MAKE ART 2009 - What The Fork?! :: distributed and open practices in FLOSS art :: Call for projects: Extended deadline, July 22

make art is an international festival dedicated to the integration of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) in digital art. The fourth edition of make art ? What The Fork?! distributed and open practices in FLOSS art - will take place in Poitiers (FR), from the 7th to the 13th of December 2009. It will offer performances, presentations, workshops and an exhibition, focused on the encounter between digital art and free software.

make art is currently seeking new, innovative FLOSS works and projects: music and audiovisual performances, presentations, software demos, and installations. This year make art focuses on distributed and open practices in FLOSS art. ‘What the fork?!’ is about decentralisation. Forking is the new black. Forking, copying the source code of a project and continuing work on the copy instead of the original, used to have a bad reputation. It would split a project and its developer community in pieces, leading to different, often incompatible, projects. Wasted effort, rivalry and developer fights were all associated concepts. This is history. Forking a project with the intention to compete with it is another story, but the freedom to fork enables quick implementation of features and customization, bypassing acquiring committer status, bugfix or feature request protocol, working in a distributed way, together with others but not necessarily towards one goal, working from one source, cross-fertilising, inspiring, copying, patching, improving, experimenting, changing direction, and merging. This practice is boosted by decentralised software development tools, such as Darcs, Mercurial and Git. It’s not about quick hacks, but about creating room to experiment, letting go of the one working copy and creating a multiplicity of ideas.

Extended deadline for proposal : 22nd of July 2009. For more details, please visit: http://makeart.goto10.org/call