#!/bin/bash -x

# THIS IS PROMISCUOUS SLIDEWARE
# $ sudo apt-get install feh mplayer chromium-browser xreader xviewer

# SETUP

FONT="/home/lena/.fonts/PropCourierSans-Medium.ttf"

xviewer 'reimaginingcopyleft_landscape.png';

# SPEAKING FROM CONSTANT

# Speaking for / from a collective; specific practice.

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 60 caption:'Constant, association for arts and media' slide.jpg;

feh -x 'slide.jpg';

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 40 caption:'
Constant is based in Brussels since 1997, active at the intersection of feminisms, collective practice and Free Software.' slide.jpg;

feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# Imaginative technology / Collaborative Authorship / Intersectional feminism. Collaborative research, otherwise disciplined, connecting tools, modes, forms of organisation. http://constantvzw.org

# Committing to Free Culture. Everything released under Free License (FAL) created a generative practices where tools, infrastructures, content intermingle.

pix '/home/lena/Desktop/copyleftreimaginations/Constant' & disown; read

# AUTHORS OF THE FUTURE

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 60 caption:'Authors of the future: re-imagining copyleft' slide.jpg;

feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# Since 1999, Constant’s practice orients itself on the intersection of feminisms, collective practice and Free, Libre and Open Source software. Convergence of energies from FLOSS and older geneologies of radical publishing. 20 years later. 

# Reasons Conventional intellectual property law binds authors and their hybrid contemporary practices in a framework of assumed ownership and individualism. It conceives creations as original works, making collective, networked practices difficult to fit. Within that legal and ideological framework, Copyleft, Open Content Licenses or Free Culture Licensing introduced a different view of authorship, opening up the possibility for a reimagining of authorship as a collective, feminist, webbed practice.

# But over time, some of the initial spark and potentiality of Free Culture licensing has been normalized and its problems and omissions have become increasingly apparent.

# 20 years later we feel it is necessary and urgent to start a process of re-imagining or complementing this proposal with possible and impossible, desirable and absurd, experimental and utopian (extra-)legal models for the future of authorship.

# To say that we are not anymore convinced that the feminist potential of Free Culture is being realised, is a statement we do not make lightly. 

# Acknowledging more than 20 years of copyleft-activism, it is time to think again. With Authors of the future we are looking for concepts and ideas that help to rearticulate the conditions for authors of the future. Our aim is not to revert to convential modes of authorship, nor to give up on legal frameworks for authorship altogether, even if we have come to embrace extra-legal action and civil disobedience. 

# Interested in the grey literature of licensing as a way to formulate ideological interfaces to culture, and to politizise authorship practices. Our gamble is to formulate an affirmative critique in order to be able to take Free Culture Licensing as a starting point for speculating authorship practices onwards, into the future.

# risk: not overcoming the flaws of copyright that produce some of the problems we are dealing with.

# Authors of the future: a series with Eva Weinmayr, Severine Dusollier, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Aymeric Mansoux. 2019

# http://constantvzw.org/site/Authors-of-the-future-Re-imagining-Copyleft.html + http://media.constantvzw.org/wefts/121/

xviewer 'IMG_0014.JPG';

xviewer 'IMG_0016.JPG';

# Aymeric Mansoux (my lawyer is an artist): sharing confusion, historical overview, not nostalgia. explains the importance of licenses as follows:

# mplayer -ss 02:02 -endpos 1:35 'recordings/5_Aymeric_Mansoux_Free_Only_if.wav' &

xviewer '02.jpg';

xviewer '04.jpg';

# Licences = ideological interfaces, not just mere engineering. Politics; how to relate a creative work to the world.

# PROBLEMS, ISSUES

# 20 years later, problems start to appear, posing real issues specific to practice / how. Maybe because the increased involvement with queer activism, anti-colonial and intersectional practice and certainly by another relation to technologys probabilities and possibilities.

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 30 caption:'
- Authorship as property vs infrastructures of disposession
- Individual, human authorship re-inscribed
- Product not process (authorship and its implications)' slide.jpg;

feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# Free Culture licensing relies on an existing legal framework that in a way is being re-confirmed through the hole that it dug itself. It means it continues to perceive authors as individualised humans that have the right to re-license an original work. In this way, copyleft licenses perversely re-affirm the author as a romantic, solitary genius. The way authorship can be understood as inherently collaborative and collective is constrained; it can be at best thought of as a negotiation between separate individuals but it ultimately resists more fluid understandings of authorial becoming. Existing licenses do not help in any way the organisation of collaborative creation, nor does it provide a solution to acknowledge different kinds of contributors, beyond authors having made an original contribution. 

# The issues entailed by this individually centered licensing are increasingly difficult to ignore in Constant’s practice which includes algorithmic and machinic practice and tries to challenge anthropocentric assumptions. Instead of recognizing the entangled relations with other actors, existing free licensing schemes induces us to endorse a form of licensing that seems to leave no other option than anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents.

# A second cluster of problems is related to the way Free Culture Licences are based on the principles of exclusive property. In this way,authorship maintains a link to the Modern project and ultimately to coloniality and does not even begin to resolve the difficulties of cultural appropriation. We need to come to terms with the privilege that allows the exciting gesture of letting go of the boundaries of authorship and simultaneously we need to find a way to deal with the fact that the extractivist practices of plaftform capitalism seems to thrive on that same gesture.

# Most important: connecting licensing to practice. It is neither (just) about the individual author, nor about the product. It is very much about the connection between digital objects, and practice around it. We started to see we needed not just to rethink a our thinking about Free Culture licensing, but also the way we think about the way we collaborate. 

# Linking 'what' and 'how'. Working on orientations for collaboration; ecosystem of protocols. How does collective practice relate to the world. http://media.constantvzw.org/wefts/123/

xviewer 'Constant/DSC02104.JPG';

xviewer 'Constant/DSC02105.JPG';

xviewer 'Constant/guidelinesdetail.JPG';

firefox https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/guidelines_proposal_200420;

# EXAMPLES

# Can we invent licences that are based on collective creative practices, in which cooperation between machine and biological authors, need not be an exception? How could attribution be a form of situated genealogy, rather than accounting for heritage through listing names of contributing individuals? In what way can we limit predatory practices without blocking the generative potential of Free Culture? What would a decolonial and feminist license look like, and in what way could we propose entangled notions of authorship? Or perhaps we should think of very different strategies?

# examples of licenses that come back to the discussion of how the work relates to the world

xreader 'samples/02.decolonial.pdf' & disown; read;

xreader 'samples/03.nonwhite.pdf' & disown; read;

xreader 'samples/05.peerproductionFR.pdf' & disown; read;

xreader 'samples/06.koji.pdf' & disown; read;

xreader 'samples/07.climate.pdf' & disown; read;

xreader 'samples/01.consumersdilemma.pdf' & disown; read;

xviewer 'samples/traditionalknowledges.png';

# CINEMAS SAUVAGES

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 60 caption:'Cinemas Sauvages: A wild license?' slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# Cinemas Sauvages is a festival organised at irregular moments around Brussels. http://www.festival-cinemas-sauvages.net

xviewer 'Sauvages/fmcs-logo noir.jpg';

# How they describe themselves xxxx

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 30 caption:"
Cinema Sauvages is an open place and an open moment, crossed by opposing currents. It invites films and approaches that do not bother with the notions of property, copyright or authorship. Consciously sometimes, via free licenses; naively often, listening only to their energy. These films show themselves and divert themselves without constraints. Searching for their own, working on their media, engaging in collective adventures, questioning themselves politically, they pass from hand to hand." slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 60 caption:'A wild license?' slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# FERAL LICENSE WORKSHOP

xviewer 'Sauvages/PWFU3620.JPG';

xviewer 'Sauvages/DSC01947.JPG';

xviewer 'Sauvages/DSC01948.JPG';

xviewer 'Sauvages/DSC01949.JPG';

xviewer 'Sauvages/DSC01950.JPG';

xviewer 'Sauvages/DSC01951.JPG';

xviewer 'Sauvages/DSC01952.JPG';

# THE HALLUCINATING RETRO LICENSE

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 60 caption:'The Hallucinating Retro-License' slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# recent interview with Joachim Soudan, Rebecca Fruitman https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/piksel

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 30 caption:"Filmmakers who come to the festival, they have dreams of their ideal situation in which they want their films projected. The desires are very diverse. Like Rébecca mentioned, some want to be present in the projection, there are practices around celluloid that demands that films are shown on celluloid. There are people who are happy their films are shown and who agree that the rights situation is not perfect, but they might be more worried about the context in which their work might appear." slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 30 caption:"People might be afraid that a film about an African sculptor or a film about a young girl end up in racist, machist or pedofile contexts. Contexts turned wrong in such a way that it is completely not according to the political views of the cinematographer. So the Hallucinating Retro-License is taking the idea of modularity from the Creative Commons license. We were thinking to start from the experiences of the Cinemas Sauvages version 2019 to collect an enormous quantity of desires that come from the practice. To create a modular license with many many details." slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 30 caption:"So we started to fantasise, to have fun with it. What if a maker only wants to show the film to audiences of 12 persons ... What I liked is that it starts in the practice and it could serve other festivals, be it Sauvages or an other festival. We used it like an invitation to reflect and to open up a practice." slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# LICENSES AS A TRANSFORMATIVE INTERFACE

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 60 caption:'Licenses as transformative interfaces' slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

# Remember Aymeric: politics! Licensing as a form of ideological interface to culture, to authorship. Grey literature with an attitude that should not be left to lawyers nor to platform capitalist. If leaving alone – probable, not possible. The spectre of transformation.

convert -background white -bordercolor white -fill black -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 25 caption:"This is how we can maybe understand grey matter or grey literature: a spot from where you can turn the very probable into quite possible. This is where things can be altered. Precisely because this is the place where things can be written down, where things start tracing the too probable trajectories of the contemporary structuring of matter, and can be somehow partly re-written and changed from the probable to the possible in an instant. This at least is where the probable and the possible blur, they are both there. This is the spacetime of transformation.

Jara Rocha in: Geraldine Juarez, Render me grey, an interview with Possible Bodies (2019)" slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';

convert -background black -bordercolor black -fill white -size 800 -border 30 -font $FONT -pointsize 30 caption:'pad.constantvzw.org/p/copypaste
constantvzw.org' slide.jpg;
feh -x 'slide.jpg';