New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 3: Remix re-examined

See here for part 1 and here for part 2

Navas’s and Manovich’s thinking on remix seem to complement each other nicely. Where Navas analyses remix as discourse from a historical context, taking into account power-relations and the wider societal context shaping and triggering the rise of remix, Manovich takes a deep leap into the future, trying to think a world in which remix and the free flow of information through meta-media have become ubiquitous. He explores what this will mean for the way we produce, consume and analyse culture. Navas shows how remix has been an active force for change in the past, Manovich wants to explore how remix can still be an active stance to shape culture in the future. Both of them introduce the problem of fluidity and time and what this means for our (print-based) object-oriented society based on repetition of well-defined objects created by specific authors. Navas looks at the archive as a means to capture and stabilize cultural fluidity whilst at the same time creating reliability. Manovich looks at the way we can work with modularized recombinable data-sets to structure and control information flows. Both of them struggle with the dilemma of object-like thinking within a fluid environment. For both of them remix is or has become the defining characteristic of our digital culture.

Open Books

The dilemma’s Navas and Manovich touch-upon in their writing on culture at large can be directly related to our thinking surrounding the book and/or the future of our knowledge and communication system within academia. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, a book is an assemblage, a multiplicity, it only exists in its connections. The paradox lies in the fact that a book can at the same time be seen as an organism as well as a body without organs, with neither a subject nor an object, as pure becoming:

“A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.”¹

This very well captures the dilemma between a more closed off and object-oriented thinking of the book and a more fluid, open thinking of the book as a network of relations, making contact on and through the outside. The metaphor of remix and the influence of remix culture and theory on the way we look at the book is thus an interesting one. What happens with the order of the book as we embrace this more open thinking of the book as becoming, without a stable core, no fixed author and a yet unknown system of authority? The question is whether it is still useful in the digital age to think of the book—and our knowledge system based upon it—as a stable object and whether it is possible (and necessary!) to look at the book more as an object of possibilities, a fluid moment of potentiality and becoming. And this is where remix theory comes in handy, trying to think exactly what it means when objects increasingly become bodies without organs and only exist in their connections to each other.

The importance of Navas analysis of remix for the book and the knowledge system we have created around it, lies in the way he tries to cope with the problems of stability and authorship. Navas discusses three partway solutions that are, as I feel, of direct interest for scholarly communication and its battle with these notions in the digital age. First of all he explores the archive as a way of both stabilizing flow and creating a form of authority out of flux and continual updating. Next to that he proposes the role of s/he who selects (or curates or moderates) as an alternative for the author. In a way one can argue that this model of agency is already quite akin to scholarly communication, where selection of resources and referring to other sources, next to collection building, is part of the research and writing process of most scholars. Finally Navas tries to explore an alternative means of critique based on a fluctuating identity and culture that tries to resist commercialization by staying on the liminal threshold; one based on seizing the production tools, and on seizing control over repetition by means of representation. And Manovich argues for a similar potential, the potential of culture (and in this respect knowledge) creators to modularise data and make it adaptable within multiple media and various platforms, mirroring scientific developments with standardized meta-data and the semantic web. These are all interesting steps beyond thinking ‘the book’ status-quo, challenging scientific thinking to embrace process, sharing, and letting go of idealized ideas of authorship that can stand in the way of true creativity. Navas does an interesting job in starting to deconstruct them, to show how they increasingly become problematic in todays remix culture brought about by the possibilities of digital media.

But in many ways Navas (as well as Manovich) runs up against what seem to be the borders of this more process-oriented thinking. His alternative options are equally still very much connected to stability: the archive is needed to objectify culture; selection is another form of agency and does not (fundamentally) do away with authorship; and an alternative form of critique is still a critique focused on agency and on a (stabilized) object, on a structure of control. The question of keeping an archive also becomes increasingly problematic when objects become dispersed amongst various platforms. How do we keep track of an object or of data once it goes viral? And what about the role of the selector when selections can be made redundant, choices can be altered and undone by mass-collaborative, multi-user remixes and mash-ups? In what way are the solutions Navas and Manovich offer only temporary solutions to cope with a world that is and always has been in flux and is now increasingly unstoppable in all its fluid manifestations? In what way might it be necessary to let go of this object-like thinking and to start theorizing a perception of culture, science and critique that lets go of these fixed frames of thought and immerses the real of eternal becoming? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to perceive culture as a fluidity from which we abstract objects for the sake of analysis and clarity, instead of seeing culture as being build up out of separate building blocks and recombinable data-modules? Isn’t it time to start thinking a knowledge and communication system based on continual updates and change, without a stable core, both as its object and subject? And is this even possible? In what way does the concept of the open book present us with a paradox in this respect?

Performative inflections

Remix Theory and many remix theorists (like for example Navas, Manovich, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky, Mark Amerika) have one more important aspect in common. Many of them experiment with different kinds of remix-practices themselves. In many ways their work poses a challenge to the often perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. Navas remixes his older writings, updates them and uses various media (amongst others film) to bring his message across. By using a blog as his main outlet he connects to other thinkers and consumers. On his blog he also acts as a curator or selector, bringing together other texts on remix. Furthermore he practices an interdisciplinary practice mixing his theoretical writing with his curatorial and art practices concerning remix. In Navas words:

“Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.”2

Manovich approach to his work in many ways mirrors software production. He brings out various versions of his work, unedited, and in many ways “unfinished”, waiting for feedback from the community after/from which they can subsequently be updated. His books can also clearly be seen as a remix of his various articles. Furthermore his scientific method can be seen as one in which media and methods from the hard sciences get mixed up and applied to ‘traditional’ humanities subjects within his cultural analytics framework.

Remixing knowledge

What is so interesting about remix for academic knowledge production, consumption and dissemination? I see remix as an exciting way to initiate a ‘thinking beyond the book’. Digital texts and books contain the potential to transform our knowledge system or the way we think and relate to knowledge. This ‘thinking beyond the book’ is not something that only became possible with the rise of the digital. It has always been part of the way we have envisaged and constructed our knowledge system.  There are however some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.

Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge.

Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as I have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities.

 

1 See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=2

 

Society of the Query – Part 1: Lovink, Boutang, Pasquinelli and Numerico

Last month the Institute of Network Cultures organized a two day conference entitled Society of the Query. Below you can find a wrap-up of the notes I took during the conference. More elaborate blog entries focusing on each of the lectures separately can be found here and you can also take a look at the video recordings here.

Subtitled Stop searching start questioning, the Society of the Query conference was soon nick-named the anti-Google conference, though its focus was a little bit different. The underlying idea was to take a critical look at Google and its dominance in the digital domain, as a way to start thinking about ways to conceptualize the idea of search, and to think about its theoretical background. In order to achieve this goal, the Institute of Network Cultures brought together people from all kinds of disciplines and backgrounds, academics, tech people, artists, media critics, to discuss the politics and culture and the philosophy and aesthetics of the search and search engines. As Geert Lovink, the main organizer states in his opening talk, the (sub)title of the conference was dedicated to the American Computer Scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, who wrote about the rise of the search paradigm and asked the question what the long-term implications would be of this search dominance. Hence the motto of the conference ‘stop searching, start questioning.’ What are the wider consequences of the rise of search in everyday life, of surfing as the dominant activity on the Web? As Lovink states, the Internet is still widely under theorized: we need some new ideas and theories to reflect upon this issue. Lovink’s aim is to develop a cultural theory of search. To achieve this we should (also) focus on alternative (search) models, for through the alternatives we can also come to a better understanding of the present situation and how to deal with Google.

From the perspective of critique (anti-trust, legal issues) we can consider from which point of view to take on this giant. What exactly defines our problem with Google, is it (justified) fear, is it envy? What disturbs us so much about Google itself? Whatever the problem, as Lovink says, we should not let Google become an obsession. We should not underestimate our influence when it comes to the power we have to develop political, aesthetic and cultural concepts that can undermine this giant. In this respect Lovink feels theory and criticism have a much larger role to play. Research, alternatives interfaces, and artistic interpretations all contribute to a cultural flow that could push things into another direction.

The first speaker, Yann Moulier Boutang, from France, recently wrote a book entitled Cognitive Capitalism. The main question he asks during his talk is whether it is possible to escape the monopoly of Google. For the dominant position of Google is growing each year. Exactly why is Google so popular, he asks. According to Boutang this mainly has to do with the increasing number of services Google offers. The problem is that these services are increasingly being perceived as being new ‘commons’ or services that should be public state services. Hence we are not only afraid of Google’s monopoly but even more afraid of Google becoming (being?) a rent seeker of our own collective intelligence, exploiting us as producers of knowledge. In a way Google’s platform can thus be seen as a form of cognitive capitalism, as a factory for the commoditization of knowledge.

Boutang describes what in his view can be seen as the economic model of Google. Google creates a neo- or meta-market on top of a society of personal data, of singularities (pollen). The counterintuitive part of this model is that it needs some ‘free’ or ‘gratis’ space in order to be able to aggregate some added value in another field. You need some non-market driven services to aggregate money. ‘Free’ is thus an inescapable part of the model. Who is working for Google? We are. By our contribution (clicking, surfing) we pollinate. Google offers us a platform, a hub. What Google sells is thus not only a space for publicity but also the network itself in real time. And this is the strength of Google: it offers you a platform of free services and lets you through these services again contribute to the platform: it functions as an economy of contribution which you add to by pollination. What Google sells to firms is not knowledge as a good but the possibility to enter into the market. In the realm of cognitive capitalism a shift has thus occurred from the sphere of marketable input and output to the sphere of human pollination. As Boutang states, this naturally creates a problem. Where knowledge is perceived as a public good, Google gathers its income from the exchange of information and knowledge, creating additional value in this process. Google, as a true capitalist, is able to capture this value created in the net by building platforms that function like agricultures or hives. In this way, Boutang says, Google is emblematic of the “communism of capitalism”. We need to understand that the basics of our economy have changed. And this raises some important questions: Is it possible to free the click workers? Can a search engine increase our autonomy? Should we think about a nationalization of Google? (where Google imitated the public model of knowledge?) And what about the privacy issue? And should we protect the peer to peer networks?

The next speaker, Matteo Pasquinelli, an Italian media critic, starts his talk by stating that knowledge is easy to replicate, since it is non-competitative or non-rival. Where we have embraced the network as a new kind of space for social interaction and self organization, the digital sphere at the same time also amplifies competition. The digital matrix multiplied everything, cooperation as well as monopoly. Pasquinelli wonders whether knowledge is (still) really non-competitive, with the monopolistic colonization of the digital sphere by Google. Referring to Nicolas Carr, he states that the hearth of Google is the page rank algorithm. With this algorithm, Google mines the intelligence that is in the number of links. The greater amount of links to a site, the greater its knowledge. And clicking on the links makes the system smarter, Pasquinelli states, referring again to the diagram of cognitive capitalism. In this sense the digital sphere can no longer be satisfyingly analyzed in the context of ‘the good people and the evil empire’ in the  Foucaltian, biopolitical idea of control and the big brother paradigm. Where Google produces value in a new way, Pasquinelli states we cannot use these old conceptual tools to describe this process. We should not focus on control but on value and on how this value is produced, accumulated and re-appropriated by us. Pasquinelli asks whether it is possible to do critical network thinking? And what notion of value do we need with that? How can we describe the value of the node, of the way Google organizes the fluid, liquid flow of data through its algorithm? It is an economic flow of values that circulates on the Internet and offline. What is the value of the network? How do we valorize the level of pollination and valorization, now that the value of circulation is much higher than the value of production?

Google’s income comes from advertising. But as Pasquinelli states, Google is exploiting cultural capital with this. What about the copyright question when free culture and free cooperation feeds Google? Social production and the idea of free knowledge propagated by thinkers like Lawrence Lessig are quite naïve, Pasquinelli states, because they do not grasp the whole value system around knowledge and the way our free contributions add value to the system. We need to think about new business models that look into this exploitation which also entails a dematerialization of traditional commodities. With this crisis of the traditional commodity and product (everything free) comes the rise of a new monopoly, a monopoly of space instead of a monopoly of the product: Google monopolizes the metadata space. We are faced with a liquid matrix which makes it very difficult to challenge Google. Pasquinelli asks whether we could not create an open-source page-rank algorithm. Whatever we create, it has to relate to the way Google extracts value. Pasquinelli ends his talk by proposing that maybe the model of CrossRef might be an alternative, or creating a page rank based on trust.

Teresa Numerico, from the university of Rome, gave a very interesting talk on cybernetics, search engines and resistance. With the metaphor of cybernetics, mechanical devices can be described in terms of biological organisms. They are able to self-organize themselves as if they could interact and exchange messages with the environment. In this way we can interpret machines as vehicles of messages (input or output) without questioning what happens with them. Numerico goes deeper into the system of cybernetics as developed by Norbert Wiener. According to Wiener, messages between man and machine, between machines and man and between machines and machines are destined to play an ever-increasing role. Communication can thus be seen as interactive, as the collective possibility of interacting. According to Wiener, information cannot be stored. If we store it, we will depreciate its value, where information is more a matter of process than of storage. Numerico also discusses Joseph Licklider and his ideas concerning the library of the future, consisting of a new form of collecting, of controlling and monitoring the processing of information. After discussing Plato’s Meno dilemma, Numerico describes the elements of a search engine and what makes them similar to the cybernetics metaphor. For the ranking algorithm hypnotizes the self-organization within the network. Google gives us a cognitive pattern or framework that is very strong, which is also shown by research into the information behavior of the researcher of the future (Jan 2008), which shows that horizontal information seeking is all around. Numerico combines this cybernetic search engine perspective with Foucault’s idea of the archeology of knowledge and the definition of the archive. It is obvious that the archive of a society is part of the culture of that civilization. At the same time we now have no control over the meaning of the archive as it is being created. The question is however what we value more, control or communication? Numerico ends by suggesting some actions for resistance against cognitive control (in a Deleuzian fashion):

-Be creative not communicative

-Choose ‘pourparles’ instead of communication

-Close the devices (every now and then)

-Live without leaving (too many) digital traces

-Do not interpret people and the world only according to their digital representations

-Forget or delete digital memories

-Express the living culture; in Fahrenheit 451 people learnt books by hearth

 Other things we might do according to Numerico:

-Stimulate cross generation information literacy and education

-Encourage variation. Variation is the key-factor for the transmission of knowledge and culture: variation vs. standardization: support all different searching technologies. For we need to have different perspectives on technology

-Asses trust and authority by checking a multiple sources through a cross-mediation effort.

Numerico stresses that we should stimulate difference and variation in the creation of the archive by a double-strategy consisting of both logging off on the one side and creating alternatives on the other. She ends by stating that conversation also needs time and relaxation, something we should probably be focusing on more.

Adieu Copyright – A debate

Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The essay, entitled Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten (Goodbye copyright, farewell cultural conglomerates) was presented to economist Arjo Klamer.  Klamer gave a sparkling speech – setting the tone for the following discussion – by claiming that Smiers and Van Schijndel’s essay was just not radical enough. By referring to well known numbers (10% of the cultural producers claim 90% of the remits) and hopelessly cumbersome and complicated processes of IPR regulations, upholdings and claimings, Klamer wondered why we even have such a system. He went on to systematically explain how property right is closely intermingled with a product, an object one can trade. This proprietary right is the basis of our market thinking. This market can only function through the merits of a state that enforces this proprietary right. Klamer calls this a conspiracy between the market and the state. He explains that in the utopian thinking of Smiers and Van Schijndel, the abolition of copyright serves mainly to break down the power of the large cultural conglomerates that control the cultural market in order to encourage a fairer system of competition. They claim this would be more democratic, will encourage free communication and will be beneficial for our cultural life.

Klamer wants to go even further. He claims that the authors still grasp too much to the idea of music and art as products. Klamer questions the whole idea of cultural products and product oriented thinking. He claims the way we look at these cultural artifacts or expressions as products is a simple metaphor for our ability to buy them. But artistic expressions are no products, they are ‘words’, they only get their ‘meaning’ when they are uttered, they function in a larger context and in this way are dependent on us, the ‘utterers’, the consumers, the potential readers. His starting point is not the product but the metaphor of the conversation [the term discourse to me sounds even better]. Art is a conversation, music is a conversation, science is a conversation. Nobody owns a conversation; it can be compared with friendship [also an inalienable, tangible good]. A conversation is a good people share together in a community, you cannot enforce it (not even the state), you cannot steel it and you cannot free-ride on it; and it is based on the principle of reciprocity [think of the gift economy about which I will write some more in the future].

But money comes into this system too. Klamer calls this the third sphere, the ‘in-between sphere’. Science still functions like this to a large extent. The scientific community works from the common understanding that knowledge is something we all share, science is the conversation we all build upon. Who owns an idea? Even Nobel Prize winners base their ideas on endless conversations with others. IPR does not do right to this conversation and to the quality of the conversation. In science this problem is solved by the providing of services (Klamer gives the example how in the US many artists have a position at the university were they teach and work. There art work is seen as a kind of service to the community in which art is ‘less commercialized’). Klamer’s final statement: leave the state and the market for what they are and let’s acknowledge cultural expressions for their true value, which is much better realized or finalized in the social space, the ‘third space’ in which communal goods reign. This is the sphere we want to contribute to, from which we can get acknowledgement and establish reputation. For the real and true scarce good is attention. This is what distinguishes the one from the other nine, both in science and in art. This is not a fair system and it will never be a fair system. And this unfairness lies not in the power and the influence of the cultural conglomerates, Klamer states, attacking Smiers and Van Schijndel’s premise; the scarcity of attention is a social phenomenon. This scarcity is also exactly what can be liquidated (see for instance how Damien Hirst plays with this notion). This is not to say that the market and the state should rule this world, and in this sense Klamer states the presented essay is still of the utmost importance. Cultural life exists in the third sphere and is realized in (this) community with others, people who feel committed to a bigger interest instead of in the creation of a product for their own profit. Reciprocity, conversation and attention: that is what this sphere is all about. 

After Arjo Klamer finished his speech, Joost Smiers gave a short exposition of the book. He stated that with the abolishment of copyright the market will no longer function as radical around the numbers of one and ten: the public will be much more able to follow their own taste [ignoring the fact I think that the long tail maybe does not exist as recent research has contested]. Smiers does however throw away notions like Creative Commons, stating that they no longer merit the ownership of products and this is an issue he does not want to discuss. He does not believe we should do away with the ownership of cultural goods [on a side note, I feel Smiers is conflating Creative Commons licenses, which are alternative copyright license and thus still centre around the notion of ownership, with the more radical parts of the free culture and free information movement. They are interlinked but not the same!]. Smiers asked the question what will happen to the market once we abolish copyright, how will the market function? He strongly believes entrepreneurial people will be needed in such a new system and this will offer opportunities for those who are active. 

In the first debate Annelys de Vet (graphic designer at the Sandberg Institute) and Nirav Christophe (lector theatrical creation processes and open dramaturgy) engaged with each other and the public. De Vet argued that copyright is a closed manner of handling things; it is a standstill opposed to an open movement. Artists don’t design products, they create processes in a context of processual design in which they are part of a larger whole. Artists don’t quote; they are part of a dialogue or a conversation. Copyright is based on a world of fear where she wants to work and collaborate in a world based on trust. Christophe concurs that theater is foremost a dialogue and thus serves as a good metaphor for the evenings debate. For theatre is always a half-product: as a theater writer your play only comes into existence once it is finished by others. A theatre writer is used to people making adaptations to his texts, making their own interpretations; it makes the texts better. Theatre does not create products, it creates processes. Christophe states that copyright is foremost also a philosophical problem. What is the relationship of the author to his text? Is the text yours? Since Roland Barthes and the death of the author it is no longer maintainable that texts produced by an author are the possession of that author. Only the experience of them being read or uttered, the interaction, makes them come alive. A cultural experience is only created during a certain amount of time in a process that is often created together with others, even together with the public. 

De Vet thus concludes that art should be seen as a dialogue, as a process. The oeuvre of an artist consists of all kinds of different moments, in which the links between these moments create the meaning and this is not linkable back to a product. There is so much pressure on artists nowadays to be original, and so much fear to appropriate, to copy. Yet De Vet encourages this, it will still be different, it will always be used in a different context, it will follow another trajectory. Being unique and signing your work can go hand in hand with the above attitude, they are not each others opposites. Many people are involved in the creation of a design; design is about the creation of a dialogue. Copyright has no relevance in this process, claims De Vet. Christophe concurs and states this is a more realistic view of the modern artist than the romantic 19th century conception of the individual performer. De Vet and Christophe see the economic difficulties of their notions but are up to the challenge of thinking in different ways. 

Questions from the audience phrased the fear of plagiarism: what if one copies or steals my work? What if I get ‘screwed over’? As we know from the debate between Habermas and Foucault, conversations are not always open and honest. This is a way to idealist stance. De Vet  replied that no system is perfect, in a 1 to10 system people are ‘screwed over’ too. She wants to keep a positive stance based on trust.  Media sociologist Jaap van Ginneken replied by stating that under the current copyright system Walt Disney steals everything and then patents it again as its own. Even the Lion King is an adaptation of a Japanese story. So big business seems very efficient in screwing you over too. Joost Smiers remarked that for wrongful appropriation (for instance by a fascist regime) you have alternative laws, you do not need copyright for that. Next to that a system of shaming will probably develop. Other mechanisms will thus develop to maintain the system

In the second debate we met Hans Abbing, emeritus professor in art sociology and Jan-Willem Sligting, programmer at Paradiso and musician. Sligting remarked that copyright is such a different concept where it covers multiple domains, from law to philosophy and economy. Referring to Thomas More and Utopia, he states that a world without copyright will unfortunately just be that: an utopia. But Abbing dives into this make believe world, stating the time is ripe: copyright is increasingly contested online and the current economic crisis urges for the need of equal playing fields. First of all it will improve the situation of artists, where their incomes while become more equal. But most of all the consumer will benefit. There will be more space for diversity and niches. But Abbing also doubts this fantasy. Diversity is not inherently connected to copyright. A society can only handle a certain amount of diversity: you cannot know the details of everything. We need to trust on others, on selection, our attention span is always crooked. The consumer wants selection and we shouldn’t trust too much on the premise of ‘small is beautiful’. And what about that level playing field? How does this relate to different regions on a world scale? We also need big corporations. We should just as well fear social monopolies. Don’t underestimate the power of funders for instance.

Klamer still emphasizes the benefits of contributing to something that is bigger than you. In science and religion the financing is done by way of gifts (gift economy), which according to him is a very valuable system as we are reimbursed for our services. According to Abbing however, gifts only work in small societies on a personal level. Gifts on the Internet will never have a real shape, this will not work according to him. 

Sligting however mentions initiatives like Fabchannel and SellaBand which have business models which are centered on the community. Abbing states that there are a lot of experiments going on but that they need to be based on reciprocity, people will not just donate something, and they want to feel connected to a cause. Simple commercial artifacts (t-shirts, stickers) already help a lot.

Arjo Klamer remarks that science is also totally based on reciprocity: services for reputation. There is however a fierce strive for recognition in this field. This situation is very similar to the independent arts; Klamer claims that such a reciprocal model will be very well applicable to this sector too. Using copyright in this realm is abnormal, it does not work like that in other cultures and it should thus not be norm giving. We need to be more creative with how we establish value. Think about the potential of deluxe editions.

Comments from the crowd focused on the elitism of the debate: not all art is equal, the 1/10 rule is there for a reason, simply because not all works are good. We also need to discuss quality in this context. With a final statement Joost Smiers ended the debate, using the scientific metaphor of the paradigm shift: if a model no longer works we need another one. A world without copyright is not imaginary. We need to break through this dominance to establish a more normal and competitive market in which more people will earn more money. Smiers’ goal is to support this notion with hard figures. It is not an utopia. Smiers wants to create alternative business models and will keep developing them in the future. 

My feeling about the evening was that from a theoretical point of view it hopelessly complicated matters and on a practical level didn’t offer any solutions. Although the debate an sich was very interesting, I think the attack on the big conglomerates by Smiers and Van Schijndel should not be the primary goal of the abolishment of copyright. I feel the fierce attacks on the state and the market that were uttered during the evening (notwithstanding the fact that their powers and reach might actually be too large) unnecessarily complicated the issue, and made it more disputed than it already is. Compare the debate between Lawrence Lessig and Kevin Kelly in which Kelly compared Web 2.0 with socialism (I agree with Lessig in this matter).

Even if we accept the notion of art as a process and dialogue, this does not mean we have to do away with the big companies and commercialization. Making money with their work, in what way they deem fit is still a free choice of creative producers, and commercialization of an experience economy, more akin to the processual and fluxual nature of the current art procedure, is already well on its way. This is why I applaud initiatives like Fabchannel, SellaBand and also Creative Commons, who, on an alternative note, try to create new business models based on sharing, community and reciprocity. Without loosing the option to liquidize these created values. This criticism connects to that of the confused public, which during the evening continually begged for practical solutions and did not receive any. The debate remained too theoretical on many levels, without offering truly new potentials. And doing away with initiatives like Creative Commons, that in a very practical manner try to do something refreshing with the whole IPR problem, to me seems just stupid. The total lack of references to new business models by Smiers and Van Schijndel was also very disappointing. Maybe the practical solutions can be found in their book, however, it is not available Open Access on the net and unfortunately, after this evening, I felt neither compelled nor convinced to buy the book. Felt kind of like a lost chance….

RiP, Maecenas and Event

Brett Gaylor photo by Steve Garfield CC BY-NC-SA http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/3361531377/

Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained more popularity and media attention.

WIRED dedicated a whole article, consisting of an interview with Gaylor, on the movie and discusses its business model, the release and popularity of the movie and the ‘copyfight movement’ Gaylor is involved in.

 Why would Gaylor choose the Maecenas model? When we consider other possible free online content (or Open Access) business models, the Maecenas model does seem to be a more logical model than the model I wrote about yesterday which Bloomsbury Academic is applying to Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix. For in this model there is a clear cut end product, a printed book that can be bought to cover the costs for the production and the free online dissemination of the product. In the case of RiP, this seems a less logical path to follow: the whole idea behind this documentary movie is of course that there is no end product: in the process of continually remixing, reediting and mashing-up the material RiP consists of, the documentary could better be seen as a (continuous) project than a product. As WIRED states: ‘in the realities of remix culture, where there is no such thing as a final cut’. This of course does not mean that certain ‘snapshots’ of the documentary can not be ’materialized’ and sold as products to cover for the costs. And Gaylor does this too, releasing DVD versions of the movie and showing his documentary in a theatrical run at movie theaters and festivals. So in a way, he is betting on two horses. However, Gaylor’s alternative choice for the Maecenas model seems very interesting for the current project. In this specific case it seems like a very good idea to apply this community based model, where RiP collected quite a large network of remix collaborators and enthusiasts around its project core and attracted lot of similar minded folks interested in the goals and values Gaylor tries to spread and promote with his movie, who might definitely be interested in promoting this project further.

However, one of the additional problems of financing and even possibly profiting from such an inherent collaborative and community based project is how to divide the costs and the benefits? As Gaylor states in the WIRED interview:

 “But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away.”

 This of course also refers to the problem of attribution in such an ‘authorless documentary’ or collaborative approach: who will get the money? Will it go to Gaylor, (who of course in this case is still very much the master mind and creative brain behind the project) will it go to the foundation Open Source Cinema, which Gaylor has founded?

For Gaylor this does not seem to be the biggest problem however. His goal is to make the documentary as largely available as possible, arguing that that should be what copyright should be about in the first place. Gaylor in WIRED:

 “We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible as possible,” […]“It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe, that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”

 

When asked about his views on copyright he favors a balance between creating an incentive for producers and at the same time creating as wide accessibility to the consumer population as possible:

 “The classic copyright ones: Providing an incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.”

 Gaylor also has some interesting thoughts about the future of remix culture and business models concerning movie distribution in such a context. He talks about going to the cinema as maybe becoming a (money making) experience event on the same scale as going to a concert. This could then serve as a way to cover for the costs that will be lost when the content will be available as a free download or as a pirated version:

 “We’ll see how I feel about that in a year. The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you can get on a DVD or online.”

 And this is interesting indeed, while things might be increasingly online for free the logical option seems to be to charge for events that are unique and cannot be recreated in a ‘reproductive’ manner in an online environment. And this means that, paradoxically enough (or is it even that paradoxical?), Event becomes a capitalist commodity, whereas that what can be reproduced and spread easily online will more and more become available for free. Talk about turning around your business model.

Remix online for free

Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog.

 

Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before here. Basically their business model revolves around the same idea I wrote about yesterday in my post on Martijn Aslander: giving away free ebooks online will not harm print sales, it can even increase print sales. Although technically speaking, in the case of Remix, Bloomsbury Academic is working with a form of delayed Open Access. So in this case one should speak about an embargoed Open Access model (where the book was already available in print for half a year). Thus the question remains whether Bloomsbury Academic will continue with such a delayed Open Access business model (which according to many Open Access purists isn’t real Open Access), or whether they will present their print and free online releases at the same time from now on.

 

In any case, I am really glad Remix is now available as a free download and I can truly recommend the book! You can download a PDF of the book here.

 

Schyzophonia. On Remix, Hybridization and Fluidity

I read Lawrence Lessig’s Remix a few months ago, a great book with a stimulating positive approach to the whole piracy and copyright problema, focusing on finding solutions which cater to the increasingly prevailing remixed and remediated forms of digital art and culture, in which the hybrid has become common ground. Lessig discusses new musical ‘innovators’ like Girl Talk, who creates elaborate and eclectic remixes of current pop sounds and anthems, creating a new musical discourse which reflects, winks, ironizes and mocks, while still standing firmly on its own. These kind of adaptations, versionings or reinterpretations have been part of music since its beginnings, coming to the forefront mostly in dub, hiphop, turntablism and the use of samples in electronic music. Just think about all the beats, breaks, loops and glitches that have made a career for themselves and their derivative offspring in musical history.

 

Electronic music, though now very much grounded in the digital realm, did not originate there, but it did find a save heaven or warm nest in the online environment. Remixing, sampling and turntablism can be seen as the starting point of all kinds of different genres in electronic music, they might even be seen as the most essential aspect of this music genre. This has lead to all kinds of ontologies and classifications into genres and subgenres which have been set up to help define te jungle (ha!) of all the diverse electronic creations.

 

A great sarcastic attempt to develop such a musical ontology for electronic music has been around on the web for years: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. A highly personalized ontology that is (with many self-created genres and similar definitions and descriptions), though in its hilarity also strangely precise and very informative. The master mind behind Ishkur is Kenneth John Taylor. In an interview with Taylor, conducted by Joe Farbrook from Histories of Internet Art (who sees Taylor’s work as a form of found art), Taylor explains himself and his guide. His main reason to publish his guide on the Internet was the fact that there are to many copyright infringing samples on it and Taylor did not want to create a commercial product to profit of others work. He also wanted to be able to add the samples next to the text, playing whilst you are reading. Taylor’s vision towards his guide is very interesting, defining it as an unfinished project:

 

“If you are really into New Media and internet art and all that jazz, here’s some food for thought: My Music Guide isn’t done. It will never be done. It’s what you call a “work in progress”. I continually update it, revise it, change it, add different samples, newer samples, new genres, new definitions and snarling little comments to it as time goes on. There is no definitive version of it at all. It is constantly being changed by me. I think that is something that the New Media world is adopting now. I first heard of it, actually, from George Lucas when he mentioned the original Star Wars Trilogy as being a “work in progress”. And when you think about it, that’s exactly what the internet and new media is. There is no central planner. There is no Great Design to this World Wide Web of ours. We really have no idea what we’re doing now, and we have no idea what this thing is going to look like ten years ago (when it will likely be run and controlled by technologies that don’t exist yet). We are making this thing up as we go along. Every webpage is “under construction”, a work in progress. There’s no such thing as NOT being under construction, after all. I think that appeals to art as well. Under the traditional view, an artist will finish a piece (be it a book or a painting or whatever), and then work on the next piece. But the new model is one of continuously revising and updating existing pieces to fit new paradigms, to broaden their message, to evoke more complex reactions and responses, to keep up-to-date and make relevant commentaries about social life, or to keep improving. Art as Maintenance, and Maintenance as Art. If that doesn’t crank your gears, I don’t know what does. It’s a fascinating concept, I think.”

 

In this way the new remix culture can be seen and defined as a never ending story, in which (digital) culture is becoming fluid, amendable and liquid. This can be seen in music foremost but also in movies and documentaries, as I wrote about before, and in books. Some examples of fluidity in this respect can be seen in the unbook movement for general trade market publishing and the liquid publication project for scientific publications. But most of all this remix culture can be seen in the production of knowledge itself: knowledge can even be defined as a remix of different types of information into a meaningful context. So in a more meta context our whole information society is based on (the possibility of) remix, as Lessig also remarks in Remix. In a way,  as Eduardo Navas argues in his article Remix, the bond of repetition and representation, the remix connects a culture with its past, reflecting as it does on a previous narrative:

 

“The remix is always allegorical, meaning that the object of contemplation depends on recognition of a pre-existing cultural code.The audience is always expected to see within the object a trace of history.”

 

But to get back down from this generalization cloud, we need to define the difference between this inherent remixiality in culture at large and todays specific remix culture. In a great wiki on the web called extendboundariesofliteracy (of which also a formal article has been published) it is explained as follows:

 

“The principle of remix has always been integral to cultural development, an invisible process through which cultures grow and evolve. On top of this “organic process”, however, self-conscious practices of remix have become popular cultural pursuits of cultural activity. Digital technologies have vastly amplified – in terms of quality and quantity – remixing options. Today, remixing cultural resources comprises what Lessig (2004) refers to as the new “alphabet” – that is, as the new building blocks of creative writing.”

 

Returning to Ishkur and electronic music, his ontological cravings concerning music go even further as he created the Great Samples Database, which is a user generated list of records and their respective source samples. The whole idea of creating a music ontology (which was already apparent in online encyclopedias/databases like Allmusic and Discogs) was very much enriched with the development of streaming Internet radio. With the coming of Last.fm (which only streams 30 seconds samples on request and the ocassional full track) and the likes (Spotify seems to be the next best thing so I hear) such an encyclopedia plus sound has increasingly become reality. Based on user generated tagging and categorising and based on the principle of serendipity, the whole music scene can and is now being indexed, subindexed and interlinked, creating an immense database of potential ways to discover and interact with music (not withstanding the fact that Last.fm has great lacks and gaps in content covered and played).

 

But back to the question of sampling, remixing and copyright. When did sampling exactly become such an outlawed activity, making artists liable to clear the different samples they used in their music? Why exactly does this feel wrong to me an clearly many others? Eduardo Navas goes back to the basics of remix, tracing its origin to music and leaning heavily on Jacques Attali’s concepts of repetition and representation, representation meaning the live performance by the author, aura still intact, and repetition reflecting the possibility the mechanic offers to record the music, to expand its use in different contexts and mediums. Navas actually argues that it is the (remix) DJ that again, by means of his agency, introduces the concept of representation into music, stating that in his way the DJ is actually composing a new score, freeing the music once more from its convines of repetition. In this way the copyright claims concerning the old idea of copy/repetition are no longer valid, as the remix is no longer a form of copy and past, but a new cultural creation, which Navas even calls a form of cultural resistance (consumer becomes producer, liberating him/her from his/her passivity: consuming via interactivity), referring to Critical Theory:

 

 

“To be clear, then, what the DJ initially brought forward is the appropriation of repetition by representation; thereby making representation friendly to repetition. Thus, representation does not resist cooption by repetition; if anything, today it is optimized for assimilation, by being constantly reblogged (remixed).”

As Jonathan David Tankel argues in a 1990 article on sound engineers (The practice of recording music: remixing as recoding), the remixer can be seen as an independent artist:

“The remix engineer can be viewed as an artist distinct from the original musician(s), no longer a collaborator, as Kealy suggested, but an independent creative force.”

 

With the introduction of agency in the remixing and aggregation of certain parts or elements of music into a new whole, the parallel can be drawn to what I argued before about information turning into knowledge by means of an active stance of the creator, combining information nodes into a meaningful collection which then constitutes knowledge:

 

“It is in a way his or her interpretation, combination and contextualization of the information. This explains why people have moral rights or even claim copyright or intellectual ownership over their active creation of knowledge out of information.”

 

Navas agrees that this constant new interpretation of history is what gives the creator his agency and independent stance:

 

“Thus, reflection of history comes through constant interpretation (in this case, by way of representation remixing repetition). The added lines of “Le Catalogue” are a metaphor for this element of historicity. In the end, no matter what tools are used to mix or remix in culture, what is important is being able to develop a critical position: one that will allow for a constant flux between representation and repetition with the purpose to confront false-consciousness.”

 

As Tankel argues, remixing is recoding. And the remix never ends, it is everlasting, ever expanding and unstopable, an active force giving actual potentiality to the creator and freeing music/content/information from its constraints. The progressive possibilities to mash-up, refashion and reconfigure culture in such an inherently modern manner, makes music/content/information/art, as Tankel concludes while referring to Benjamin, into the building blocks of represented repetition itself:

 

“The remix recording creates a new artifact from the schemata of previously recorded music. It is prima facie evidence of Benjamin’s contention that to “an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”

 

 

Freedom on trial?

To continue the freedom of knowledge and information debate on a more practical level,

as most of you might have heard, bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay (which I have written about before here) is currently on trial. Interesting enough the people behind The Pirate Bay and similar Swedish organizations, like Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge, use the freedom of information argument to defend piracy. As he states:

 

“On the one side, there is the public. Every human with access to the Internet has received fingertip round-the-clock access to all of humanity’s collective knowledge and culture. This is a fantastic leap ahead for mankind – much larger than when public libraries arrived 160 years ago, and comparable to how society changed with the arrival of the printing press.
On the other side, there are the current people in power, who would like to harness this power to build a surveillance machine – collecting information about regular Joes, and actively preventing the free exchange of ideas – that would make George Orwell look like a cheery, skipping optimist. Many powerful institutions are pulling in this direction.”

 

The trial is already been called the ‘political trial of the century’ and seems to be going favorably for the Pirate Bay. Via BoingBoing I discovered that in honor of the trial of the Pirate Bay’s founders, the people behind the documentary series ‘Steal this film’ have released a new trial edition of what is eventually to become a movie on intellectual property right and file sharing. You can download it from their website. The first part of this documentary can be found in many places, including here.

This is actually a very interesting documentary (series), which follows the same idea as the remix documentary RiP I wrote about before, putting raw (searchable) footage and snippets of what is to become the final documentary online, together with more or less finalized versions of the documentary (like a sort of preprint in scholarly communication lingo).

 

 

 

The documentary follows roughly the same logic as Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix, arguing that it is of no use to criminalize a whole generation of downloaders or ‘pirates’ for that matter, and that it is much more productive to search for an alternative solution to this problem, or in other words to search for an alternative business model that will sustain the free flow of cultural goods and information. The documentary includes a very nice book history analogy, referring not only to the coming of the printing press but also to historical notions of book piracy, with contributions from famous book historians like Elisabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton. The documentary includes interviews with other renowned figures like Yochai Benkler, and Rick Prelinger from the Prelinger Archive. I like the way he makes the following statement near the end of the documentary:

 

“I think we need to have a broad conversation that is probably going to be an international conversation where people who make things and people who use things, I am talking about cultural works, sit together and think about what kinds of rules best serve these interests. I don’t know that we are going to agree, but I think we need to ask a little bit more about utopia, we need to really figure out what kind of a world we would like to live in and then try to craft regulations to match that. Being reactive doesn’t cut it.”

 

 

 

I saw Rick Prelinger speak at a Creative Commons conference in de Balie in Amsterdam a year ago, together with speakers like Kenneth Goldsmith from Ubuweb and people from Fabchannel, discussing alternative business models. The panel I attended discussed amongst others:

 

 “…the public content zone beyond that of user-generated-content: the possibilities and problems related to making professionally produced cultural productions publicly available on the internet. What kind of revenue models exist for that? How is the public interest in accessibility squared with the need of professionals to make a living? What new and alternative distribution models emerge for professional cultural producers and cultural institutions?”

 

I think this is the important discussion, as Rick Prelinger also stated above, we need to find a solution for both producers and consumers of cultural and knowledge products and content. For as the documentary and Lessig’s books also show, the potential value of the free availability of all this information on the Internet is huge, stimulating new cultural creativity and knowledge production in. Next to that this development can even be very beneficial for society and the economy in general. In fact, as a recent Dutch report on file sharing showed, file sharing can even foster (the Dutch) economic growth in the long run.

Update April 30th 2009: Another report from researchers at the BI Norwegian School of Management shows that people who pirate the most from P2P sites are also the ones most likely to buy legit downloads. Of course there is some discussion about these findings, but the conclusions are interesting nevertheless. (via: Ars Technica)

Be sure for more posts on alternative business models in the future.

Remix Manifesto

 

RiP: A remix manifesto, is the first Open Source documentary, in which film maker Brett Gaylor (founder of www.opensourcecinema.org) invites the public to remix his footage in his participatory media experiment. The documentary ‘explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers’. With appearances by Lawrence Lessig, the Creative Commons founder who just published his great new book Remix (also see my previous post about Science Commons) and Cory Doctorow, our favorite blogger over at Boing Boing and writer of the equally great (and freely downloadable) book Content.

Underneath you can find the trailer of the documentary and you can contribute your own mash-up here.

 

 

Update April 6^th 2009: you can now watch RIP: A remix Manifesto – version 1.0 – here: http://www.opensourcecinema.org/book/rip-remix-manifesto-1-meet-girl-talk