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% HIDDENKEYWORDS: Greenhalgh, Eleanor|Williams, Claire|Ulziikhuu, Urantsetseg|Clar, Christina|Colenbrander, John|Haag, Christoph|Murtaugh, Michael
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% UU = Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu
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The following statements were recorded by Urantsetseg Ulziikhuu (Urana) in **2014**.
She studied communication in Istanbul and Leuven and joined Constant for a few months
to document the various working practices at Constant Variable. Between 2011 and 2014,
Variable housed studios for Artists, Designers, Techno Inventors, Data Activists, Cyber Feminists,
Interactive Geeks, Textile Hackers, Video Makers, Sound Lovers, Beat Makers and other
% digital creators who were interested in using Free, Libre and Open Source Software for their creative experiments.
digital creators who were interested in using F/LOS software for their creative experiments.
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Why do you think people should use and or practice Open Source software? What is in it for you?
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The knitting machine that I am using normally has a computer from the eighties. Some have these scanners that are really old and usually do not work anymore. They became obsolete. If it wasn’t for Open Source, we couldn’t use these technologies anymore. Open Source developers decided that they should do something about these machines and found that it was not that complicated to connect these knitting machines directly to computers. I think it is a really good example how Open Source is important, because these machines are no longer produced and industry is no longer interested in producing them again, and they would have died without further use.
The idea that Open Source is about sharing is also important. If you try to do everything from zero, you just never advance. Now with Open Source, if somebody does something and you have access to what they do, and you can take it further and take it into a different direction.
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I haven't always used Open Source software. It started at the Piet Zwart Institute where there was a decision made by Matthew Fuller and Femke Snelting who designed the program. They brought a bunch of people together that asked questions about how our tools influence practice, how they are used. And so, part of my process is then teaching in that program, and starting to use Free Software more and more. I should say, I had already been using one particular piece of Free Software which is FFmpeg, a program that lets you work with video. So there again there was a kind of connection. It was just by the virtue of the fact that it was one of the only tools available that could take a video, pull out frames, work with lots of different formats, just an amazing tool. So it started with convenience. But the more that I learned about the whole kind of approach of Open Source, the more Open Source I started to use. I first switched from MacOSX to maybe Dual Booting and now indeed I am pretty much only using Open Source. Not exclusively Open Source, because I occasionally use platforms online that are not free, and some applications.
I am absolutely convinced that when you use these tools, you are learning much more about inner workings of things, about the design decisions that go into a piece of software so that you are actually understanding at a very deep level, and this then lets you move between different tools. When tools change, or new things are offered, I think it is really a deep learning that helps you for the future. Whereas if you just focus on the specific particularities of one platform or piece of software, that is a bit fragile and will inevitably be obsolete when a software stops being developed or some kind of new kind of way of working comes about.
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I use Open Source software every day, as I have Debian on my laptop. I came to it through anarchism -- I don’t have a tech background -- so it’s a political thing mainly. Not that F/LOSS represents a Utopian model of production by any means! As an artist it fits in with my interest in collaborative production. I think the tools we use should be malleable by the people who use them. Unfortunately, IT education needs to improve quite a lot before that ideal becomes reality.
Politically, I believe in building a culture which is democratic and malleable by its inhabitants, and F/LOSS makes this possible in the realm of software. The benefits as a user are not so great unless you are tech-savvy enough to really make use of that freedom. The software does tend to be more secure and so on, though I think we're on shaky ground if we try to defend F/LOSS in terms of its benefits to the end user. Using F/LOSS has a learning curve, challenges which I put up with because I believe in it socially. This would probably be a different answer from say, a sysadmin, someone who could see really concrete benefits of using F/LOSS.
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Actually I came from Open Content and alternative licensing to the technical side of using GNU/Linux. My main motivation right now is the possibility to develop a deeper relationship with my tools. For me it is interesting to create my own tools for my work, rather than to use something predefined. Something everyone else uses. With Free Software this is easier -- to invent tools. Another important point is that with Free Software and open standards it's more likely that you will be able to keep track of your work. With proprietary software and formats, you are pretty much dependent on decisions of a software company. If the company decides that it will not continue an application or format, there is not much you can do about it. This happened to users of FreeHand. When Adobe acquired their competitor Macromedia they decided to discontinue the development of FreeHand in favour of their own product Illustrator. You can sign a petition, but if there is no commercial interest, most probably nothing will happen. Let's see what happens to Flash.
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I studied sculpture, which is a very solitary way of working. Already through my studies, this idea of an artist sitting around in a studio somewhere, being by himself, just doing his work by himself, didn't make sense to me. It is maybe true for certain people, but it is definitely not true to me today, the person I am. I always integrated other people into my work, or do collaborative work. I don't really care about this 'it is my work' or 'it is your work', if you do something together, at some point the work exists by itself. For me, that is the greatest moment, it is just independent. It actually rejoins the authorship question, because I don't think you can own ideas. You can kind of put them out there and share them. It is organic, like things that can grow and that they will become bigger and bigger, become something else that you couldn't have ever thought. It makes the horizon much bigger. It is a different way of working I guess.
The obvious reason is that it is free, but the sharing philosophy is really at the core of it. I have always thought that when you share things, you do not get back things instantly, but you do get so much things in another way, not in the way you expect. But if you put in a idea out, use tools that are open and change them, put them out again. So there is lot of back and forth of communication. I think that is super important. It is the idea of evolving together, not just by ourselves. I really do believe that we do evolve much quicker if we are together than everybody trying to do things by his or herselves. I think it is very European idea to get into this individualism, this thinking of idea of doing things by myself, my thing. But I think we can learn a lot from Asia, just ways of doing, because there community is much more important.
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I don’t necessarily develop like software or codes, because I am not a software developer. But I would say, I am involved in analog way. I do use Open Source software, although I have to say I do not much with computers. Most of my work is analog. But I do my researches on the website. I am a user.
I started to develop an antipathy against large corporations, operating systems or softwares, and started to look for alternatives. Then you come to the Linux system and Ubuntu which has a very user-friendly interface. I like the fact that behind the software that I am using, there is a whole community, who are until now without major financial interests and who develop tools for people like me. So now I am totally into Open Source software, and I try to use as much as I can. So my motivation would be I want to get off the track of big corporates who will always kind of lead you into consuming more of their products.
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What does Free Culture mean to you? Are you taking part in a 'Free Culture Movement'?
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I'd like to think so, but I realised of that it is quite hard. Only now, I am seriously trying to really contribute back to projects and I wouldn't even say that I am an active contributer to Free Software projects. I am much more of a user and part of the system. I am using it in my teaching and my work, but now I try to maybe release software myself in some way or I try to create projects that people could actually use. I think it is another kind of dimension of engagement. I haven't really fully realised it, so yes for that question if I am contributing to Free Culture. Yes, but I could go lot deeper.
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I am a big supporter of the idea of Free Culture. I think information should be available for people, especially for those who have little access to information. I mean we live in the West and we have access to information more or less with physical libraries and institutions where we can go. Specially in Asia, South America, Africa this is very important. There is a big gap between those who have access to knowledge and those don’t have access to knowledge.
That’s a big field to explore to be able to open up information to people who have very poor access to information. Maybe they are not even able to write or read. That’s already is a big handicap. So I think it is a big mission in that sense.
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Could Free Culture be seen as an opposition to commercialism?
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It is a tricky question. I think no matter what, if you go down the stack, in terms of software and hardware, if you get down to the deepest level of a computer then there is little free CPU design. So I think it is really important to be able to work in this kind of hybrid spaces and to be aware of then how free Free is, and always look for alternatives when they are available. But to a certain degree, I think it is really hard to go for a total absolute. Or it is a decision, you can go absolute but that may mean that you are really isolated from other communities. So that's always a bit of balancing act, how independent can you be, how independent you want to be, how big does your audience need to be, or you community needs to be. So that's a lot of different decisions. Certainly, when I am working in the context of an art school with design practitioners, you know it is not always possible to really go completely independent and there are lots of implications in terms of how you work and whom you can work with, and the printers you can work with. So it is always a little bit of trade-off, but it is important to understand what the decisions are.
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I think the idea of a Free Culture movement is very exciting and important. It has always gone on, but stating it in copyright-aware terms issues an important challenge to the 'all rights reserved' status-quo. At the same time I think it has limitations, at least in its current form. I'm not sure that rich white kids playing with their laptops is necessarily a radical act. The idea and the intention are very powerful though, because it does have the potential to challenge the way that power -- in the form of 'intellectual property' -- is distributed.
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Copyright has become much more enforced over the last years than it was ever before. In a way, culture is being absorbed by companies trying to make money out of it. And Free Culture developed as a counter movement against this.
When it comes to mainstream culture, you are most often reduced to a consumer of culture. Free Culture then is a obvious reaction. The idea of culture where you have the possibility to engage again, to become active and create your version, not just to consume content.
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How could Open Source software be economically sustainable, in a way that is beneficial for both developers/creators and users?
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That's a good question! A very hard one. I'm not involved enough in that community to really comment on its economic future. But it does, to me, highlight what is missing from the analysis in Free Culture discourse, the economic reality. It depends on where they (developers) work. A lot of them are employed by companies so they get a salary. Others do it for a hobby. I'd be interested to get accurate data on what percentage of F/LOSS developers are getting paid, etc. In the absence of that data, I think it's fair to say it is an unsolved problem. If we think that developers 'should' be compensated for their work, then we need to talk about capitalism. Or at least, about statutory funding models.
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It is interesting that you used both 'sustainability' and 'economic viability'. And I think those are two things very often in opposition. I am doing a project now about publishing workflows and future electronic publishing forums. And that was the one thing we looked at. There were several solutions on the market. One was a platform called 'Editorial' which was a very nice website that you could use to mark down texts collaboratively and and then it could produce ePub format books. After about six months of running, it closed down as many platforms do. Interestingly, in their sign-off message it said: _You have a month to get your stuff out of the website, and sorry we have decided not to Open Source the project. As much as we loved making it, it was just too much work for us to keep this running_. In terms of real sustainability, Open Source of course would have allowed them to work with anybody, even if it is just a hobby.
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It is very related to passion of doing these things.
Embroidering machines have copyrighted softwares installed. The software itself is very expensive, around 1000€, and the software for professionals is 6000€ to buy. Embroidering machines are very expensive themselves too. These softwares are very tight and closed, you even have to have special USB key for patterns. And there are these two guys who are software developers, they are trying to come up with a format which all embroidering machines could read. They take their time to do this and I think in the end if the project works out, they will probably get attention and probably get paid also. Because instead of giving 1000 € to copyrighted software, maybe you would be happy to give 50€ to these people.