Dear list,
Thanks for inviting GOTO10 and sorry for the late introduction, I hope
we still have some time to exchange some ideas or perspective on this
theme. Some other GOTO10 members have also joined the list and might
jump in or react as well.
I assume most of you are not familiar with GOTO10 so here is a small
introduction:
GOTO10 is a collective of artists/hackers that are interested in
developping artistic and creative projects in the area of FLOSS, digital
art, knowledge exchange and online communities. We are a distributed
collective/organisation, in the way that we don't have any central
structure or location. The only reference point for us are the servers
we live in and we mostly work by consensus decision-making for our
projects.
As individual members, we have our own artistic projects, either solo,
or in collaboration with other members and artists outside of GOTO10.
As a collective, the most visible projects we have at the moment are:
- the pure:dyne GNU/Linux distribution for digital artists, which
recently received support from Arts Council England (I'm not sure what
is the policy for announcing stuff on this list, so instead of
forwarding the mail directly, you can have a look here:
http://lists.goto10.org/pipermail/nfo/2008-April/000033.html )
- the yearly "make art" festival in Poitiers, France, which is organised
and curated by GOTO10 and proposes lectures, workshops, installations
and performances around FLOSS and art.
http://makeart.goto10.org/2007/?page=welcome&lang=en
- the upcoming FLOSS+Art book, published by Mute and expected to be released
September 2008. The book is a collection of articles on free software
and digital art, with various themes: artistic, political and social.
The book will be a gateway to a future repository of
texts and material on the same themes.
- Workshops and courses a bit everywhere in Europe and sometimes
outside. We mostly teach to artists and students on many different
subjects, from hardware hacking to home studio production software for
music and video, of course all based on FLOSS :)
The way we work usually is focused on collaboration, that means that
only a few GOTO10 projects are 100% run by us. What interests us
is to organize events with like-minded organisations where both sides
end up more knowledgeable and achieved something greater than
they could have achieved alone.
There is also a less visible side to GOTO10 which is the server side of
our activities. We strongly believe in machines as a creative backbone
for artist driven communities. As a consequence GOTO10 sometimes acts as
a proxy to allow communities to have access to online services. For
example we maintain an IRC network which is used by other organisations
such as openlab, placard, riereta, giss.tv, platoniq and others.
We also provide SVN repositories and hosting for artist communities who
are working with FLOSS and we have a dedicated streaming server that is
made available for anyone who wants to develop artistic projects using
audio/video broadcasting. And of course we maintain several mailing
lists.
Last but not least we are always looking for new nodes in our network of
machines to extend and redistribute those resources for free (as in free
speech, free beer and google-ads-free).
more info: http://goto10.org
Now, to come back to what has been said on this list before,
I personnaly think that FLOSS, art and cultural organisations,
while being in some circumstances connected, are three distinct things,
and I'm not convinced that FLOSS is something that can be applied
litteraly to non digital matter. In other words, software is a medium in
itself, people are producing software, but people are not software.
I would be interested if anyone on this list has concrete examples where
FLOSS has been used to model a non digital project/community/organisation,
beyond the simple inspiration that can provide the openness suggested by
FLOSS models and the simple use of FLOSS for production/admin tasks.
Best Regards
Aymeric Mansoux.
|