Strategies of Sharing: the Case-study of Deptford.TV
by Maria X & Adnan Hadzi
Watch the video-essay Strategies of Sharing (2006) at http://www.deptford.tv/bm/
Are you ready to share?
Web 2.0 is all about sharing and networking. Software like blogs, wikis, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and file-sharing platforms such as YouTube and Flickr have made it possible for anyone privileged enough to enjoy access to new technologies to publish their thoughts, diaries, personal information, literature, photos and videos, and invite everyone else to access, share and process this information (to varying degrees and subject to authorisation). This article attempts to explore the ‘strategies’ of sharing, using the project Deptford.TV (http://www.deptford.tv) as a case-study.
Deptford.TV is an open and networked project that employs methods of commons-based peer production and uses open source software to build a video database for collective film-making. It is also a community project that attempts to collectively document the regeneration process in the area of Deptford, Southeast London. Deptford.TV was initiated in September 2005 by Adnan Hadzi, in collaboration with SPC.org media lab (http://www.spc.org), Bitnik.org (http://www.bitnik.org/en), the Boundless.coop (http://www.boundless.coop), Liquid Culture (http://www.liquidculture.info) and Goldsmiths University of London.1 It started assembling audiovisual materials about Deptford and the regeneration process taking place in the area by asking local community members, video artists, film-makers, visual artists, activists and students to contribute diverse work2. All the rough materials and edited media content that people have submitted is available on the Deptford.TV database. The material will also be distributed over the boundless.coop wireless network using open content licenses. Deptford.TV is a work in progress which is currently growing by inviting more people to contribute audiovisual work, and by organising events in physical space, such as workshops and screenings.
The Art of Participation
It is old news that we live through ‘the information era’3. Nevertheless N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) discourse on information as pattern/randomness is very timely: Hayles argues that, whereas materiality is characterised by presence, information is characterised by pattern (as complementary to presence). She further argues that, within the information era, the presence-absence dialectic -although always pertinent- has been pushed into the background. In its place, a new dialectic has been foregrounded: that of pattern and randomness. Hayles goes on to explain that, whereas presence-absence is an oppositional dialectic (absence is the negation of presence), pattern and randomness are not oppositional but complementary. In that sense, randomness is not seen as the absence of pattern -in the way absence is seen as the lack of (material) presence- but as the ground for pattern to emerge. Pattern-randomness implies yet another shift of emphasis, claims Hayles: the shift from ownership to access. Whereas ownership requires a presence (something tangible one would wish to own), access implies pattern recognition.
In the field of art we have witnessed a shift from the material object (painting, sculpture etc.) to immaterial concepts, open-ended processes, distributed systems and relational environments since the early 1960s. Movements such as futurism, conceptual art, environments, events and happenings, and later on digital, new media or computational art, and ideas such as relational aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2001), brought this shift forth. As Hayles points out, whereas art objects were calling for someone to own them, immaterial concepts, open systems, processes and relationalities call for people to ’embody’ or ‘inhabit’ them, take part in them, contribute to them, co-create or ‘become’ them. Examples of such work are numerous: Tale of Tales’ (http://www.tale-of-tales.com) piece The Endless Forest (http://www.tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest) for example is, among other things, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG). The artists wanted the Forest, unlike some of their previous work4 or performances taking place in physical environments, to be always ‘live’. Nevertheless, they did not want the piece to depend on their constant presence for its ‘liveness’, as this would obviously be impossible. This led them to create a consistent virtual world which people can inhabit. The Endless Forest is always (a)live as users animate it through their own presence: in The Forest users become deer (as avatars) who inhabit -and thus become- the art-piece. This is not unlike Alan Kaprow’s environments and Happenings: the audiences were invited to get into Kaprow’s work, ‘become’ it, inhabit, enact and change it.
Networked practices often -but not always- operate as open systems that provide their users/audiences with access to their content, internal dramaturgies, structures, and/or rough materials. Due to their networking quality, which means that such works bring together many interconnected things or people, such practices can be more open, fluid, dynamic and unexpected in comparison to work created and thus ‘controlled’ by one artist or a tightly knit team. Such practices -and Deptford.TV is such as example- invite users/audiences to take part in them, rather than own them. The degree of access and involvement participants are offered depends on the project. It can vary from formal interaction where audiences can make choices within the frame of a predefined narrative, to co-authorship where participants are invited to create the piece together with its initiator(s). Even more radically, communities of users can, sometimes, initiate themselves the collective production of a piece5. Once participants become central to a piece and, possibly, claim co-authorship for it, the power, responsibility, and -conceptual, aesthetic, technical or other- control over the outcomes radically shifts from the ‘creator(s)/producers’ to the ‘audiences/consumers’. This shift challenges the traditional dichotomy between creators /producers vs. consumers of content and context, and calls for the rethinking of such distinctions.
Open projects that challenge the producer vs. consumer dichotomy demonstrate the emergence of a new paradigm called ‘commons-based peer production’. This term was coined by Yochai Benkler (2006) 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 organisation or financial compensation. The free and open source software movement along with collaborative projects such as wikis are the best known examples of such practice. In the cultural sphere a growing number of projects invite the audiences’ involvement, participation and contribution, 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 work6. Sher Doruff (2003: 73) employs the term ‘collaborative culture’ to describe cultural practices of collaboration and inter-authorship that shift the focus from conventional inter-disciplinary exchanges “towards a synergy that marginalizes individual contribution over the relational dynamics and emergent possibilities of the collective.” The Internet, being a decentralised peer-to-peer environment, provides a good infrastructure for projects that favour open access and collaborative creativity over ownership and authorship.7
Deptford.TV
But who are these people who want to share their work? Who are the Deptford.TV users? In the summer of 2006 there were 54 people involved with Deptford.TV, most of which were locals (living not only in Deptford but also other neigbhouring Southeast London areas such as New Cross, Greenwich, Peckham and Brockley). Although fairly diverse, these people shared three main interests: 1. film-making; 2. practices of file-sharing, open source software, alternative copyright litigation (copylefting) and remix culture; and 3. their local area of Deptford and the regeneration process currently taking place there.
Why do these people want to share their work? What kind of work are they prepared to share? Which strategies do they employ in the process of sharing? And how do they tackle the challenges such practices involve?
In that same summer (2006) we interviewed 12 Deptford.TV users. The aim of these interviews was to understand why these people were interested in contributing their work to the Deptford.TV project. We wanted to know what did collaboration mean to them, and how did they feel about their work being shared, remixed, re-edited, re-used, and redistributed.
The first issue we had to tackle was how to select participants for the interviews. Did our interviewees have to be a ‘representative sample’ of the people that took part in the project? Or could they be randomly selected? And what constitutes a ‘representative sample’ within this context? Should we undertake the process of labelling, counting and recruiting our interviewees according to their gender, nationality, and age range? Or should we select people in relation to their fields of expertise and contribution to the project?
We soon decided that a quantitative approach was not the most appropriate within our context, and that statistics were irrelevant. What we needed was for a different type of diversity to be represented: since we are looking at a collaborative project and wish to explore how people work together, we decided to interview people who made different types of contribution to the project: film-makers Janine Lãi, Elvira, and Amanda Egbe shot videos specifically for Deptford.TV; film-maker Gordon Cooper and design collective Raw Nerve contributed videos from their archive material; Bitnik media collective wrote software for Deptford.TV; Stephen Oldfield performed a live music gig which was documented and uploaded on the database; Camden McDonald offered a venue for live events (Mindsweeper); Nik Hilton created and contributed a video from his perspective as an architect; and James Stevens contributed the technical infrastructure for the project through Deckspace and Boundless. Our interviewees also happened to be fairly diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and age, although this reflects the diversity of the Deptford.TV participants rather than our concern about these interviews.
On Collaboration
Over the past fifteen years artists have clearly become increasingly interested in collective work. The nature of group work has also changed fundamentally. More and more frequently, artists are co-operating with one another (…) in order to exploit shared strengths and talents but also in order to depart from well-trodden paths that are dependent on the subject. (Block & Nollert, 2005: 8)
The first thing we wanted to discuss with the participants of Deptford.TV is the notion of collaboration. The most important element of Deptford.TV as well as many other Web 2.0 practices from YouTube to Wikipedia is a mentality of openness, which becomes manifest in practice as collaboration, exchange and sharing. So we asked the interviewees what collaboration means to them. In asking such a broad question we clearly were not after a dictionary definition of the term – what we wanted was each participant’s very personal take on collaboration as a methodology for producing work -as well as living everyday life.
All the participants talked about collaboration in terms of sharing. For them, it is not just about working together. Most importantly, collaboration is about sharing resources and expertise in order to create collaboratively something that none of them could create on his/her own. They all described collaboration as a rich, enjoyable and productive experience that involves discussion and negotiation and brings together people from diverse backgrounds, disciplines and fields of expertise. Kieran McMillan (Raw Nerve) describes collaboration as “jamming together”, whereas Rebecca Molina (Raw Nerve) talks about it as “empowerment achieved through the exchange of knowledge, expertise, and resources.” Oldfield identifies collaboration with the willingness to explore new ideas and, in doing so, abandon any predefined structures that might prove too rigid or inappropriate.
While in favour of collaboration as a creative practice, the interviewees also described it as a complex and time-consuming process that requires an investment of time and energy. Everyone stressed the importance of allowing time for a collaborative process to evolve organically. Stevens pointed out that lack of time can lead to the formation of what people often consider as more time-effective systems of collaboration such as committees, which often become too rigid and have the opposite results by suppressing communication, creativity and individuality. Everybody agreed that, despite the difficulties it involves, collaboration is a process worth investing in, in terms of the quality of both the experience and its outcomes.
An issue that kept resurfacing is the tackling of hierarchical systems of organisation within collaborative practices. We asked the Deptford.TV participants whether they consider leadership to be necessary in the framework of such practices. Can members of a group operate on equal footing without a leader? If leadership is necessary, can it shift from one person to another rather than being identified with one fixed leader?
Most of the participants declared their preference for collaboration within flexible schemas where roles can shift, and individual leadership -if this emerges as a necessity- can be distributed rather than centralised. Elvira and Lãi declared that, although leadership might be necessary in certain group situations, they are not interested in collaborating within traditional hierarchical scenarios where one leader undertakes overall control. Bitnik agreed, but pointed out that leader-free groups ran a higher risk of ‘failure’: things can easily go wrong and projects can fail to work out. Nevertheless, Bitnik consider the process of equal collaboration within artistic practice so important, that they see this as a risk worth taking. Raw Nerve, on the other hand, think that leadership is necessary in terms of vision and drive -without (a) fixed leader(s), they argue, there is no overall vision (although there can be many clashing ones) and collaboration can lead to chaos and frustration. It is worth observing that, as a design collective that collaborates with the industry, Raw Nerve are more consumer-oriented compared to the rest of the participants, and thus have a stronger interest to secure effective product delivery.
Throughout these interviews the idea of ‘equal footing’ was repeatedly identified as an important aspect of a healthy collaboration. It soon became apparent though that the diverse participants of a collaborative project need not be expected to contribute ‘the same’ or in the same way. Bitnik argued that, within a group, there are always people who need more time than others because they are less articulate /vocal /confident /motivated, or just not clear about what they want to do and/or how to achieve it. Bitnik stressed that a group should actively try and involve such people rather than conveniently push them aside and get on with the work. Nevertheless, they also stressed that no member of a group should be expected to sacrifice or suppress their personality or ideas in order to facilitate the function of the group as a whole, as this is bound to eventually lead to dissatisfaction and conflict.
Cooper insisted on the importance of collaboration based on equal footing, particularly within the context of a ‘community project’. He has often witnessed people outside a specific community coming in as leaders of projects that are supposedly designed for the benefit of the community; Cooper stressed that this practice can be patronising towards the very community it purports to benefit. Stevens discussed the danger of projects being closely ‘guarded’ by their initiator or a core group of participants who invest too much in them to be able to let go. He believes that the aim of a community project is for the community itself to take over so that the project can be ‘dissolved’ within it. This means that ownership of the project should be dispersed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a single leader or core group.
All the participants agreed that collaborative projects, other than being richer and more enjoyable experiences, often result to better outcomes due to their interdisciplinary nature. Raw Nerve particularly insisted on the quality of the work produced through interdisciplinary collaboration. They argued that such practices can produce outcomes that a sole artist/ professional would never have been able to develop in isolation. Bitnik also stressed their interest in working collaboratively as a collective. They pointed out that, within the field of digital /new media art and activism interdisciplinary collaborations are often necessary, since the sharing of skills and resources is vital for certain projects to be realised. Finally, Lãi and Cooper both pointed out that collaborative work often brings longer-lasting results, as it is the outcome of a more organic process.
On Authorship
There is a tradition that includes Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, the comte de Lautréamont, and Jorge Luis Borges that rejects the originality of the author, characterises the author as producer, and identifies a collective authorship: Individuals are the ensemble of their social and cultural relationships. They compile and arrange knowledge and act as mediators of an idea, and ergo exist as a subject in the plural. (Nollert, 2005: 25)
All the interviewees have contributed their own work to Deptford.TV, thus allowing for its re-distribution, remix, re-edit and reuse through alternative licensing systems such as the Creative Commons and GNU General Public license. We wanted to know why they decided to do that. How do they feel about the fact that their work can be reused? Do they think personal attribution is important? Why did they decide to abandon or share control over their own work?
Everyone agreed on the importance of personal attribution in terms of protecting their identity as creators of content or context, as well as the work itself (which can be tracked down and monitored). Having said that, most of the participants also agreed that once their work is in the public domain, it is not their own property any more. Elvira felt that once people watch her films they become theirs too. Oldfield, whose sound performances operate a lot through improvisation, explained that his work emerges as the outcome of specific circumstances the audiences make part of. In that sense his performances are not his own, but belong to everyone present at the time of their creation. Bitnik are happy for their code to be re-authored as they think that this process can threaten neither the work nor their identity as artists as long as they are being attributed as the first authors of the piece.
Many of the participants pointed out that “nothing is new”: we are all already re-using ideas, concepts, forms and aesthetics, and base our work on huge amounts of other work which has influenced us throughout our lives.8 This can be artistic work but also folk stories, music, crafts, common cultural references, and everything else that constitutes our cultural ‘baggage’. Through our work we develop and reproduce a lot of these references, or we use them as stepping stones to get somewhere else. What an author actually does, argued Bitnik, is to give form, identify, make emerge and/or attribute specific meaning to something that is already there, rather than produce something new out of nothing. Since our work is already based on the recycling of culture and ideas, many of the participants argued, why should we be so protective of it? Why shouldn’t we allow for our work to be recycled and for other people to use it as their stepping stone? Why shouldn’t this work belong to the whole community as well as a single author?
Re-using existing work and allowing for one’s own work to be re-used enhances creativity -this is something everybody agreed on. Elvira felt that mainstream litigation often limits creativity through blocking what is a natural process of sharing and re-appropriation. Bitnik see re-appropriation as liberating of both content and practice. Other interviewees, such as Oldfield and Lãi, believe that sharing is beneficial to the work itself, as it allows it to achieve its highest possible impact. Lãi argued that one has to trust that one’s work (in her case film) will not be used in ways that are not appropriate -the only other option is to ‘bury’ the work for fear of something that, most probably, will never happen. Cooper made the same point: one has to either take a risk as a creator and liberate his/her work, or else cling to it for ever, hiding it away from public view and debate.
Raw Nerve described how their designs can acquire a life of their own once allowed to keep developing in the hands of other people -a life that they themselves had not anticipated. They nevertheless made a distinction between sharing their work with communities, and being ‘ripped off’ by big companies who will happily appropriate their designs without paying a fair fee. Cooper was also sceptical in terms of releasing his film archives to the public domain: although he will happily share some pieces, other works are too important for him to share, and he prefers to keep for himself. He thinks that this balance between sharing and holding on to, opening up to public usage and keeping for oneself, is very important in terms of safeguarding one’s individuality as an artist as well as any particularly precious (in terms of either monetary or emotional value) piece of work.
Among the people we interviewed, Stevens was the most sceptical concerning issues of authorship and the use of alternative licenses. He pointed out that currently there is a lot of confusion and contradictions around these issues. Stevens thinks that this confusion deters many artists from taking part in collaborative projects and making their work freely available. According to Stevens, alternative licensing systems attempt to explore and map any ‘open space’ in media production and usage. He explained that such systems support a policy of restrictive openness as an alternative to the current copyright policy of absolute restriction and total overall control. Nevertheless, Stevens argued that alternative licensing systems are extremely complex, and people who make use of these should be prepared to defend themselves and/or their work in case of misuse or misrepresentation. He believes that wider exploitation of these licenses will unavoidably bring forth such issues in the future.
Conclusions (Maria X)
- Share your work, but do it your own way. You will find it is worth it.
- Be prepared to invest time and energy into the process of sharing.
- Be sure to gain a rich experience in return for your investment.
- Be prepared to stand up for yourself as there is always a chance that people will try to misuse the work or misrepresent you as an author. Nevertheless remember that, most likely, none of these will happen.
- Be certain of the benefits of communicating your work to a wider audience through opening it up and allowing for it to be shared.
- Let go. A collaborative project does not belong to you, even if you are its initiator.
- Collaboration is about diversity.
- Collaboration is hard work -take your time, be prepared for conflict, and allow for ‘failure’ as well as ‘success’.
- Nothing is new, and your ideas are no different…
- Finally:
The individual and the group cannot avoid a certain existential plunge into chaos. This is already what we do every night when we abandon ourselves to the world of dreams. The main question is what we gain from this plunge: a sense of disaster, or the revelation of new outlines of the possible? (Guattari, 1992: 1)
We started interviewing Deptford.TV participants in an attempt to understand what made them interested in the project and willing to share their work with potentially anyone who would like to use it. By the end of the interviews we had, as always, even more questions, but we also had some answers: it became clear that all the participants we interviewed enjoyed taking part in Deptford.TV as this provided an opportunity to produce new work (film, performance, software, other) within an interesting and inspiring (to them) social context and/or revive archived projects by contributing them as content within a ‘living’ database. According to Sharon Daniel:
A ‘conception’ of the ‘beauty’ of a database is not located in the viewer’s interpretation of a static form but in the dynamics of how a user inflects the database through interaction with its field or frame. A database incorporates contradiction (…).The aesthetic dimensions of the database arise when the user traverses this field of unresolved contradictions.
Talking with its participants we understood how Deptford.TV, as a database film-making project, exists as a dynamic, permanently in flux “field of unresolved contradictions”: the participants talked to us about their will to share one’s work with like-minded people and their fear of the work being misused; their wish to explore alternative copyright litigation and their scepticism regarding the legal complexities alternative licensing systems are bound to unearth; their feelings of ownership and protectiveness towards their own work, as well as their desire to see the work evolve and acquire several unpredictable lives of its own. According to Hadzi (2006: 8) one of the aims of Deptford.TV is to raise awareness about individual responsibility in the way we relate to mass media, through providing a multiplicity of accessible standpoints which await for us to select and possibly shape into potential ‘news-feeds’. Through these discussions I remain positive that Deptford.TV succeeds to generate an open, flexible and dynamic pool of contradictions that demands from its spectators to create their own ‘spectacles’. How many people will actually take the challenge though? We’ll have to wait and see.
P.s.
You are personally invited to rewrite this essay. You can watch the edited video essay Strategies of Sharing (2006) at http://www.deptford.tv/bm/
You can access the full unedited interviews on http://watch.deptford.tv (you need to register as a deptford.tv user to be able to access these and more than 2,000 other clips online, as well as use the technical platform for collaborative film-editing).
this text is also published in the body, space & technology journal
NOTES
1 Deptford.TV was initiated and is currently managed by Adnan Hadzi (2006) as a practice-led research project. Hadzi’s research focuses on new forms of film-making and the development of technologies and platforms that can support collective post-production, which he believes is the most difficult part of film production in terms of collaborative work. This is the main difference between Deptford.TV and other file-sharing platforms such as YouTube: the aim of Deptford.TV is not just to provide a database of videos that everyone can access, but also to provide the technical platform that will allow for the collaborative processing and post-production of these film materials. Another major difference is that Deptford.TV is a thematic project which collects videos that relate to the area of Deptford in Southeast London and the regeneration process that takes place there. Deptford is one of Southeast London’s oldest industrial areas and has always been one of the most underprivileged areas of the country. According to Heidi Seetzen (2006), “Deptford is now the site of a number of high-profile buildings and cultural projects, to the point that there is now talk of the emergence of a ‘Deptford Riviera’ and a limited amount of media speculation that the area may finally emerge as “Britain’s answer to Left Bank.””
2 For example current work, archives, rough materials, edited content, but also performances in physical space which are documented and put on the web.
3 For example see Toffler, A. (1980) The Third Wave. New York: William Morrow & Co.; and Bell, D. (1973) The Coming of Post Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting. New York: Basic Groups
4 See for example Wirefire (1999-2003) http://www.etrnopy8zuper.org/wirefire, or 8 (2003-4, exists only as prototype) http://www.tale-of-tales.com/8/
5 The First Person Shooter game Counter Strike is a good example: according to Celia Pearce (2003), the first version of the game was created entirely by its players using the level-builders in the Half Life game engine.
6 See for example the work of UK-based group Radioqualia http://www.radioqualia.net, Danish collective Superflex http://www.superflex.net, as well as the work of programmer /artist Jaromil http://rastasoft.org
7 In saying that it is important to point out that I in no way consider the Internet to be a ‘pure’ medium – I would rather think that it is, by now, clear to all that it has become heavily controlled by corporate giants such as Microsoft and AOL. To quote Doruff again (2003: 77), “There is no guarantee that the self-organizational innovation commons of the Net will continue under the potentially crippling controls of wireless protocols, perhaps dead-ending the future of proliferating communities.”
8 When it comes to literature Julia Kristeva (1980: 69) has introduced this idea through her notion of ‘intertextuality’, which refers to the vertical connection of a text to other texts. This notion is very much associated with poststructuralist theory.
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