Hello Armin,

I shall clarify further too :)

Armin Medosch said :
> > If I can connect some dots in what you say above, then maybe the
> > romantic cliché of the hacker mixed with net politics, P2P software,
> > media art and the early commercial success of free software and open
> > source led to the appropriation of copyleft by artists and
> > intellectuals, turning it into some statement beyond the software realm.
> 
> while this is not wrong and also not such a bad thing in itself, my
> posting was actually pointing to another thing, namel that there existed
> cultures and practices where there are exchanges and meeting points
> between hackers, artists, activists and intellectuals which are more
> two-way. This goes much beyond the sort of fetishised appropriation of
> the legal aspect of free software. 
>
> Artist groups such as the Situationists rallied around copyleft ideas
> which they called Potlatch in the 1950s. Politicised video artists in
> the 1970s invented their own social forms, such as the open media
> workshop, where they shared materials and knowledge. What now exists as
> 'hackerspaces' had precurses in the net culture lab of the 1990s such as
> backspace, bootlab, netbase, ljudmilja, etc.

Absolutely. I did not mean to say something else. My reply was probably
clumsy, I intended to also mention examples from mail art and neoism,
but somehow managed to skip it...

Anyway, yes, indeed, we are facing on both sides, if I can reduce it to
such a binary extreme for the sake of simplification, a rich history of
practice and reflection on knowledge. These histories are not isolated,
they are interleaved, with overlaps, meeting points, whether conceptual
or physical, and have similar patterns.

Yet in your original post, you are "zooming" into a precise moment in
time: 

> By the turn of the millennium there was a lot of excitement about the
> possibilities of media art and free software and open content. The tone
> had been set by the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin 1999, to my
> knowledge the first event to ask "how can methodologies from free and
> open source software development be applied to other domains, such as
> content production and media art."

This is precisely within this particular time range that my question was
framed. In your opinion, what is it concretely that artists and
intellectuals found attractive in free software and open content?
Despite all the proto-copyleft practices they might have been been
experiencing with, what is it in the free software copyleft that
suddenly seems to be so exciting and novel from an artistic perspective? 


a.
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