DIVVY/dual.symposium.03 [Chen]

Duration: 11 minutes and 48 seconds

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

License: CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Genre: Instructional

Producer: NTT InterCommunication Center / NPO Gadago / Mozilla Japan

Director: Dominick Chen

Views: 417 (15 embedded)

Posted by: dominick on Apr 22, 2007

DIVVY/dual symposium at NTT ICC on 09.24.2006. Dominick Chen, moderator of the symposium, gives few examples to connect the media art scene with a wider, transdisciplinary field of open-ended creativity. Transcription and initial translation by: - Ashley Rawlings - Tomomi Sasaki - Lena Oishi - Chihiro Murakami - Dominick Chen Related links: 0] DIVVY/dual 1] TokyoArtBeat 2] NTT ICC 3] Mozilla Japan

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All right, first I'll give a general introduction about the project.
This is a website called 'Fresh Meat' and this is 'Source Forge. '
These are the two most famous portal sites for open sources.
Like the talk about Artist 2.0 or Fluxus 2.0 earlier, when we think about this kind of updating,
we should also consider what kind of media technology we can take reference from.
Like Yamagata-san mentioned, there is a dissociation between ideals and expressions in contemporary art.
Take Duchamp's Fountain for example. Not only is it ready made,
it has a negative context that it is already completed as an art work.
Let us remind ourselves that Duchamp assigned this kind of ambiguity to his works.
In the 70s, Shuzo Takiguchi and his colleagues received permission to make a replicate of this work, 'Large Glass'.
Duchamp liked to mix up the original with replicas, and these hints can be found all throughout history.
His stance was that since someone went into the trouble of making that history in the first place, it should be recognized as such.
There is a museum called Palais de Tokyo, and their director is a theorist called Nicolas Bourriaud.
I integrated the contemporary artists of the time with his concept of 'Relational Aesthetics'.
There is a project called 'AnnLee' by two French contemporary artists, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno.
They bought the rights for an animated character of a young girl from a game animation company in Akihabara for 30,000 yen.
They passed out the rights to about twenty artists, and asked them to express AnnLee in any way they wanted.
From birth to death, people worked on AnnLee all over the world. The project encompasses a multitude of problems, from the lifespan of a work to copyright.
Raqs Media Collective is a group of artists from India that can also be called social researchers.
They collaborated with Tsukamoto-san and Kaijima-san from Atelier Bow-wow on 'Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Salai'.
where they built a simulation model of how people who had lost their homes rebuilt a self-governing home.
Raqs is a rare collective that takes the relation between society and art, and also artwork as its theme.
I think their name holds a hint that will help us with what we're thinking about today.
We refer to FAQs [frequently asked questions] to help us understand software and web services,
and the name Raqs means 'Muslim dancing like crazy', but is also derived from 'rarely asked questions'.
They place value or bring to surface the marginal thoughts
and questions that people don't normally ask, because they deem it necessary for art.
At the same time, improving software and thinking about art are two different things.
Improvement of productivity is open source's domain - for example, how to speed up and improve software.
On the other hand, there is no value in offering to speed up or debug art.
There is an assumption that improving creativity and improving productivity of a factory are two completely different things.
But can we dismiss it as having no functional capabilities for art?
The social function of art, as Yamagata-san called it, is to present the value of things that haven't been verbalized
through nonverbal media. However, this type of concept isn't shared within society yet.
Open source has many things can be used as reference.
For example, general public license, which was proposed in the 80s by Richard Stallman through the free software movement
which is the background of open source. Another is General Public License for GNU/Linux OS.
There is a famous quote concerning Internet architecture that can even found on t-shirts sometimes:
'We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.'
These words imply an organization's way of existence that can be applied to open source.
At the beginning of this project, I've had people come up and ask, 'What's different from Wikipedia?'.
Wikipedia is a wonderful media, but it can be considered a treasure house of definite description because it eliminates chaos as much as possible.
There is a work called 'un wiki' by English artist Wayne Clements that is being exhibited at ICC,
which visualizes a record of words that were deleted from Wikipedia.
Which is to say, it's not a matter of gathering the truth here.
In that sense, there is a permeating perception that Google is a God in this era,
our future lies with AdSense, and advertising permeates our lives.
There is a limit here, where existing models are being pushed out, and I feel boxed in sometimes.
In comparison to that exhibition, an artists group called Ubermorgen.com collaborated on a project
called 'Google Will Eat Itself'. It can be viewed online.
GWEI buys Google stock with money made from AdSense, and plan to 'eat' Google in time.
They have a counter which shows how many years it will take, which says 30,000 years at the moment, so they have a long way to go.
There is a playfulness here but at the same time, our imaginations are stimulated by
possibilities of redefinition and alternatives in seemingly unchangeable environments.
Now I will introduce the concepts of 'openess' and 'plasticity'.
I'll take up the meanings and definitions of the DIVVY/dual project at a later date,
and talk about my ideas on what it means to be 'open'.
This is based on proposals, rather than a constructed theory.
In relation to the concept of 'affordance', Tsubaki-san talked about prompting 'touches'
by offering works online in downloadable form, and have your target audience
'touch' and get to know the work. You aren't the only one expressing yourself through the process.
James Gibson, the psychologist who coined the word 'affordance', says that
to touch something is an explorative act inside the concept of 'active touches'.
Being open allows for this kind of affordance.
Pro-cronyism is a transparent record of the way things were made.
This is one of the values that I discovered in Endo-san's work.
As something that is inter-related, it has the value of being redefinable
and this can be used as one of open source's values.
To wrap it up, my intention was to communicate the kind of thinking that went into this project.
Next is a presentation on the work that Endo-san impelemented.