Salvatore Iaconesi (of ‘Art is Open Source’ and the ‘Ubiquitous Commons’ project is interviewed by La scuola open source:
* How do you envision an “open source school”?
Well, now you are going to hate me, but it doesn’t matter. In my opinion an “open source school” does not exist. According to what I’ve said above, an “open source school” should coincide with the whole world. In an Open Source School new aesthetics, new beauties, new desires and new relational opportunities, and even a new kind of awareness should join new tools and methodologies, so that they will change the way we consider time (more Kairos and less Kronos) and the wish to make perceptible, legible and available knowledge.
A third space between Apollo and Dionysus.
An “open source school” should be ubiquitous. It is a mental state, not a project.
It is magic, telepathy, poetry, body.
We talk a lot about hackers, makers, creative people. But we rarely wonder which role magic, poetry, telepathy could play in social innovation and change.
We must realize that hackers, makers and creative people are already part of the industrial economy and, therefore, they are at the service (mostly unpaid) of other interests.
A friend told me that the only last and real freedom left is going crazy. I think it’s a remarkable statement, and it must be taken in serious consideration.
Me and my friend/brother Alex Giordano, for example, got it very seriously: we thought to make something that could be called “Basaglia Hub”, a hub that applies the great Basaglia’s innovations to the current life to bring back innovators into society.
The “open source school”? It is definitely a mental space (That’s why, for instance, I love talking of “telepathy” when we reach these issues).
* What would it change if an “open source school” existed?
If an “open source school” would exist, we would dream more, maybe together with many other persons. Networked dreams.
If you were given the opportunity to change the way knowledge is transmitted at school, how would you imagine it? ? As I stated before, transmitting knowledge is just a part of school. There are thousands of instruments and methods to convey knowledge branches: they can be formal and informal, technological or traditional, conscious and unconscious. This is not what is lacking .
What is lacking is wishing, awareness, mental space and time (and its perception) for the transmission of knowledge. So I would work on these concepts.
In this vision, considering school as an “entrance to the world of work” becomes a problem. I mean that the “world of work” is changing irrevocably. It has already changed. It would take a lot more space to have a serious discussion on this issue. Luckily, the discussion is wide and rich, and you just have to look around to see the results. I am only saying that the idea of work is increasingly fluid and indistinguishable from that of “life” and “leisure”.
For these reasons we seriously need to think about our freedom, our autonomy and our ability to create relational ecosystems, able to support each other in a mutual way, on a wide range of different economies.
In this sense, the best advice I can give is to relate to people instead of doing it to companies or organizations, by learning to communicate and to establish relationships between bodies (no matter if they are digital, physical or hybrid), in a sincere , mutual and open way. Beyond the narcissism and the need for financial resources, embracing the possible, the imaginable, the beautiful, the true, the sustainable, the ecological ( not only in an environmental meaning)
By doing that, we may realize to be surrounded by people, not by companies, organizations, percentages and statistics. By bodies. With their desires, aspirations, dreams, cultures. This is, in my opinion, one of the more perceptive interventions that a school should implement.”