Iterations
What is the future of collective digital practices ?
Working together, exchange, sharing, collaboration, Do It With Others ...
Blogs, fora, social networks, servers,
Eating, thinking, passing time, learning, laughing,
House, table, couch, room, countryside, bus, school, workplace, public space, shop
Description:
Iterations is a travelling expo by a temporary art-group consisting of artists from Brussels and Graz.
Together they create one collective work.
The work is multi-authored and will first be exhibited in ESC in 2015.
opening will be on 15 may 2015.
the invited artists will work together in ESC, more or less ten days in advance.
A next version of the work that will be re-itterated by a new version of the group. We are considering a partner organisation in Italy, beginning 2016.
will be exhibited in 2016 in Brussels, partner organisation to be confirmed.
Starting point
On many levels artists using digital tools collaborate, exchange, work together or implement collectively developed technologies.
* They exchange content / ideas
* Set up and use online resources, repositories, libraries for sharing code, manuals, they provide work and sources that are re-usable under free licenses.
* Some co-develop software, or engage in digital artivism
* ...
The aim of the expo is to create visibility for collective digital creative processes.
The project wants to give attention to these processes and to the motives that drive artists to engage in collaborative models and Free digital tools. Ideology plays an important role: many artists feel ethics and aesthetics are connected especially when it comes to software and the internet. Their are also practical reasons for engaging in free software: adapting code / tools to the specifics of your project, reliability, price, licensing issues (schools). The final art work often does not show the shared and collective work that has gone into it which is often a considerable part of the work-process.
Now that ubiquous connectivity and blackboxed computing are in many peoples pockets, it is important to revisit the power of coupling free software with free society projects to help create sustainable digital ecologies of exchange.
Let's face it: which world do you want to be part of: A) your digital tools are rented to you as service, your works are hosted under commercial terms, your creative work is part of Googles business plan ? B) humans exchange, learn, invent and discover together through technology. ?
The temporary group is an attempt to create a real live case study in collective creation, a learning situation that outputs art and knowledge to a large number of people who can connect to it in different intensities of engagement and different registers of collaboration.
Constant and Esc, the two organisations that initiate the Iterations exhibition, exist since times that the semantic web and Web 2.0 were notions that still sounded innocent and even potentially utopian ( did 2.0 ever sound innocent? :P ), untainted by the current corporate- and state control and data abuse. Since then open source and free sotware have been widely embrased by tech savy activists and corporate multinationals alike: Free software has moved from a promissing alternative to becoming integrated in the digital mainstream.
In advertising, fluent terminology has always been a violent money making tool. One result of entering the meanstream is the commercialisation of concepts and vocabulary. Among many others, the words 'open', 'sharing', 'collaboration' have been assimilated into the contexts of online bussiness. No longer do they only belong to the scope of well mannered good willing idealists. One mission of this project is to reboot words into praxis and rethink our use of terms.
This experience with early digital collectives, free software art collaborations, can be an imortant resource for a younger generation of tech artists. That is why the concepts and practices, inspirations, tools and outputs in this project are 'iterating' over a multi-generational group of artists. Some remember the beginning of the net, some are 'born web 2.0': who grew up with a web that generates incredible capital for a few, and proposes exploitational models of distributed work for multitides of others.
The project acknowledges the powers of repetion. Doing things several times allows for building up experiences from which can be learned, we improve our skills, and strengthen our insights by going over viewing and reviewing, again and again.
The 'work' that we speak of here is the visual component of a workingprocess that created it. To draw a comparisson: Mushrooms are the visual exponents of a rhizomatic fungus rootstructure that hides in the soil. No root structure: no mushroom. No creative process: no art work.
The project can be seen as a labarotory with fuzzy edges. An art based situation that bleeds into many other sectors and disiciplines: informatics, sociology, privacy studies, network-theory, copy-left studies etc.
The project wants to provide for a discursive media-work that can feed thinking about collective aspects of digital culture: how do the tools that artists use relate to the reality we help shape into existence ?
Therefore the expo has two faces: it has a 'visual arts' face and it has a 'executable' face: that means the work contains the sources and elements that played a role in the construction of the work. Such as:
* Software tools are available and described, context is given on the groupmembers, their work and the reason why they are invited in the group.
* A documentation section on influencial or relevant artists, artmovements, socio-technological developments, network and media theory and other references are presented.
* Resources used (or not) in the work are available.
The artists coming together in the group work with free libre open source tools. Their skills, medium, working methods are complementary. They come from various media and artistic disciplines: some are programmers, some work online, some of them are audio / video makers, some are into scenography, architecture or spatial design. Some are experienced group workers, others work as individual artists on their own individual works, using open licensed, collectively generated digital tools.
They can commit for a clearly defined time.
A specific question to the artist group is to not underchallenge the audience. :-)
Technologic art projects have a tendency to fetish the permanent state of being unfinished, being in development. Iterations wants to be explicit on two levels: While the work speaks to audio-visual, touch and other cognitive senses, the intellectual, methodological process and sources are fully available. No compromises on either side.