DIVVY/dual.symposium.00 [intro]

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Duration: 16 minutes and 29 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: 496 (128 embedded)

Posted by: dominick on Apr 11, 2007

Video record of the symposium held at the NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] on 09.24.2006 with Hiroo Yamagata, Kiyoshi Kusumi, Noboru Tsubaki and Takumi Endo, moderated by Dominick Chen. Abstract: Introduction given by Satoko Takita, Chair Woman of the Mozilla Foundation Japan. 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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Hello. Thank you all very much indeed for coming here on a Sunday afternoon.
My name is Dominick Chen and I work as a researcher at the ICC.
today's Open Salon is titled 'Is Open Source Art Possible?'
and will last for about three hours, with the aim of concluding around 5pm.
Let me introduce the panelists taking part.
First, sitting to my left is Hiroo Yamagata.
Yamagata-san has been translating writing by people involved in the world of Open Source, Free Culture
and Creative Commons, and he also produces criticism online.
To Yamagata-san's left is artist Noboru Tsubaki.
Tsubaki-san has been working as a contemporary artist since the 1980s, showing in many exhibitions and biennials.
Sitting to the left of Tsubaki-san is Kiyoshi Kusumi.
Kusumi-san's work in the 1990s was done under a variety of pennames rather than his own name,
he has worked as the editor of the art magazine 'Bijutsu Techo'.
Now, he works as a freelance art strategist,
helping out artists with developing the concepts for their work.
Known as Doctor BT (for Bijutsu Techo) or Doctor GD (for Geijutsu Dojo), he is very active in the field of art criticism.
To Kusumi-san's left is artist Takumi Endo.
Endo-san's is currently showing his installation work 'Rondo' on the 4th floor of the ICC,
and his project 'Phonethica', an installation that visualizes the connections beween languages, is also being exhibited.
He has created new works satelitte exhibitions related to this project, but I will introduce those later.
Over the next three hours, our five panelists will be discussing a variety of issues, but before we start,
I would like to allow a few words from our sponsor Mozilla Japan, which has been a huge help in realizing this project,
so I hand it over to allow Satoko Takita, chairwoman from Modzilla Japan. Thank you very much.
Hello.
My name is Satoko Takita, chairwoman of Modzilla Japan.
If there are any of you wondering why Modzilla Japan is here today,
then I would like to take a few minutes to explain.
This time I was told about this event titled 'Is Open Source Art possible?',
but actually Open Source is first of all a term and method used in software development.
I think rather than Mozilla, everyone here is more likely to be familiar with the name of the Firefox browser,
which has been very succesful recently. Firefox actually came out of what was originally a closed world.
Now, this is a long story, and if you look on the web today, you'll see my report
'Satoko Takita tells the history of Open Source', but that would take an hour or two to relate, so I'll put it simply.
Firefox originally came out of a closed world,
and, you probably remember, but there was a battle going on between the Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers.
Meant as commercial products, they were developed within a closed world, and affected the organization of that world,
changing the shape of engineers' know-how and their techniques, and began to open source in 1998
It was from about that time that the term 'open source' became common usage,
so it's no exaggeration to say that Netscape was one of the originators of the term 'open source'.
We took that history, made the software open source,
and with tens of thousands of engineers looking at the source code and making various changes to it, Firefox was born.
As for open source in the art world,
I have a feeling that it has already become open source.
I think the way in which users and the people who paint, draw and make things will fuse in the future will be
exactly the same as in the computing world. In the future, Firefox, its users and its creators will become one.
The possibilities of art and human communication changing as a result of these processes is very interesting indeed.
We are very pleased that everybody here has been able to take part in this project.
With the fusion of the media, computing and art worlds, I believe the world will continue to expand and interconnect.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
As Takita-san has just said, open source has already been around in the software world for 10 years,
and the word open source has already become economically and culturally established.
The cultural and artistic sides to that equation are gradually becoming more and more of a core part of the internet.
One part of that is about Creative Commons, but in a broader sense it's about the Free Culture movement.
I'm interested in Open Source and how it relates to museums, and as Takita-san said, it is an issue of communication.
That is, museums take on the role of representation and given how they dictate what it is that people should be seeing,
I think that there is room for them to open up that method of communication.
The concept behind the renewal opening of the ICC this June was 'Art x Communication = Open!'
as it is putting the term 'Open', we woud like to consider its meaning through this project.
So, moving on, Tsubaki-san and Kusumi-san will be giving presentations of what they think about these issues.
Firstly, we will show you a film that Kusumi-san has prepared, and open that up to commentary from the other panelists.
Following that, Tsubaki-san will introduce his recent activities and the other panelists will give their comments.
After that, Endo-san will talk about the other related exhibitions taking place,
and lastly, we will have a discussion to wrap up the issues that we have brought up.
The final 10 or 20 minutes will be a Q&A session open to the audience, so please feel free to ask questions.
For viewers on Skype, we will accept questions from DIVVY/dual Skype IDs. Feel free to send questions in at any time.
This project involves a variety of different people, so I will give you a brief explanation of them.
I work as a video archivist managing the Creative Commons project called HIVE.
Then, there is Tokyo Art Beat, run by the Gadago NPO. Tokyo Art Beat is a bilingual web service that lists all
the art and design exhibitions and events taking place in Tokyo and around, and it has a growing number of users.
In collaboration with Tokyo Art Beat, the desire to start a project that would re-examine the relationship between artists and viewers,
gave rise to the DIVVY/dual project.
Today's symposium, hosted by the ICC, is being held as one in a series of events related to DIVVY/dual.
The related exhibition, which is being held in Ginza, is of a work that was itself made with Open Source values.
Kusumi-san will give you an introductory presentation about it.
Many of you might know him as the editor of monthly Bijutsu Techou (BT), but he often goes beyond the art world,
to dig inside subculture and the net culture, so as to go back and forth between fine art and culture in general.
He also set up the 20th Century fan Club, a highly conceptual community on Mixi, the online networking service,
and a lot of artists participate in that community.
Kusumi-san has thought a lot about the relationship between art and culture in the 20th century.
He also writes a blog under the 'donburaco' username on the Hatena blog site.
There is the Creative Commons movement that handles renders web content, not software into Open Source,
and it is incredibly interesting to consider how this is developing in Japan.
In this entry, he analyzes the collectiveness inside the legendary Manga mecca called 'Tokiwa-so',
to state that part of the substance of Creative Commons can be found in such community.
Next is Tsubaki-san. This sculpture piece, 'Fresh Gasoline' from late 80s',
was also shown at the 'Little Boy' exhibition curated by Takashi Murakami in New York recently.
This is the project 'UN Boy'. He conceptually hacked the existing United Nations,
to present an impossible but imaginable, alternative UN in a fantasic way.
Within the same movement, this installation was made to the theme of 'battling with the world', and was shown in Paris.
For his project 'Radikal Dialogue Project', he actually went to Palestine in order to realize it.
Lastly, Yamagata-san.
cruel.org is his very interesting website on which he writes in an incredibly incisive way about anything he chooses.
He works as a translator and he has introduced books as important as these to the Japanese audience.
So, let's take a look at Kisumi-san's film and initiate a discussion about it.