Rick

Look forward to seeing the book. Re the Open Museum discussion,
i recently posted my Open Observatory manifesto

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/an_open_observatory_manifesto/

I am heavily influenced here by my work as an astronomer over the last
thirty
years. Thirty years ago astronomers viewed the data they took ( in those
days
photographic plates) as their personal property and their careers hinged on
their
controlling this data ( and their students careers depended on their access
to their
professors data). Today NASA and NSF now have a contractual stipulation that
all data
funded by NASA must be made publically available= its funded by public money
so the public has a right to access it. This has led to a scientific
revolution in
astronomy= more science is now done on the hubble data archive, than with
new observations= and more science is done by other people than by the
astronomers who took the data. The international virtual observatory
movement
has generalised this and there are now shared data analysis tools that are
open sourced.

This open data is still not the case in many fields of science even though
the data was funded by public monies, but its a growing trend (even in the
genome project). And indeed
the model is that the scientist is funded up front to take the data, and
then
its open sourced. In the humanities its still not the case often= and access
to collections is tightly controlled ( cf the ongoing debate about the dead
sea
scrolls..)

So a first piece of your open museum proposal could simply be that
any work commissioned using public monies must be open sourced
on the ideological basis that the public paid for it so they have a right
to it. And indeed the artist is paid up front ( just as the scientist is
paid
up front)

This approach obviously ignores the fact that in art ( as opposed to
science)
a lot of the art economy depends on speculation and that a small tiny
fraction
of artists get very rich because the intellectual property can be controlled
and
monetarised in speculation. I guess in science the equivalent is that a few
scientists have benefited from very lucrative patents that they have filed-
which are not so much speculative but are market driven. Patents that result
from government funding are tightly regulated, with the inventor and the
institutions
getting their share.

Many of these issues were discussed at the CODE conference some years
back and in the book edited by Ghosh in the leonardo book series

http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/ghosh.html

Open source software is considered by many to be a novelty and the open
source movement a revolution. Yet the collaborative creation of knowledge
has gone on for as long as humans have been able to communicate. CODE looks
at the collaborative model of creativity -- with examples ranging from
collective ownership in indigenous societies to free software, academic
science, and the human genome project -- and finds it an alternative to
proprietary frameworks for creativity based on strong intellectual property
rights.

the museum issue is tangentially addressed


roger


<http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/an_open_observatory_manifesto/>

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Richard Rinehart <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Hello again New-Media-Curating,
>
> In addition to the other mischief we like to cause individually, Jon
> Ippolito and I are co-authoring a book for MIT Press, due out Spring '11 on
> collecting and preserving new media art <end shameless pitch>.
>
> I include below a brief excerpt from the book relevant to our discussion
> this month on commissioning variable media art. In it, I'm proposing a new
> model for an archive of new media art I call "the Open Museum" and
> describing perhaps a new way that commissioning could be seen to function in
> that.
>
> I was originally inspired along these lines by the V2 arts organization in
> Rotterdam that had a stipulation in which new media works commissioned for
> their lab space must remain open-source within the lab space for future
> commissioned artists. It got me thinking, why not take that great idea a
> couple steps further.....
>
> "Students, scholars, and the public can currently access images and records
> –representations - of artworks held in museum collections, but they cannot
> access the collections themselves. The Open Museum takes advantage of the
> unique property of new media that allows one to share the original without
> diminishing it. In the Open Museum, the source code and other files for
> digital artworks from the collection are free for users to download, study,
> use, and re-mix into new works. In this way, even the casual student can
> peer under the hood and examine the inner workings of these artworks in the
> way that previously only privileged scholars could with traditional material
> collections. .......
>
> Intellectual property law was created to balance the private need with the
> public good. It grants authors and artists exclusive rights over their work
> for a limited period (not a short period, sometimes 90 years after the
> artists lifetime) after which the rights in the work move into the public
> domain. The artist has time to find ways to earn a livelihood from their
> work and this is seen as an incentive to create in the first place. Why
> then, could not public museums act as stewards of the public good and
> compensate the artist earlier rather than later by commissioning works for
> the Open Museum, after which they apply Creative Commons licenses and
> release the work to the public. The museum would earn their renown not for
> the quality of art they obtain in exclusivity, but for the art they obtain
> and then give away. The artist gets money up front and still owns their
> work. And the public is served by waiting months rather than decades to gain
> access and rights to use the work in question."
>
> Two more items.
>
> Within the Berkeley Art Museum's net art portal, we were able to include
> *some* of the function of the Open Museum - an open-source net art archive.
> Call it a baby step.
> (see http://netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu and scroll down to NetArtchive)
>
> An earlier post to this list (from Leigh I believe; I lost the email),
> outlined how public institutions in Scotland are now using their muscle to
> gain IP rights in works they commission. While public art funding and IP are
> quite different between the UK, US, Canada and elsewhere, I wonder if the
> Open Museum provides a more positive spin on how public institutions could
> partner with artists with regard to the disposition of IP in commissioned
> works - or - is the Open Museum just another step toward big brother taking
> everything?
>
> What do you all think? What are the ways in which commissioning new media
> *could* work in addition to how it already works? What are your dreams?
>
> Richard Rinehart
> ---------------
> Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator
> Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
> bampfa.berkeley.edu
> ---------------
> University of California, Berkeley
> ---------------
> 2625 Durant Ave.
> Berkeley, CA, 94720-2250
> ph.510.642.5240
> fx.510.642.5269
>



--
Roger Malina is in France at this time

I
011 33 (0) 6 15 79 59 26
or (0) 6 80 45 94 47
Roger Malina is acting Director of the Observatoire Astronomique de
Marseille Provence and Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT
Press and member of the steering committee of IMERA the Mediterranean
Institute for Advanced Studies.