Time/Bank will open a New York City branch in the form of a temporary restaurant on the Lower East Side, which will offer daily lunch in exchange for time credits and time currency that you can earn by helping others in Time/Bank community.

There will be a changing menu of meals prepared with recipes provided by a group of artists who like to cook, including Martha Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carolina Caycedo, Lawrence Weiner, Liam Gillick, WAGE, and many others.

Time/Bank Restaurant is commissioned by Creative Time for the exhibition Living as Form curated by Nato Thompson.

Living as Form is an international project exploring over twenty years of cultural works that blur the forms of art and everyday life, emphasizing participation, dialogue and community engagement. Living as Form provides a broad look at a vast array of socially engaged practices that appear with increasing regularity in fields ranging from theater to activism, and urban planning to visual art. Presented by New York City-based public art organization Creative Time, the project brings together twenty-five curators, documents over 100 artists’ projects in a large-scale survey exhibition inside the historic Essex Street Market building, features nine new commissions in the surrounding neighborhood, and provides a dynamic online archive of over 350 socially engaged projects.

As part of DownStreet Art, Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield will manufacture large quantities of small electronic art works that they will give away free of charge through their pop-up “store” at 24 Eagle Street in North Adams, MA. Each work of art will feature an object that has been gifted by the public to the Hatfields.

Give One, Get One Free: The Hatfields seek interesting items, curiosities, toys, trinkets, memorabilia, and other objects that can serve as a focal point for these works.

Before the opening and throughout the exhibit’s run, people are encouraged to bring in their small objects so that they may be incorporated into a future work of art. Gifted objects should be no more than a few inches in size, and light-weight items are preferred.

Objects can be delivered to MCLA Gallery 51 at 51 Main Street in North Adams daily from 10 am – 6 pm. Those who donate objects before the exhibit’s opening on Thursday June 23rd will receive a coupon which guarantees the holder a work of art at some point during the exhibit’s run.

DownStreet Art is a public art project designed to revitalize downtown North Adams. By harnessing existing arts organizations and events and transforming vacant and open spaces into arts destinations, DownStreet Art defines North Adams as a cultural haven, driving tourists and community members downtown.

The Principle of Reciprocity by Dr. Hector Rodriguez from Videotage Unlimited on Vimeo.

Wikitopia :: Keynote Speech 1
The Principle of Reciprocity
by Dr. Hector Rodriguez
September 18, 2010
HKU SPACE Po Leung Kuk Community College

Marcel Mauss’ classic study of The Gift introduced the principle of reciprocity, which has played a fundamental role in the evolution of modern social anthropology and critical theory. Mauss regarded the giving and receiving of gifts as a widespread cultural phenomenon. Although the gift often appears to have been spontaneously and freely offered, it is in fact obligatory. According to Mauss, it consists of “three obligations”: the obligation to receive, to give, and to return. The exchange of gifts thus exemplifies a complex procedure of ritualized exchange.

The principle of reciprocity can be understood in at least two different ways. First of all, the study of gift exchange constitutes a prehistory of the modern contract. Mauss showed that modern market transactions grew out of the ritualized gift practices characteristic of many societies. Mauss opposed the practices of the capitalist economic system and regarded the gift as an alternative model of exchange based on sharing and common participation. This idea clarifies the nature of public licenses and the aims of the free culture, copyleft, and creative commons movement. Secondly, the principle of reciprocity can be understood as a new version of social contract theory. As developed by philosopher Thomas Hobbes, social contract theory addressed the main question of classical political philosophy: How is society possible?

This presentation explains the theory of reciprocity, describes its implications and possible interpretations, and traces its influence on such contemporary theorists as Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Paul Sartrre, Marshall Sahlins, and Boris Groys.

Starting about a year ago, Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle have been developing a time bank for the art community. On a practical level, their Time/Bank is a platform where artists, curators, writers and other people in their field, can exchange time and skills — help each other get things done without using money. In a more idealistic way, the Time/Bank can become a place where certain types of actions and ideas, that seem to have no value in our market-driven society, can gain a sense of worth. Time/Bank is now up and running online. Get involved.

“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?” — Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)

Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Its parameters continue to expand in all directions.’ As Wikipedia states, Ubu is non-commercial and operates on a gift economy. All the same – by forming an amazing resource and repository for the avant-garde movement, and by offering and hosting these works on its platform, Ubu is violating copyright laws. As they state however: ‘should something return to print, we will remove it from our site immediately. Also, should an artist find their material posted on UbuWeb without permission and wants it removed, please let us know. However, most of the time, we find artists are thrilled to find their work cared for and displayed in a sympathetic context. As always, we welcome more work from existing artists on site.’

Where in the more affluent and popular media realms of block buster movies and pop music the Piratebay and other download sites (or p2p networks) like Mininova are being sued and charged with copyright infringement, the major powers to be seem to turn a blind eye when it comes to Ubu and many other resource sites online that offer digital versions of hard-to-get-by materials ranging from books to documentaries.

This is and has not always been the case: in 2002 Sebastian Lütgert from Berlin/New York was sued by the “Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur” for putting online two downloadable texts from Theodor W. Adorno on his website textz.com, an underground archive for Literature. According to this Indymedia interview with Lütgert, textz.com was referred to as ‘the Napster for books’ offering about 700 titles, focusing on, as Lütgert states ‘Theorie, Romane, Science-Fiction, Situationisten, Kino, Franzosen, Douglas Adams, Kritische Theorie, Netzkritik usw’.

The interview becomes even more interesting when Lütgert remarks that one can still easily download both Adorno texts without much ado if one wants to. This leads to the bigger question of the real reasons underlying the charge against textz.com; why was textz.com sued? As Lütgert says in the interview: “Das kann man sowieso [when referring to the still available Adorno texts]. Aber es gibt schon lange einen klaren Unterschied zwischen offener Verfügbarkeit und dem Untergrund. Man kann die freie Verbreitung von Inhalten nicht unterbinden, aber man scheint verhindern zu wollen dass dies allzu offen und selbstverständlich geschieht. Das ist es was sie stört.”

But how can something be truly underground in an online environment whilst still trying to spread or disseminate texts as widely as possible? This seems to be the paradox of many – not quite legal and/or copyright protected – resource sharing and collecting communities and platforms nowadays. However, multiple scenario’s are available to evade this dilemma: by being frankly open about the ‘status’ of the content on offer, as Ubu does, or by using little ‘tricks’ like an easy website registration, classifying oneself as a reading group, or by relieving oneself from responsibility by stating that one is only aggregating sources from elsewhere (linking) and not hosting the content on its own website or blog. One can also state the offered texts or multimedia files form a special issue or collection of resources, emphasizing their educational and not-for-profit value.

Most of the ‘underground’ text and content sharing communities seem to follow the concept of (the inevitability of) ‘information wants to be free’, especially on the Internet. As Lütgert States: “Und vor allem sind die über Walter Benjamin nicht im Bilde, der das gleiche Problem der Reproduzierbarkeit von Werken aller Art schon zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts vor sich hatte und erkannt hat: die Massen haben das Recht, sich das alles wieder anzueignen. Sie haben das Recht zu kopieren, und das Recht, kopiert zu werden. Jedenfalls ist das eine ganz schön ungemütliche Situation, dass dessen Nachlass jetzt von solch einem Bürokraten verwaltet wird. A: Glaubst Du es ist überhaupt legitim intellektuellen Inhalt zu “besitzen”? Oder Eigentümer davon zu sein? S: Es ist *unmöglich*. “Geistiges” Irgendwas verbreitet sich immer weiter. Reemtsmas Vorfahren wären nie von den Bäumen runtergekommen oder aus dem Morast rausgekrochen, wenn sich “geistiges” Irgendwas nicht verbreitet hätte.”

What seems to be increasingly obvious, as the interview also states, is that one can find virtually all Ebooks and texts one needs via p2p networks and other file sharing community’s (the true Darknet in a way) – more and more people are offering (and asking for!) selections of texts and books (including the ones by Adorno) on openly available websites and blogs, or they are scanning them and offering them for (educational) use on their domains. Although the Internet is mostly known for the pirating and dissemination of pirated movies and music, copyright protected textual content has (of course) always been spread too. But with the rise of ‘born digital’ text content, and with the help of massive digitization efforts like Google Books (and accompanying Google Books download tools) accompanied by the appearance of better (and cheaper) scanning equipment, the movement of ‘openly’ spreading (pirated) texts (whether or not focusing on education and ‘fair use’) seems to be growing fast.

The direct harm (to both the producers and their publishers) of the free online availability of (in copyright) texts is also maybe less clear than for instance with music and films. Many feel texts and books will still be preferred to be read in print, making the online and free availability of text nothing more than a marketing tool for the sales of the printed version. Once discovered, those truly interested will find and buy the print book. Also more than with music and film, it is felt essential to share information, as a cultural good and right, to prevent censorship and to improve society.

This is one of the reasons the Open Access movement for scientific research has been initiated. But where the amount of people and institutions supportive of this movement is gradually growing (especially where it concerns articles and journals in the Sciences), the spread concerning Open Access (or even digital availability) of monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the majority of the resources on offer in the underground text sharing communities consists) has only just started.

This has lead to a situation in which some have decided that change is not coming fast enough. Instead of waiting for this utopian Open Access future to come gradually about, they are actively spreading, copying, scanning and pirating scholarly texts/monographs online. Although many times accompanied by lengthy disclaimers about why they are violating copyright (to make the content more widely accessible for one), many state they will take down the content if asked. Following the copyleft movement, what has in a way thus arisen is a more ‘progressive’ or radical branch of the Open Access movement. The people who spread these texts deem it inevitable they will be online eventually, they are just speeding up the process. As Lütgert states: ‘The desire of an increasingly larger section of the population to 100-percent of information is irreversible. The only way there can be slowed down in the worst case, but not be stopped.

Still we have not yet answered the question of why publishers (and their pirated authors) are not more upset about these kinds of websites and platforms. It is not a simple question of them not being aware that these kind of textual disseminations are occurring. As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability. Perhaps some publishers also see the Open Access movement as something inevitably growing and they thus don’t see the urge to step up or organize a collaborative effort against scholarly text piracy (where most of the presses also lack the scale to initiate this). Whereas there has been some more upsurge and worries about textbook piracy (since this is of course the area where individual consumers – students – do directly buy the material) and websites like Scribd, this mostly has to do with the fact that these kind of platforms also host non-scholarly content and actively promote the uploading of texts (where many of the text ‘sharing’ platforms merely offer downloading facilities). In the case of Scribd the size of the platform (or the amount of content available on the platform) also has caused concerns and much media coverage.

All of this gives a lot of potential power to text sharing communities, and I guess they know this. Only authors might be directly upset (especially famous ones gathering a lot of royalties on their work) or in the case of Lütgert, their beneficiaries, who still do see a lot of money coming directly from individual customers.

Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.

As Adrian Johns states in his article Piracy as a business force, ‘today’s pirate philosophy is a moral philosophy through and through’. As Jonas Anderson states, the idea of piracy has mostly lost its negative connotations in these communities and is seen as a positive development, where these movements ‘have begun to appear less as a reactive force (i.e. ‘breaking the rules’) and more as a proactive one (‘setting the rules’). Rather than complain about the conservatism of established forms of distribution they simply create new, alternative ones.’ Although Anderson states this kind of activism is mostly occasional, it can be seen expressed clearly in the texts accompanying the text sharing sites and blogs. However, copyright is perhaps so much an issue on most of these sites (where it is on some of them), as it is something that seems to be simply ignored for the larger good of aggregating and sharing resources on the web. As is stated clearly for instance in an interview with Sean Dockray, who maintains AAAARG:

“The project wasn’t about criticizing institutions, copyright, authority, and so on. It was simply about sharing knowledge. This wasn’t as general as it sounds; I mean literally the sharing of knowledge between various individuals and groups that I was in correspondence with at the time but who weren’t necessarily in correspondence with each other.”

Back to Lütgert. The files from textz.com have been saved and are still accessible via The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. In the case of textz.com, these files contain ’typed out text’, so no scanned contents or PDF’s. Textz.com (or better said its shadow or mirror) offers an amazing collection of texts, including artists statements/manifestos and screenplays from for instance David Lynch.

The text sharing community has evolved and now knows many players. Two other large members in this kind of ‘pirate theory base network’ (although – and I have to make that clear! – they offer many (and even mostly) legal and out of copyright texts), still active today, are Monoskop/Burundi and AAAARG.ORG. These kinds of platforms all seem to disseminate (often even on a titular level) similar content, focusing mostly on Continental Philosophy and Critical Theory, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory, The Frankfurter Schule, Sociology/Social Theory, Psychology, Anthropology and Ethnography, Media Art and Studies, Music Theory, and critical and avant-garde writers like Kafka, Beckett, Burroughs, Joyce, Baudrillard, etc.etc.

Monoskop is, as they state, a collaborative wiki research on the social history of media art or a ‘living archive of writings on art, culture and media technology’. At the sitemap of their log, or under the categories section, you can browse their resources on genre: book, journal, e-zine, report, pamphlet etc. As I found here, Burundi originated in 2003 as a (Slovakian) media lab working between the arts, science and technologies, which spread out to a European city based cultural network; They even functioned as a press, publishing the Anthology of New Media Literature (in Slovak) in 2006, and they hosted media events and curated festivals. It dissolved in June 2005 although the Monoskop research wiki on media art, has continued to run since the dissolving of Burundi.

As is stated on their website, AAAARG is a conversation platform, or alternatively, a school, reading group or journal, maintained by Los Angeles artist Sean Dockray. In the true spirit of Critical Theory, its aim is to ‘develop critical discourse outside of an institutional framework’. Or even more beautiful said, it operates in the spaces in between: ‘But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.’ To be able to access the texts and resources that are being ‘discussed’ at AAAARG, you need to register, after which you will be able to browse the library. From this library, you can download resources, but you can also upload content. You can subscribe to their feed (RSS/XML) and like Monoskop, AAAARG.org also maintains a Twitter account on which updates are posted. The most interesting part though is the ‘extra’ functions the platform offers: after you have made an account, you can make your own collections, aggregations or issues out of the texts in the library or the texts you add. This offers an alternative (thematically ordered) way into the texts archived on the site. You also have the possibility to make comments or start a discussion on the texts. See for instance their elaborate discussion lists. The AAAARG community thus serves both as a sharing and feedback community and in this way operates in a true p2p fashion, in a way like p2p seemed originally intended. The difference being that AAAARG is not based on a distributed network of computers, but is based on one platform, to which registered users are able to upload a file (which is not the case on Monoskop for instance – only downloading here).

Via mercurunionhall, I found the image underneath which depicts AAAARG.ORG’s article index organized as a visual map, showing the connections between the different texts. This map was created and posted by AAAARG user john, according to mercurunionhall.

Where AAAArg.org focuses again on the text itself – typed out versions of books – Monoskop works with more modern versions of textual distribution: scanned versions or full ebooks/pdf’s with all the possibilities they offer, taking a lot of content from Google books or (Open Access) publishers’ websites. Monoskop also links back to the publishers’ websites or Google Books, for information about the books or texts (which again proves that the publishers should know about their activities). To download the text however, Monoskop links to Sharebee, keeping the actual text and the real downloading activity away from its platform.

Another part of the text sharing content consists of platforms offering documentaries and lectures (so multi-media content) online. One example of the last is the Discourse Notebook Archive, which describes itself as an effort which has as its main goal ‘to make available lectures in contemporary continental philosophy’ and is maintained by Todd Kesselman, a PhD Student at The New School for Social Research. Here you can find lectures from Badiou Kristeva and Zizek (both audio and video) and lectures aggregated from the European Graduate School. Kesselman also links to resources on the web dealing with contemporary continental philosophy.

Society of Control is a website maintained by Stephan Dillemuth, an artist living and working in Munich, Germany, offering amongst others an overview of his work and scientific research. According to this interview conducted by Kristian Ø Dahl and Marit Flåtter his work is a response to the increased influence of the neo-liberal world order on education, creating a culture industry that is more than often driven by commercial interests. He asks the question ‘How can dissidence grow in the blind spots of the ‘society of control’ and articulate itself?’ His website, the Society of Control is, as he states, ‘an independent organization whose profits are entirely devoted to research into truth and meaning.’

Society of Control has a library section which contains works from some of the biggest thinkers of the twentieth century: Baudrillard, Adorno, Debord, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Habermas, Sloterdijk und so weiter, and so much more, a lot in German, and all ‘typed out’ texts. The library section offers a direct search function, a category function and a a-z browse function. Dillemuth states that he offers this material under fair use, focusing on not for profit, freedom of information and the maintenance of freedom of speech and information and making information accessible to all:

“The Societyofcontrol website site contains information gathered from many different sources. We see the internet as public domain necessary for the free flow and exchange of information. However, some of these materials contained in this site maybe claimed to be copyrighted by various unknown persons. They will be removed at the copyright holder’s request within a reasonable period of time upon receipt of such a request at the email address below. It is not the intent of the Societyofcontrol to have violated or infringed upon any copyrights.”

Important in this respect is that he put the responsibility of reading/using/downloading the texts on his site with the viewers, and not with himself: “Anyone reading or looking at copyright material from this site does so at his/her own peril, we disclaim any participation or liability in such actions.”

Fark Yaraları = Scars of Différance and Multitude of blogs are maintained by the same author, Renc-u-ana, a philosophy and sociology student from Istanbul. The first is his personal blog (with also many links to downloadable texts), focusing on ‘creating an e-library for a Heideggerian philosophy and Bourdieuan sociology’ on which he writes ‘market-created inequalities must be overthrown in order to close knowledge gap.’ The second site has a clear aggregating function with the aim ‘to give united feedback for e-book publishing sites so tha tracing and finding may become easier.’ And a call for similar blogs or websites offering free ebook content. The blog is accompanied by a nice picture of a woman warning to keep quiet, very paradoxically appropriate to the context. Here again, a statement from the host on possible copyright infringement: ‘None of the PDFs are my own productions. I’ve collected them from web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, socialist bros, cross-x, gigapedia..) What I did was thematizing.’ The same goes for pdflibrary (which seems to be from the same author), offering texts from Derrida, Benjamin, Deleuze and the likes: None of the PDFs you find here are productions of this blog. They are collected from different places i the web (e-mule, avax, libreremo, all socialist bros, cross-x, …). The only work done here is thematizing and tagging.’

Our student from Istanbul lists many text sharing sites on Multitude of blogs, including Inishark (amongst others Badiou, Zizek and Derrida), Revelation (a lot of history and bible study), Museum of accidents (many resources relating to again, critical theory, political theory and continental philhosophy) and Makeworlds (initiated from the make world festival 2001). Mariborchan is mainly a Zizek resource site (also Badiou and Lacan) and offers next to ebooks also video and audio (lectures and documentaries) and text files, all via links to file sharing platforms.

What is clear is that the text sharing network described above (I am sure there are many more related to other fields and subjects) is also formed and maintained by the fact that the blogs and resource sites link to each other in their blog rolls, which is what in the end makes up the network of text sharing, only enhanced by RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, holding together direct communication streams with the rest of the community. That there has not been one major platform or aggregation site linking them together and uploading all the texts is logical if we take into account the text sharing history described before and this can thus be seen as a clear tactic: it is fear, fear for what happened to textz.com and fear for the issue of scale and fear of no longer operating at the borders, on the outside or at the fringes. Because a larger scale means they might really get noticed. The idea of secrecy and exclusivity which makes for the idea of the underground is very practically combined with the idea that in this way the texts are available in a multitude of places and can thus not be withdrawn or disappear so easily.

This is the paradox of the underground: staying small means not being noticed (widely), but will mean being able to exist for probably an extended period of time. Becoming (too) big will mean reaching more people and spreading the texts further into society, however it will also probably mean being noticed as a treat, as a ‘network of text-piracy’. The true strategy is to retain this balance of openly dispersed subversivity.

Update 25 November 2005: Another interesting resource site came to my attention recently: Bedeutung, a philosophical and artistic initiative consisting of three projects: Bedeutung Magazine, Bedeutung Collective and Bedeutung Blog, hosts a library section which links to freely downloadable online e-books, articles, audio recordings and videos.

“How can the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce” - Deleuze and Guattari.

Despite the recent hype around ebooks, the future of publishing remains uncertain. The growth in markets for electronic distribution has resulted in a messy and highly competitive ecology of digital rights management systems, conflicting file formats and devices, and an online book market driven by new players such as Google and Apple. Meanwhile, pirate networks for ‘liberated knowledge’ have opened other avenues for delivering content (whether legal or not), while the open access movement has increasingly consolidated as a legitimate alternative to corporate publishers. These are the realities of media convergence as perpetual crisis, or at least an ongoing entanglement of interests, and a situation full of potential for the future of the book.

This month on -empyre-, we invite a general discussion on the topic of publishing in convergence. Against a background of economic transition, what possibilities currently exist for advancing and scaling new models for writing, collaborating, distributing, reading and interpreting knowledge? What potential affordances can be extended to style, format, design, and dynamic content? Are there novel architectures allowing collective authorship, including the mediation of presence? How could ‘networked book’ experiments shift from being a novelty toward an accepted genre of publication? Is it possible to overcome peer review? How can the production of theory, educational resources, art and literature evolve?

WEEK ONE: Distribution
Sean Dockray
Emmett Stinson

Emmett Stinson is a Lecturer in Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He is the President of SPUNC - The Small Press Network and a Fiction Editor for Wet Ink: The Magazine of New Writing. He is also a panelist on the Department of Innovation’s federal Book Industry Study Group, established by Senator Kim Carr. His debut collection of short stories, Known Unknowns, has just been published by Affirm Press.

Sean Dockray is an artist in Los Angeles. He is a co-director of Telic Arts Exchange and has initiated a handful of collaborative projects including a school (The Public School), a theory text-sharing website (AAAARG.ORG), and an architecture radio show (Building Sound). He has contributed writing to X-TRA, Bidoun, Fillip, Volume, and Cabinet magazines, and his video and sculptural work have been exhibited at Gigantic Art Space, ESL, the Cheekwood Museum, the Turtle Bay Museum, and the Armory Center for the Arts. “The Public School (for Architecture)” in New York, a project in partnership with the architecture group, common room, was recently awarded a fellowship from the Van Alen Institute. With fellow collaborators in The Public School, Caleb Waldorf and Fiona Whitton, Sean is organizing a 13-day seminar at various sites throughout Berlin this July, called “There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing,” which will discuss the promises, pitfalls, and possibilities for extra-institutionality. Sean studied architecture at Princeton University before receiving his Masters in Fine Arts from University of California Los Angeles.

Sean Dockray wrote:

Hi everyone,

Morgan asked me to introduce myself and my experience with AAAARG as a distribution platform and give an update on what’s happening now, so I’ll follow her questions more or less to the letter.

I think there is enough background about the project in these two links and I’ll try and avoid repeating it here.

* email interview with Julian Myers:
http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/08/four-dialogues-2-on-aaaarg/
* chat interview with Morgan:
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-with-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/

There’s a lot that I’m interested in discussing, but from the perspective of “distribution” there are a couple of things that stand out at the moment:

Now that digital reading devices like the Kindle or iPad are becoming popular and widespread, PDFs (and other digital text formats of course!) seem like a viable market. Obviously manufacturers are competing for students and trying to partner with academic publishers. The person who wrote the cease and desist letter from Macmillan (iPad partner?) describes himself as an expert from the music industry. AAAARG has been around for more than 5 years — there are a lot of places around that host or index the same material, not to mention the totally common practice of people sending each other PDFs — and it’s been in this last 12 months that all of the cease & desist letters have come in. What was once just a bad copy now becomes the product itself.

Another point in this constellation are non-profit services like JSTOR, which again makes partnerships with publishers and academic institutions. An individual is absolutely aware of being outside of the academy here - most material is not accessible at all and the material that is accessible costs a lot of money. And for those in institutions but outside of wealthier countries, it’s often a similar situation.

Within these kinds of shifts, who has the right to build a library? We’re technically and legally not allowed to share a PDF between Kindles (the way I might give you a book after I’ve finished reading it) so what does that mean for similar collective acts? I’m thinking about the history of the public library, of little traveling libraries, of how collections were acquired, donated, redistributed, etc. about how one book might be read by hundreds of eyes. Now, of course, every individual is responsible for purchasing their individual file and sharing is reframed as unethical, illegal, naive, etc.

Maybe that’s enough for now?

Oh, finally, for an update on what happened and what’s happening now: see the very end of the interview with Morgan above! Before this week is through there will be more news, but for now I’ll just say that some people will be unhappy and many more will be happy.

Sean

Renato Ferro wrote:

Morgan and Sean, I just read both links and am fascinated by your project. Can you explain both the AAAARG and The Public School? What’s the relationship between the two specifically. And the AAARG site is static right now? Renate

Sean Dockray wrote:

Briefly, we say that The Public School is a school with no curriculum. Which means that the curriculum comes out of the people participating in the school, in the life of the school. Because teachers, students, and administrators are constantly switching places, sometimes several times in a day, it’s not simply the class, but the whole curriculum, the entire “institution” that is part of the regular discussions. Lots of people make the project. The Public School works by asking people to propose classes that they wanted to take (or teach); and then others can begin saying their interested, having discussions, sharing resources, etc; and then the classes that seem the most vital or timely or provocative are scheduled. There is no disciplinary framework (the school is not accredited and it has nothing to do with the public school system in the US) which means the people involved often come from different places and can have significantly different investments in the subject matter. Unlike online learning which uses the internet to broadcast classes, to disperse the classroom, we’re more interested in using it as a way of getting people together, in trying to activate the radical potential of the classroom.

Although they are independent, AAAARG and The Public School do have a relationship that’s both conceptual and technical. Practically, classes at The Public School can use an “issue” from AAAARG as a syllabus. A few examples of this (accessible from the AAAARG tab right under the class title):

Kultural Kapital — http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1326
UC Strikes and Beyond — http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1856
Economies of Attention — http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1445
Queer Technologies — http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/64
Performance/ Performativity/ Enactment — http://la.thepublicschool.org/class/1515

But this also means that as classes happen at The Public School, the people involved with that class will scan and upload readings to add to the syllabus. On the AAAARG side of things, if the issue is shared, then that means anyone can add a text into it (for example, I made the Kultural Kapital issue “shared” and then someone added Jason Read’s “Micro-Politics of Capital” text). It’s a double movement into and out of the discussion of the class.

The Public School is obviously localized (in several cities), relative to AAAARG. But hopefully the class wages themselves can be a resource to groups of people anywhere who want to do the same class. We don’t record classes or broadcast them or anything (partly because it is usually boring to watch, but mostly because it impedes the physical meeting as people futz with technology or hold their tongue) but we do try and circulate the class idea itself and perhaps some material and organizing discussion. I know that Kultural Kapital has happened, or is happening now, in at least 2 other places!

So to respond to your question a little more generally, Renate, AAAARG predates The Public School by a few years, but both are motivated by a certain tendency towards self-education and engaged autonomy (Charles Esche?). They are both collaborative to the point that the each has a life of its own.

Finally, I’ve been thinking more recently about “resources,” how we might produce them and how their existence might change things. So, by resources, I simply mean something that is shared and useful (shared with and useful to whom is an open question). Producing resources could just be an act of designation; or maybe it rearranges, removing from one sphere of life and inserting into another; or by creating new knowledge, or making restricted knowledge available. Put together, these actions generate common resources. Given some of what has been making the news over the past year (at California public higher education, Middlesex Philosophy Department, for-profit colleges absorbing federal aid, Puerto Rico, just to rattle off a scattered few) or the larger financial trends over the past few decades, it seems appropriate to think about - resources as a part of strategic withdrawl.

Sean

PS: for a couple more days.

Emmett Stinson wrote:

Hi Everyone:

Michael has asked me to introduce myself, and I thought I¹d talk a little about my own research in relation to the posts so far.

I think the question of what AAAARG is (raised by Renate) is an interesting one. Sean, obviously, sees AAAARG as an online library or archive, one that offers freely accessible digital copies of books that, by and large, are related to the tradition of continental theory and related disciplines. Others (notably, it would seem, Pan Macmillan), however, would see AAAARG as simply a website for book pirates, which violates authorial copyright (and the copyright license owned by publishers).

I’ve just written an article offering a pragmatic analysis of so-called “book piracy” for Overland magazine, and I have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practise. On the one hand, I am emphatically against any attempts to criminalise or penalise activities relating to not-for-profit “book piracy” and am a staunch believer in copyright reform that enables a more free and open access to copyrighted material. But I also come from a publishing-industry perspective and strongly believe that both authors and their publishers (or other intermediaries) have a legitimate right to expect payment for their labour.

The argument that books and information should be (monetarily) free to everyone is absolutely compelling for academics; since most academics have salaried positions, they don’t need royalties from books to survive. But for other kinds of writers, the idea of free culture may simply result in more alienated labour (i.e. people who say things like “write advertising copy during the week, but I’m a novelist on weekends”).

Book piracy is clearly a huge problem for the industry (much bigger, I think, than most publishers realise), although I think publishers themselves can partially solve this ‘problem’ simply by acknowledging that ebooks require a different form than print books. This goes beyond ebooks that include “value adds” (i.e. audiovisual content); publishers need to radically rethink the form of ebooks by creating books that can be customised by users and include user feedback/interaction in order to make the book a dynamic process rather than a static artefact. An artifact can be pirated, but an evolving process can’t.

On a final note, last week I spoke with two librarians in charge of major Australian research libraries; interestingly, they were both strong advocates of significant copyright reform, and very much believe in something like the creative commons mode of copyright. Ironically, they argued that electronic providers of copyrighted content are currently the biggest barrier to a more free and open information exchange. Most Australian research libraries spend far more money on electronic resources than they do on print, and very few digital providers offer reasonable single-use or single-user fees. So digital publishers, themselves, are not in anyway inherently more open or free.

Emmett Stinson

Michael Dieter wrote:

Hi Sean, Emmett and the empyre list,

I’m one of the curators of the topic for this month, along with Morgan Currie and John Haltiwanger. Thought it’s a good time to introduce myself through some reflections on this topic of distribution.

To pick up a number of issues flagged by Emmett around sustainability, I’m interested in asking Sean whether he can speak more about if there are plans to perpetuate the ethos of the AAAARG.org experiment now that the site appears to be stalled? And on this point, I’m wondering more specifically whether AAAARG.org has a politics, and how might that be defined. I understand that providing access to resources and extra-institutional education are aims, but what underpins this desire, is it an idea of radical democracy? A liberalism? An anti-capitalism?

Of course, I’ve noticed that the way you speak about the project during interviews does imply a certain kind of politics of networking. Partly something out of your hands, not exactly based on critique, but about connective or reticular alternatives (“Rather than thinking of it like a new building … imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.”).

The relation between filesharing and intellectual property is itself a complex situation, however. I’m wondering about the point of indistinction with this logic of networking at the center of AAAARG.org as an exchange economy. I’m thinking of Matteo Pasquinelli’s recent work here, who has suggestively drawn attention to the parasitic dimensions of contemporary informational economies – utilizing the philosophy of Michel Serres – partly as a critique of free culture ideologies. A difficult point for radical thinking to grasp, he claims, “is that all the immaterial (and gift) economy has a material, parallel and dirty counterpart where the big money is exchanged. See MP3 and iPod, P2P and ADSL, free music and live concerts, Barcelona lifestyle and real estate speculation, art world and gentrification, global brands and sweatshops” (http://matteopasquinelli.com/docs/immaterialcivilwar.pdf). From this perspective, even liberated knowledge exchange-based sites like AAAARG.org (or blogs like Monoskop, not to mention massive e-book trading forums like Gigapedia) are not only targeted as threats to the rise of e-Reader markets, but also paradoxically prepare the way for devices like the iPad or Kindle in the first place. Liberated resources here return to commodification, not directly, but on the side.

Thinking about Emmett’s post, I agree we need to seriously re-think the general impulse towards free, but also question the economics of this situation politically. We should definitely support, celebrate and fight for open access to resources, but it seems like there’s no point being theoretically free, if there’s no possibility of sustaining that autonomy. I’m wondering Sean if you have any thoughts on this paradoxical situation?

Sean Dockray wrote:

If it helps, Emmett, I also have mixed and contradictory feelings about the practice.

I know I’ve been playing too much chess recently - I’m imagining how discussions over “book piracy” seem to open up along fairly common lines: e4 - why are there restrictions on the movement of texts when it is technically possible to overcome geographic, political, or economic limitations? c5 - authors and publishers have put in real labor and deserve monetary compensation in return.

The variations that might come out of this position? Attempts to prove that piracy actually helps book sales as opposed to reducing them. Arguments to settle for symbolic capital or other forms of valorization that can be “cashed in” elsewhere. Assurances that if piracy just went away the market would make sure that all those limitations were overcome. Proposals for micro-payments, creative commons, and other reforms. (This is obviously not the route chosen by Macmillan, who made news last year for “standing up to” Amazon over lower prices for digital books). Less common lines might be that piracy amounts to a strange form of unpaid marketing; that when it comes to art and theory, reading and writing doesn’t break down so cleanly along the lines of consumption and production, or leisure and labor.

Emmett’s argument about alienated labor resonates with me at this moment in particular because I have had to wait until finishing my full-time day job (which is the equivalent of writing ad copy) each day to participate in this week’s discussion! I’m assuming some in this discussion have a university job based in these issues, or are teaching a class on them, or are writing on the topics? Some are in the position to translate the knowledge or symbolic value from discussions on this list into real income. I’m conflicted when tenured faculty use AAAARG to make a reader for their classes, to save themselves time. I completely agree with the calls to think about the unaffiliated, selfishly I suppose, because that’s my camp!

[ One thing that I'm wondering is, should these discussions be based on the assumption that each download represents quantifiable lost income for publisher and author? Obviously this has legal precedent, where people end up "owing" a few million dollars because of the music they downloaded. But the zero-sum logic of it all frames the discussion in a certain way. The actual economics of publishing are a mystery to me and it isn't public, so I'm left with speculation (watch out!) based on anecdotal data. I spend roughly the same amount on books and art as what I make on sales, fees, and rentals (OK, I'm flattering myself a little bit here). Is this common? Is it the same thousand dollars passing through all of our hands? ]

How might we pose our mixed feelings in a way that isn’t point- counterpoint, but something less identifiable; or even how do we try and imagine possibilities beyond the capitalist framework, something that’s not just turning the price dial down on a product until it hits the level where people start using their credit card again?

Jumping over to Michael Dieter’s post, which says that file-sharing, like gentrification, produces value that ends up in the pockets of those few who own the networks or buildings or whatever, I’d agree that Free Culture is not the road map or destination point or anything (and so I haven’t argued for that anywhere). Looking at the specificity of AAAARG, which is composed of people who are generally cognitive workers themselves, reading and referencing as a part of their practice, I see a space of confrontation over the very materials with which we produce; many of the authors on AAAARG are also registered and several of them have expressed extraordinarily nuanced, ambivalent, and internally conflicted positions: Paul Gilroy, Jason Read, and Stuart Elden for example, on the site or on other networks. Publishers (doing their job) surreptitiously register and send cease and desist letters about Marxist and anti-copyright texts. And of course the people who use the site think quite concretely about the nature of the site (what belongs?) and tactics for the project.

What I’m getting at is that it’s not my place to assign a politics to AAAARG, that comes out of its use and out of the responses or activity it provokes, its life as a public space. Nevertheless, I personally see it aligned with the occupation movement, as something which is actively trying to produce conditions for critical thought, which itself is being downsized and subject to inane requirements to justify itself through results. Although I will fully support reform demands that come up here (for wage increases, better health insurance, favorable copyright laws, etc.) I feel most invested and interested in autonomous spaces and forms (things like Virno’s “defection modifies the condition within which the struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon” or Tiqqun’s “The Party is a collection of places, infrastructures, communised means; and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those places, the *use* of those means, the sharing of those infrastructures.”)

Back to P2P (actually in an effort to break free of the IP discussion).. as Pasquinelli writes of the parasite on (between) P2P culture (the owners of the network who take money for that very “free” activity), we can always be looking at who is profiting from free labor and Free ideology that sustains it. My mind jumps to things like access to libraries (my UC Library card was taken away when I stopped teaching) or access to JSTOR (also removed at the same time) or conferences, festivals, and the like. Those knowledge networks that academics take for granted, but the boundaries of which are most apparent to the precarious laborers (grad students, lecturers, adjuncts who regularly cross in and out of the institution, gaining and losing “privileges” each time), rely on valorization as compensation for virtually free labor, while education remains a profitable industry for some.

Finally, on this idea of “sustainability” that has been brought up directly or indirectly in several posts… it seems like Michael is asking for a response about the act of writing in general: why invest our energies in autonomous projects if in the end, it isn’t sustainable (they won’t sustain the people who write with a living wage)? Of course, capitalism isn’t sustainable either, but I think his point is that AAAARG is more of a symptom of capitalism than a response to it. Maybe this comes down to whether you think the system generates the crisis within capitalism or if we do. Either way, I’m not going to make an argument for file-sharing paying writers enough to pay their landlord, their insurance company, their kid’s daycare, their student loans, their credit card, and so on! AAAARG is definitely not the solution to that. It is contingent, happening now, part of a movement, something that I wouldn’t want to collapse or simply be recuperated. A different kind of sustainability we might be talking about. A little later in the Tiqqun text the lived practice of communism is described as “the formation of sensibility as a force” and “the deployment of an archipelago of worlds.” This compared to iTunes for books or Creative Commons… a different game entirely…

Hi, Matthew Stadler here.

Thank you Morgan. Publication Studio is a for-profit business that uses what we call “non-exclusive rights.” We ask the authors for permission to publish our editions (printed, bound book and DRM-free ebook) and we encourage or enable, if we can, the authors to publish the same texts with others. Where authors we admire are caught in an exclusive rights contract with a publisher that will not circulate their work we offer to “bootleg” the book and produce our customary non-exclusive edition, alongside the legal one. We always begin a “bootleg” by explaining our service to the other publisher and asking how they would like to proceed. We pick these cases very carefully in the hopes that we can productively model the use of non-exclusive rights. We feel this rights arrangement offers the best future for publishers and for writers. So far (10 months) we have five books that help model bootlegging.

By printing and binding the books ourselves using cheap, reliable print-on-demand machinery (an old Instabook III), maintaining a digital commons with free off-the-shelf tools such as Wordpress and a.nnotate, and organizing social events that are paid for by whomever attends — we either go super cheap and make up the costs by selling enough books; or, we work with talented cooks and musicians, so that our audience pays for those things and gets the books and authors in the mix — we’re able to make a profit producing books on-demand for an audience that can begin very small (one reader) and grow to whatever size it will.

Our guiding goal is to connect texts to readers meaningfully. We cultivate meaningful conversations around the work, and this grows an informed desire for the text itself. We have no interest and invest no resources in selling books to people who will not read them. This is a radical departure from the conventional approach to for-profit publishing. We focus only on cultivating the conversation around reading, which makes a market of readers and draws the books we sell into that market.

All of the material capacities of print-on-demand publishing together with digital distribution of (for us, PDF) texts have thrown us back on the primacy of social relationships. Publication is the creation of a public. Our only work is to attend to the relationships that create such a public. The economy and the material practice that supports writers will follow directly from proper attention to these relationships, one by one by one. We make money move through making these relationships rewarding and meaningful enough that people will pay for the texts. (We price our books at roughly 4x material production cost, which is roughly 2x labor and material cost, and split the profits 50/50 with the writer; most of our novels, for example, cost $20 of which the writers gets $5.) We pay writers more per-book than conventional publishers.

Regarding your initial questions, Morgan, we have also helped structure and publish several collaboratively written books. Two used an Etherpad (now PiratePad) writing environment to enable a geographically-dispersed but socially unified group to work together in real time on a book-length text. Both of these turned out to be funny, fun, but nearly unreadable and a huge pain-in-the-ass to deal with and edit (or not). A third, WHAT WE ARE LEARNING, was structured and enacted by three writers (Sam Lohmann, Colin Beattie, and Alyse Emdur) and is, I believe, enormously successful model for activating a social group as the authoring intelligence. Our “store” has more details, as well as our usual “free reading commons” copy of that book (which you can read and annotate, using the a.nnotate tool we’ve engaged). http://www.publicationstudio.biz/books/34

Contributing artists and theorists: Burak Arikan & Engin Erdogan (Τurkey), Samuel Bianchini (France), Michael Bielicky, Kamila B. Richter (Chech Republic/ Germany), Marcelo Expósito (Spain), Furtherfield (UK), Pat Kane (UK), Carlos Katastrofsky (Austria), Dmytri Kleiner (Germany), Nicholas Knouf (USA), Tobias Leingruber (Germany)/ Jamie Wilkinson (USA)/ Greg Leuch (USA), Aarton Koblin & Daniel Massey (USA), Geert Lovink (Netherlands), MediaShed & Eyebeam (UK/ USA), Molleindustria (Italy), Ge Jin aka Jingle (China), Matteo Pasquinelli (Italy), Platoniq.net (Spain), Juan Martin Prada (Spain), Kate Rich (UK), Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse (USA), Trebor Scholz (USA), Anders Weberg (Sweden), Dan Phiffer & Mushon Zer-Aviv (US/IL).

The network society and especially the internet culture of the last twenty years has changed our mode of working, communicating and living. The numerous and continuously evolving digital networks of people, institutions, movements and organisations have been based on the new possibilities of technology but have also given birth to new forms of economy and value that fit into the immaterial time and space of flows. The elements of collaboration, collective intelligence, free and common knowledge have now become principal and have empowered a multitude of people that believe in the new potentialities given in the networked reality. This digital multitude, the new contemporary creative working class, surpassed the borders between work and leisure, driven by a desire to learn, to share, to collaborate. The notions of the attention economy, the gift economy, the common wealth, the immaterial, affective but also precarious labour are frequently used to describe the phenomena of our era. But, what is the meaning of these new features of economy in times of global financial crisis?

What role do the networks really play? Can the offer alternative and sustainable models of collaboration and production? Or they are a contemporary illusion that contributes to the difficulties and adversities that the contemporary multitude needs to face?

The new online exhibition hosted in the website of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, aims to focus on the new forms of labor as well as on the new values and costs emerging in the new connected reality and it therefore presents:

• artists’ projects and critical perspectives commenting on the new forms of internet economy
• initiatives and open platforms by independent creators who encourage the use of free and open software, the exchange of knowledge and experience,
• texts by critics and media theorists on networks, economy and the arts.

The online exhibition Esse, Nosse, Posse: Common Wealth for Common People has the form of an open platform aiming to be continuously enriched and updated with proposals, works, initiatives and texts on the specific field.

In January 2010 The Zero Dollar Laptop Project kicks off with clients of St Mungo’s charity for homeless people in London. We will be recycling hardware, breaking Windows and installing Free and Open Source Software to build media laptops and create music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet. Participants will leave the project with street-smart technical knowledge and a wireless enabled media laptop, classier than any shiny power-book.

The Zero Dollar Laptop is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective — now and long into the future. Do you have an old, unused laptop taking up space in your home or office? Would you like to see it returned to productive life? If YES, then please donate your old laptop.

DONATE YOUR LAPTOP!

First email us and tell us about it. ruth[dot]catlow[at]furtherfield[dot]org

In order to become a Zero Dollar Laptop your old laptop will need:-
- a working screen
- processor-a minumum 1GHz Pentium 3, Athlon, Celeron.
- 256 (but more ideally 512) ram
- wireless card would be helpful
- We can help you to work this stuff out if you are not sure.

If you live in London or Sheffield we can arrange a pick-up or drop-off in January 2010. If you don’t live in London or Sheffield but would still like to donate your laptop to the project please mail your laptop (well padded and with all the peripherals you can spare) to:-

Zero Dollar Laptop Project,
HTTP Gallery, Furtherfield.org,
Arena Design Centre,
71 Ashfield Road,
London N4 1NY,
ENGLAND

Thanks!!

More About Zero Dollar Laptop: The Zero Dollar Laptop project is a programme of workshops, public debates, exhibitions and networks of skills and media sharing for arts, technology and the environment.

Inspired by the Zero Dollar Laptop Manifesto; developed in partnership with Access Space with St Mungo’s charity for the homeless as part of Furtherfield.org Media Art Ecologies; supported by funding from the Transformation Fund.

Artistic Team: Jake Harries and James Wallbank (Access Space); Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett and Olga Panades (furtherfield.org)

For more information contact Ruth Catlow - ruth[dot]catlow[at]furtherfield[dot]org

I’ve been on the list for a while, but I don’t think I ever introduced myself. I work in performance and occasionally film and video, and write about performance history. Trebor asked me to introduce to the list the work I will be presenting at the Digital Labor conference in November. I can’t say too much about it yet since it is still developing, but here are the basics.

The piece will be based on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. I was struck in learning – through this list I believe – that, according to a recent survey, a good number of (western) MTurk workers engage with the tasks crowdsourced through the service in order to kill time and have fun, rather than simply to earn money. Given the outrageously low wages paid for these tasks, this should not have come as a surprise. Nonetheless, I was intrigued by the notion of engaging in MTurk “HITs” (Human Intelligence Tasks) as a form of entertainment. More specifically, I was intrigued by the performative quality of this mode of engagement, in which repetitive undemanding activities meet a pervasive habit of compulsive multitasking.

The original plan was to commission the execution of a series of tasks highlighting the performative aspect of this type of labor. After looking closely at a number of projects similarly engaged with Amazon’s service, however, I began to feel increasingly uncomfortable at the idea of positioning myself as a task requester, albeit in the context of a critical project. This discomfort is rooted, I suppose, in a more general skepticism about the effectiveness of critically confronting a problem by way of instanciating it, a strategy that nonetheless seems to have a sound standing in some sectors of the art world, and which occasionally has produced compelling work (I’m thinking, for instance, of the work of Santiago Sierra).

I decided that I would develop my project entirely from the standpoint of the “provider”: I enrolled on MTurk as a worker and have been performing HITs for the last month or so trying to get a sense of how the platform works, what kind of tasks do people request, and what is it like to engage in this kind of work. One of the first things that struck me is the variety (and oddity) of tasks crowdsourced through the service. Some tasks are quite straightforward: finding and matching information, translating text, transcribing audio, cataloguing images, answering surveys. Others verge on the scam: visiting a blog or a website and living “positive feedback”. Others are so odd that they sound like they could in fact be artists projects (“Write about a never before seen living environment”) or cognitive experiments (“Name all the objects in this photograph”).

I am considering different possible forms for the project’s final presentation. One way to proceed would be to embrace fully the performative aspect of this way of engaging with HITs and to devise a way to document this online work AS performance. Another way would be to appropriate and subvert material from the HITs (images, instructions, text, lists, etc.) and use it to produce performance “scores” or “scripts” in the spirit of Fluxus instruction pieces: short texts, images, or drawings prompting open performative realizations.

I will be looking forward to meeting some of you at the conference, and to lively and stimulating discussions.

All the best,

Francesco

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