The Net.Art Commons (1)

This is the text from a presentation at Medialab Prado in Madrid, by Juan Martín Prada, for the Inclusiva-net meeting in July 2009. Perhaps the first text to specifically link net.art to p2p and commons oriented themes?

Juan Martín Prada:

“The space around us increasingly lacks areas that are not private, fenced or restricted. Common space in cities is usually limited to common transit spaces (highways, sidewalks, etc.) or has been replaced by places for meeting and socializing provided by shopping and leisure centres, scenarios where the shared, enthusiastic presence of thousands of people in their free time is a necessary condition for active commercial activity. What is public space today? That is one of the most relevant questions arising at present, a central theme of inquiry for all critical thought and especially for the most socially committed artistic proposals.

Unfortunately, the concept of “the commons” is often understood not as something that belongs to everyone but rather as something that belongs to no one and therefore is worthless, given that it lies outside the systems of appropriation and exchange that comprise market systems.

There can be no question that in a reconsideration of what the commons means nowadays, nothing has played a more influential role than the Free Software and Open Source movements. Faced with the oligopolies of the proprietary software industry, it was necessary to recover the cooperative, non-proprietary environment that characterized the development of software prior to the early 1970s. Richard Stallman’s creation of the Free Software Foundation (1985) following AT&T’s paralyzation of the Unix open source operating system and the establishment of the GNU General Public License have comprised the most significant initiatives in maintaining the principle of the commons in technological development. They spurred an entire current based on the inevitable identification of software (understood as a cultural code) and language, which found it inconceivable to purchase the words of a language for exclusive use.

We are currently witnesses to the beginning of a new era in working for the generation of a field of “the commons” in the context of networks. Now more than ever paths are being explored toward opening up, reusing and transferring both software and contents. And although contradictions do exist between the official ideology of Open Source culture and its actual practice , it is increasingly clear that the conviction is gaining force that the fundamental principles of action models set forth in the concept of “Free/Libre & Open Source Software” (FLOSS) are applicable to any service and even reach beyond the world of computers. This applicability involves the transformation of a certain production model into a highly distributable model, the possibility of using any asset, modifying and adapting that asset to one’s own needs, distributing it freely, etc.

Certainly today there is great excitement as we see that some of the fundamentals of free and open source software can also be applied to the field of contents and data available on the Web, which brings us to the dawning of an emerging trend towards “free data” (“free” meaning both free of charge and freely available). This path, however, still has huge obstacles. The most significant one is that, at present, almost none of the large repositories of data generated by users on the most frequently used Web 2.0 platforms is easily reusable for forming other, different databases (although they may be reusable in technological terms, in almost all cases, that is strictly forbidden by the companies that manage those repositories). This is surely one of the great paradoxes of Web 2.0: the combination of public material as content and containers subject to the private domain.

NET.ART WORKS AS THE COMMONS

There is no question that artistic creations, like many other creative activities where the author’s subjectivity is part of what is created, have great difficulty when the freedom and premises of free and open source software are applied to them. The most frequent limits are licences based on “some rights reserved”, exclusively permitting some freedom in the use of these productions in a more or less free distribution of the work. It is clear that the inclusion of the freedom and premises that characterize free and open source software to the field of artistic creation signifies a radical questioning of the concept of authorship, brought into question time and again by the creative tendencies linked to digital remix strategies.

Regardless of the possible adaptation of the freedom and premises of FLOSS to the field of net.art, it cannot be denied that the emergence of manifestations of net.art in the mid-1990s constituted one of the events that most clearly placed artistic practices within the field of the production of “common goods”. The immaterial nature of online work, fully accessible through the Internet from any location, is an extreme reclaiming of the identification of artistic proposals with “the commons”. In opposition to this notion, various attempts at marketing net.art works which have been carried out by galleries and museums have shown a transfer of the context of the art-institution and the logic of its market to the Internet setting. However, it was also one of its most paradoxical representations. Selling or trying to sell a work of net.art means buying something that cannot be exchanged, which is inherently something that cannot be sold.

These attempts at imposing market systems continued the process already begun with the development of video art and subsequent artistic manifestations on CD-ROM. These attempts using media designed for mass distribution ended up being limited, paradoxically, to a small number of copies in limited editions . This combination of a media-based artistic strategy and an anti-media social application comprised antimony that still plagues digital artistic manifestations. In this trend or its consent, the medium was considered solely in regard to its characteristics and linguistic or conceptual research potential, with no thought to the social dimension of its technical nature.

In reality, upon acquiring a net.art work, one actually acquires only the place where it is located (only the URL, as the indication of where it is stored can be commercially appropriated). In this sense, the situation is contrary to that of the possession of an object art work, whose characteristics are fundamentally comprised of the possibility of moving it around in space, all the possible benefits its owner could derive from the exclusive nature of its possession being dependent on that, as well as hiding it or enjoying it exclusively, commercial exchange, etc. As a result, the power held by the owner of a net.art work is limited to a paradoxically “counter-media” use of the medium.

This, on occasions, took the form of restricted access to it, acting against the exclusive essence of the medium, which is interconnection and free, permanent, multiple and simultaneous access. However, with regard to the works carried out for the Web, the only concept of possession is understood as something identical to the common right to experience them.

THE CIRCULATION OF COMMON GOODS AS A WORK SUBJECT

If part of network art can be considered as one of the most radical forms in which artistic creation is identified with the creation of a commons, we should also remember that reflection on the sale of common goods and rights in the Network Society is seen as one of its major thematic cores, especially in recent years. A good of example of this is the project Vote-Auction (2000) by UBERMORGEN.COM, which offered citizens with a right to vote in the 2000 US presidential election the option of selling their vote on the Internet to the highest bidder. This proposal, of selling that which cannot be sold, marketing something which is a non-transferable individual right, was a parody of the increasing approximation between democracy and capitalism that takes place in the Network Society, as well as a satire of the electoral industry, understood here as an essential factor in the consumer logic in democratic functioning.

There are also quite a few online projects on how to coordinate, organize and plan the activity of sharing (which in the digital field means that, by sharing, no one loses any of what they share) and that understand this type of practice as a specific type of politicized artistic production. Given their concern about how goods and capital circulate on the networks, many of these artistic-activist projects place a priority on a reflection on how common goods circulate, on the various possible types of common goods (an identification that is parallel to the Marxist one of different types of capital), as well as ways in which forming groups or associations is possible where sharing can take place or where the proliferation of the commons is feasible.

Precisely, another project by UBERMORGEN.COM, carried out with Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, titled GWEI – Google Will Eat Itself (2005), was about the more or less obvious processes of subjugation of all communicative dynamics in the network-system to the commercial interests of only a few companies. Based on Google’s “AdSense” programme, this project served to criticize the system of commercial appropriation generalized on the Internet network by this US company. The idea was to turn its income system from advertising into a self-cannibalizing system; the money obtained through Google ads placed on a specific network of Web sites would be used to buy shares in Google, which would subsequently be transferred to their users . Of course, the proposal was a parody; the estimated time it would take until all Google shares were acquired and transferred to the public domain of users of the application was over two hundred million years.”

Author bio:

He is the author of numerous articles and essays about digital aesthetics, and of the following books: La apropiación posmoderna. Arte, práctica apropiacionista y Teoría de la posmodernidad (published by Fundamentos, Madrid, 2001) and Las nuevas condiciones del arte contemporáneo (Briseño Editores, Córdoba, 2003). He is a contributor to many printed and digital publications in Spain and abroad, including journals such as REIS, Red Digital, Papiers d’art, A minima, Temps d’art, Transversal, Exit Books, Exit Press, Mecad e-Journal, or the newspaper La Vanguardia (Barcelona). He has been a member of the Art-Science-Technology commission at FECYT, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology. He has a PhD on contemporary art from the Universidad of Madrid (1998) and he is currently full time professor at the Social and Communication Sciences School at the University of Cádiz (Spain). He has curated shows of digital media art, and since 2007 he coordinates the platform “Inclusiva-net.org” at Medialab-Prado (Madrid, Spain).

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