[This essay is presented as part of Open_Source_Art_Hack. In it
Josephine Berry examines seminal net art projects such as Rachel Baker's
TM Clubcard, 0100101110101101.org's plagiarisms, I/O/D's Web Stalker and
others in relation to the free software movement.]
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Bare Code: Net Art and the Free Software Movement
by Josephine Berry
In September 1999, the GNU/Linux operating system was awarded a prize by
the jury of the art and technology festival Ars Electronica. This award–
for the ".net" category–converted a computer operating system,
developed through open collaboration, into an artwork.
Setting aside the question of the jury's Duchampian gesture of
nominating a tool of production as a work of art, the event could be
said to signal the popularization of the analogy, now frequently drawn,
between avant-garde art practice and free software production. This
analogy insists upon the recognition that the activities of making art
and software are both defined by the necessarily collective nature of
creative and intellectual production.
On the one hand, the individual genius is recognized as eclipsing the
dialogic nature of cultural production behind the emblem of personal
style or innovation, which in turn casts the nonartist as creatively
defunct. On the other, closed or proprietary models of commercial
software production can be said to ring-fence innovation by unfairly
claiming individual or corporate authorship of the latest spin-off of a
radically collective history of software production in the computer
sciences. Copyrighting and closing the source code of a piece of
software also artificially narrows its potential future adaptations and
condemns it to the stifling monotony of a fixed identity (product),
altered only by the strictly controlled modifications that will lead to
its release as an upgrade: the illusion of innovation and difference in
a regime of unwavering homogeneity.
The rigid controls imposed by intellectual property rights–dependent on
the demonstrable origination and hence ownership of ideas–bury the
"code" (artistic or technical) away from the scrutiny of potential
collaborators and "defends" against the fecund chaos of uncontrolled
invention. Whereas the coders slaving away at Microsoft are cut off and
largely motivated by economic remuneration, the enthusiasts working in
the free software community enjoy the benefits of the potlatch or gift
economy where "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."[1]
Likewise, where the artist locked into life on the gallery circuit is
condemned to the permutation of a signature style that resembles the
assembly-line production of software upgrades, the plagiarist artist,
released from the burden of individual identity, surfs the riotous waves
of ownerless creation into the unknown.
So the comparison between avant-garde art and free software does more
than point out the collective nature of cultural production; it also
points to the revolutionary effects this realization may have when the
consumer and the producer become indistinguishable. This same dream of
indistinctness also underpins the avant-garde wish to dissolve art into
life or, better, to realize art as a practice of life. The division of
(artistic) labor–the enemy of such indistinctness–is a crucial
starting point for avant-garde engagement when conceptualizing a
revolution in culture or beyond. To transpose a Marxist analysis of the
means and relations of production onto culture: The individual artist
has sometimes been compared to the capitalist who harnesses and thus
alienates proletarian labor power into surplus value that can, as
accumulated product or "oeuvre," be used to perpetuate the exploitation
of the many by the few. The genius-artist, true to the "winner takes
all" model of capitalism, is able to obscure the heteronomy of culture's
production behind the singular expression or possession of a sovereign
intellect and imagination. A radical realization of art, then, would be
the deposition of the sovereign producer and a return of the shared
wealth of creativity to its true owners: the multitude. For this reason,
a reappropriation and transformation of the artistic means of production
comes to the fore–an opening up of cultural source codes to an
undetermined end.
An early articulation of this idea, and one that used the same language
of political economy, was the German writer and philosopher Walter
Benjamin's 1934 speech to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, titled
"The Author as Producer." Combating the contemporary consensus among
leftist thinkers that the work of art should express the correct
political "tendency" in its content, Benjamin argued that the
revolutionary author should move beyond the limited concern with the
product to effect the transformation of the "apparatus of production."
In order for the writer's work to have an "organizing function," he
insisted, it is also necessary for the writer to have a teacher's
attitude. And today this more than ever is an essential demand. A writer
who does not teach other writers teaches nobody. The crucial point,
therefore, is that a writer's production must have the character of a
model: it must be able to instruct other writers in their production
and, secondly, it must be able to place an improved apparatus at their
disposal. The apparatus will be the better the more consumers it brings
in contact with the production process–in short, the more readers or
spectators it turns into collaborators.
doctrinaire, the insight into the cultural product as a tool or
apparatus that invites a collaborative appropriation and transformation
seems remarkably modern. Where, in the case of writing, the apparatus
and the product are indistinguishable–or only distinguishable as
discrete functions of the continuous fabric of language–in the case of
digital culture and, specifically for our purposes here, net art, the
software that is used to produce the artwork is not similarly continuous
or transparent. Using proprietary software for the production of an
artwork when its source code is closed means either that the model
character of the work must be understood as functioning otherwise or not
at all. Or, alternatively, this idea can be formulated as the more open
question: What is the model character of net art? If, as is largely the
case, net artists use proprietary software to produce their work, to
what extent can they be said to be transforming the apparatus of
production?
[Bare Code continued at http://www.netartcommons.net/article.pl?sid=02/05/08/0615215]
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Commissioned by Gallery9/Walker Art Center:
http://gallery9.walkerart.org
Josephine Berry is deputy editor of the culture and technology magazine
Mute (http://www.metamute.org/)
