the following presentation was given at the knowledgre transfer conference at the university of salford in manchester on the 29th of november 2006. you can download the programme  and the slideshow as .pdf files.

Deptford.TV – strategies of sharing

“Can the utopia of liberated media practices, expressed as a recurring pattern in times of new technological  inventions throughout the 20th century, become viable as an approach within a 21st century context, through  the use of FLOSS systems and open content licensing schemes?”

1. Show 1st Slide Map of Deptford.TV – What is Deptford.TV?

Deptford.TV is a research project on collective film-making focusing on post-production and distribution with social software interfaces over which the collaborators can share their ideas, over a combination of WIKI and the EDL – Edit Decision List, protocol used as standard by many editing software programmes. It is a collaboration between facilitators of infrastructure such as Dekspace and the Boundless.coop, software programmers, the Bitnik media collective, open source and free software advocates – Liquidculture and film-makers

Adnan Hadzi’s contribution to this collaboration is the original method to design the Deptford.TV database documenting the regeneration process of Deptford, in South East London. Deptford.TV functions as an open, collaborative platform that allows artists, film-makers and people living and working around Deptford to store, share, re-edit and redistribute the documentation of the regeneration process. The open and collaborative aspect of the project is of particular importance as it manifests a form of liberated media practice. In the case of Deptford.TV this aspect is manifested in two ways

A) audiences can become producers by submitting their own footage

B) the interface that is being used enables the contributors to discuss and interact with each other through the database. Deptford.TV is a form of television, since audiences are able to choose edited timelines they would like to watch, at the same time they have the option to comment on or change the actual content. Deptford.TV makes use of licenses such as the creative commons and gnu, general public license to allow and enhance this politics of sharing…

This politics of sharing started with Linux. Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a computer operating system. It is one of the most prominent examples of open source development and free software; unlike proprietary operating systems such as Windows or Mac OS, all of its underlying source code is available to the public for anyone to freely use, modify, and redistribute.

Free software is a matter of the users‘ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

   * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

   * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1).  Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

   * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

   * The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so  that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).  Access to the source code is a  precondition for this.

The Linux distribution chosen for the Deptford.TV project is called DYNEBOLIC.

It is one of the easiest installable systems, you just copy the folder from CD to the computer hard disk.

2. 2nd slide “you are personally invited…”

Deptford.TV contributes for FeedBack

In the spring of 2006 Deptford.TV received a Call for participation in FeedBack 04.

The Feedback Project is a curatorial initiative which invites participants to think critically about what messages and meanings exhibitions offer and aims at encouraging audiences to have opinions about the way that museums and galleries curate and organise exhibitions.

Under FeedBack Project, two main activities take place: FeedBack Publication and the Open Forum.

FeedBack Publication invites contributions from people who have an interest in the Arts to submit their experiences, opinions and comments through texts, images or projects which will be published. The project is concerned with contemporary curating and the equation artist-curator-audience. The forthcoming issue of FeedBack Publication is focused on participatory art events and their significance in current art practice. This will be the second FeedBack publication. 

FeedBack Project’s Open Forum took place three times during exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery. Audiences were invited to discuss views on the curatorial aspect of the exhibitions via email, flyers and the Whitechapel’s website. It also took place in Athens during Visions, an international arts event. FeedBack Project is currently in discussion with Space Studios in East London in order to hold a number of Open Forum sessions during 2007-2007.

The initiators of FeedBack are Goldsmiths‘ own Nayia Yiakoumaki, and Elpida Karaba. 

They where looking to collect “ideas related to creating discursive spheres between audience, curators and artists”. FeedBack 04 was aiming to concentrate “on the idea of participatory projects and particularly on the experiences of those participating in the making and realisation of these projects” in order to create an archive of “documents, statements, interviews, arguments and conflicts”. 

The most obvious way to participate in FeedBack was for each one of us to submit a text on his/her own research, which would employ Deptford.TV as a case-study. We thus interviewed 12 of the participants of Detpford.TV, aiming to produce a written essay, as well as a video essay. Both essays are uploaded on the Deptford.TV website http://www.deptford.tv. Faithful to the Deptford.TV’s frame of mind, the rough material those essays are based on is accessible for the audiences to look at or read, and remix, re-edit or rewrite. We consider these essays to reflect our own viewpoints and agendas, thus ‘incarnating‘ the realisation of just one way of reading and writing about the materials we collected. As Deptford.TV is not affiliated with any one institution, we are not under pressure to produce ‘politically correct‘ outcomes. Instead, we try to accommodate some raw, ‘un-beautified‘ responses, that are sometimes silenced within formal frameworks –just like the Deptford.TV database hosts rough, primary materials that audiences do not normally get to see. We hope that some of the people we interviewed, as well as people interested in the broader field of collaborative practices and remix culture, will take the time to –slightly or radically– adapt, reinvent or rewrite these essays to better reflect their own, diverse, viewpoints. 

In fact, You are personally invited to rewrite this essay.

3. show 3rd slide “Presence / Absence”

Collaboration

Deptford.TV focuses on the shift from the individual genius of the artist to the collective nature of the cultural production.  

Quoting from Katherine Hayles. We live in the information era, and Hayles argues that information, unlike materiality, is pattern rather than presence. She further argues that the presence-absence dialectic has been pushed into the background by a new dialectic based on pattern and randomness. Whereas presence-absence is an oppositional dialectic (that is, absence is the opposite of presence), pattern and randomness are not oppositional but complementary. In that sense, randomness is not seen as the absence of pattern, but as the ground for pattern to emerge. Hayles goes on to look at how pattern and randomness apply in our everyday lives, and looks at virtual reality environments where this dialectic leads to the paradox of presence-absence. 

According to Hayles, pattern – randomness also implies a shift of emphasis from ownership to access: ownership requires a presence (something tangible one would wish to own) whereas access implies pattern recognition. Networked practices operate more often as open systems that invite users/audiences to participate, providing access to their internal dramaturgies and structures – or rough material –when it comes to database filmmaking. The degree of involvement participants are granted really depends on the specific project, and it can be anything from formal interaction (audiences have a number of choices but remain very much placed within the constraints of a predefined and closed system) to co-authorship, where participants are invited to create the piece together with its initiator(s), or the audiences themselves initiate the collective production of a piece. Once participants start claiming authorship for a piece, this really marks a major shift in power, responsibility, as well as conceptual, aesthetic and technical control over the outcomes, which challenges deeply the traditional roles of creators /producers vs. consumers of content, and calls for us to rethink these distinctions. 

show 4th slide: “Commons based Peer Production”

Open projects demonstrate the emergence of a new paradigm called ‘commons-based peer production‘, a term coined by Professor Yochai Benkler to describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the internet) into large projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation. The free and open source software movement along with collaborative projects such as wikis, are the best known examples of this practice. In the cultural sphere, more and more projects invite the audiences‘ involvement and participation, and/or use open source software providing their users with access to content and know-how, as well as the possibility of developing or recycling the project for the production of their own work. The Internet, being a decentralized peer-to-peer environment, provides the best possible infrastructure for projects that favor open access and collaborative creativity over ownership and authorship. 

Examples of such works:

Show 5th Slide Half-Life Game

Counter Strike: First Person Shooter game, its first version was created entirely by its players, using the level-builders in the Half Life game engine. According to Celia Pearce, the Open Source movement is particularly strong in the First Person Shooter game genre, with games that tend to contain marginal narrative content, but are often at the forefront of engaging player creativity. In March 2001 Counter-Strike was awarded the best Studio award at the Computer Game Developers Conference, although its creators were not professional game designers, but Open-Sourcers who wanted to develop their own game environment. Counter Strike was made available as freeware on the web and quickly became the most popular Online First Person Shooter Game.

Show 6th Slide KR

When it comes to digital /media arts, they often involve appropriation, collaboration, and the free sharing of tools and ideas. So it is not surprising that a growing number of artists use open source technologies, and produce works that, among other things, recycle, duplicate or hack existing artworks or systems. 

Some of these artists are: 

•  Austrian-Swiss collective Knowbotic Research who experiment with formations of information, interface and networked agency, in an attempt to find viable forms of intervention in the public domain, 

Show 7th slide radioqualia

•  New Zealanders, London-based duo radioqualia who develop their own tools and use various streaming media softwares to experiment with the concept of artistic broadcasting, using the internet and traditional media forms, such as radio and television, as primary tools.http://www.radioqualia.net/

Show 8th slide Critical Art Ensemble

•  American interdisciplinary collective Critical Art Ensemble, dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technologies, critical theory and radical politics. 

Show 9th Slide YesMen

•  The YesMen. What some would call identity theft, and which they call ‘identity correction‘, by impersonating representatives of the most powerful multinational companies that have committed crimes for which they have never been charged. The Yes Men undertake to impersonate them in public, in conferences, on TV or on the web, in order to ‘correct their

4. show 10th slide “We asked about…” Strategies of Sharing

But let me go back to the Strategies of Sharing and the Deptford.TV project, and talk about our interviews and interviewees. The main aim of these interviews was to gain an insight into the complexities of producing  collaborative work within a creative context. We wanted to find out which are the processes and methodologies employed in such practices. Most importantly, we wanted to illuminate, through our discussions with these participants, their own, personal strategies and tactics. We used ‘heavy‘ terms, that is, terms that are loaded with multiple, often contradictory meanings, to challenge the participants, inviting them to offer their own definitions and approaches. The questions we asked followed three main threads: collaboration, authorship, and community. The issue of diversity came up during the interviews as a fourth thread, as participants either insisted on its importance or were immediately put off by the term. 

Show 11th slide “what does collaboration mean…”

We asked the contributors what collaboration means to them. Is it enjoyable as a process? Is it productive? Does it enhance creativity? Can it suppress individual creativity? Can it work outside hierarchical systems –or not?

Show 12th slide “What does authorship…”

We further asked how they perceive the notion of authorship and to what extent this is important to them as contributors of either content or context. Do they consider personal attribution to be important within a collaborative project? How do they feel when their work is reused, remixed or re-edited –and thus re-authored? And how do they feel about the fact that their work can be reused for commercial purposes, or for ideological purposes they do not necessarily endorse? To us, collaboration invokes the notion of a community that emerges from the very practices of sharing –we are talking about the sharing of time, space (physical or virtual), views, resources, content, skills, knowledge, information, and/or support networks. 

Show 13th slide “What does community…”

We asked the Deptford.TV participants what does the term community signify to them, hoping to get responses that are both personal and grounded in experience -rather than theoretical and ‘politically correct‘ answers. Furthermore, we asked whether the Deptford.TV project initiates, shapes, or awakens a community? And whether it includes, or possibly excludes, existing communities or individuals?

Show 14th slide “Interviewees …”

We interviewed 12 participants in 10 interview sessions. These were:

•  Janine Lãi, is a local resident, film-make. Janine has experienced a regeneration process in her own area, and hopes that her personal experience can feed into the context of the Deptford regeneration. She contributed film shot specifically for Deptford.TV
•  Gordon Cooper, is a local resident since 1978 and a film-maker. Gordon has an interest both in the Deptford area, and in generating open-access and shared resources through the use of alternative litigation such as the Creative Commons. Gordon contributed archive film material. 
•  Elvira, is a local resident, student and film-maker. She contributed film shot for D.TV
•  Bitnik are a media collective based in Zurich. Switzerland. Bitnik produce artistic, social and collaborative work. They are concerned with open media practices and the production of tools that can facilitate such practices. They produce their own software systems which they are interested to make applicable in different contexts. Their goal is to merge platform and content, and involve the audiences as producers. Bitnik contributed software. 
•  Stephen Oldfield, is a local resident since twenty years, and a sound artist. Stephen contributed a live sound performance and its recordings. 
•  Camden McDonald, is a local resident, a performer, and one of the initiators of the Mindsweeper project: a floating venue on a boat that hosts screenings and other small-scale events. Camden contributed the physical space of the Mindsweeper. 
•  Nik Hilton, is a local resident, and an architect. Nik is interested in the intersection between film and architecture. He got involved with Deptford.TV due to his interest in collaborative work, and the difficulty of applying this to his professional life as an architect. Nik is also interested in the local area and the Deptford communities. He contributed film shot for D.TV
•  James Stevens, is one of the initiators of the project Boundless (Deptford), and the initiator of Deckspace media lab (Greenwich). James has a long history as the initiator of projects concerned with open spaces and public access media. His main aim is to facilitate people’s access to technologies. James contributed the infrastructure for D.TV through these two projects, as well as the physical space for the D.TV workshops. 
•  Raw Nerve are a design collective based in Deptford. Raw Nerve work on a number of community-focused projects, and they aim to build up the connectivity between different creative people in the area. Raw Nerve contributed film archive material. 
•  Amanda Egbe, is a film-maker and a Goldsmiths MA student. Amanda is interested in the political and technical issues raised by practices of collaborative film-making, as well as the social issues raised by processes of regeneration. Amanda contributed film shot for D.TV. 

And now the Movie “Deptford.TV essay: strategies of sharing”, 5 min. (excerpt of 28 min).

Show first 5 to 10 minutes of the film