us during the negotiations (for all negotiation is a question of correctly assessing and amassing force)? I also spoke of the juridicial void as to how we can actually get this money into the school once we’ve signed these ellusive contracts. Does the money come directly to the school? No, for the moment. Does it go to a non-profit? This is apparently illegal, even if many do it. Et cætera, et cætera. Can I get paid overtime, or as a supplement to my current teaching, in order to work on these projects? No, for the moment. So we’re in a legal void.
But did this interrest anyone in the forum? Nope. Well, actually, after I railed at this general inertia, and eventually stormed off stage, quite a few people came up to me in private to express their support, but only in private of course. Hence the “Great Schism” : those that want to move French art schools into new territories, and those that see it as a form of active-minoritizing force that needs to be protected as is, as an a-topos or heterotopia (cf. Foucault). Strangely enough, these two positions are not incompatible, in fact one might even require the other, only in different strategic contexts. But we’re not there yet.
Research in art schools, some sort of political protections and economic means for us in these wonderful institutions we so desire to defend? New perpectives opening up onto critical uses of the powerful but frightening new social model? I guess that’ll be for some other day.
Here’s a crappy photo I took of the best moment, when two young students appeared onstage and sang our various manifests back to us in full royalist garb and manner. They were flanked by all the art school students who had also made the effort to come to the event (and were left silent, by the way).
On a happy note, I was given a lovely room at the last minute at the Hôtel de némours. If ever you’re looking for a nice place to stay in Rennes, this is your spot. The interior was apprently redesigned recently by a belgian architect, and reminded me of a pleasant stay at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco, but cheaper (since I didn’t pay for it, but also because it’s cheaper ;-). Usually hotels are so amazingly ugly that it was nice to see a simple adjustment to a typical small european hotel come out so nicely.
Why am I speaking about some nice but minor hotel when there were more important issues at hand? Well, you have your answer right there.
Oops, it happened again. I open my big mouth and end up getting dragged yet again into a conference where I probably won’t have anything to say. I was politely debating with a collegue from another art school on the subject of research, art schools, and the university system, when it turns out that he is one of the organizers of the big art-politics-education shindig in Rennes. I’m still not to sure what to think of this issue, it’s still pretty obscure for me as it’s steeped in the French political context, although I definitely have some positions on the difficulties of conducting research in our current situation. Whatever the case, I haven’t prepared anything, and I haven’t even read over the resumé of the last meeting on the subject I’m supposed to debate. I suppose I’ll have to cram on the train.
I will be debating in a round-table context, which is just about the stupidest configuration I can think of. I hate round-tables. People sit on a stage and give their opinions on things while other people watch. I much prefer moderated open debate. Or out-and-out speeches.
I insisted on mainting “une réserve de silence” if I do not have anything to say.
I originally was planning to go to the Assises as a spectator, and to participate in the next meeting of CEDAR for which I definitely have things to talk about.
Antonin Fourneau has just published the DOGMeNIAROF over at the ENIAROF blog. It is of course inspired by Lars von Trier & Thomas Vinterberg’s Domge95 Vow of Chastity (that said, our vow is more a vow of lasciviousness). The idea is to create an associative movement countering various unfortunate tendencies in digital art, and more importantly digital art festivals. And as an affront to the big daddy of all digital arts festival, we’re sending it into the Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category to see what they’ll do with it (we don’t expect much on that front, but who knows).
What does this have to do with code, you ask? Everything. Although ENIAROF is an inclusive project (mud wrestling anyone?), it emerged from artists working principly with code. A lot of us were inspired as youths from video games and 8-bit computers. While we might have since moved on to more elegant expressions, we found the need to create a messier, playful arena, with equally playful methodologies of production. What if CODE|ART had its own punk movement? ENIAROF tries to participate in that effort.
And it goes without saying that ENIAROF 0.2 will have a lot of Processing-based installations.
As rule 10 states that participating artists have to translate DOGMeNIAROF into their native toungue (if not yet already translated) and publish it online, here goes:
DOGMeNIAROF
[1] Although ENARIOF takes as its point of departure the term ‘Carnival’ (§), in no means must it take place within a carnival (especially contemporary carnivals!). To the contrary, it can in fact be seen as its re-appropriation (détournement).
[2] Installations must be built on-site, although materials may be prepared in advance. If a work has not been created for Eniarof, it must blend in with the rest. In the same vein, an Eniarof artist can introduce works of another artist, but he or she must then take charge of its integration.
[3] Each Eniarof participant must contribute to at least one of the aspects of preparation: communication, management, installation, dismantling, etc.
[4] Each participant can seek private financing/partnership for his or her attraction. A blank space will be reserved on all Eniarof communications for partners’ logos. (Artist-as-athlete?)
[5] Each participant will help in at least one other project, both to keep the atmosphere convivial, but also to take pride in another installation functioning if by chance one’s own installation is not working.
[6] All participants must avoid superfluous expenses. Do not attempt to hide traces of the work’s production within an encasement for which you do not have the means.
[7] Eniarof organizers can only be paid percentages of fees that in the end are destined to artists. All other assistants in the production of Eniarof cannot be paid any more than the participating artists are themselves paid. In the same sense, the barman, the guardian, the ticket-taker, … are not paid any better than the artists themselves.
[8] Each participant must take care that people within their entourage know about ENIAROF.
[9] The authors of attractions cannot be labeled during the event itself, however attribution can be communicated in the press releases.
[10] Every artist participating in Eniarof, and for which the Dogme has not yet been translated into his or her native language, must translate said Dogme (or have it translated) and publish this document (for example: on-line).
[11] Each participant must identify the principal idea and material needs of his or her attraction approximately three months in advance of the event.
[12] Each participant must possess an Eniarof t-shirt to promote ’da crew in swank cosmopolitan parties. The artist can make his or her own t-shirt, or obtain one of the printed t-shirts during the event.
[13] An Eniarof must be produced within at least an hour of an Emmaüs (†) center, or its equivalent (for raw materials).
[14] All materials borrowed from Emmaüs or its equivalent must be returned after the event, except in special pre-negotiated cases (for example, in case the object has to be dismantled or transformed).
[15] In order to reinforce the idea of a network of participants, former Eniarof participants are invited to participate in at least one new Eniarof. In this way, artists enact the links of the network.
[16] An Eniarof project must be an attempt at making an attraction. The attractiveness of the work will thus be its judge.
[17] The attractions should ‘spill-over’ into each other. Do not get obsessed with some pre-defined form. The overall spilling-over of one work into each other will create a backdrop for Eniarof (its social cohesion), the esthetics of an Eniarof (not necessarily the same for each iteration). If a neighboring artist spills over too much into your space you have several solutions: reroute his or her spill-over, steal their work from them (risking being robbed from in turn), build on top it, …
Translator’s notes:
§ ‘ENIAROF’ is ‘Foraine’ spelled backwards. An english equivalent might be ‘LAVINRAC’
† Emmaüs is a non-profit network of centers redistributing goods to the poor. Similar institutions exist in many countries, for example the Goodwill network in the United States.
I’ve been offline from the Abstract Machine project for over two weeks, thanks to my Internet connection which is constantly on the brink. Often not enough to even get an email off. It’s been spotty for the past three months, but never enough to keep me from working. Until the Christmas period, that is, where it out-and-out died. Suddenly it’s back up, without explanation, leading me to a quick post before it dies again. It’s enough to drive you insane. My provider has changed hands an infinite number of times (five and counting) and has currently caught me up in the middle of a year-long contract with Alice who is incapable of staffing their hotline adequately. Imagine two weeks of automatic speed dialing only to be cut-off once you’ve finally played the n(0-9) multiple-choice game we all know and love.
It’s brought back an old debate for me, one I hadn’t followed in years : the question of the accident. Here’s a snippet, for example, from a recent interview with Paul Virilio, the latest inventor of this definition of technology as accident-producer:
On me reproche souvent de ne m’intéresser qu’aux accidents. Non, je ne m’intéresse qu’à la vitesse. Inventer le train, c’est inventer le déraillement. Inventer l’avion, c’est inventer le crash. Inventer l’arme atomique, c’est inventer la prolifération nucléaire. Autrement dit, la vitesse est un progrès. Mais également un progrès de la catastrophe. — Paul Virilio, in Libération 17-18 December 2005, p.47.
We’ve been hearing for the past few years, that Internet2 is on its way. O’Reilly has called it Web 2.0, but it’s more or less the same thing: the web as middleware, as application, as desktop — but more importantly as aggregator, as modular platform. It’s been something I’ve believed in ever since Netscape tried to do it back in the late 1990′s. I even tried to turn this Abstract Machine project into a sort of artistic .NET-competitor back in 2001, before the Villa Arson who was housing the project got cold feet and bailed out (or whimpered out the French way, by refusing all meetings and calls until you get the message). I never found anyone else to take over the project, so I moved on to other concerns. But I’ve totally gotten the middleware revolution for years, and have been trying to push into it, as can be seen through some of my students’ projects, for example the Webwaste project from 2001/2, or some workshops I organised at the Villa Arson or at ARI/ENSAD. My whole current argument about the definition of the word “Platform”, as can be found in the Jouable lectures and workshops, revolves around this belief. Even the latest Web class is a prelude to building aggregateable content.
But there’s obviously a flipside to this Web 2.0 euphoria, and that brings me a little closer to something Paul Virilio has been saying about the Internet for years. And although Virilio is ultimately a Luddite, he is a very prescient one, and maybe should be read a little more closely. While the Web 2.0 will open up spaces, as Virilio reminds us, it will invent a new form of accident, a new form of catastrophe, just as all technologies before. While my current pain is minor, it does give pause as to what the new form of accidents the Web might invent for us. We might also ask, from a creative point of view, what kind of Achilles Heel (cf. “Talon d’achille”) it might open up for us to exploit artistically.
Virilio is of course full of it when he claims that the Internet is collapsing collective urban space — that new technologies are allowing us to access remote spaces to the detriment of the local, of the “viare” — the rail, the road, the good-old-fashioned slow and continuous path :
Aujourd’hui, on vit la fin de la trame “viaire”, c’est-à-dire du contact avec le sol, la route, la rue, au profit d’une perception survolée et lointaine : celle des hélicoptères qui survolent la ville, ou des voitures qui passent à toute vitesse, sur une autoroute. On ne perçoit plus qu’à distance, c’est-à-dire de haut ou de loin. Les pouvoirs jouent la dissuasion pour que les gens restent chez eux. — Paul Virilio in “Liberation”, 17-18 December 2005, p.46
He is right in only the most superficial and obvious way. Sure, the continuity of localities are disrupted by the near-teleportation speeds of the new forms of displacement. But when I lived in Paris — perhaps the ultimate hypercity of the late 20th century — I was always amazed at the degree to which the RER, the Metro, the BUS, and the rue combined into one another, and more importantly opened up new forms of locality, and especially new communities, even forms of resistance. I did not find myself, contrary to what Virilio claims, to use these various forms of speed to jump over undesireable communities, in fact it was quite the contrary : they allowed me to develop new ones and integrate those with the most heterogeneous classes of the Parisian polis. I.e. while these forms might be designed to distance us, they in fact accelerate at the same time new forms of resistance to such a design. I remember in one of his seminars at the Collège Internationale de Philosophie he claimed that faster technologies always supplant slower ones: for example the escalator always supplants the stairs. Why do we still have so many stairs then, and often accompanying escalators? I asked him, to only receive a muddled reply. The obvious response should have been the constant breakdowns of the escalator, which he seems to suggest in other contexts, for example his discussions of train wrecks giving way to new railway safety systems. But even here I think there is something more complex at work.
The Web 2.0 people are good people, and join the positions of the geeky-types to those of more art-geek-types, such as Geert Lovink in After the Dot Com Crash or more recently via Pixelache and their Dot Org Boom conference. The later are of course critical looks at the evolution of the Web, but perhaps we haven’t been critical enough in our heterotopist euphoria to the still looming dark underbelly of the Internet, i.e. as a form of control.
Anyway, my local crash has led me to pull back on my latest architecture which was designed to allow me to work entirely off the web, in a totally transparent fashion. Basically I’ve spent the past four months working on a web-platform architecture for the Abstract Machine that, perhaps with the exception of the blog, becomes totally unoperational without 24/7 immediate and high-speed access. I’m definitely going to have to rethink my whole architecture.
Ok, so everything has officially gone haywire here in France.
First, our Minister of Culture, the succinctly named Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, decides to legalize DRM’d content, and more importantly to propose a law more or less forcing DRM as the standard media exchange model, effectively making various open-source peer-to-peer solutions illegal. The law is called DADVSI (Droits d’auteurs et droits voisins dans la société de l’information). You can consider it an offshoot of Clinton’s DMCA. For example, in the law, it stipulates that trying to bypass a copy-protection system can land you in jail for three years with a 3000€ fine. The Minister denies this as caricature (pointing to new amendments that he’s added to the bill), but as far as I can tell, this anti-bypass stipulation is still part of the proposal. He speaks of the right to copy for personal needs, but says nothing of the legal quagmire cryptography has gotten itself into under the DMCA. Nor has he said anything about libraries or education.
Obviously, as an artist who defends hacking as an artistic method within one of his very institutions (I teach in an art school), I’m more than a bit troubled that the big boss is undercutting artistic freedom in the name of defending artists. Obviously, and to give him credit, he’s trying to defend artistic royalties, but ultimately the model he defends is one that protects traditional media that has simply been updated to the digital format, while singling out as the culprit the very expression that looks to be the next artistic form of expression: namely algorithmic or dynamic media. He has been defending video games recently, which is good, but that’s an easy one because that field has become an industry, and it is easy to regulate. I’m more interested in the lateral-growth field of dynamic media as a multiplicity, and these actions are going to do more to stop that diversity than protect it. Indeed, it might be the very thing that stifles it. I might be wrong, of course, but a lighter step, with larger consultation, should have been de rigeur.
Traditional media has become huge, too huge — indeed the 800-pound gorilla — and needs no such protections. It is becoming more and more of a barrier to entering into a dynamic relationship with media in general. Traditional media needs shaking up — it’s a creative ecosystem issue — and that’s exactly what’s happening. I still think it’s too soon to take a final position either way on these issues, and a Minister of Culture should look more to new forms, than defending old ones that are honestly doing fine thank you very much. He might think that’s he’s hip by inviting Virgin into the parliament to give demonstrations of their high-tech online music stores. But he’s mistaken: that’s still the old media empire. It’s still in power and is trying to wield it to get into the new power arena. And every time I turn on the television (Canalsat, sub-division of Vivendi) I am reminded of the power this empire still wields over us.
If you’re wondering how this thing came about, a part of his law was — yes it’s true — actually penned by Vivendi lawyers, and join all the insane arguments Hollywood has been making for years about the need for huge unified media empires to protect us little artists that obviously wouldn’t know what to do without them. All this in time for Christmas, when everyone is busy elsewhere, and all within a law that has to be debated en urgence, i.e. with one single reading so as to pass it through as quickly as possible.
The infamous line that exploded the debate, came from the SACEM (a powerful institution dealing with music royalties). Symbolically addressing open-source authors, they said, “Vous allez arrêter de publier vos logiciels” (you will stop distributing your software). They also vowed to fight in the courts anyone who would do so, once these laws had passed. Obviously this pissed off a lot of people, notably the French web radios who called for various boycotts and created anti-DAVDSI petitions that have caught fire and made it difficult for the Minister trying to pass his law.
The protests got to such a shrill that even within his own majority party, members started defecting during the parliamentary debate, and have now voted-in a pro-P2P amendment, initiated by the Socialists and Communists. Their idea is to propose an opt-in tax, basically the equivalent of a subscription-model only run by the state, that would allow you to exchange files in an unlimited manner over peer-to-peer networks. lol!
In response, that amendment has brought out a bunch of “artists” in the press — basically singers and musical groups — who’ve started protesting the anti-DRM-pro-Peer-to-Peer faction of the Socialist Party. It’s hilarious to watch, as 50-something leftist singers come out railing against “free culture”, making statements that drag us back to the good old Napster-Metallica debate when Lars Ullrich made an ass out of himself with what probably began as good intentions. This is obviously going to reinforce the Minister of Culture who, while he was dropping his pants for the music industry, claimed he was doing so in the name of artists.
So all hell has broken loose, and at least one good thing has come out of it: the government has proposed to postpone the debate until January when everyone’s gotten over the hangover (and the Minister has mobilized enough “artists” to his cause).
I actually met the Minister of Culture — he’s quite charming — and sat through a surreal session while he negotiated with the theatre unions during some heated strikes that were going on over a year ago. He had been appointed by Chirac to take care of this strike, but all the while I suspected something else, considering that he’s very close to the multimedia publishing industry. I still pinch myself to this day that I wasn’t more vocal on these issues when I had the chance, but I deferred to my colleagues out of solidarity, not wanting to confuse their negotiations.
I’ll leave off my rant here. Please excuse me while I go buy another Christmas Carol off iTunes.
Thanks to Marius Watz‘s post over at Generator.x (The Company Formerly Known as Macromedia), I noticed that Macromedia has finally been swallowed whole by Adobe. That I didn’t get to this information about 30 seconds afer-the-fact, but rather several days afterwards, is testimony to how far I’ve travelled on this subject. The first time I had wandered off like this was during the terror and agony of waiting for Director to be ported to Mac OS X. It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, as I learned several languages and environments in the hiatus. But now, this time around, I’ve more or less nailed the coffin shut as far as Director’s future is concerned.
It’s also been fun to explore other means of playing with code artistically, which I probably wouldn’t have done if I was still trapped in the magical world of sprites.
That doesn’t mean I couldn’t eventually turn around the hammer if Adobe pulled out some magic rabbit. But until Macromedia Adobe actually comes to my bedside and tells me the contrary, Director is a lame duck. Sure, it’ll probably drag on, and who knows, it might even get a new life (cough). But I’ve already switched all my workshops and teaching over to Processing. Any responsible artist teaching code to the next generation should do the same. Processing is open, easy to learn, expanable, and most importantly built and used by artists. Macromedia originally built their company off Director, and it was built as a demo tool, as a training tool, but also as an artistic tool. It was sound and motion, along with code. And until Flash came along to spoil the party, it was kick-ass. It was pretty much a platform, but over the last few years turned more and more into a multimedia tool.
I’ve been using Director since version 3.0, so I’ve seen this thing evolve. It’s currently traversing dark days. And now with Apple’s switch to Intel, I’m not only going to have to wait for Adobe to update Director — should be painful, if they decide to do it at all — but also all the third-party xtras, including some pretty obscure xtras that are absolutely key to my success. So it’s looking pretty grim for me right now. I was planning on releasing a DVD-Rom of my last algorithmic film using my Concrescence platform, for example. Well, guess that’ll have to wait another… year? two years? never? I have no idea, as Abobe won’t tell.
Anyway, I’m not going to risk sacrificing my students over this. At least they’ll have more options until Adobe comes clean on its intentions. Meanwhile I’ll be over here agonizing on the future of several of my works.
Oh, did I mention that Shockwave 3d still sucks?
Here’s Marc Canter’s original reaction to the whole affair.
Happy New Year!
Here’s an interactive greeting card to welcome you to all the great things that await us in 2004.
Just in time for the war, a mapping program that’ll give you real-time updates on the White House‘s geographical expansion program.
Recently, I’ve built a flashlight-controlled Space Invaders in response to World Trade Crash of September 11th. The whole event had sort of taken over my life, I was equally fascinated and disgusted by the whole thing, as well as by the (lack of) response which will inevitably become an excuse to do whatever the f*** we’ve always wanted to to overbloated warpath.
So last week I emulated the original Space Invaders, and added the possibility of using a simple flashlight or car headlights to contol the movement of the lone defender. I’ve been experimenting projecting the game directly onto buildings such as the Marseille World Trade Center, where any common citizen can come and defend the world against alien invaders from the sky. I use a car cigarette adapter and laptop batteries to keep everything working, and very mobile.
