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% FS = Femke Snelting
% CS = Cornelia Sollfrank

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% TITLE: Performing Libre Graphics

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In **April 2014** I traveled from Leipzig to the north of Germany to meet with artist Cornelia Sollfrank. It was right after the Libre Graphics Meeting, and the impressions from the event were still very fresh. Cornelia had asked me for a video interview as part of _Giving what you don't have_,[^]{http://postmedialab.org/GWYDH} a series of conversations about what she refers to as 'complex copyright-critical practices'. She was interested in forms of appropriation art that instead of claiming some kind of 'super-user' status for artists, might provide a platform for open access and Free Culture not imaginable elsewhere. I've admired Cornelia's contributions to hacker culture for long. She pioneered as a cyberfeminist in the 1990s with the hilarious and intelligent net-art piece _Female Extension_[^]{http://artwarez.org/femext/content/femextEN.html}, co-founded Old Boys Network[^]{http://www.obn.org/} and developed seminal projects such as the _Net Art Generator_. The opportunity to spend two sunny spring days with her intelligence, humour and cyberfeminist wisdom could not have come at a better moment.

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% LABEL: What is Libre Graphics?
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Libre Graphics is quite a large ecosystem of software tools; of people, people that develop these tools but also people that use these tools; practices, like how do you work with them, not just how do you make things quickly and in an impressive way, but also how these tools might change your practice; and cultural artifacts that result from it. It is all these elements that come together, I would call Libre Graphics.The term 'libre' is chosen deliberately. It is slightly more mysterious than the term 'free', especially when it turns up in the English language. It sort of hints that there is something different, something done on purpose. And it is also a group of people that are inspired by Free Software culture, by Free Culture, by thinking about how to share both their tools, their recipes and the outcomes of all this. Libre Graphics goes in many directions. But it is an interesting context to work in, that for me has been quite inspiring for a few years now. 


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The context of Libre Graphics is multiple. I think that I am excited about it and also part of why it is sometimes difficult to describe it in a short sentence. The context is design, and people that are interested in design, in creating visuals, animation, videos, typography... and that is already multiple contexts, because each of these disciplines have their own histories, and their own types of people that get touched by them. Then there is software, people that are interested in the digital material. They say, I am excited about raw bits and the way a vector gets produced. And that is a very, almost formal, interest in how graphics are made. Then there is people that do software. They're interested in programming, in programming languages, in thinking about interfaces, and thinking about ways software can become a tool. And then there are people that are interested in Free Software. How can you make digital tools that can be shared, but also, how can that produce processes that can be shared. Free Software activists to people that are interested in developing specific tools for sharing design and software development processes, like Git or Subversion, those kind of things. I think the multiple contexts are really special and rich in Libre Graphics. 


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Free Software culture, and I use the term 'culture' because I am interested in, let's say, the cultural aspect of it, and this includes software. For me software is a cultural object. But I think it is important to emphasize this, because it easily turns into a technocentric approach, which I think is important to stay away from. Free Software culture is the thinking that, when you develop technology, and I am using technology in the sense that it is cultural as well to me, deeply cultural, you need to take care as well of sharing the recipes, for how this technology has been developed. This produces many different other tools, ways of working, ways of speaking, vocabularies, because it changes radically the way we make and the way we produce hierarchies. It means for example, if you produce a graphic design artifact, that you share all the source files that were necessary to make it; but you also share as much as you can, descriptions or narrations of how it came to be, which does include maybe how much was paid for it, where difficulties were in negotiating with the printer; and what elements were included, because a graphic design object is usually a compilation of different elements; what software was used to make it, and where it might have resisted. The consequences of taking the Free Software culture serious in a design context, means that you care about all these different layers of the work, all the different conditions that actually made the work happen. 


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The relationship from Libre Graphics to Free Culture is not always that explicit. For some people it is enough to work with tools that are released under a GPL, an open content licence. And there it stops. Even their work will be released under proprietary licences. For others, it is important to make the full circle and to think about what the legal status is of the work they release. That is the more general one. Then, Free Culture, we can use that very loosely, as in 'everything that is circulating under conditions that it can be reused and remade'. That would be my position. Free Culture is of course also referred to a very specific idea of how that would work, namely Creative Commons.