Fwd: <nettime> Review of the CODE conference (Cambridge/UK, April 5-6, 2001)

["Supreet Sethi" <supreet@xxxxxxxxx>]

Forwarded From: Florian Cramer <paragram@xxxxxxx>

> (The following review was commissed by MUTE and will appear in the
> forthcoming MUTE issue, see <http://www.metamute.com>. Josephine Berry has
> my cordial thanks for editing the text into proper English. The MUTE
> people were so kind to let me speak about literature and systems theory on
> a panel with Robert Coover and Jeff Noon at Tate Modern. See
> <http://www.metamute.com/events/mutetate08042001.htm> for the details.
> -FC)
> 
> 
> 
> CODE: Chances and Obstacles in the Digital Ecology
> 
> 
> The recent Cambridge conference CODE amounted to more than a
> straightforward expansion of its acronym into - in computereze - its
> executable "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Economy". It
> actually got some of its participants collaborating. The most interesting
> idea regarding collaboration came as an off-the-cuff remark from James
> Boyle, professor of law at Duke University, who compared the recent
> interest in open digital code to environmentalism. The first environmental
> activists were scattered and without mutual ties, Boyle said, because the
> notion of 'the environment' did not yet exist. It had to be invented
> before it could be defended.
> 
> After two packed days of presentations, it could well be that the virus
> will spread and make artists, activists and scholars in digital culture
> associate 'IP' with 'Intellectual Property' rather than 'Internet
> Protocol', whether they like it or not. Unlike many Free Software/Open
> Source events with their occasional glimpses at the cultural implications
> of open code, the CODE programme covered the free availability and
> proprietary closure of information in the most general terms setting it
> into a broad disciplinary framework which included law, literature, music,
> anthropology, astronomy and genetics. Free Software has historically
> taught people that even digitised images and sounds run on code. But that
> this code is speech which can be locked into proprietary schemes such as
> patents and shrinkwrap licenses, thereby decreasing freedom of expression,
> is perhaps only beginning to dawn on people. John Naughton, moderator of
> the panel on "The Future of Knowledge", illustrated this situation by
> describing how, in the US at least, it is illegal to wear T-Shirts or
> recite haikus containing the few sourcecode words of DeCSS, a program
> which breaks the cryptography scheme of DVD movies.
> 
> There is little awareness that any piece of digital data, whether an audio
> CD, a video game or a computer operating systems is simply a number and
> that every new copyrighted digital work reduces the amount of freely
> available numbers. While digital data, just like any text, can be parsed
> arbitrarily according to a language or data format (the four letters
> g-i-f-t, for example, parse as a synonym for 'present' in English, but as
> 'poison' in German), the copyrighting of digital data implies that there
> is only one authoritative interpretation of signs. The zeros and ones of
> Microsoft Word are legally considered a Windows program and thus subject
> to Microsoft's licensing, although they could just as well be seen as a
> piece of concrete poetry when displayed as alphanumeric code or as music
> when burned onto an audio CD. The opposite is also true: no-one can rule
> out that the text of, say, Shakespeare's Hamlet cannot be parsed and
> compiled into a piece of software that infringes somebody's patents.
> 
> The legal experts speaking at CODE also explained the enormous expansion
> in intellectual property rights in the last few years. While patents are
> widely known to conflict with the freedom of research and even with the
> freedom to write in programming languages, the conference nevertheless
> extended its focus beyond this and made its participants aware of IP
> rights as the negative subtext to what was once considered the promiscuous
> textuality of the Internet. Still, it was surprising to see speakers with
> very diverse academic and professional backgrounds position themselves so
> unanimously against the current state of IP rights. In another informal
> remark, Volker Grassmuck proposed that we refocus 'information ecology'
> from software ergonomics to the politics of knowledge distribution. Does
> digital code need its own Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund?
> 
> The conference took its inspiration from Free Software, but didn't bother
> going into basics and priming the participants on what Free Software and
> Open Source technically are - which was both an advantage and a
> disadvantage. General topics were advanced right from the first session
> without first clarifying such important issues as the meaning of the
> 'free' in Free Software. GNU project founder Richard M. Stallman - who
> usually explains this as 'free, as in speech' not ' free, as in beer' -
> revealed his own questionable conceptions by proposing three different
> copyleft schemes for what he categorised as 'functional works', 'opinion
> pieces' and 'aesthetic works': as if these categories could be separated,
> as if they weren't aspects of every artwork, and as if computer programs
> didn't have their own politics and aesthetics (GNU Emacs could be analysed
> in just the same way Matthew Fuller analysed the aesthetic ideology of
> Microsoft Word.)  It was annoying to hear Stallman reduce the distribution
> of digital art to 'bands' distributing their 'songs', and it was equally
> annoying to hear Glyn Moody call Stallman the Beethoven, Linus Torvalds
> the Mozart and Larry Wall - a self-acclaimed postmodernist and
> experimental writer in his own right - the Schubert of programming.
> 
> To make matters worse, the artists who spoke on the second day of CODE
> echoed these aesthetic conservatisms in perfect symmetry. Michael Century,
> co-organiser of the conference and Stallman's respondent, unfortunately
> didn't have enough time to speak about the notational complexity of modern
> art in any detail. He was the only speaker to address this issue.
> Otherwise, artists were happy to be 'artists', and programmers were happy
> to be 'programmers'. Stallman's separation of the 'functional' and the
> 'aesthetic' was also implied in Antoine Moireau's Free Art License
> <http://www.artlibre.org>, a copyleft for artworks which failed to
> illuminate why artists shouldn't simply use the GNU copyleft proper. This
> question is begged all the more since the license is based on the
> assumption that the artwork in contrast to the codework is, quote,
> 'fixed'.  While Moireau's project was at least an honest reflection of
> Free Software/Open Source, one couldn't help the impression that other
> digital artists appropriated the term as a nebulous, buzzword-compatible
> analogy.  While there are certainly good reasons for not releasing art as
> Free Software, it still might be necessary to speak of digital art and
> Free Software in a more practical way. Much if not most of digital art is
> locked into proprietary formats like Macromedia Director, QuickTime and
> RealVideo.  It is doomed to obscurity as soon as their respective
> manufacturers discontinue the software.
> 
> On the other hand, the Free Software available obviously doesn't cut it
> for many people, artists in particular. The absence of, for example,
> desktop publishing software available for GNU/Linux is no coincidence
> since the probability of finding programmers among graphic artists is much
> lower than the probability of finding programmers among system operators.
> This raises many issues for digital code in the commons, issues the
> conference speakers seemed, however, to avoid on purpose. While most of
> them pretended that it was no longer necessary to use proprietary
> software, their computers still ran Windows or the Macintosh OS. It would
> have been good to see such contradictions if not resolved then at least
> reflected.
> 
> Code, Queens College, Cambridge, UK, April 5-6, 2001
> 
> Florian Cramer <cantsin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/
> 
> -- 
> http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/
> http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
> GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3D0DACA2 
> 
> 
> 
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