On July 2nd I was invited to give a workshop at Supermarkt’s event ARTS & COMMONS: Art, Money and Self Organization in Digital Capitalism. Together with the participants of my workshop, I wanted to discuss the co-creation of artistic work, in the mold of open source collaboration or Yochai Benkler’s term ‘commons-based peer-production‘. The form was a hands-on collaborative collage workshop to get us on-topic, and give participants a taste of peer-production for themselves, followed by a discussion on how peer production of art is currently being attempted, and what might be necessary to improve and spread the process. An in-depth recipe for the collage workshop can be found here, but the general concept was for different teams to work sequentially on the same artworks, with the only method of collaboration and communication between the teams being some written documentation, which would accompany the work-in-progress as it moved from one team to another. We were building on existing work in the commons – Judith Carnaby and I had put together a collection of interesting Public Domain imagery (printable PDFs here), largely gathered from the Public Domain Review, New York Public Library, and the British Library’s Mechanical Curator. As we didn’t have enough time to put together a huge collection, this was bulked up with a few pages ripped out of magazines, where we very naughtily infringed the copyright… er, I mean, where we made a provocative artistic protest, striking at the corrupt heart of the copyright industry’s hegemony. Or something. Next time it will be 100% public domain, I promise :) To understand the process, I’ll take you through...
In July 2014 I joined Tristan Copley Smith of Open Pixel and Open Source Beehives in Barcelona to make a documentary about the 10th annual Fab Lab Conference and Festival, which incorporates issues of the growth of Fab Labs and the potential next steps – for example, Barcelona’s Fab City project is an integral part of its plan to be an truly sustainable city within 40...
Mark Fonseca Rendeiro and Wikimedia Deutschland have started an in-depth podcast about open source people and projects in Berlin! Subscribe! download! rejoice! Mark interviewed me recently about all sorts of things I’ve been up to in the last couple of years: open source in video, our experience with Open It Agency, making my own open source clothing and an introduction of our new initiative, Open Source Circular Economy Days. Download the podcast:...
Sorry, no English subtitles for this one! as part of the German government’s ‘Scientific Year 2014’ project, Wikimedia Deutschland is running a series of talks and podium discussions around the theme ‘Digital Competencies’ – this is the first edition, dealing with privacy and data security. Titles and basic animation were prepared in Inkscape and animated with Synfig, and (as usual) I used Kdenlive for editing and Audacity for sound mix. this was a two-camera gig, shot with Ash Robinson from Dollarmixbag. The music is from Broke for Free‘s new album Petal, which I’m sure I’ll be using plenty in the coming months! I made three further videos for this series- two with Ash, and one shot with Ben Mergelsberg from Wrangelfilm. Digital Natives: ein gut klingender Begriff mit wenig Substanz? Digitalisierung der Arbeitswelt ‘Algorithmus is Watching For You’ – droht die ‘Filter...
From OpenDataDay.org: Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments. This was the local Berlin Open Data Day event, organized by the wonderful people of the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland and held at Wikimedia Deutschland‘s headquarters in Kreuzberg. Check out the projects in detail here: odd14.hackdash.org Video by Sam Muirhead CC-BY Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland Made with Free / Libre / Open Source software (kdenlive.org, gimp.org, audacity.sourceforge.net/, magiclantern.fm/, ubuntu.com) Music Duck Duck Goose CC-BY Jupiter Skydive (jamendo.com/en/track/1088272/duck-duck-goose) Only Instrumental CC-BY Broke For Free...
