Hello!
My name is Gabriel Menotti and I've been lurking the list for a while.
At the present time, I'm a Communications PhD student at the Catholic
University of São Paulo (Brazil). My research is focused in how
curating can be a creative process somewhat similar to programming
(since it deals with the articulation of databases to constitute a
system, etc).
I got quite motivated to contribute to this thread because I
participate of a diy cinema group called Cine Falcatrua ("hoax" or
"scam"). We are deeply connected to the piracy p2p scene but, among
other events, we organize "free or libre" movie exhibitions, gathering
copyleft, creative commons and activist videos. There is a good
explanation in english of these exhibitions in the Piksel website:
http://www.piksel.no/pwiki/ReallyFreeMovieExhibition
Well, because of this kind of activity, we had some dialog with the
free software movement, specially in Brazil. We even prepared some
editions of this programme to the brazilian International Free
Software Forum.
That gave me a glimpse on how free software is often proposed as a
miraculous solution, yet it is never fully implemented as a cultural
practice. Opening the source code can't do any good to the users if
they don't know how to read it; it can't do any good to creative
production as a whole if you don't also open your creative process.
If the users don't know how to read code, all they can do is complex
bug reporting (according to the paramenters they learned from
proprietary GUIs).
I think Matthew Fuller sums up very well this problem in the following
paragraphs (from Behind the Blip):
"[...] proprietary software traps supposedly "free" programmers into
their imaginal space by convincing them that they will have no users
unless they conform to what is already known, what is already done.
Free Software is too content with simply reverse-engineering or
micking the cramped sensoriums of proprietary software. Copying
Microsoft Word feature-by-feature and opening up the source code is
not freedom. Mimesis is misery."
It's easy to see what that means if we compare Cinelerra (a powerful
Final Cut / Adobe Premiere mockup) to Pure Data (a dataflowing
programming language devoted to audio/video/multimedia). Both are open
source software/ frameworks, and both are used to produce audiovisual,
but in a radically different way.
Cinelerra framework insists on the closed ouvre, on the separation
between production and consumption (i.e., producers and consumers),
while Pure Data explodes this completely. In fact, every "movie" made
in puredata is actually a software piece, processual systems naturally
open to interventions and contaminations.
All in all, I think that, if we're to think open source seriously, we
must look at it as a particular poetics, not only as a collection of
products ou a community.
Hope my english wasn't very confusing. =)
Best!
Menotti
2008/4/2, jd002c5250 <[log in to unmask]>:
> Hello Crumb list,
>
> Perhaps I can start this discussion by taking people back to their first
> experiences with open source. In my case I was developing work using old
> 8bit consoles and needed a set of development tools to compliment this work.
> I had heard about a particular piece of software called Puredata and
> travelled to montevideo in Amsterdam for a 5 day training course. I arrived
> with my shiny windows laptop thinking I understood how it worked and what I
> could do with it. Within about 2 hrs of arriving windows had been erased and
> replaced with Linux (the planet ccrma distro at that time). On returning
> home I realised I could no longer use my computer and would have to develop
> a whole new set of skills. Rising to this challenge it became apparent that
> in order to develop work within this environment I would have to become more
> socially engaged with the community of users / developers. Perhaps one of
> the first mistakes I made was to look for open source equivalents of
> proprietary software / development environments rather than to engage with
> the open nature of the system.
> ---
>
> Dominic
> http://ptechnic.org/
>
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