Contents Open 12 Freedom of culture

Open 12
Freedom of culture
Regulation and privatization of intellectual property and public space

The growing number of conflicts relating to the public and private ownership and control of knowledge and culture has lent a certain urgency to our thinking about the ‘common’ in the public domain. ‘Freedom of Culture’ has become a pressing issue with legal and ethical implications. To what extent can culture be freely distributed, exchanged or appropriated? And what guarantee is there for the continued existence of places where the ‘commons’ can manifest themselves and be discussed? This issue of Open focuses on questions regarding the privatization of intellectual property and presents several alternative approaches to urban design that aim to restore the communal dimension to public space.

Jorinde Seijdel
Editorial
Online article

Stephen Wright
Digging in the Epistemic Commons
Online article

Using the ideas of Gabriel Tarde, Ludwig Wittgenstein and George Herbert Mead, writer and critic Stephan Wright reflects on the question of how, in a capitalist knowledge economy, to prevent intellectual property from being commodified and knowledge from becoming increasingly privatized.
Online article

McKenzie Wark
Copyright, Copyleft, Copygift
Online article

The current free market system and the existing legal system block the free development of our culture. In order to change this, McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, argues for a shift from a commercial economy to a gift economy, where the focus is on social relations rather than on profit.
Online article

Brian Holmes
The Absent Rival
Radical Art in a Political Vacuum

Cultural critic Brian Holmes explains how in communal space, which is determined more and more by technology, the privatization of knowledge continues to increase. Can language and communication still be meaningful in this context?

Joost Smiers
Art without Copyright
A Proposal for Alternative Regulation

Joost Smiers, researcher at the Research Group of Arts and Economics at the HKU in Utrecht, is currently working on a book, Imagining a World without Copyright. In this publication he outlines his objections to the contemporary copyright system and sketches the contours of a new system. This text describes, in broad strokes, the themes found in his book.

Willem van Weelden
‘If You’re Explaining You’re Losing!’
The Stalemate of Net Criticism

Net criticism, by consistently employing a strategy of decentralization and un-organization (‘becoming minor’), has become marginalized. How relevant can it continue to be from within its self-appointed ghetto? The ambiguous way in which net critics have responded to the ideas and actions of Lawrence Lessig, front man of the Free Culture movement and one of the initiators of Creative Commons, makes this question all the more urgent, argues Willem van Weelden in this polemical essay.

Pascal Gielen
Artistic Freedom and Globalization

Many culture and art critics have pointed to the negative impact of globalization on the art world over the last decade. As this concept has been linked to a variety of phenomena such as ‘commodification’, mediatization and uniformization, it has become heterogeneous and anaemic. Sociologist Pascal Gielen attempts to clarify the relationship between globalization and all the evils ascribed to it. In order to give art a renewed role in inspiring reflection, he calls for the creation of a free zone in which globalization is accepted in all its complexity.

Interview
Maxine Kopsa
A Boot-Camp Scenario for Over-Funded Artists
An interview with Chris Evans about Militant Bourgeois: An Existential Retreat

Militant Bourgeois: An Existential Retreat is a project by British artist Chris Evans that became an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) and an artists’ residence along the A10 in 2006. Fifteen artists accepted the challenge and confronted the primitive and unsubsidized ‘retreat’. Evans focussed on the field of tension between patronage, especially the increasingly criticized Dutch system of state subsidies, and current art production. Maxine Kopsa talked to him about anachronisms and the relation between artist and society.

Arjen Mulder
Column
Online article

Dennis Kaspori en Jeanne van Heeswijk
Guest Welcome

This section assembles various texts that reflect on the public domain’s problematic position in today’s society. With a government that is devolving power and has also wholly geared its policy towards risk limitation, repression and the avoidance of confrontation, we must abandon the idea that the public domain is something we can take for granted. The public domain has to be created. This opens up the possibility of cultural practices operating in this void.
The editors of Open invited Dennis Kaspori and Jeanne van Heeswijk to author a contribution including various initiatives that raise this issue and formulate proposals that could lead to potential solutions. The text below also serves as the point of departure for the two-year project ‘Hospitality for what is to come’, which Jeanne van Heeswijk and Dennis Kaspori are realizing in association with the European Cultural Foundation from the ‘Blauwe Huis’ (the ‘Blue House’) in Amsterdam. The project will consist of a number of interconnected guesthouses, meeting places and clandestine routes that serve as a platform for contributing to the debate about hospitality and migration.
The texts in Open 12 problematize the public domain from the viewpoint of various practices. The event, the place, the campaign, temporary and mobile interventions, and the economic system offer a differentiated perception of the opportunities to create a public domain, even if it is only temporary or extremely localized. For example, art historian Merel Willemsen provides insight into the Camp for Oppositional Architecture, a two-day event organized by the Berlin-based architectural journal, An Architektur, in association with Casco in Utrecht. The Camp brought together people who share a growing disaffection with the dominant architectural practice, which in their eyes takes insufficient consideration of the political implications of the profession and fails to critically address important issues such as globalization and the continuing dismantling of the welfare state.
The Universal Embassy is a project that demonstrates how judicial space can be exploited, creating a place in the former Somali embassy in Brussels that serves as a base to enable the sans-papiers – the people ‘without official documents’ – to meet each other, exchange information and emerge from the shadows en masse. In his text, the Belgian artist Tristan Wibault describes the Universal Embassy as an embassy for those who no longer have one.
Opening a highly personal window on his life as an activist, Dutch radio producer and activist Jo van der Spek explains how political activism is becoming increasingly interwoven with cultural activities. The leitmotif in his story is the ‘Vertrokken Gezichten’ (Departed Faces) campaign, which serves as a mark of solidarity with the victims of the fire at the deportation centre at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
Transparadiso, a Vienna-based collective of artists and architects, demonstrates how temporary and mobile interventions can function in an over-regulated planning process. Tactical interventions and strategic thinking make it possible, invited as well as uninvited, to create space in these processes for a greater involvement and accountability of all the actors. Lastly, the Argentinian collective m7red offers a probing analysis of the economic crisis in Argentina and shows how this has, for example, led to the introduction of alternative practices for the exchange of goods and services – cultural ones in particular – that have ended up beyond the reach of most Argentinians.

Artists contribution

Oliver Ressler
Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies

The work of the Austrian artist Oliver Ressler (b. 1970) focusses on the search for alternative economics in response to the current neo-liberal climate. One of his recent projects is Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies. Created under the auspices of republicart (www.republicart.net target="new"), the project consists of a series of installations exhibited in various places, each time expanded with new work. Each installation contains monitors with video interviews, as well as a typical quotation taken from one of these and projected in the exhibition space. Ressler made a presentation for Open, in which seven fragments from the video interviews are combined with a photograph of the person interviewed. The interviews were recorded in various cities.

Swop Projects
Give Away in Circulation

In 2003, Lise Skou and Andrea Creuz, both working in Denmark, set up Swop Projects, a platform for developing and visualising alternative models for the dominant global monetary economy. Their projects continually criticise and challenge the growing notion of ‘intellectual property’ as expressed in copyright, patents and exclusive rights.
Their contribution to Open stems from the Give Away Shops that are regularly organised by Swop Projects. On these occasions they ask visitors to sketch ideas for strategies to call the hegemony of the current system into question. These ideas can be both purely pragmatic as well as utopian. Their contribution consists of a special selection of these sketches. The website www.swopnetwork.dk target="new" features a complete survey of the ideas, offering an inspiration and invitation to add new ones.

Bookreviews

Domeniek Ruyters
Bouwen voor de kunst? Museum architectuur van Centre Pompidou tot Tate Modern

Arjen Mulder
Book of Imaginary Media. Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium

Omar Muñoz Cremers
Mediapolis: Popular Culture and the City

Geert Lovink
Territory-Authority-Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages