Hocus Pocus

Florian Cramer (DE)

A good decade after the discourse of Free Software and Open Source has been introduced into the arts, it hasn't gone anywhere except for new tools and communities, and lots of lip-service. The Creative Commons have unwillingly destroyed copyleft outside software development, 'Web 2.0' has perverted community culture and bottom-up participation into an into a panoptical surveillance nightmare, media studies still praise Open Source on Powerpoint slides, 'relational aesthetics' gave the contemporary art system the excuse to avoid all issues involved while pretending to vaguely engage with them. While a cross-over of experimental arts and computer hacker culture did happen within small niches of the now-collapsing media art system, it has been hampered with regressions into cybernetics, misunderstanding of FLOSS as work methodology, and incapability to communicate to a larger world. All the while, the issues of ownership and discursive-institutional power over contemporary art are as pressing as perhaps never before.

Florian Cramer, lector and head of the Networked Media Master programme, Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam.