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[pdftitle={What Does Open Mean in Digital Arts?},
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pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
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\begin{document}


\title{What Does ``Open'' Mean in Digital Arts?}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{November 2nd, 2002}

\maketitle


\section{Concerning the topic of my speech}

I have been kindly invited here to speak about ``open source and open
art''. If digital art would be free in the sense of Free Software, it
would not only have to be available for free use and redistribution, but
it also would have to be built and or at least viewable with Free
Software. Which means: No use of Flash, no GIF files, no video DVDs, no
mp3, no QuickTime, no Macromedia Director, no Quark XPress desktop
publishing and so on. Such art would look and feel different because it
would use different technical platforms, in some cases even technical
restraints.  Instead it would have to use open formats and free tools
like ASCII, LaTeX, ogg vorbis, Perl or Python, centering its own
distribution radically upon the possibility to be spread, viewed and
modified with entirely free means, at the expense even of technically
smoother or more integrated proprietary standard solutions.

Therefore, I would like to modify the topic ``Open Source and Open Art''
into the following question: ``What does `open' mean (and imply) in
digital arts?''.  In the digital arts -- but not only there --,
``openness'' has a double meaning: It could, on the one hand, mean free
public distribution of art or public access to it, or it could mean
openness of its technical platform. (Let me elaborate on that.)

\section{Artistic Openness}

If we speak about freedom and openness in digital information, the model
clearly is Free (or Open Source) Software which has received increasing
attention in artistic net cultures over the last few years. What is Free
Software in relationship to Open Source? Both terms mean technically the
same -- i.e. copylefted software --, they only stress different aspects
ofit: freedom of usage and openness of the sourcecode. ``Free Software''
is the older, more political term associated with Richard Stallman, the
Free Software Foundation and its GNU project, ``Open Source'' was coined
in 1998, according to its initiators, as a more business-compatible
``marketing pitch for Free Software''. 

The Free Software Foundation defines Free Software through four
criteria, or, freedoms granted to its users:

\begin{quotation}

\begin{itemize}

\item The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

\item The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your
needs (freedom 1).  Access to the source code is a precondition for
this.

\item The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
(freedom 2).

\item The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements
to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3).
Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

\end{itemize}

\end{quotation}

Obviously, these freedoms are specific to algorithmic computer software,
but not less obviously they can easily generalized as (a) unrestricted
freedom of using a work, (b) unrestricted freedom of studying the work,
(c) unrestricted freedom of redistributing the work and (d) unrestricted
freedom of modifying the work. The same principles are valid of ``Open
Source''. So Free Software at first doesn't have any implications about
the nature of its development process. It can be a community process,
but -- as many examples of Free Software show -- it doesn't have to be.
On the other hand, its principles of course exist to allow and not
restrict community authorship. Free Software implies, btw., a positive
and strict notion of authorship, because it values attribution. A Free
Software developer can make his or her authorship/coding skills publicly
visible as opposed to an programmer of proprietary software. The best
known programmers in the world like Donald Knuth, Andrew Tanenbaum,
Richard Stallman and Daniel Bernstein are Free Software programmers.  By
itself, proprietary software is much less individual and much more an
anonymous product than Free Software.

How does Free Software relate to art?


When we discuss Free Software and art, the implication often seems to be
as if artists had to catch up with Free Software. Quite the reverse is
true though if we look, for example, at Situationism. From 1958 onwards,
publications of the Situationist International included the following
copyright notice:

\begin{quote}
All texts published in \emph{Situationist International} may be freely
reproduced, translated and edited, even without crediting the original
source.
% ,,Alle in \emph{Situationistische Internationale} veröffentlichten
% Texte dürfen frei -- auch ohne Herkunftsangabe -- abgedruckt, übersetzt
% und bearbeitet werden.``\cite{SI}
\end{quote}

In other words, the Situationist copyleft grants all the four freedoms
of the Free Software definition -- free usage, study,
redistribution and modification. It therefore fully qualifies as a Free
Software or Open Content license according to the Free Software
Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source
Definition of the Open Source Initiative.

Beyond the mere distribution policy, Situationist poetics themselves
were centered around appropriation and modification of found material,
which the Parisian situationists defined as ``détournement''. A simple
example was a situationist film which consisted of a kung-fu movie
overdubbed with marxist theorizing. ``Détournement'' thus was a hybrid
of Brecht's epic theatre with its method of ``estrangement'' and collage
techniques of 20th century avant-garde art including futurism, dadaism,
surrealism and pop art. 

In the late 1980s, a whole subcultural art discourse plagiarized the
Situationists by making plagiarism its own main topic and slogan. Its
main voice was the fanzine SMILE  which could be published by anyone.
(Picture SMILE 8). The name SMILE was a travesty of the General Idea's
Canadian arts magazine FILE which itself had been travestied by the Mail
Art zines BILE and VILE.  Since 1983, SMILE appeared in more than one
hundred issues, each of them often plagiarizing the other. They were
created by several dozen publishers who usually assumed the collective
identities Monty Cantsin or Karen Eliot. Finally, the whole multiple
name concept of Monty Cantsin and SMILE was plagiarized by the Italian
Luther Blissett project in the 1990s which made the name of an English
soccer player its phantom identity.

The institutional and media conditons of the Festivals of Plagiarism are
almost emblematically visible on a photograph shot on the Festival of
Plagiarism in Glasgow 1989: It is situated in an alternative gallery,
the machine in the foreground is a xerox copier, and the exhibition
consisted of xeroxed pamphlets, newspaper collages and self-made
t-shirts. What is not visible on the photograph are other media like VHS
video and audio tapes.  In other words: All media and technologies are
analog. As an interesting detail, computers have been used only in order
to create analog artefacts. Although this is a Festival of Plagiarism,
no one seems to have realized or reflected the radical implications of
digital media for copy culture.

Through the gallery space and the use of media, the festival situates
itself clearly in the visual arts. On the other hand, the media and
technologies used are emblematic of subculture and non-professional art.

\begin{itemize}
\item The xerox copier is the multiplication technology of fanzine
culture
\item Collages and xerox copies are the main media of Mail Art which
itself remained largely a network of amateur artists
\item Audio tapes were the typical medium of self-produced underground
music in the 1980s.
\end{itemize}

So in the end, this plagiarist art remained in a ghetto where it only
recycled itself. It never succeeded to be aggressive, institutionally
challenging plagiarism as an appropriation of official codes because it
didn't succeed to grasp and therefore plagiarize the discourse of the
official art world.

Of course, there are much older examples of ``plagiarist'' poetics
in art or at least of a collective circulation and usage of artistic
works: the novels of Rabelais, Cervantes and Sterne for example, the
proliferation of musical themes in Renaissance music and Renaissance
workshop painting.

If plagiarism could be defined as simulated novelty, then its opposite
is fake as simulated historicity. Almost all religions and gnostic
doctrines are founded on documents whose years of origins were
manipulated to make them older as they actually were. (This is even true
for the New Testament.) The names of prophets were collectively used
sometimes over several centuries. Hermes Trismegistus and Christian
Rosenkreutz could be called the precusors of Monty Cantsin and Luther
Blissett, and that analogy can be found in SMILE issues themselves.

The 1980s plagiarists were aware of historical connections when they
plagiarized the Situationists which in turn drew upon 
Lautréamont, the author of ``Les chants de Maldoror'', and a passage in
his 1886 work ``Poésies'': 

\begin{quote}
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It approaches the sentence of
one author, takes its expressions, removes a false idea and replaces it
with a better one.
% ,,Das Plagiat ist notwendig. Es ist im Fortschritt inbegriffen.
% Es geht dem Satz eines Autors zu Leibe, bedient sich seiner Ausdrücke,
% streicht eine falsche Idee, ersetzt sie durch die richtige
% Idee``.\cite{lautr}
\end{quote}

Already in 1886, Lautréamont does not simply conceive of plagiarism
simply as doubling or accumulation of information, but -- if you like --
as a critical process of collective peer review and improvement of work.
His saying could be smoothly plagiarzed, detourned, appropriated into a
principle of Free Software development: ,,Free Software is necessary.
Progress implies it. It approaches the works of one programmer, takes
its code, removes a false construct and replaces it with a better one.``
This exactly describes the way Free Software like the Linux kernel is
being developed. On the other hand, Free Software also has its own
specific notion of plagiarism which applies when somebody illegally puts
free code into a piece of proprietary software.

In that perspective, Lautréamont's wording ``plagiarism'' appears to be
somewhat odd, if nevertheless to the point. After all, the notion of
``plagiarism'' is, on a historical scale, quite modern. In the first
century A.D. the latin poet Martial accused another writer of
``plagium'', i.e., ``kidnapping'' of his verse. For 1500 years, this
saying remained metaphorical, as the term ``plagiarism'' was coined as
late as in the 17th century (according to dictionaries). In other words:
Before 1600, the concept of ``plagiarism'' did not exist. That it was
invented at the same time as copyright, is of course no accidental.
Since its inventon, plagiarism and thus all practices that defy
``intellectual property'' have become the other, the negative
implication of copyright (and vice versa).

What is copyright? -- Copyright is a political regulation of the
publishing industry, not of the users. It is an exemption granted for a
limited period of time, at the moment until 70 years after the death of
the author. Most artworks and writings we know thus are no longer
copyrighted. (But don't ask me why museums still have ``reproduction
rights'' on Renaissance paintings.)

All digital arts are code-based. Since the invention of writing and
mathematics, the particular quality of code has been that it can be
copied and transcribed without information loss in the reproduction
process. Because of this, the equation 1+1=2 has survived without
falsification over a couple of milleniums, although it has been recoded
into various notation schemes including Roman, Arabic and binary
numbers. 

So far, I have spoken only of copyright and copyleft strategies as
regards to so-called ``content'', i.e. information itself, not the
technological carriers of information. But if we speak about electronic
and digital arts, we have to particularly focus on the formats,
protocols and generators of informaton.



\section{Technical Openness}

If we look at the material and immaterial carriers of traditional arts,
we see that they all could be called ``open platforms'': Canvas, paper
and books, marble, musical score notation, language. Their manufacturing
and internal structure was open and transparent in that they weren't
proprietarized by monopolies. Any manufacturer or artist can produce
them either commercially or noncommercially. 

Among the materials listed, the closest analogy to software and digital
data formats might be languages and musical score notation, since they
are symbolic and not material.  Both written languages -- like English
and German -- or musical score notation are open, publicly documented
standards. Equivalents of closed platform are harder to imagine: A
composer for example could design a cryptic, nonstandard notation
system, teach it only verbally to musicians whom he would force to sign
a non-disclosure agreement and never pass along their knowledge. The
result would be, obviously, that his music would never be performed
anymore after his death.

In electronic information technology, most hardware standards are open.
This applies to TV standards like PAL and NTSC, video standards like VHS,
the audio CD format or FM radio. You don't have to pay patent fees or
royalities for soldering your own radio receiver or burning your
self-recorded audio cd. Free software programmers can write audio cd
playing software for PCs without having to pay patent fees either.

But the same is no longer true for formats like video DVD or even mp3
audio, both of which are encumbered with patents or proprietary
cryptography schemes. The situation has changed all the more with the
growing importance of software for the display of digital information:
While noone used software players when the audio CD was introduced, many
people prefer software DVD video players to consumer hardware DVD
players. In addition, software-only formats become increasingly popular,
thus making digital media formats significantly more fluid and
innovative.  For video, the DiVX became popular in a very short time, it
was improved without regards to data compatibility, and it can supersede
older formats or codecs, because people aren't forced to buy new
hardware, but just need to upgrade their software to play the new
format. Which means: file formats and encoding schemes become the
equivalent of paper, canvas, score notation, etc. But this means that
information carriers are no longer stable for centuries or even
milleniums, but change in increasingly rapid cycles.

The other problem is that proprietary data formats create a vendor
lock-in. A company can now have the monopoly on the \emph{access} to
data just by controlling the file format and keeping its internals
secret. Before the popularizaton of the Internet, file formats were a
secondary issue because files on personal computers were just seen as
secondary devices for eventually delivering a work on
computer-independent output media such as paper, video tape or audio cd.
Since the popularization of the Internet, file exchange increasingly
supersedes those output media. If a single company controls the file
format, it owns the information carrier and thus has monopoly control
over both the production and perception of works created in this format.

A prime example is Macromedia Flash, others are QuickTime, Microsoft
Office file formats, Visual Basic and browser-proprietary HTML.
Macromedia Flash intentionally blurs the dinstinction between the file
format, the authoring application and the viewer plugin by calling them
all the same and forcing artists and their audience to accept that
short-circuit. The company can arbitrarily decide which computing
platforms to support and which not -- excluding for example, users of
the GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems on non-Intel hardware --, can
arbitarily decide on the licensing of both the authoring and the viewing
software, and it can arbitarily decide to kill off the format at any
time. Artists working in Flash thus must invest an enormous amount of
trust and confidence in the company which in fact controls the
availability of their work. -- An extreme example of such forced user
loyality is the programmer-artist Netochka Nezvanova and her absurdly
proprietary video manipulation software ``NATO''; if anybody criticizes
Netochka Nezvanova in public, she revokes their software licenses. 

The historical example of a proprietary piece of software that obscured
the distinction of authoring software and file format was Apple's
HyperCard program. In the late 1980s, HyperCard was extremely popular
among digital artists as a combined hypertext, multimedia and
programming environment. Although most artistic work done in HyperCard
was public domain and could be modified up to the level of its scripting
algorithms, it is factually lost today after Apple discontinued
developing HyperCard and older versions no longer run on the present
MacOS.  Unlike in the transition from VHS or UMatic to DVD, there is no
way of transferring the old HyperCard data into a newer format like, for
example, script-generated HTML.  This explains why Free Software and
open standards are attractive for digital artists because they provide
the only alternative to vendor lock-in. If HyperCard had been Free
Software according to the definition I gave at the beginning of my talk,
even artists without programmer's skills could have taken the sourcecode
of the program and commission, perhaps against payment, other
programmers to port and maintain the code for today's operating systems
and PC architectures, or they could commission a software converter from
HyperCard to script-generated HTML. I am afraid that we will see the
same story happening again with Flash. The work of what Lev Manovich
calls the ``Generation Flash'' is doomed because it is encumbered into
non-open software and will vanish with it. This example also shows why
free software is not about freedom for programmers, but about freedom
for users.

(But we need to differentiate: Free software vs. proprietary software is
not the same as open standards vs. proprietary data formats. An example:
The jpeg image format is an open, publicly document, patent- and
royality-free standard. You can create, display and modifiy jpeg images
either with Free Software (like the Gimp) or with proprietary software
(like Photoshop), you can create, display and modify a
standard-compliant web page either with Free Software (like Emacs and
Mozilla) or with a proprietary software (like Windows Notepad and
Internet Explorer). Since Free Software is fully transparent in its
sourcecode and includes no restriction of usage, the file formats it
creates are always open by definition.)


\section{The Bottom Line}

Free Software enables digital art to be put into public use and
therefore is in self-interests. Change of aesthetics is not always
obvious, but can be substantial if one switches to only free tools and
values data transparency. One shouldn't glorify hackers as the better
digital artists -- their notions of art are mostly conservative, based
on a classicist notion of beauty and good craft. In the end,
``Openness'' in art is above all an ethical question. I would highly
resist making a quality distinction between open art as good and
proprietary art as bad. Example: Netochka Nezvanova. Mallarmé.
Lautréamont said that poetry should be made by all, but his works
suggest the opposite. Art can be particularly good when its morally
questionable.

Critical of Foucault and Foucaultian critics like Kittler:
Functionalizing people, denying subjectivity.  Subjectivity does exist
and is important. Free Software comes from a scientific and engineering
tradition, not from art.


\end{document}
