A landscape of bricoleurs

Peer to peer communication is every bit an act of bricolage – of tinkering, re-ordering, re-combining, de- and re-constructing existing elements into new and unforeseen forms, only to pass them along the chain to be further transformed. The participant in peer to peer culture, whom we might call a ‘bricoleur’, is ever part of an endless dialogue, an evolving process that reaches beyond and before their contribution.

This takes some adjusting to, and nowhere more so than in the world of media and the creative arts, where the spectre of authorship, and the draconian intellectual property rights that trail closely behind it, loom heavily over the most seemingly throw-away proceedings. But as consumers increasingly refuse to take a passive role and those in the communications industries gradually come to accept the full possibilities of participatory culture, or CGM (consumer generated material), the transition towards a peer to peer model, and thus a model made up of a fluid, mobile network of bricoleurs comes ever closer.

The Bricolab project

Bricolab.com is a group of interconnected sites designed to foster creative collaboration via Open Source Culture, social networking and web 2.0 technologies. Made up of a blog, set up for resource sharing and commentary on p2p creativity, a wiki for community collaboration and a Project Space for community forging, blogging and file sharing, Bricolab is a free, open space built on the back of the Open Source applications MediaWiki, Elgg and WordPress.

The PocketPacket project

While the project is ultimately an open culture jamming session, which will evolve in response to the community that will ultimately shape and reshape its function and form, the first community project to be launched from Bricolab is the PocketPacket project. The PocketPacket is an experiment in ‘p2p-brut’, which is to say p2p in the raw.

Essentially a means of taking p2p to the streets, the PocketPacket is a downloadable set of posters, stickers and postcards to attach to community dictated monthly projects, to be dropped off in public spaces. The first of these projects is that of the PocketPedia.

PocketPedia

The PocketPedia is a simple, street level project designed to make the gift of free GNU Wikipedia articles to strangers, delivered by means of the PocketPacket to trains, buses and other locations of extreme boredom. It is a small gesture that at once provides hand-selected, and personally endorsed reading material for commuters the world over and draws attention to peer to peer alternatives. All are welcome to get involved, and can do so via the PocketPacket website.

Future projects

Future PocketPacket and Bricolab efforts will arise from the community. Current suggestions include the distribution of home made original and derivative art, and creative commons licensed mp3 cds composed and remixed online.

(Image courtesy of atom.smasher)