OPEN-SOURCE:A NEW SITE OF ART PRODUCTION?

JR Williamson

OPEN-SOURCE: A NEW SITE OF ART PRODUCTION?

Jonathan Ridal Williamson

MA Sculpture Royal College of Art

Contents

01: Introduction

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02: Technology & Making in a Wired World

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03: Unpicking Open-Source

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04: Aspects of Mechanical Reproduction

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05: Object as Process

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06: Conclusion - A New Site of Production?

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01 - Introduction ‘The world of people who make things is in upheaval‘ (Grima 2012) This quote is taken from a recent essay on the emergence of open-sourced, highly networked technology driven eco-systems in which certain types of making takes place, specifically in the arenas of product design and manufacturing. The notion of upheaval is the starting point for an analysis of making in a wider sense, For the purposes of this text a consideration of making is extended to include the plastic arts, specifically sculpture, in order to critically examine whether the adoption of these same emerging technological practices constitutes a new or at least distinct site of production in art.

When artists start to respond to the technological flux shaping the very idea making in related disciplines, and indeed to metabolise the tools and processes of those industries, does this raise the atavistic questions on the separation of art from technology? Furthermore to what extent does the notion of autonomy of art survive when its process and substance becomes so reliant on the tools of technological and industrial production?

Open source is a movement that has been waiting for its time to come. According to its proponents, such as designer Joris Laarman, that time is now. Laarman’s claim, certainly as far as open-sourced design is concerned, is that it serves “to redistribute knowledge and the means of production. It has the potential to change everything we know about design, from manufacturing to education” (Van Abel 2011 p. 121) Laarman traces the roots of open source to the Modernist movement, "true modernists wanted open source design one hundred years ago" (Van Abel 2011 p. 121) and cites the example of the De Stijl movement. Gerrit Rietveld published manuals about how to make his chairs, but the information was of little use to the public at the time due to the lack of skilled fabricators.

Fig.1 Original plans for the red and blue chair featured in the September 1919 issue of De Stijl magazine

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Laarman notes how Modernism's claims to democratize design were flawed in that a huge amount of power ended up concentrating in the hands of big factories and design firms. If, in general, modernism resulted in the mass consumption of an international and generic style, at least some modernists kept alive a utopian and democratic attempt to make the tools of production accessible to a wider public.

“A theory must be general and valid for anybody” -Yona Friedman The architect Yona Friedman made the claim that the two most important architectural developments of the twentieth century were the steel space-frame structure and the Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters. As a conceptual combination they offered, according to Friedman, the potential for a post-war utopian vision for mass housing based on elevated mega-structure grids affording the individual space for unique personalisation. Friedman’s post-war theoretical vision, aligned to those of the Situationists, contained within it ideas very disruptive to the prevailing orthodoxies and narratives of architectural practice.

One of his key concepts was that the process of production of architectural space should actively and necessarily include the end users of that space. To this end he produced books and manuals aimed at those with no formal architectural training. The aim was to open-source the process of building and to make makers of us all.

Fig.2 A Yona Friedman drawing

Again this is a prime example of an open-source theory ahead of its time. Rietveld and Friedman’s intention, not just to share ideas but to create a culture of “user involvement”, were simply waiting for the appropriate technological levers to gain traction. For example, in architecture, the internet has underpinned the development of the Open-Source Architecture1 movement. The manifesto for which – itself a document open to multiple authorship – states that: “Drawing from references as diverse as open-source culture, avant-garde architectural theory, science fiction, language theory, and neuro-surgery, it [OS Architecture] adopts an inclusive approach as per spatial design towards a collaborative use of social software for transparent operation throughout the course of an integrated public life” (Ratti 2012) Similarly in the arena of furniture design, Rietveld would probably recognise the motivations of the recently launched OpenDesk2 project which offers freely downloadable plans for machine buildable furniture.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opensource_Architecture http://opendesk.cc

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A key characteristic of these recent developments in design and architecture is that they open up and democratise the processes of making. In doing so they challenge the accepted industry orthodoxies of supplier and consumer. Historically the same orthodoxies have existed in art production, perhaps even to a greater extent. The following chapters will examine some of the conditions and resistances attached to technology in art and specifically the role of open-sourced making as a potentially disruptive force. Equally, the hypothesis of a “new site of production� is systematically tested by attempting to contextualise and locate the key values of open-source art practice within a wider history of art production.

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02 - Technology & Making in a Wired World The Third Industrial Revolution In April 2012 the Economist cited the advent of the third industrial revolution on its front cover. A special report in that issue (Economist 2012) discusses the roles of additive manufacturing (3D printing), industrial automation and smart software as some of the factors instrumental in bringing about this revolution. Joseph Grima, editor of Domus, expands on the wider implications of a democratized design future in his essay Adhocracy commissioned for the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012.

If the last revolution was about making perfect objects—millions of them, absolutely identical, produced to exactingly consistent quality standards—this one is about making just one, or a few…If design is no longer the domain of a select few creating products of consumption for “the many”, according to the top-down model of bureaucratic industrialism, what is it?

(Grima 2012) Grima argues that the rhizomatic realm of adhocratic systems1 can be characterized by embracing “imperfection as evidence of an emerging force of identity, individuality, and non-linearity”. And rather than the closed object “the maximum expression of design today is the process”.

Essentially Grima’s proposition is that we are seeing the start of a shift from a broadcast delivery system of production, where a relatively few producers make standardized identical products in huge numbers for mass consumption, to a devolved network delivery system made possible by low cost and highly versatile apparatus, availability of information and skills and self-organization.

2ND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BUREAUOCRACY CLOSED OBJECT MASS PRODUCTION BROADCAST

3RD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ADHOCRACY OPEN OBJECT BOUTIQUE/CUSTOMISED PRODUCTION NETWORK

There are parallels here with the craft movement of the 19th Century as noted by a recent Guardian article on DIY design: “with a shift in the geography of production (the hailed return to decentralised cottage industries) will we finally have to pay the real value of what things are worth? We may revive William Morris's craft utopia yet” (Wainwright 2013).

The difference is that craft never had the potential to challenge industrial production in terms of reach or sophistication. Conversely it is also true that broadcast production systems could never hope to offer the uniqueness and individual vision of the craftsperson or artist. Grima points to an emergent middle ground which offers the merits of both.

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An adhocracy is defined as a highly organic structure with a culture based on non-bureaucratic work

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As digital fabrication models become more sophisticated they offer genuine alternatives to the established techniques of industrial production. A recent exhibition at the Design Museum predicts “the era of mass production as the only alternative to craft and artisan manufacturing may be coming to an end. The New Industrial Revolution will enable a diversity of manufacturing”.

Undoubtedly we are witnessing an emergent, highly versatile and disruptive technology. Perhaps we are at the stage where the hyperbole1 outruns the ability to deliver. Young (2013) takes a longer term view “it’s not the objects of 3D printing that are the most exciting - it is the systems and effects it could set in motion”.

Art and Technology The Economist (2012) report concludes that “digitisation in manufacturing will have a disruptive effect every bit as big as in other industries that have gone digital”. But what of the potential to be disruptive in the visual arts? Is the so called “open object” even of interest to a discipline which has historically thrived on uniqueness? To contextualize this question it is useful to briefly outline a perspective on the historical relationship between art and technology.

The word technology comes, via a Greek modification, from the proto-Indo European root 'tek'meaning "shape, make” (cf. Sanskrit taksan "carpenter"). It follows that at one time to be a technologist was simply to be a maker and vice versa. Now of course technology is synonymous with the use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems 2. The humble carpenter has been left to his plane and square. This schism between art and technology as two very different kinds of making, and indeed ways of seeing, is now totally ingrained in modern thinking. As legend has it the Renaissance was the most recent period in European history when an individual might enjoy polymathic training and move fluidly across disciplines. However by the 19th century science and technology were established in the service of solving large scale industrial issues.

“Until C18 most sciences were arts, the modern distinction between science and art, as contrasted areas of human skill and effort, with fundamentally different methods and purposes, dates from mC19” (Williams 1988 p.42) Similarly the notion of art was developing its own identity, academic traditions and institutional value systems. The split between arts and sciences was established, a condition reinforced by most education systems to the present day.

I would argue then, that a consequence of this historical fork was a systemic distancing between the arts and sciences (including technology). It must be noted that as the second industrial revolution (mid 19th century up to WW1) powered into 20th century, the emergent Modernist movement was certainly influenced to a great extent by the machine age in all its forms. The avant-garde were quick to take leave of the past, to instigate structural change from design and architecture to music, literature and the visual arts. Yet the distancing was perpetuated and compounded as the Modernist movement placed an increasing authority on the autonomy of art from society.

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In his State of the Union address, President Obama placed his hopes on 3D printing technology, which he said has the "potential to revolutionise the way we make almost everything" (BBC, 2013).

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Merriam Webster dictionary definition

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“It is important to stress that to treat autonomy as a defining feature of the modernization of art is itself an expression of modernism” Hamilton (2010 p.252).

This emphasis on the self-determination of the artwork can be seen as an opposition to the drivers of technology at large, by definition useful and functionally deterministic. “for Adorno, autonomous artworks have a social situation but - as I will put it – no direct social function: ‘Insofar as a social function may be predicated of works of art, it is the function of having no function’’. Hamilton (2010 p.251).

Latterly, the implicit logic of Modernism, that of telos, a sense of a future predicated, and to some extent guaranteed, by society’s progress aided by through science and technology, has all but deserted contemporary art except as a source for reflections on its very absence. Historian Benjamin Buchloh observes that “the post-war situation can be described as a negative teleology: a steady dismantling of the autonomous practices, spaces and spheres of culture, and a perpetual intensification of assimilation and homogenization” (Bois, Buchloh and Foster 2005 p.89) If notions of progress underpinned Modernism they were also its demise. Modernism’s claim for a universalism, a dream “of utopian visions which would transform society” (Adamson 2011 p.10) was not sustainable.

Fig. 3 Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Winding Towers, Belgium, Germany. 1971–91.

Gelatin silver prints, © Hilla Becher

In this image the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher conveys a distancing of the viewer from the heavy machinery of mining. The relationship with industry becomes one of a reductive photographic typography.

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Despite the philosophical distancing, it’s important to note that art has a long history of appropriating technology for its own ends; it could be said in the production of the poetic image. Print making, photography, film, video, animation and web art are obvious examples which have matured into relatively distinct practices within fine art. Each is now taught as a specialisation and to some extent each has acquired its own critical language and frames of reference.

A birds-eye view of sculpture, on the other hand, would suggest that it is more generally concerned with "stuff", with matter that surrounds us and material transformation in the broadest sense. Thus it has developed a history necessarily unaligned to any particular technology. Within that history, clearly, there is a lineage of certain specialisms, notably the casting of metals which has relied on established technological processes, albeit unchanged for centuries.

Post-war America was probably the most recent era when art saw a significant shift from the bespoke to the industrial. Minimalism and Pop art in particular registered influences from industrial production. Land art escaped existing conventions by challenging not only means of production but site of production, sometimes on a massive industrial scale.

And indeed it must be noted that certain technologies have had a profound impact on art theory in the 20th century. Walter Benjamin was one the first to theorise on how art’s authority would be eroded in the age of mechanical reproduction. This point is elaborated in Chapter 4. According to (O’Kane 2012) the corollary of this erosion being a shift to conceptual practice: “Duchamp was interested enough in the technologised world to try to remove the act of making from art altogether”.

An Equivocal Relationship So if indeed we are entering a third Industrial Revolution, what can be said of its impact in art today?

I would argue that although contemporary art is in constant flux, to the point of an ideological rejection of stasis, it remains slow in this era to register any significant upheaval from contemporary industrial (essentially digital) currents.

“Modern [digital] creatives who want to work in good faith will have to fully disengage from the older generation’s mythos of phantoms, and masterfully grasp the genuine nature of their own creative tools and platforms. Otherwise, they will lack comprehension and command of what they are doing and creating, and they will remain reduced to the freak-show position of most twentieth century tech art” (Sterling 2012) For all the ‘upheaval’ as cited by Grima around the third Industrial Revolution, there remains, as yet, a level of general resistance to its concerns in contemporary art, which perhaps sees itself as entirely other from mainstream means of production. For some of the reasons outlined, art maintains an equivocal relationship with technology. Labels like Sterling’s ‘tech art’ and ‘digital art’ do not help with the process of assimilation. Somewhat like the term ‘public art’ they immediately denote a special category worthy of less than special consideration. Kholief (2012) claims there is an “undeniable mantra that media art and electronic art have historically been held in a separate [less favourble] light from the broader canon of visual art practices”. Even in a major survey of digital art

by Wands (2006 p.11) the author cannot find language to denote parity “if we look at art as a creative reflection of modern culture, then digital art can be considered a subset of contemporary art”. The problematic relationship between digital and mainstream contemporary art is also discussed by King 8

(2005) who puts forward the argument that computing as a tool for artists emerged just at the wrong time: “too late for the mathematical explorations of Constructivism and Suprematism (by decades), just too late for Op Art (by a few years) and just in time to see Postmodernism make the kind of content-based art that the computer lends itself to somewhat redundant. Hence computer art has never been mainstream and has also been dogged by its association with the nonartist and art-naïve practitioner from the computer sciences”.

Previous industrial currents in art were synthesized into a broadly recognizable aesthetic, which was also founded on a (then new) philosophy of rejection of the artist’s touch. Digital fabrication for instance has so far failed to gather a huge momentum in contemporary art let alone achieve a recognizable aesthetic. And it may well never do, precisely because its industrial outputs are already so prosaic and engrained in the everyday. Also the philosophies around Minimalism and the machine aesthetic were absorbed and eventually overturned. As Herbert (2013 p.13) points out “the refusal of touch had reached an early zenith via Jeff Koons”.

Fig. 4 Walter de Maria, Broken Kilometre, 1979

A New Site of Production Art is produced in the context of a continuum of social and technological change. Reyner Banham’s influential text Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) (Banham 1980) first introduced what constitutes the notion of a “Machine Age” and argued that the architecture and design of a period reflect and express – indeed, are formed by – the machine age in which they occur. If Banham’s theory is to hold true for our time, then contemporary visual artists, particularly in sculpture - which still positions itself as a materially “making” discipline - must reconnect with prevailing thinking in other disciplines of making. New practices in manufacture, design and (to some extent) architecture are forging ways of making much more attuned to the available technology of our time.

In spite of the historic resistances discussed here, I will discuss in subsequent chapters some the motivations, opportunities and approaches to working in this space.

Traditionally art has resisted the “broadcast” model of production made available by previous revolutions. This was seen to be realm of product and categorically not art. The third industrial however is an opportunity to re-evaluate these polarities and gain a “new understanding of software as cultural artefact” (Watz, 2011). The moment is here for art to appropriate the tools of this latest revolution, to move decisively into this site of production and engage critically with the open system.

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03 – Unpicking Open-Source “We know more or less how analogue art movements once behaved. We don’t yet know much at all about collectively-intelligent theory-object “shareable concepts,” whether they’re worth anything or can deliver anything. Maybe they will brilliantly synergize. Maybe they will ignobly crash” (Sterling 2012)

What constitutes open-source art practice?

In the broadest sense it is simply about creating a system for sharing ideas, often in the form of knowledge and skills but essentially resources of any kind. Such a system becomes exponentially more powerful with the addition of some mechanism for feedback or peer review. Generally opensource systems are characterized by access (usually public), a creative community, debate, contribution and ultimately change. They are not static entities erected in monument to a fixed idea, rather they are process oriented. Keats (2007) offers a slightly tighter definition which identifies open source as ‘all about incremental refinement through serial authorship’. This latter definition owes more the origins of open-source within software development but within art practice the term has been ascribed to a range of projects with some aspect of process.

For example, PARK(ING) DAY, a public art initiative started in California to reclaim urban parking spaces as community parks, has been labelled open-source (Keene 2008). Following interest in their first small scale project the organisers chose to promote the idea as an “open-source project”, and created a how-to manual to empower others to create their own parks.

In Denmark the arts collective Superflex describe the work they make as tools often “inviting people to participate in structures of production that alter the conditions of the economy in which the projects operate” (Liverpool 2012). Often working outside the fringes of commercial economic structures, previous projects by Superflex include Free Beer, in which a new beer recipe was drawn up and freely open-sourced under the condition that the creators were credited appropriately.

According to Keats (2007) the Free Beer project was devised to “explore how traditional intellectual property restrictions could be undermined beyond the realm of software”.

In both the above examples the outcomes were far from technological. In one case experiential (a pop-up park) and in the other consumable (a beer). However the technology was instrumental in facilitating the systems of knowledge.

However it is in the realm of digital art practice where open-source methods have really become instrumental. According to Watz (2011) “in the creative field [of computing], the most significant development is the realization that software processes aren’t simply tools, but can become the very material from which the works are made…The real revolution came with the introduction of opensource tools such as Processing1”. Added to this software revolution a further industrial revolution in terms of cheap digital manufacture and the conditions are present for the art to enter a new site of production.

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Initiated by MIT Media Lab in 2001, Processing is a free software development environment written by artists for artists

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Everything Everywhere In June 2012 the Metropolitan Museum (New York) invited a selected group of digital artists to a “hackathon” event with the objective of scanning, manipulating and 3D printing objects from the museum’s collection. Some hybrid objects were produced as a specific outcome of the event but what makes the project more interesting is that the 3D models where subsequently made publicly available.

The Met basically open-sourced one of the world’s best collections of sculpture spanning Canova to ancient Greece.

Fig. 5 Examples of 3D models of heads from the Metropolitan Museum collection.

Open-sourced via thingiverse.com

Once in circulation there is the potential for endless replication, releasing a possibility for unlimited touchable copies of some of art history’s most iconic works. Furthermore, anyone with the proper tools is able to alter the objects at will, which could “lead to some great revisionist mischief” (Chayka 2012a).

Furthermore, as noted by Teasdale (2013) ‘the possibility of creating objects using widely available and easily programmable software seems a liberating and democratizing one...the possibility of pre-made 3D scans, easily accessible and printable, opens up an archival, archaeological treasure trove’ Taking the Metropolitan Museum’s precedent to the next level, artist Olivier Laric is currently working with the Contemporary Arts Society in the UK to make 3D scans of their entire collection, comprising some two million pieces.

But was the output of the hackathon a culturally significant event or just another potential input to the junk producing “crapjets”1 which are already on a trajectory to low cost ubiquity? Arguably it is both.

Baudrillard argued that in current times the dominant simulacrum is the model or simulation, which by its nature already stands for endless reproducibility.

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a pejorative term coined by the Institute for the Future to describe the phenomenon of 3D printers (Young 2013, p.77)

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According to Baudrillard, when it comes to simulation and simulacra “it is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real” (Fegula n.d.). In other words, the theory asserts that the current cultural condition resembles a hyper-reality. In the symbolic exchange of society all is composed of references with no referents.

This argument is underlined in this case of the open-sourced Met collection and indeed open-source art practice in general. Each reproduction of Nefertiti’s head serves as a simulacrum, a reference to the original, now debased through its loss of uniqueness. The copy and object as process will be examined in greater depth in Ch. 5.

Employing open-source data, 3D models in this case, in the process of artistic production may be considered a predictable corroboration of postmodern theory written a generation ago, but others would argue that the wider aspects of open-source production are very contemporary (as in relevant to today) and represent a disruptive force in the visual arts.

Artist Kyle McDonald argues “Open-source is about sharing your process…this open, democratic philosophy immediately separates technology-based art from the greater art world, where secrecy is a byword and the last thing commercial galleries want to do is show how their sausage gets made. But what if open-source ideology could disrupt (in the start-up sense) the confines of the contemporary art scene? Everything would change, from the solitary nature of art making to the lack of support infrastructure for artists and the entrenched gallery economy” (Chayka 2012) Taking a different perspective on publicly available data, the collective Art Is Open Source (http://www.artisopensource.net) do not create objects but rather socially oriented web based projects which typically aggregate live feeds from social media sources. Their aim of “understanding human change with the advent of accessible, ubiquitous, relational, digital technologies and networks”.

Reproducibility and distribution of data, models and software are, of course, inherent, in open-source systems. But more generally, open-source production is a synonymous with a particular kind of emerging collaborative practice which according to (Chayka 2012) is “antithetical to the entrenched idea of the single author”.

Fig. 6 Gavin Turk, Cavey, 1991-7 Gavin Turk playfully deals with the notion of the signature artist

As ideas, tools and knowledge are exchanged so fluidly in the tech-art community the resulting work often cannot be attributed to a single individual “work is made so collectively that it can become difficult to tell who contributed what aspect to what project” (Chayka 2012). Indeed part of the appeal to artists of embracing an open-source mentality is this very aspect of collaboration. As work is 12

developed and presented it is simultaneously an invitation to other members of the community to adapt, modify and hack. The traditional veil of mystique behind which artistic production take places is lifted. Anyone is a free to pull the same levers.

In this sense art production starts to resemble more and more the prevalent modes of production in the mainstream economy (design, engineering, manufacturing etc.) but ironically as it does so, so opensource work becomes more problematic to the engrained economy of the art world.

Economic Considerations “Open source holds a variety of challenges for contemporary art. If the techniques are completely public and the work collaborative, how can artists hope to sell their own work, or protect it from undue co-option?� (Chayka 2012) Beyond crowd funded projects or the prospect of institutional support there is no clear answer to this question. At this still early stage of open-source art practice it is difficult to see how the combination of ambiguous ownership and demystified production will translate into viable marketplace for works.

Arguably this combination of factors represents a structural change in contemporary art production for which there is no obvious precedent.

It is interesting to note that previous movements in art since the 1960s, for example Arte Povera and Conceptual art, have, at times, displayed strong tendencies against commercial interest and the commoditization of the art object. Ultimately these protests failed. Work from these respective periods have been fully assimilated in the canon of fine art history and simultaneously acquired a collectable value.

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03 – Aspects of Mechanical Reproduction As previously discussed, open-source art practices are inextricably bound to reproduction and reproducibility. To locate digital art practice, particularly that involving open-source, in the wider historical context of art production it is interesting then make a more qualitative consideration of how the poetic image can survive in the digital age. This discussion encompasses to the notion of aura of the artwork referenced through the theories of Walter Benjamin.

Fig.7 The curtain of Parrhasius th

A 5 century BC story narrated by Pliny tells of a painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius. A bunch of grapes painted by Zeuxis was so lifelike it attracted the birds from the trees. However as Parrhasius went to remove the curtain covering his painting, it was revealed the curtain itself was a painted image. The story attests to an early and enduring fascination with the copy as uncertainty in art.

The Poetic Image in the Digital Age All western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato - Alfred North Whitehead A recent panel discussion (April 2013) at the Royal Academy raised questions around the possibilities for the “poetic image in the digital age” with specific reference to Greek philosophy and Walter Benjamin’s influential essay Art the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin 1936). For Benjamin, the reproduction of the work of art eroded the ‘aura’ and authority of the original. Today, the mass (re)production and dissemination of images has reached a level Benjamin could scarcely have imagined. A central point of the discussion was whether Benjamin’s point still holds, and in the ‘Digital Age’, when images are able to be created with unprecedented ease and distributed instantly to mass audiences, what possibilities exist for the poetic image. An extension or corollary of this discussion is the future condition of the poetic object given the availability of the technologies discussed earlier.

Howard Caygill, professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, presented an historic contextualisation of the relationship between society, imagery and truth and defined the “poetic image”, in Plato’s time at least, as the “technē of mimesis”. A more up to date definition is provided by DeBolle (2012) who makes a distinction between pictures for documentary ‘ descriptive‘ images and “pictures for artistic or other creative purposes appealing to the imagination, which one could call ‘poetic images'’’.

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In Plato’s Republic the well-known Theory of Forms is put forward arguing for the existence of a natural order or hierarchy spanning the sensible and insensible worlds. With respect to “truth” and “timelessness” Plato's philosophical hierarchy speaks of the primacy of the idea followed by the object and lastly the image. Plato shackles the image to imitation and believes it to be the "lowest form of truth". The allegory of the Plato’s Cave is used to convey a distrust of imagery.

Caygill (2013) argues that Walter Benjamin wrote Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction partly as anti- Republic essay (Plato's Republic). There exists an anti-Platonist tradition, including Kant, Nietsche and Benjamin, which proposes the image for, not the image of. This tradition attempts to free the image from the idea of the "image of" and therefore the legacy of Plato.

The political dimension of the image (including poetic and visual imagery) was of interest to both Plato and Benjamin although their perspectives are somewhat different. In Plato’s Republic Book 10, Socrates threatens to expel the poets or “image technicians” from the polis and considers images to be a waste of time at best or dangerous in the sense of politically powerful. The “image of” being that of imitation and necessarily a form of falsehood for the would-be enlightened philosopher-king.

Whereas Benjamin suspends any assumptions about hierarchy of idea/object/image and argues for painting as "emergent and fugitive". Benjamin also suggests that Platonic hierarchy was governed by the limitations of technology and is not threatened by it.

Benjamin and Plato are linked in a concern with the copy – an issue central to the survival of the poetic image in the digital age. For Plato all images are false copies of a higher truth, and for Benjamin the (not unrelated) issue is one of authenticity.

Aura in the Digital Age Writing the Work of Art essay in 1936, Benjamin was committed to the idea that film and photography represented an unprecedented technological and cultural change with respect to the production and distribution of image. His key point was that aura (of the work) is threatened and attacked by mechanical reproduction. Speaking of traditional art mediums “[Benjamin] observes that unique objects, like devotional fetishes or hand-crafted items, are perceived to have an ineffable quality that is proportional to being one of a kind” (Robbins 2011). Benjamin states not only that this quality is absent from non-unique film and photographic works, but that loss of aura (of the original) is set to become a general condition. Robbins (2011) observes that from the Work of Art essay “we get two important ideas about aura. First, aura is waning. Second, this loss of aura becomes more pronounced in proportion to technological advancement”.

By aura Benjamin means authenticity - how an object’s worth is hinged on the perceived authenticity and limited accessibility to it - which he understands as the actual presence in time and space: "... its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be" (Benjamin 1936) Photographic images in particular lose their authenticity in the era of mechanical reproduction since "from a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the 'authentic' print makes no sense." (Benjamin 1936) According to Robbins, the Work of Art essay is ultimately political and central to it is a meditation on the question 15

“will modern Europe become communist or fascist, and how might film tip the scales one way or the other? Benjamin gives no decisive answer and leaves both possibilities open” (Robbins 2011) Putting the political dimension aside, perhaps the principal the legacy of the essay is as a prescient work of cultural criticism. Writing in the early 1950s Lewis Mumford continues the debate on art and technology although is much less equivocal that Benjamin on the positive aspects of the machine’s role in cultural communication. Mumford contends that modern man's overemphasis on technics has contributed to the depersonalization and emptiness of much of twentieth-century life.

"Three and a half centuries ago Francis Bacon hailed the advancement of scientific learning and mechanical invention as the surest means of relieving man's estate...Bacon did not forsee that the humanization of the machine might have the paradoxical effect of mechanizing humanity" (Mumford, 2000 p.4) Where they agree is in the sense of a growing disconnection from source memories i.e. when we first saw, experienced or learned something. This, too, amounts to a draining of aura.

Manufacturing Aura According to Heydt (2010), Benjamin was wrong to overstate the disappearance of aura and failed to predict how aura would, in fact, be re-conceptualized in the postmodern age as ‘sign value’. Andy Warhol is cited as primary postmodernist who “visually reinforces the repercussions of mass production unveiling how the rebirth of the aura is rooted in fabricated scarcity and brand names”.

Contrary to Benjamin’s idea that aura exists solely outside the commodity system, Heydt links the idea of postmodern aura inextricably to capital and commodification: “Whereas, Benjamin foresaw the onslaught of mass production as a threat to the aura, his assumption was flawed insofar as the socioeconomic condition actually served as a catalyst to the construction and proliferation of sign value and false commodity fetishism fuelled by the illusion of auratic value” Heydt (2010) In terms of aura, the interesting point is to observe the parallels between mass production in industry and mass reproduction in art. The paradox of industrial mass production lies in the drive for economies of scale which result in lower cost and lack of scarcity. This proved effective in creating affordability but not necessarily desirability. Thus, according to Heydt, sign value was conceived (in the form of advertising, logos, limited editions and brand messages) “as a distinctive mechanism of capitalism to compensate for the mass production of identical objects facilitated by the industrial revolution”.

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Fig. 8 “Absolut Unique” vodka bottle.

Sign value is created in the form of industrially replicated scarcity. In 2012 Absolut re-tooled their production line to with spray guns. A random algorithm controlled which colours were sprayed in the production of nearly 4 million unique bottles. The marketing message states ‘whichever bottle you get is the only one of its kind. Your very own ABSOLUT UNIQUE work of art’

Similarly the art world has developed its own compensatory mechanisms. In the conclusion of the Poetic Image debate, speakers including Julian Stallabrass asserted that a thriving contemporary art industry has created defences around itself through various strategies, including restriction of supply and manufacture of aura. This subject is given closer attention in his book Art Incorporated: “Art appears to stand outside this realm of rigid instrumentality, bureaucratized life, and its complementary mass culture. That it can do so due to art's peculiar economy, based on the manufacture of unique or rare artefacts, and, its spurning of mechanical reproduction” (Stallabrass 2004 p.3) To some extent Stallabrass (2004 pp.1-9) presents a validation of Walter Benjamin’s original argument. But equally in the same text he makes a detailed analysis of the economy of the international art market in doing so presents a compelling meta-narrative of how the successful commodification of art has relied to an extent on similar ‘sign value’ mechanisms which undermine the idea of art as ‘zone of freedom’. In a review of Art Incorporated (Davy 2005) notes that “art has maintained its distinction from mass culture long after Walter Benjamin’s aura, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Andy Warhol’s soup cans undermined that distinction….Stallabrass traces significant shifts that highlight the illusion of art’s autonomy” So it would seem that strategies exist, both in art and industry, employing sign value (manufactured aura) to promote and assist the circulation of objects. Extrapolating the argument into a near future, Young (2013) writing in a special issue of ICON on 3D printing, makes a prediction on the potential impact of this technology and its capacity to disrupt the status quo.

“Walter Benjamin's aura of the original may become nothing more than patent documentation or DRM1 protection” This phrase needs to be unpicked as it contains within it an assertion central to this dissertation.

Essentially what Young is claiming here is that the digital age will presage the condition of the poetic object to come closer to that of the industrial object. Technologies enabling endless iterations of copy, edit and manufacture bring with them an implicit dimension of open-sourced hybridity regardless of whether this is in the interests of certain parties. A consequence of which is the need (for some) to invent new solutions to old problems. If the invention of sign value was a protectionist response to the second industrial revolution then DRM can be seen as a response to the third.

1

Digital Rights Management – a software technology to protect the use but not the distribution of digital media.

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Whether these mechanisms of control prove successful is another matter1. The wider point is to observe the longer trajectory affecting the means of production and reproduction, and how this trajectory distances us yet further from the idea of the original.

1

Young (2013) speculates further on the prospect of widespread intellectual property infringement “we will see Zaha Hadid file claims against Shapeways for publishing pirate vases and counterfeit couches”. As if to illustrate the point, a recent Tate debate article (Holtham 2013) asked “When is 3D printing okay? “. The article made specific reference to a controversy surrounding the Design Museum awards of 2013. Dutch design team Unfold, nominated in the Product category for a mobile 3D printing kiosk, controversially made replicas of the work of two other nominees. Dies Verbruggen of Unfold says of the kiosk project “it's about our role as designers in a post-digital era. We want people to see opportunities, not only threats."

(Dezeen 2013)

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05 – Object as Process Introduction The previous chapter provided a brief historical context to some of the issues introduced by mechanical reproduction in art. This chapter will examine modes of contemporary art practice which actively embrace aspects of digital (re)production, moving from the poetic image to the poetic object, specifically the idea of engaging with object as process. The artists discussed below are committed to the idea that digitally mediated work, embracing aspects of open-source, represent an artistic opportunity rather than a threat.

Several interesting questions arise from a dissection of (art) object as process, not least the relationship to design methodologies. Arguably some of the works described here are designed objects, explicitly produced and manufactured using technology lifted wholesale from industry. How should we understand and read them in an art context? This is interesting from an art perspective as it self-consciously seeks to undermine the “distinction from mass culture” (Davy 2005) highlighted in the previous chapter.

The Introduction posed the question about the porosity of art to different ways of making. These questions are examined in more depth here. In appropriating the tools of the digital designer, the digital artist is indeed closing the gap between the disciplines with implications for the status of the art object. If aura is (and remains) a function of fetishization of the art object, not to mention supply models based on uniqueness, handcrafted-ness and scarcity, what happens when the artist becomes more of a transformative agent in an open-sourced network environment? In this climate artists are developing new strategies which position art practice within this site of production rather than in opposition to it. Necessarily this has opened up new ways of looking at object as process.

Thompson and Craighead: Critique of Aura Artist duo Thompson and Craighead have directly addressed the issues of uniqueness in their work, which functions as a critique of the condition of manufactured aura in contemporary art.

Fig. 9 Thompson and Craighead, Short films about Flying, 2002

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Short Films about Flying (2002) is a digital art work using a “mash up” technique which automatically generates a unique film for the viewer on demand. Each 'movie' combines a live video feed from a web camera at Logan Airport in Boston—provided by a commercial website—with randomly loaded net radio sourced from elsewhere in the world. Text grabbed from a variety of online message boards is periodically inserted, appearing like cinematic inter-titles. Interestingly this technique has recently spread rhizomatically into viral marketing1.

Broomberg and Chanarin: War Primer 2 War Primer 2 is a an adaptation of the Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 photographic book Kriegsfibel (War Primer). In the original book Brecht, appended an original short poetic verse to a series of war photographs, themselves freely sourced mostly from LIFE magazine. The text of this verse was used by the artists as an internet search term to source contemporary images of the ‘War on Terror’ which were subsequently inserted or overlaid on the original pages.

“Kriegsfibel converts images into dioramas in, as it were, an epic theatre of war; War Primer 2 (2011), which riffs on Brecht’s original as Brecht riffed on LIFE’s, splinters

them.” (Seif 2012)

Fig.10 Broomberg & Chanarin, Page from War Primer 2 2011

Although the sourcing of ‘poor images’ via a search engine does not technically fall under the definition of open-source art practice (as presented in Ch.3), this work is included as it highlights a process oriented digital mediation in the making of what Seif (2012) calls a “work of art for the age of digital reproduction”. War Primer 2 may manifest itself in conventional book form but alternatively it can be seen as an instance of a ‘networked object’ in that some aspects of its making have been outsourced to digital service. The artists’ role is that of an agent in a wider process.

1

http://kissmefirstapp.com/ is digital viral marketing project to promote a new novel by Lottie Moggach

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Matthew Plummer-Fernandez: An Infinity of Cultural Artefacts The music is not in the piano - Alan Kay. This aphorism was often used by computing pioneer Alan Kay especially as a criticism of the US education system. His point was that to have access to a device (musical or computational) is quite distinct from an understanding of the device or competency in its use.

The analogy is useful as an approach to understanding the process based work of the artist Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, amongst others.

Works such as Venus of Google (fig.11), which makes use of both open-sourced images, opensourced software, and 3D printing, are physical manifestations of relatively complex algorithmic processes.

In the making of Venus he was initially given a search term as part of a wider artistic exchange process. The term returned many similar results via Google, one of these being an image of a woman modelling a body-wrap garment.

Subsequently a computational transformation was applied to the image using a specific type of ‘hillclimbing’ algorithm which resulted in a 3D printable object.

The algorithm uses an image comparison technique which attempts to merge two objects over many thousands of iterations, “eventually mutating towards a form resembling the found image in both shape and colour” (FernandezPlummer 2013).

Fig.11 Venus of Google, 2013

The artist states “I’m interested in this early era of artificial intelligence, computer vision and algorithmic artefacts, ‘exemplifying the paradox of technology being both advanced and primitive at the same time. The Long Tail Multiplier series investigates the potential use of algorithms to create virtually infinite cultural artefacts” Venus of Google is characteristic of Fernandez-Plummer’s practice, where notions of ‘outcome’ in terms of the object on display are displaced by a systematic process - a series of digital transformations, often non-deterministic - which can simply be paused at an arbitrary point. The process is the primary concern of the artist and the ‘finished’ work must be seen in the context of that process, not autonomous from it. Additive manufacture offers the artist/object maker significant new possibilities in terms shifting the emphasis of the work, almost exclusively, to the creative process

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behind it; possibilities to foreground the mathematical, computational and transformative as the key drivers of that process. And herein is the location of the “music”.

“Everyday items such as toys and a watering can are 3D scanned using a digital camera and subjected to algorithms that distort, abstract and taint them into new primordial vessel forms. In some cases only close inspection reveals traces inherited from their physical predecessors. These are then 3D printed on a z-corp printer” http://www.plummerfernandez.com/Digital-Natives

Fig.12 Digital Natives, 2012

Process Art Rebooted?

An argument could be made that, in art, nothing is new. Mathematical systems, industrial outsourcing and a foregrounding of process (including chance factors) have all been observed and well documented in 20th century art. And of course since the earliest digital works of the 1970s, e.g.

Manfred Mohr, computation has been at the disposal of the artist in the production of the poetic image.

Fig .13 Sol LeWitt, 1 2 3: All Three Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967/2000

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From the late 1950s through to the 1970s, Europe and North America saw the rise and establishment of new forms of abstract and conceptual art including the kind of process art LeWitt referred to as “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” (1965 cited in Kosuth, 1969). An example of contemporary writing on such work is given by (Bochner, 1966). “it is against comfortable aesthetic experience. It is provocative art ...distant from the humanistic stammering of Abstract Expressionism. Old art attempted to make the non-visible (energy, feelings) visual (marks). The new art is attempting to make the non-visual (mathematics) visible (concrete). The new art...deals with the surface of matter and avoids its 'heart’”.

Conceptually, materially, and indeed ideologically, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and their contemporaries were far removed from their expressionist forbears two generations earlier. Not only were they exploring new ideas of what art could or should be about, they were attempting to create a whole new visual language in the late Modern era. These artists demonstrated a disregard for subjective or aesthetic concerns in preference of intellectual rigour around the original premise of their work, often drawn from disciplines such as geometry, number theory, set theory, music and other analytical or mathematical systems. Bochner observes that “rather than a style we are dealing with an attitude. The serial attitude is a concern with how order of a specific type is manifest. The order takes precedence over the execution.” (Bochner, 1967).

Digital Narratives and Venus of Google, for instance, do indeed draw upon the heritage of all the aforementioned practices but what distinguishes this type of work? Clearly there are parallels in terms of how order of a specific type is manifest but it’s important to examine the differences as well as the similarities. Has the emphasis on (human) language which underpinned much conceptual work of the 1970s (Marzona 2005 pp.15-19) simply been replaced wholesale with a machine language?

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A key difference to note would be the enforced distancing from the object, and indeed disappearance of the object favoured by the conceptual artists. A defining characteristic of conceptual art wass that the idea of the work, as communicated by language, was the work.

Lawrence Weiner, for instance, has been described as a "language-based sculptor" (Smith 2007). On the surface a phrase which might apply equally to Jon Rafman (fig.14) or Fernandez-Plummer who both employ instructions encoded in language as a central element of their practice.

Fig. 14 Jon Rafman, NAD (Zigzagman Malevich) (2013).

3D printed sculpture made as a digital rendering of a classical Greek bust overlaid with a Kazemir Malevich scribble.

However Conceptual artists purported a desire to outlaw aesthetic considerations and insist on a primarily intellectual engagement. “Art that imposes conditions on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism” (Weiner cited in Marzona 2005 p.16).

The same cannot be said of the recent digital sculptures shown in figs. 11, 12 and 14. Language (specifically the meaning or import of a linguistic statement) is not the level on which encounter this work. Rather we are obliged to engage primarily with its objecthood, its aesthetics, it means of manufacture (a networked object), and invited see it as a contemporary artefact.

Thus when attempting to compare contemporary digitally mediated work with earlier conceptual work, there may be similarities in terms of a scripted execution, but we immediately run into a difference of medium specificity. Understanding this work as belonging more broadly to the canon of process art is more helpful. Whether or not it successfully re-opens the debate on process art depends on one’s view of what constitutes a contemporary medium.

Any foundation in sculpture would introduce the student to the basic ideas of additive versus subtractive technique. Whilst still a useful starting point, this lesson hardly begins to capture the changing condition of sculpture since the end of a Greenbergian attitude to medium specificity. It might be a simplification to say that subtractive techniques largely belong to the last century but as the very term sculpture gave way to installation and assemblage it is clear to see that the contemporary condition of sculpture has long been to freely appropriate and combine materials without censure. “’Sculpture‘, a fourteenth-century word from the Latin sculpere, means to carve, cut, cleave.

Applied to practice now, it means, frequently to take and tilt and patch together things that precede the sculptural act” (Herbert 2013 p.29) As suggested in Ch.2 a history of sculpture is about the transformation of “stuff”, so what is the "stuff" we make things out of today? What things deserve consideration prior to the sculptural act?

Any answer to this must take into account the possibilities inherent in digital materials and digital manufacture. Additive manufacture (in terms of 3D printing) is a fitting contemporary extension to what was referred to as additive sculpture. This opens the possibility of a dialogue with past process oriented work but without imitation.

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Ultimately these divergences are what make the work of Plummer-Fernandez contemporary and distinctive. I would argue this is a new site of artistic production with unknown perimeters. If the artworks emerging from of this site do not much resemble more established modes of contemporary art it is precisely because they have the quality of something yet to be determined. The whole space of 3D print and the concomitant engagement with of object as process should be very much of interest to the artist precisely because it is not well understood. An analogy exists with the launch of the personal computer in the early 1980s, a technology which was not understood at first and had to find its place over time. “it is not until you push back against the systems of control that the implications [of a new technology] reveal themselves. We need to keep printing to find its limits. In the end the potential applications of a technology are discovered by democratising and dispersing it" (Young, 2013)

George Eksts: Artist as Agent Eksts work seems to refer to the process of making by drawing attention to incompleteness and objects in a state of flux. In the Infinials series (fig. 15) a body of sculptural work is loosely based around ‘finials’, architectural devices that function both as statements and refutations of finality. He works in a variety of mediums but where his work touches explicitly on object as process is in the appropriation of freely downloadable 3D models from online warehouses. In the case of A Frame and others in the series, the 3D models are selected by searching for incomplete or unfinished files, so designated by their initial creators. Eksts creates wall sized drawings from these files which he states is an act of completion. The drawings are appended with ribbons and in doing so perhaps become somewhat detached from abstract status of model and begin to enter the space of the gallery and the realm of the viewer.

Fig. 15 George Eksts, 'A Frame', 2012 5m x 4m. Ribbon, nails, wooden bobbins.

This work does not employ the complex computational muscle of Fernandez-Plummer but adopts similar strategies of using “found” digital materials which are repurposed. With A Frame there is definite sense of artist as agent in a wider connected system of works.

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06: A New Site of Production?

As highlighted in Ch.2, work which is produced as a function of digital technology has often struggled to be seen as (high) art. In a recent essay the writer Bruce Sterling, presents a critique of the so called ‘New Aesthetic’ (‘an eruption of the digital into the physical’) which offers one explanation as to why this might be so.

“Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished. That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one” (Sterling 2012) Sterling points to an unthinking engagement with digital tools and notes that even after a ‘generation’ of work in the field, ‘it should be much better acculturated than it is’. As much as practioners of the New Aesthetic have struggled to find a truly contemporary voice, I have argued that the faltering progress of digital work can also be traced back to an institutional bias which has its roots over 200 years ago. Let’s briefly return to the division bell where specializations were sought and found in reaction to advances in the means of production.

Romanticism and the advent of the Fine Arts The first industrial revolution brought about profound changes in capitalist commodity production with its various specializations and reduction of use values to exchange values. According to (Williams 1988, p.42) this led in a shift in the positioning of the arts: “There was a consequent defensive specialization of certain skills and purposes to the arts or the humanities where forms of general use and intention which were not determined by immediate exchange could at least be conceptually abstracted. This is the formal basis of the distinction between art and industry, and between fine arts and useful arts (the latter eventually acquiring a new specialized term in technology” Thus the modern day notion of the fine arts was cemented during the first half of the eighteenth century aided by the prevalent Romantic Movement which, in contrast to the Enlightenment emphasis on Rationalism and Empiricism, emphasised the self, creativity, imagination and the value of art: “an extended sense of liberation from rules and conventional forms was also powerfully developed [in the Romantic period] not only in art and literature and music but also in feeling and behaviour” (Williams, 1988, p.275). Along with this separation came developments in the idea of autonomy of the arts (in terms of use value) from the rest of society’s outputs.

For the Romantics there was a tautology of art and autonomy. Beiser (2006 p. 41) explains the apparent contradiction between the Romantic’s inheritance of the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s doctrine of aesthetic autonomy: 26

"the Romantics insisted on the autonomy of art, not in spite of, but precisely because of, their moral and political ends. Ironically, it is by virtue of its autonomy that a work of art represents the highest moral and political value: freedom. A work of art signifies freedom just because it is autonomous or just because it is not a means to other ends, whether these are moral or physical" The relationship between Romanticism and Enlightenment is also tied to the ancient struggle between the Dionysian (celebratory and unconscious) and Apollonian (conscious and rational) ideals of aesthetics in the arts. According to Herbert (2013 pp.11) the ascendance of Dionysian aesthetic established under the Romantics was to remain well into the 20th century, given a renewed impetus by the assimilation of Sigmund Freud’s investigations into the unconscious – “until the end of 1950’s Apollo languished while Dionysus was ascendant”.

First to Third Revolution – A Full Circle I put forward that the third industrial revolution is not only a series of related technological developments but represents a democratising force which releases the tools of industry back into the hands of the artist. In doing so goes some way to changing the historic perspective of art as something very other to industry and technology.

Herbert (2013 p.11) characterizes the new “Apollonian era” in terms of a three way fork away from the “dreamily handmade” towards “combinatory processes, towards the use of industrialised materials and consequently toward pure cerebration”.

Pre-empted by Duchamp who wanted art “to turn from an animal to an intellectual expression” (Clemens 2009), Minimalism and later Conceptualism systematically removed the hand of the artist and ultimately the dematerialized the object altogether. This clearly marked a shift in aesthetic during this late Modernist period but the autonomy of the work was still privileged.

“It is important to stress that to treat autonomy as a defining feature of the modernization of art is itself an expression of modernism” (Hamilton 2010 p.252) The third industrial revolution represents an opportunity to re-contextualise and synthesize much of recent art history but in an environment where autonomy is much less of an artistic concern.

Minimalism set the precedent for appropriation of industrial methods. Conceptual art privileged process over object or outcome. As discussed previosuly, both of these modes are being reanimated in open-source art practice, but without the imperative to make the same sorts of claims of autonomous separation from other makers using the same tools. With a thinning of distance between art and massculture perhaps we can now lessen the grip of 200 year old distinctions which prevent us from engaging with technologically mediated work on the same terms as, say a sculpture by Henry Moore, or a painting by Kandinksy; distinctions which ultimately limit our notion of art. Considering how it was advances in the means of production which brought about a specialized view of art in the first place, there is a satisfying symmetry to the idea that a new set of advances can potentially result in a cultural unravelling of old certainties.

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Nietzsche was critical of the separation of the “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” in post Greek/Christian western philosophy. He says that we have separated two important aspects of ourselves. As we have seen, 20th century western art has, by turns, emphasised different modes of production: unconscious investigation versus rational distancing through a mediation of concept. Nietzsche argued that “it is only when the creative individual expresses his will to power by synthesising these elements the he can progress” (Jones 1998). Digitial/open-source technology, as a framing of practice, may well offer a new site where both aspects of self can happily reside without a battle for pre-eminence.

The use of technology does not necessarily determine the outcomes. Rather, in the senses discussed here, it facilities a process and generation of systems of knowledge which then translate to outcomes.

Of course artwork mediated through some aspect of technology will inevitably contain within it a similar distancing of encounter (in the conceptual sense), but this only reflects the wider condition of distancing in society attributed to technological developments.

Systems of Knowledge & Anti-Art With its four pillars of collaboration, serial authorship, the copy and iterative development, opensource practice contains within it structures for creating its own systems of knowledge. Keats (2007) argues that outcomes are indeed a function of this collective body of knowledge: “open-source efforts tend to grow more powerful as more people become involved in them”.

As argued by Stallabrass (2004 pp.1-9) the mainstream art world, as observable in the international art market, is very much in thrall to the movements of global capital, which in turn props up the selfsame market. The commercial sector and to a large extent the museum sector still maintains, and indeed protects, long established practices of privileging of the recognisably individual artist and artwork. Chayka (2012), as a proponent of open source, challenges the credibility and indeed the value of maintaining such a ‘closed shop’: “The standard museum label, with its one name and single date, is an outdated concept in a time when work is rarely made alone, and often changes over time. The concept of authorship thus becomes dynamic and fluid, making work more interesting, not less” This point is echoed by Keats (2007) “dogmatic notions of copyright and intellectual property are dominating our culture…the arts today stand to benefit from open-source principles probably more than any other sector of society” Such a broad point has to be considered moot and certainly depends on which side of the arts industry one stands to benefit. Taken as a whole the industry has not been slow to embrace change but perhaps one of the last remaining transgressive taboos in contemporary art is the impulse to effectively undermine the system of authorship and ownership which has maintained a viable art economy over centuries. In this sense we can consider open source practice as a form of anti-art, an inheritor of the pre and post-war avant-gardes?

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The Situationists were “critical of the separated role of the avant-garde” (Plant 1992 p.40) and felt a responsibility to reposition art as integral to ‘ordinary life’. Borrowing on the Dadaist anti-art philosophy “both Dada & surrealism agitated against the removal of art to a separated realm in which it is practised by a few specialists within well-defined perimeters…they disrupted notions of originality, genius and artistic forms of expression” (Plant 1992 p.40) In some ways the open source movement arrives at the same place. Less dogmatic and more rhizomatic that its predecessors1 it reduces the distance between the terms ‘artist’ and ‘maker’ and in doing so lays bare a newly demystified process.

An Expanded Field ‘Yet I would submit that we know very well what sculpture is.’ - Rosalind Kruass Just as sculpture went through a major Expanded Field (Kruass 1979) in the 1960s, the current decade offers potential for further expansion by a very similar process of categorical unfolding. Sixties expansion was not driven by new technology (with the exception of video), but it was certainly prompted by an artistic exploration of the liminal spaces between established categories of making.

For example categories such as landscape and architecture which, until that time, did not belong to the traditional lexicon of sculptural practice. Kruass pointed to the contemporary condition of sculpture, that of “ontological absence, the combination of exclusions”.

Fig. 12 detail of Kruass’s expanded field

More generally Krauss’s point is that art criticism of that period could not be contained within a historicist argument. There are times such as in the 1960s and 70s when the rupture of contemporary work with the past was so marked that a new critical framework had be to established in order to rescue the term ‘sculpture’ and correctly identify the new.

I propose that open-source art practice must be characterized as a similar rupture which cannot be neatly placed in an evolutionary model. Which is why I like to use the term ‘maker’ if not to rescue the term ‘artist’ but at least to rescue the conventional idea of an artwork as authored by a single individual.

1

Superflex, for example, are exception to this rule. They have employed open-source structures as a critique of conventional systems of production (including the normative ideas of art production).

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Naturally, the influential legacy of Postmodernism must be cited in any discussion of authorship. If one could possibly construct an argument for an evolutionary model of what we now call open-source then it would be built on the foundations of hybridity, plurality and pastiche evident in the “shattered mirror” (Adamson 2011 p.13) of Postmodernism.

“No single strategy binds postmodernism together.

The movement was a convergence of like-minded practitioners, not a group marching in lockstep.

Nonetheless, many key players in architecture and design adopted one particular method: the cutandpaste technique of bricolage”.

(V&A 2011) Fig. 16 Richard Prince, Untitled (cowboy), 1989

In a perfect example of Postmodernism’s “proto-open source” approach, a ‘rephotograph’ work by Richard Prince directly appropriates the visual language of advertising. However, despite the prevalent modes of “cut and paste” and indeed a wholesale raid on the cultural sourcebook, the postmodern era did nothing to shift the time honoured association of artist and artwork. Certain postmodern artists may have “played a key role in eroding disciplinary lines between fine art and design anticipating today's more fluid creative landscape” (Adamson 2011 p.10) but ultimately the authorship of the artist was asserted in a material sense.

Roland Barthes posited the Death of the Author in 1968, following Marx’s crucial insight that it is history than makes man, not man who makes history.

“Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (Barthes 1968 p.147).

As a poststructuralist work of critical theory, this text became influential in our ways of understanding literature and subsequently art. What for Barthes was theoretical has now become actual.

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Autonomy and the Politics of Open Source In conclusion conflating the terms ‘artist’ and ‘maker’ has to be considered a political issue. For some this may expand the zone of freedom in which art operates, for others it may represent the exact opposite. If the artist is using the same collaborative tools and technologies as, say, the providers of the Linux operating system1, or a team of engineers rapid prototyping at BMW, what remains essential about art practice? Ultimately this depends on what privileges we ascribe to the term artist.

Open source represents a bridge between art and different (but related) disciplines of making. From a casual perspective, the act of crossing the bridge may seem detrimental to the identity of the artist, but this would be to ignore the question of intention.

When art practice shifts to occupy an expanded field which does not, as yet, have its own clear designations, which, to adopt the Kruassian model can only be described as a combination of exclusions, how then do we separate notions of autonomy, identity and intention? If we agree that the identity of the artist has survived until the modern day then we must infer that there are characteristics of art practice worthy of such a designation, albeit a highly permeable one.

At one time the autonomy of art was obvious and indeed its condition. As J.M. Bernstein notes, the art of modernity is characterized by its developing autonomy, and ‘modernism is that increment in which art becomes self-conscious of its autonomy’ (Hamilton 2010 p.252). Fortunately for the artist his or her identity is no longer determined by some sort of autonomous practice. Autonomy, anyhow, is now very much a problematic term. According to Schneider (2012), “contemporary art is a field vaguely founded upon the theoretical rejection of aesthetic autonomy”. Poststructuralist theory forwarded “ideas of the apparent illusion of subject autonomy” (Potts 2004) and to put it more directly, Kiendl (2008 p.7) asserts that “the autonomy of art from society has been revealed as a modernist myth”. According to Beech (2007) any defence of autonomy is “like to come across as regressive, defensive and nostalgic…the autonomy of art appears today as a largely academic question”.

So if autonomy is no longer a “meaningful category” (Schneider 2012) what barriers remain? Having crossed the bridge how do we successfully install art inside the mechanisms of mainstream industrial production? This has to be contingent not on preserving art’s modes but its values. So in fact the question of autonomy remains relevant. Not in the sense of those on the Left calling for a reboot of ‘socially engaged autonomy’ (Beech 2007), which is surely a contradiction, but in the apolitical sense of self-determination. If art is to move into the mainstream of production, into a world without originals, it needs to preserve the condition of not being determined by a set of external factors. This is the hurdle to jump in order to retain the privilege of a work of art. If art maintains its proper intention - to ask questions, from the profound to the everyday - rather than to answer them, then its modes of operation are irrelevant.

So, whether as a hub for sharing know-how, a tool for institutional critique or as quasi-autonomous generative method of form, an open-sourced systems can be original and powerful. They bring together a networked effect of individuals and tools but do not necessarily mandate outcomes.

1

a highly successful computer operating system developed under the open source model

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For some, open-source practice might be dismissed for its essential hybridity. It sits awkwardly on the boundaries of design art, industrial design and manufacturing. Indeed the territory of digital fabrication has been described as a ‘rarefied precinct’ by Herbert (2013 p.19) ‘where art merges overtly with luxury goods and status symbols, with works prepped on a computer and plans sent to a fabricator’. But this would be to overlook other attributes. It is characterised by the building of shared community but ironically - by challenging existing forms of production and distribution - is counterinstitutional (whether explicit or indirect).

As a mode of production, the art world has historically favoured the boutique over the broadcast but we increasing live in a world of copies, of weightless images and models in constant circulation and modification as predicted by Baudrillard. Either the art world clings on to a long diminished notion of aura or embraces the more radical idea of abandoning the original altogether. I propose that artists need to start developing strategies around the latter. Such are the creative tools at our disposal that in a sense the power of industry has returned to the hands of the individual maker, albeit in a way which may appear to threaten any rump of artistic autonomy and upsets conventional economies of scarcity.

In the nineteenth century Baudelaire criticized the regressive tendencies of artists who were still cloaking themselves in the past, urging them to paint modern life in all its contradictions. Open-source is a contemporary condition, really still in its infancy, which needs to be fully embraced precisely for all of its contradictions.

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References and Bibliography Adamson, G., Pavitt, J. (eds), 2011. Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-90. V&A Publishing nd

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