Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet

Olga Goriunova

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136624766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In this book, Goriunova offers a critical analysis of the processes that produce digital culture. Digital cultures thrive on creativity, developing new forces of organization to overcome repetition and reach brilliance. In order to understand the processes that produce culture, the author introduces the concept of the art platform, a specific configuration of creative passions, codes, events, individuals and works that are propelled by cultural currents and maintained through digitally native means. Art platforms can occur in numerous contexts bringing about genuinely new cultural production, that, given enough force, come together to sustain an open mechanism while negotiating social, technical and political modes of power.

Software art, digital forms of literature, 8-bit music, 3D art forms, pro-surfers, and networks of geeks are test beds for enquiry into what brings and holds art platforms together. Goriunova provides a new means of understanding the development of cultural forms on the Internet, placing the phenomenon of participatory and social networks in a conceptual and historical perspective, and offering powerful tools for researching cultural phenomena overlooked by other approaches.

1 Organizing Free-range Creativity

The role played by individual behaviour can be decisive. More generally, the ‘overall’ behaviour cannot in general be taken as dominating in any way the elementary processes constituting it.

(Isabelle Stengers and Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature)

The technical is aesthetic is political is cultural; each of these domains folds into the other and is fed back on itself; every layer informs, embeds, and models the others, distributing their particular power patterns throughout societal systems and their blurry zones of transfer. Art platforms work with cultural production that is immanent to societal unfolding. But as an experimental process of organization in software and culture, the ways of working it engages with may also manifest, although differently, in the logics guiding the participatory and social Web, creative industries, peer-to-peer networks, and the development and thoughts of the FLOSS movement addressing these spheres. All this makes for further highly interesting complications.

What is the core of art platforms? Creativity and some form of sociality. What is at the heart of participatory platforms? Sociality and some form of creativity. If the encouragement of forms of creative expression within a social context and with a dynamic vector of liveliness irreducible to formulae is a central characteristic of art platforms, annoyance is often triggered by the way capitalism channels creativity and in doing so privately captures ‘community-created value’ in varieties of the participatory Web.¹ The networked cultural production and aesthetic force mapped by art platforms are often understood as motor powers driving, among other things, cognitive capitalism’s valorization systems. As such they are then too easily locked into opposition to ‘truly open’ endeavours,² such as free-software-based open cultures, which are, in turn, criticized themselves as free production ready to be capitalized on. In order to discuss art platforms as loci of creative emergence that are enabled to organize according to self-chosen logics in coupling with various factors at play, we first need to examine the possibility of such freedom and the condition of creativity as it actualizes with and through technology in today’s world. Inevitably, to proceed further, we have to look at ‘free’ technologies and the concepts of creativity currently available.

POST-MARXISM AND LIBERALISM: FREE SOFTWARE AND OPEN CULTURE

A shift to precarious and ‘immaterial’ forms of labour, to open and flexible labour organization, spontaneity, collaboration and cooperation, and to the figure of the ‘creative class’ and to that of the creative industries as a set of mechanisms soliciting labour that acts in self-expression and self-development, is a continuation of, or rather, an enlargement of the tendency for open structures to become dominant and integrated into new forms of production. If network logic is the core model according to which our society is organized,³ and creativity is seen as a crucial resource and power advancing its economy, such a system needs to be aimed at working with unprecedented degrees of openness and flexibility, and working towards the ‘empowerment’ of massive groups of people. It means the large-scale involvement of creative capacities into innovative practices.

Autonomist Marxist theory as well as a number of political theorists not directly associated with the Italian operaismo movements, such as André Gorz, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, David Harvey, Tiziana Terranova, Andrew Ross, and Brian Holmes, see the current phase of the ‘creative’ advancement of capitalist forms as an outcome of previous struggles made by workers, women, students, and others that forced capitalism to adapt to their protests and to transform itself to embrace new kinds of demands and realities. Here, crises in Taylorism, Fordism, and Keynesianism as the leading principles of the organization of working processes, wage structures, and economic policy are interpreted as connected to the struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s that challenged the stability of the ‘Planner State.’⁴ For Antonio Negri, describing this process, the Planner State was replaced by the Crisis State with a significant drop in welfare support and corporations restructuring to become flexible and mobile in order to put themselves beyond the reach of the proletariat.⁵ David Harvey describes the same period as the transition to the regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ and beginning of the neoliberal project in politics.⁶ Brian Holmes reintroduces Boltanski’s and Chiapello’s concepts of social critique—as rebellion against exploitation, and of artistic critique—as resistance to alienation, as two major lines of pressure that capitalism answered by mutating into a post-Fordist mode of production that celebrates flexibility, open communication, and creativity.⁷ The problems in reconciling such changing structures with ‘humane’ work has been intensively documented by Andrew Ross in his work on companies developing creative websites that seem particularly to embody such contradictions.⁸

The history and current development of the FLOSS movement serves as one of the fullest examples of the changes described above. Free software destabilized existing definitions of property and threatened certain forms of wealth because it touched upon the transformation of agents involved in the constitution of relationships, subjectivities, and experiences linked to the sphere of production and maintenance. It has also been noted that free and open-source software changed the culture of software because it provided a means of publicly thinking and speaking about software, a move that coincided with and was built on the development of Internet-based discussions.⁹ As a force propagating the radical restructuring of ways things are made, with substantial developments in communication and organization of work as a social movement, free software informed and accelerated the proliferation of the principles of ‘openness’ into multiple settings, including those of the cultural, social, and artistic.

Adding a layer of (cultural) abstraction to the discussions of free software risks the danger of losing the coherence of a discourse grounded in American or European laws regulating ownership and defending property and their commonsense saturation with regimes of bills, prices, costs, contracts, lawsuits, and imprisonment. But not doing so runs the risk of making formalistic translations of its constructive principles to other domains of culture.

Software is not solely bound to objects: It is shaped by and proliferates into social and cultural relations. Breaking away from the fetishism of proprietary software may lead to the commodification of social processes layered into software production and operation, something resonant with the way the move from fixed institutional forms gives rise to a variety of institutional relationships in organizational aesthetics. Thus, the radical questioning of relations of ownership and of institutional architectures as a matter of control is inevitably linked to the proliferation of commodity logic into social and cultural relations. Although both autonomist Marxist and liberal thinkers promulgate such understandings, by means further discussed in the following, the logic of these arguments and the premises they rely on do not exhaust the array of access points to this problematic and the excess of drives and capacities always at work in questions of culture, even as they are interwoven with those of economy.

Freedom and creativity are essential operators in both neoliberal democracy and management jargon, but it is the concepts these strings of characters aspire to that are core to understanding modes in which cultures and art, free and open-source software are made, not least as they are formatted into the ‘creative industries.’ Freedom and creativity are the two horses that carry liberal thinking on free software and creative industries, but they are also, under a different interpretation, the unsteady mounts of post-Marxist thinking.

Freedom is closely related to creativity. A human being is an embodiment of the capacity for creation, and freedom is a quality of creativity (conceived as always free). With the lessening importance of ‘ideal’ worlds, creativity becomes an actualization of the real, a motor and an inborn character of life. Creativity is a chance to render a human being autonomous.

Whereas Marxist interpretations of freedom as an opposition to constraint are not new, they develop a close attention to the understanding of a certain impetus to freedom as rooted in coercion and dominance (for example, in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s principle of mastery) and generate the ability to focus on the function of such mechanisms in culture (from Antonio Gramsci to Raymond Williams). Liberal theory, by contrast, adopts a concept of freedom as a self-fulfilling capacity for choice and action, assuming that a human being is de facto rationally thinking, free, and creative.¹⁰ Autonomous individuals and free societies, according to Yochai Benkler, are those who benefit through property and common property (commons) that reinforce freedom and knowledge (creativity).¹¹ Thus, one side of open-source software and open-culture advocacy is incarnated most acutely in the cohort of liberal and neoliberal law and economics professors from prestigious American universities who push for enhancing democracy and knowledge through various realizations of opensource mechanisms.

Certain forms of labour-process organization aspired to by the ‘creative class,’ and characteristic of the creative industries, frame freedom and creativity in terms of an opposition to the factory, assembly line, or other previous forms of the structuring and enforcement of labour.¹² More will be said about creativity in the second part of this chapter, but in this respect, the FLOSS production model can be seen as a change in line with the overall transfer to new forms of labour in the First World and throughout global elites and, as such, neighbours upon the creative industries discussion. Although the intellectual property (IP) regimes of those parts of the creative industries with the busiest lobbyists do not appear very keen on freeing their products from copyright enforcements, autonomy and creativity of a liberal kind are terms widely used in creative industries’ discourse and, as such, tend to replace the previous ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric of FLOSS.

As is well known and documented, whereas Richard Stallman and the early activists of free software equipped the free software movement with an ambition to profoundly revolutionize society through free access to knowledge and the means of making it, the free-market libertarian Eric Raymond and others, with the Open Source Initiative, moved towards creating a rhetoric appealing to business from the point of view of efficiency. More recently, a number of significant studies have explored the economics of FLOSS production with sociological surveys and a lot of empirical data.¹³ Attempts were made to answer the question of whether FLOSS software presents a better model of software development in terms of quality and time and effort spent; and, especially in the work of Ghosh, to interrogate the motives of FLOSS developers, including altruism, pleasure, the drive for recognition, self-education, desire to signal professional competency in the job market, to map the structure of the community, and so on.

This wave of analysis is partly related to the economic success of FLOSS. Reports demonstrate a great increase in the share of open-source software usage in IT services and in economic revenues.¹⁴ The FLOSS development model proved to be an efficient business model for software development, and new research addresses such an evolution by attempting to build working economic models that radically depart from the rhetoric of gift culture and volunteer labour of early explanations.¹⁵

Having divorced itself from revolutionary rhetoric, the Creative Commons¹⁶ incarnation of FLOSS led by Lawrence Lessig, which deals not with software but ‘content’ is no longer concerned with transforming capitalist society, for instance, but with enhancing liberal democracy and the autonomy of liberal individualism by creating legal tools that offer guarantees for certain kinds of action in the form of licenses. Such freedom and autonomy, as described previously, are assumed to be naturally given in liberal society and automatically preserved if certain instruments are applied, irrespective of the systems of conditioning, subjectification, persuasion, coercion, profit, discrimination, distortion, or control that may be operative in such a society and in those dependent on it.

Such a stage in the development of the FLOSS movement has been widely discussed in the free software world where it prompted angry, critical, but also deeply ironic responses, such as the following: ‘Lawrence Lessig is always very keen to disassociate himself and the Creative Commons from the (diabolical) insinuation that he is (God forbid!) anti-market, anti-capitalist, or communist.’¹⁷ Pristine liberal democracy advocates flatten any radical dissatisfaction with the capitalist forms of societal organization, the tip of whose iceberg is property and ownership in the age of information networks. The idea of an innately free ability to make informed rational choices as ready-made subjects, conceptualized as a constant in liberal thinking, is as ‘useful’ as an understanding of the human being as a robot. Distancing themselves from Free Software Foundation pioneer Richard Stallman’s obsessions, that were in some ways parallel to the reappearance of references to ‘communism’ within the digital domain, such accounts aim at explaining clear routes to universal happiness through open-source software, creative-commons-licensed content and, not least, flexible organization and creativity in the workplace happily coinciding with at least the promise of ready profits.

It did not take very long to apply such ideas and techniques to culture, both for purposes of escaping fixed institutionalized controls, privatization, and commodification, on the leftist side, and on the liberal side, for cutting costs.

Various Open Content licenses have appeared concerning music, art, text, or any other kind of publication, extending to sound sampling and many more forms of use, that attempt to describe and match the rhetoric of ‘free culture’ and open society.¹⁸ Both the GNU project and the Open Source Initiative are built on an understanding of software programming that places emphasis on unrestricted access to program code for the purposes of education, use, and modification for improvement or further application. Various license models, from the GPL¹⁹ (General Public License by the Free Software Foundation) to the ‘legal toolbox’ of Creative Commons are built on such an understanding of source code, which seems to be directly applied to fields outside of computer programming. Free culture in this context is understood as the freedom to distribute and modify creative works. It is also about communal creation organized horizontally, with participants adding on and improving each other’s contributions by a self-evolved mechanism. Wikipedia is often offered as the best working incarnation of open culture. Here agreement seems to end and confusion begins.

If for software, its functionality, minimization of bugs, safety, and other qualities may stand as evaluation criteria and allow for an objective estimation of more and less successful projects, such evaluation is hardly possible within the art field. The value attributed to a particular artwork is notoriously transitory and symbolic and cannot be directly derived from the costs or methods of its production, its momentary success, or any estimation of its ‘quality.’²⁰ One cannot generally compile an artwork to see if it runs. A desire to build on a certain artwork does not in any manner originate from its usefulness or functionality but is one result of a complex mechanism governing the construction of value and meaning in the cultural sphere. Besides, if open-source code ensures the better development of both software and programmers’ skills, the ‘open-source code’ of artistic work does not always offer a matching usefulness. When open content deviates from practicality and enters the realm of the symbolic, it becomes very glitchy.

License Art Libre is one example of a free-art license that exemplifies, in its evolution, the complexity of the problems described. LAL is a product of the group of Fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Departing from an Art Platform
• 1. Organizing Free-range Creativity
• 2. Aesthetic Brilliance and Repetition
• 3. Organizational Aesthetics, Digital Folklore, and Software
• 4. Geeky Publics, Amateurs, and the Potency of Art
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index