"The Bazaar in the Cathedral" is one concrete proposal for the creation of a specific platform or context: the PAF, Performing Arts Forum. This new forum is located in a village nearby Reims, France, and has been proposed as an artist-created platform, which is to be shaped according to its users' desires.
In addition, the following outlined proposal offers serious propositions in a general debate on the current institutional and economical framework for independent cultural production in Europe. The text refers to discussions that have emerged during MODE05 and have continued to be central among a range of practitioners within the performing arts. These discussions are aimed at rethinking general conditions of work, production and education in the European performing arts landscape. Open source became a keyword here, being understood as an efficient model for a self-organizing structure of knowledge-production within different economic if not post-capitalist circumstances.
The text tries to examine the potential of open source for the creation of an artist's institution by means of a specific case. It could still, nevertheless, be seen as an exemplary case study on how work in the cultural field could be organized differently if it were to be based on different conditions. Furthermore, the text offers an understanding of how strategies emanating from open source licensing can be implemented in analogue organizations and operations. These licenses do not mean to just simplify or give up copyright. They pose the potential for a distribution of responsibility through channels, which can produce other kinds of environments, offering creative circumstances for a variety of individuals, spanning a broad field of conventional disciplines beyond knowledge authorization.
The Bazaar in the Cathedral
Between the 26th and the 31st of December, 2005, around 40 artists, theorists and art practitioners took part in a meeting in the small village of St. Erme in northern France. By invitation of Jan Ritsema, who has bought an old convent building in St. Erme through his own private initiative, this group of people assembled to discuss how to develop this location into an artist-run work, research and education facility. The house itself has enormous potential for such an interest: up to 50 people can live and work there at the same time, and the current condition and infrastructure of the building is sufficient for immediate usage. What it needs is 1. users and 2. a procedure of usage that supports the creation of an open and user-created institution on a long-term basis.
The name of the facility is PAF (Performing Arts Forum), although the institution shall be open to artists and practitioners from other areas as well.
As participants in this meeting both of us share a great interest in the creation of such a resource and facility.
Being based in Berlin, we are involved in different groups and projects situated somehow in the performing arts. Within these mostly self-organized environments we each practice multiple professions such as producer, performer, software programmer, technician, curator or administrator. We adapt to these different practices and competencies according to the needs of each specific project.
Our economic and social situation is marked by conditions typical of freelance cultural producers in Berlin. We continuously switch between paid (funded) and unpaid projects. Our yearly income is between 8.000 - 12.000 Euro with very little social-security to fall back on. Public funding is not a reliable financial source for our work, and a continuous association with a funded cultural institution has not seemed realistic so far.
We feel a strong necessity to reflect on our work conditions and gain resources and power in order to play a more active role in the shaping of those conditions according to our needs.
During the last one or two years we have taken part in various discussions between artists and cultural producers who are working in the performing arts and who share similar problems and needs. (Involved in Performance Berlin , Fernwärme at Ausland Berlin , PAF Performing Arts Forum).
Starting off from an analysis of the current institutional system for performing arts in (Western) Europe (including production, presentation and education facilities), desires have been articulated in relation to
- the creation of work, production and education spaces / environments / resources that are run by artists and practitioners in a self-organized way
- the possibility for continuous networking, exchanging and communicating between artists and practitioners across national borders
- the practicing of collective education as shared research and knowledge production, continuous exchange of knowledge, ideas and information
The introduction to certain Internet technologies (Weblogs, Wikis, Chatrooms, etc.) and especially to the concept and ethics of open source software development and information commons has, in many ways, inspired the way we think of different ways of exchanging, learning and self-organizing in accordance with the desires mentioned above.
Commons Based Peer Production
It has often been claimed that art production is an avant-garde mode of production. In a nutshell, the argument goes that the typical artist has for generations been exposed to market driven working conditions (self-employed, little or no social-security, both worker and agent of one's work products). The argument continues that this mode of production is becoming much more prevalent in society. If this is the case, then there is a good argument for art production having lost its avant-garde status.
Instead outside of the arts other forms of information production have been developed, that are more explicitly based in cooperation and networks. Yochai Benkler calls those forms Commons Based Peer Production, a mode of production often used for free / open source software projects.
Examining this method in terms of its potentials to create other organizational or institutional architectures for artists and theoreticians, we are looking for resources that oppose the mechanisms of the performing arts market (creation of authorships, competition, representational products). Furthermore, we suppose that reshaping organizations and institutions of research, production and education according to a non-market-driven production model will prepare the foundation for different knowledge and practices in the field of performing arts and theory.
Content: Copyleft, Commons etc.
The Information Commons we intend to build upon consists of every cultural artefact that is not classified under 'all rights reserved'. Every ancient text and many modern source codes, all the classical musical scores, in fact most of what could be considered culture, and more specifically art, is part of the information commons. Taking a commons-based approach for an artist's institution means to actively enlarge the Information Commons with our works.
There are a number of reasons to do so.
> Copyright fuels the art industry while doing very little for the individual artist himself. The art industry is built on copyright and has, among other things, created the star system where a few artists are given VIP treatment while effectively blocking any attempt for art to be meaningful.
> Authorship. Art relies on exchange, referencing and remixing - but the economic reality of the arts market remains tied to specific authors.
> If we propose an organizational architecture for artistic production and research that supports free access and sharing of information, we must rethink how to maintain the growing economic value being produced by its users.
The open source movement used the GNU General Public License (Copyleft) as a tool to ensure that any work created by members of the movement remains accessible to all its members.
We propose to use a similar mechanism e.g. the Creative Commons share-alike license that has not been designed for software but for other kinds of creative work such as websites, text, video, etc. Such license sets creative works free for certain uses, on certain conditions "some rights reserved". It aims not only at increasing the sum of source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier.
Both the GPL license as well as the Creative Commons license are of a viral nature: Once a work has been published under such a license, all works derived from it will have to be published under the same license as well.
Such a mode of copyright as a trademark of commons-based peer production demands seeing authorship as a continuum in which many people work together to create. Neither the ingenious invention, nor the artistic intuition is the basis for authorship. Rather, being part of a functioning communication and knowledge production network creates the basis.
Procedure
Commons based peer production promises an efficient solution to a communication problem that we are facing: people working on the same thing from different places.
Just as there are various kinds of software in the information commons, commons-based peer production in the arts will enable a wide variety of artistic production.
Commons-based peer production functions as a meritocracy: not everybody involved has the same influence on the development of the project, while those who are involved more will decide more.
Of course, the literal application of a software production model to an artist's institution might create some significant translation problems, some of which might be productive, others not.
A possible area of conflict involves the usage of advanced Internet communication tools. This entails not only a certain expertise in using these tools (thus effectively creating a threshold preventing some from participating), but also a certain 'culture of usage' where building a common text and a common discussion is more highly regarded than branching into private texts.
The Internet culture of usage is a culture of short texts, of multiple but small contributions, of patience when waiting for an answer through a non-synchronized communication, and of constant initiative.
PAF open source institute
If we propose to organize PAF according to methods used in the production of open source software, we first need to find roles within that institution that correspond to the following major roles within software development: the maintainers, the developers and the users.
A user of an arts institution can be anybody who wants to use this institution for his or her own purposes but who does not take an overly active role in furthering its development.
A developer makes an effort to improve (or "debug") the institution, adding new features or proposing to change others.
The task of the maintainers is to keep the project's development on a healthy course, to prevent features better implemented in a different project from being included, or to help lay standards of development, and to do a substantial part of the development. The maintainer is usually somebody who is willing to put an exceptional amount of effort into the project and who volunteers (or is chosen) to oversee all or a specific part of the development of the project.
a) System requirements
The creation of PAF involves a lot of work that needs to be shared with as many people as possible. This group of people can be spread around the globe, but each member needs to have a personal interest in PAF. Each member needs to be willing to spend some time organizing PAF. Each member needs to have sufficient access to the Internet. Each member of this group needs to have some experience with the Internet communication tools used to organize PAF. These tools will include mailing lists, blogs, wikis etc., and all these tools aim to help creating a common text. In the case of PAF this common text will consist of rules, funding applications, project proposals, project documentations, schedules, etc.
b) Installation
The biggest challenge PAF is facing now is to name maintainers for a number of tasks that are needed to create PAF. These tasks should be as self-contained as possible as not to interfere too much with each other. Some of these tasks could be:
- internal communication (communication between developers)
- external communication (communication with users, press, etc.)
- documentation/archive (techniques and methods of documentation)
- accommodation (housing, food)
- finance (participation fees, expenses, subsidies etc)
- technical support (web, house, stage)
How each task group communicates internally is up to its members. However, traces of all communications should be available online.
In addition, we need to build a mechanism that enables everybody (users, developers, maintainers) to give constructive critique and feedback in order to "debug" the architecture of PAF. This means we need a method for "bugtracking", i.e. a transparent method for keeping a record of how critique was dealt with.
c) User guide
PAF needs written documentation, rules, guidelines, how-to's. Prominent among those should be a "how to co-develop PAF" that introduces the ethics of PAF and explains the usage of the communication tools in simple non-technical terms. The rules around PAF should be as lean and simple as possible and continuously invite new people to participate in its creation.
We need to explain to everybody using PAF that by providing valid and constructive feedback, everybody gains. We need to explain that by providing valid proposals to remedy a problem within PAF, everybody gains even more. And we need to communicate that PAF is not a place where 'everything goes' but where every feedback and proposal is considered, talked about. It will only be implemented if it is promising, but the documentation of discussion about its merits will be open for anybody who cares to look.
In a distributed organisation all the functions one individual has within the organization should be clearly identifiable as belonging to this individual. Anybody who agrees to a task as part of his or her responsibilities to PAF should at least see this task to its end or declare failure to do so. All tasks should be configured in such a way that they can be completed without having to wait for somebody else to complete theirs, and the documentation needs to be kept up to a minimum level so that if something unexpected happens, PAF would still be able to go ahead by looking through the compiled documentation.
d) Success/Failure
It seems necessary to describe measurements with which we can evaluate whether the institution/organization that we create will be a success or a failure.
Here are some proposals:
PAF fails when it excludes, becomes exclusive, excludes co-development.
PAF fails when it does not attract enough co-developers.
PAF fails when its organization is not reproducible (but instead seems to depend on charisma).
PAF fails when its set-up does not foster free sharing of information, discourse and critique.
On the other hand, PAF will be a success if its architecture becomes useful for much more than art production and education.
PAF extended
The potential that we expect from such an attempt of organising an artist's institution is far bigger than providing a particular functioning workspace in the specific location of PAF. Quite the contrary, we expect that the realization of such a working structure that enlists a range of co-organizers all over Europe will need and will bring forth a networked structure of different European artists' initiatives and local forces.
And we should be aware that such a proposal means to take sides in a political struggle, that its formation and implementation poses a threat to the arts market and arts industry as we know it. This struggle is marked by the debate around peer-to-peer networks, software patents, extension of copyright and the building of a genuine public domain of information.
To apply such a mode of production to the context of performance arts and artists' institutions means to enlarge the potential of this movement in society.
March 2006, by Ulrike Melzwig and Conrad Noack
The text will be published in the upcoming MODE05 book.
links:
Eric S. Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in: first monday, peer reviewed Journal on the Internet, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/
In this article Raymond anatomizes a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. He discusses these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world.
Yochai Benkler: Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm, The Yale Law Journal, Vol. 112, http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html
http://www.pa-f.net/
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
http://creativecommons.org/
