Adventures in information activism
by Carine Zaayman
When I noted that the United Kingdom elections are looming, and that some analysts are projecting a record third consecutive term for Tony Blair (This has now become a reality - Ed.), my desires turned to undercover operations, and artistic options for subterfuge. Sadly, the truth is that artists probably have very little power to change the larger political state.
But what we do have is an ability to speak out in our creative environments. In this way at least, we could create and maintain a small arena in which we can express resistance. Within these spaces, artists could do more than speak about their ideas, they could also stimulate the exchange of material, and counter, to some extent, the hegemony of mainstream media.
I was partly drawn to thinking around this issue upon hearing that Creative Commons (featured in an earlier project page) is launching a South African division (http://za.creativecommons.org) and that they will be hosting a workshop on May 25 (http://www.commons-sense.org) to celebrate '...the artists, authors, researchers etc who are using the cc licence in South Africa with the launch of Creative Commons South Africa and our own licences for the SA jurisdiction.' I will definitely be watching that space and reporting back on some of those activities.
In the mean time, I was scouting on the net for other online spaces (or perhaps 'pockets of resistance') that are hosting artistic projects of interest to free speech and user-determined content. The Kingdom of Piracy (http://kop.fact.co.uk) presents some interesting views on copyrighting and content sharing. Apart from their thoughtpieces on the notion of 'commons' (http://kop.kein.org/commons/tales/), they also have a number of exhibition initiatives and projects.
Radioqualia, for instance, produced the open-source Tenantspin, a part of their 'Frequency Clock Free Media System' for KOP. Tenantspin is Liverpools High Rise Tenants interactive internet television channel. The channel most recently featured an interview session with the Liverpool Riverside constituency candidates for the upcoming elections in which questions from the channels audience were posed directly to them. Documentation of this and other past events, as well as news can be found at http://www.tenantspin.org.
Other highlights that can be found at KOP, include the open software nine9 project (from the Mongrel collective) and the interactive streaming radio station last.fm. What all of these projects have in common, is a desire to give voice to the concerns of its users and the utilisation of publicly accessible digital media to do this.
Another good online resource for artists interested in the matters of digital free speech is irational.org (http://www.irational.org). They describe themselves as follows: "IRATIONAL.ORG is an international system for deploying irrational information, services and products for the displaced and roaming. IRATIONAL.ORG supports independent artists and organisations that need to maintain mission-critical information systems. These Irationalists create work that pushes the boundaries between the corporate realms of business, art and engineering.' (http://www.irational.org/cgi-bin/cv/cv.pl).
Their projects stretch from 1996 to the present day, and include videos, discussion forums and databases that aim to give the average internet user insights into the so-called information war.
In the spirit of the ideals of open-source and sharing, the old-style protection of material is looking radically out-of-date. One website, textz.com (http://www.textz.com) expresses the ideals of content-sharing very well:
'A spectre is haunting the corporate world - the spectre of organised world-wide file-sharing. mp3, to name the most common synonym for the becoming-distributor of millions of former customers, has clearly shown that the flows of digital data are much more driven by people and popular protocols than they are determined by legislation, ownership or the new global rules of the corporate-political.
napster has reverse-engineered the ideology of a whole industry, and it has finally proven its total, complete and absolute obsolescence. today more than ever, the nets are zones of excess, immune to the business model of electronic scarcity. the transnational companies that are trying to break up the file-sharing networks have declared a war they will never be able to stop. there are going to be thousands of napsters. textz.com is not even zero-point-five of them.'
(http://www.textz.com/concept/)
These open-source, content-sharing sites are currently determining the shape and dynamics of the Internet for creative agents. It is through these initiatives, I believe, that artists are able to create that space of which I spoke at the beginning of this article - a space well worth investing in locally as well.
