07/24/2005: "free stuff for sale by the giving killing animals"

Most of us would agree that it's hard to make a living as an artist. How many of would really like to open source all our art? ( What? give it away? )

Yet in essence the open source model suggests that giving it away is good. (Giving good? How so? Is this some sort of sentimental pitch? ) The existence of open source communities suggest a vision of the world where the distiinction between self and other has a different meaning: ecological ontology, where receiving is reciprocal, cyclical and not necessarily profit-based. from an economic perspective, a quasi-marxist idealism marginalized in a capitalist world. Or perhaps the motivation for open source can be traced to residue within each individuated consciousness of the awareness that life is a continuum.

Today's questions to ponder: how to reconcile survival (which implictly involves selling work based around an identity: art brand style-zone 2005 presents...) with the notion of free art (which is to say art that emerges from a collective source within life itself and must implicitly simply be recycled, returned to the earth of the mind, the noosphere of imaginative continuity.)

Resolution of these issues probably involves thinking about exchange in a wider sense than is conventional. It suggests that the human animal is a tricky paradoxical swarm of conflicting impulses: parameters for selfishness and altruism co-existing.

Replies: 2 Comments

on Saturday, November 19th, timothy ford said

some friends told me about this site, and now i'm glad they told me about it. a good conscience is a continual christmas: http://www.pmai.org , Small Table is always Red Round read more at desktoplinux.com , Astonishing, Standard, Universal nothing comparative to Memorizing i want to achieve it by not dying!

on Monday, July 25th, David Bouchard said

(I have been pretty quiet during this month, I'll comment on this at the very least)

I don't think open source software makes it more difficult to make a living for software artists, at least no more than it already is. Open source and free software doesn't imply one cannot charge a fee for his or her work. I think in this regard software art, which can be inifinitely duplicated weither it is open source or not, is closer to conceptual art, where the physical instance of a piece is not what makes the work valuable.

On the other hand, open source does raise an interesting issue regarding authorship. So far, I've been mostly thinking of open source in software art as a way to enrich the work by providing insight on the creative process itself. However, one of the main purposes of free software is to allow modifications and improvements by the community. Not only is it encouraged, but it is one's obligation to publish any major changes done to free software so that others can benefit from it.

This is a very practical model. How does this apply to art? Can we simply consider the outcome a collaborative work? If so, how can anyone possibly make a living out of it.

Do we have any examples of such art work that emerged as the product of a large community of programmers working together, like it is the case for other kinds of open source projects?