Deptford.TV takes part in the Transmission.cc workshops (during the Video Vortex conference in Amsterdam in January 2008). VX:mission will look at how distribution of Social Justice Video is happening using Free and Open Source technology. It is a chance to find out about existing distribution projects, get feedback for your own projects or ideas, find collaborators and scheme about how best to distribute your video. This is event is associated with the transmission network. For more info check http://transmission.cc

The kinds of things we’ll discuss and work on are…

• Open source Video Content Management and transcoding systems
• Translations and Subtitling tools
• Help files and Documentation to help people get involved
• Video Distribution Strategy

This gathering is planned in a association with FlossManuals .net and clearerchannel.org. It has a focus on how we can better document projects and create user-oriented help.

VX:mission:

A night of films and ideas from the world of radical social justice video. VX:mission is a working gathering of video activist and open software technology hackers. We are working together to increase the noise of social justice video on the internet and the digital pirate airwaves. Join us on this night as we bring you videos, news from the digital underground and a plan to save us from the corporate digital vacuum cleaners like YouTube.

• Introductory short Indymedia films
  and summary of Imc-Video situation.
• Demo of Plumi http://www.engagemedia.org – 10 mins
  and films from EngageMedia
• Demo of http://ifiwatch.tv and films introduced by Ifiwatch.tv’s coordinator, Zoe Young
• Demo of and Video docs on Floss Manuals and Films from Clearerchannel.org
• Demo of VisionTV custom Miro player- 10 mins
  and VisononTV films
• Show in a Box, the WordPress video blog and films
• UK Indymedia films and video activist collective Reel2Real

Drupal as a Video Distribution platform: Saturday Hacklab session

Co-ordinators Mick Fuzz, Zoe Young, Mark b
Looking at Film Forge and ifiwatch.tv as examples. Pros and Cons of Drupal

Aggregation : http://ifiwatch.tv

IFIWatch.TV exists to aggregate independent media on the International Financial Institutions – that is, on the World Bank, IMF and Regional Development Banks. This video portal has lately been redesigned to suck relevant feeds from online video publishing websites, display appropriate content and enable users to create their own feeds from the results of searches for video that interests them. To reach its full potential as a new model ‘node’ in emerging independent media networks, the system will require more and more feeds to feature standardised video metadata, so that content management systems can automatically sort and present video information in ways that make it easier for humans to find the media they want. The Transmission Metadata Standard is now ready to implement, and we will be promoting this to all who wish to facilitate more effective exchange of online video.

Video Upload and distribution : http://wiki.koumbit.net/FilmForge/

FilmForge is a distribution (or profile) of the Free/Libre Open Source Softare content management system Drupal, tailored to the needs of videomaking communities. FilmForge makes it simple to install and run your own video sharing site.

Video Documentation / Flossmanuals : Saturday Hacklab session

co-ordinator Adam Hyde

Presentation Floss manuals system and new Video related docs on Flossmanuals and Suitcasemanuals.net

In this session we’ll be looking at Floss manuals system, new video distribution documentation and other relevant work. FLOSS Manuals provides quality free manuals about how to use free software.

There are new manuals on Video Encoding, Video Distribution and DVD and subtitle creation. We hope that this can be useful for the Video activist and independent video production community.

Show in a Box : Saturday Hacklab session

Co-ordinators: Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson (from http://ryanishungry.com)

Presentation: Show-In-A-Box, Word Press video distribution system

Many video creators are shy of the web since they want to make sure their work looks good online.
Being artists ourselves, we know that presentation is very important.
Being media activists, we also know that using open source tools and sane copyrights are also important.

WordPress is a fantastic blogging tool and we’ve been using it to run videoblogs for a few years now. Over time we’ve begun to develop and use some tools that make WordPress better suited for video. Show-In-A-Box was created to bring these all together and create the ultimate videoblogging platform.

http://showinabox.tv/wordpress/about/

We are making custom WP plugins to better manipulate video. We are also making beautiful, original themes that better showcase video. We have video tutorials and a strong community to help guide newbies to creating their own videoblog to document the world around us.

We’ll show lots of awesome examples of what online video can look like using free and open tools.

Customising Miro Player: Sunday am

Co-ordinator: Richard Visionontv

Presentation: Transmission branded Miro player (Richard), and Visionontv customised Miro player (tbc)

Collectives are changing the Miro player so that they can offer a download of the player with their own channels, search features and other features added.

We’ll look at how this is done and what it means to video networks.

Subtitling Video and the Internet : Sunday pm

Co-ordinator Harcesz

Presentations Proposal for a new subtitle website, Subtitle workflow for creating DVDs

This session will look at some of the issues and opportunities facing film makers who can use the Internet to co-ordinate, create and distribute subtitle for their films.

• Specifically this session will look at plans for an open source DotSub type library website for for social justice films.

• Looking at the functionality of new tools like G8tv.org and subtitle horse. http://subtitle-horse.org/

• Outlining a workflow for creating a multilingual DVD via online collaboration.

Video.indymedia.org : Sunday pm

Co-ordinator Clara

Presentation What is the current situation with imc-video site.

A discussion bring people up to date with developments concerning a global indymedia video site. The aims would be to search across video feeds created by regional IMCs and provide a space to upload video .

There is a wiki page on this subject on the global indymedia wiki

giss.tv

Co-ordinator tati

Presentation giss tv
giss.tv is an independent voluntary platform for sharing streaming resources between different groups. It was born after the piksel

festival and has been evolving since then aroudn our empathic networks.
Is a ring of icecast2-kh servers that allows automatic forwarding when the main servers are full of clients.

also provides a web interfaceto open a mountpoint and create a landing webpage for your channel, with chat, information for next scheduled streams, etc.

it started between several admins from servers that had an icecast and wants to be a way of sharing resources, as the streams can reach peaks but the streaming servers usually have more power than they need (until they need 20 times their power!).

We are working closely with the icecast developers in the kh branch, that allows automatic relay forwarding.Icecast version: Icecast 2.3-kh18c from: http://www.icecast.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
We are being used by many small radios, and some more commercial ones, but the idea is to serve free content streams.
We are still in
development and have some big questions to answer, like:
* How can we provide admin tools or sharing options to the adins of theservers?
* How can we really protect the anonimity of the streamers? (icecast
serves the IPs – specially asked by indymedia)
* How can we link the users with the streams they might like? (working
currently in rss feeds, and yellow pages stuff.
* How can we clean the server of commercial music, when our own groups use it as part of their material? (how can you convince apunk radio that the clash is not punk enough for us? is it needed?)

Please do follow the discussion on irc if you can’t make it in person. irc.freenode.net #transmission.cc

http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/NewVideoIndymediaOrgProposal

Producing Collaborative DVDs for screenings via the Internet : Sunday am

Co-ordinator Mick Fuzz

How can we create DVDs in a Decentralised way. Is there a demand for a European wide DVD of social justice events to be used for screenings.

Past projects RuffCuts and the indymedia ENR have looked a decentralised way of creating CDroms and VHSs for screening at public venues. Broadband technology opens the door for a new level of collaboration. Broadcast quality Video files can be exchanged and on-line translation tools used to create and distribute multilingual DVDs.

We look at the question, are there existing networks of Video producers who can benefit from these technology and explore possible future projects and how can they work together.

Network Distribution Services and International Screening Database : Sunday pm

Co-ordinators Simon Worthington, Laura Oldenbourg and Merijn Oudenampsen

Presentation Mute Agents site

Existing distributors consistently fail the cultural sector and have not taken sufficient advantage of the Web for e-commerce and social networking. The mission of NDS is to provide an alternative. Using the Web’s ability to help people share information and collaborate, it enables the global promotion, sales and fulfillment of goods, improving cultural producers’ sustainability and visibility at national and international level.

The system works by creating a global web of locally-inputted information, ranging from producers and agents to outlets and goods.

Two core barriers to the creation of a global market place for independent cultural products are high freight costs and a parity of goods’ prices. We are tackling these through systems we (and others) call ‘Community Couriering’ (CC) and Peer-to-Peer E-commerce (P2P EC). With CC, people carry goods for less than commercial couriers’ rates (when they are taking certain routes for other purposes already); with P2P EC, producers and buyers negotiate prices to index them to the purchasing power in the relevant region rather than via a straight currency conversion (this is known as Purchasing Power Parity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity ).

See: dev site http://agents.metamute.org and our work area http://3d.openmute.org

The 0xdb, developed as part of the “Oil of the 21st Century” project, is a proposal for a new type of cultural database, build on top of file-sharing networks — and a practical intervention in the ongoing conflict between the protection of intellectual property and the exercise of fair use rights.

The 0xdb is a rather unique kind of movie database. It uses a variety of publicly accessible resources, like search engines and file-sharing networks, to automatically collect information about, and actual images and sounds from, a rapidly growing number of movies. What the 0xdb provides is, essentially, full text search within movies, and instant previews of search results.

The core idea behind the 0xdb is that file-sharing networks can not only be used to download digital works, but also to just retrieve information about them. Even though most movies in the 0xdb are copyrighted, and many of them are practically inaccessible for legal reasons, the monitoring of peer-to-peer traffic allows the 0xdb to identify and index these materials.

The 0xdb is not a place to download movies, which in many parts of the world would constitute copyright infringement. The 0xdb simply exercises a few elementary fair use rights: it collects metadata, provides citations, analyzes and contextualizes different types of media, and makes both the information it gathers and the tools it employs available for personal, non-commercial use.

Quite obviously, the 0xdb is also intended to serve as a point of reference for private or public institutions that are planning to make accessible large collections of films. Rather than a universal solution for the problem of cinema, or a definitive answer to the question of the archive, the 0xdb tries to provide a few practical starting points for the digital future of moving images.

The 0xdb has been developed as part of the project “The Oil of the 21st Century” (www.oil21.org).

Another recent development is Pad.ma, an annotated film archive based in Bombay (www.pad.ma).

DISPS exists to provide a novel revenue source for content producers. The architecture we describe derives from a pragmatic assessment of the increasing inefficacy of copy restriction given massive increases in storage space, bandwidth and interconnectivity. If we accept that restricting copies is becoming a Sisyphean task, it follows that we must look beyond copies and copyright in conceptualising systems of remuneration for cultural work.

Looking forward, we see a great opportunity for small-to-medium sized media enterprises (SMEs) to maximise usage of efficient, scalable, free p2p networks by encouraging free copying and distribution of their materials, whilst actively seeking voluntary supportive payments from consumers.

Embracing the Pirate: The New Landscape of Online Media Sharing by Resources, review by Pamela Cohn:

IDFA is the largest documentary festival and market in the world. And this being my first foray to the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, things have been a bit overwhelming. But certain themes are cropping up that reflect the sign of the times, not only in documentary, but in making and disseminating art for the marketplace, in general. So here’s a short missive from what I’ve been hearing the last few days.

Films Transit CEO Jan Rofekamp says that,The circuit of documentary festivals has created the partly-true illusion that the market is immense, which in turn has fed immense production volume. But the question is whether the traditional distribution channels can absorb it.The one thing I keep hearing from folks who have been coming to IDFA for years, is that the stars of the festival seem not to be the filmmakers anymore, but the sales agents and other industry entities that come to buy films and other media products here.

In response to that, there is very vocal pushback from the filmmaking community as DIY production and the possibilities of DIY marketing and distribution on the Internet take precedence over more traditional scenarios. Rofekamp also says, In the near future [Jamie King would argue that the future is now, in this regard], I think the revenue stream for entrepreneurial producers will be found online. . . . Internet distribution will mean complete freedom to the filmmakers: they can obviously offer a five-minute masterpiece or an extended five-hour version, depending on their intentions. The consensus seems to be that for all the mass proliferation of online studios that are offering revenue sharing to showcase, market and distribute film and music, filmmakers no longer need to feel that that’s the wisest choice in terms of making money for themselves.

Yesterday was the last day of the IDFA Forum and at the Now Media Hour that closed out the three intense days of pitches, Jamie King from the UK talked quite eloquently, even poetically, about the latest developments in DIY distribution. King is a writer and publishes articles on new media in various online and off-line magazines, and is also one of the makers of Steal This Film I and II. These films talk about media file sharing, and the Old Guard’s fear of new distribution forms. During his presentation, King showed a clip from Part II and explained that both brick-and-mortar and online distributors should be fearful. He’s helping to create freeware for Distributive Supportive Payment (DISP) systems basically using the same model that, say, Radiohead is using for its latest album release of voluntary supportive payments that go directly to the artists.

King preached to the audience, Embrace piracy it is the most efficient distribution system out there. Stop trying to keep people from seeing or using your media. King also reiterated that pay models are doomed because the distribution problem is solved; there is no longer a scarcity of media (hardly), and that lack of product scarcity makes the possibility of making money vanish’s time to give it away and reap the rewards. A completely anti-intuitive concept, yes, but apparently true as we watch the landscape shift irrevocably beneath our feet.

Launch of the Converge book at the Grande Finale of the Inclusion Through Media program. http://www.converge.org.uk

Deptford.TV uses the Converge Manual as HowTo publish video content on the Deptford.TV database. See also partner webpages http://www.flossmanuals.net & http://www.transmission.cc

Converge (an ITM project) created new opportunities for young people to exhibit and distribute moving image productions.
The project:

• Developed a website and published information, about existing sites where young people can upload their digital videos.
• Run a series of ‘How To’ hands-on workshops across a number of the partner groups, to enable young people to fully utilise both existing offers and build their own open source based channels.

The Inclusion Through Media (ITM) partnership, led by Hi8us Projects started in 2004. More than 20 UK partners and eight Transnational partners have produced a vast range of creative film, video and digital media work made by talented young people from different backgrounds, different parts of the country and different European countries.

ITM has been an enormously successful partnership with impressive outcomes and achievements. With the programme coming to an end in December 2007, we would like to celebrate, highlight and share our best practice. Above all we want to showcase the successful and innovative work of our participants, with our participants.

Arts Council London invites you to consider with us the implications of MySpace, Second Life, Facebook, You Tube, Flickr and other online collaborative interfaces on artistic practice and cultural participation. Do they represent a fully democratised cultural opportunity for artists and audiences?  Does endless availability, access and openness lead to a deterioration in artistic quality? Is the paid professional contributing any more than the unpaid amateur?

Join in the discussion with:-

Andrew Keen: Author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur’
Adnan Hadzi: Initiator Deptford.TV
Alex Fleetwood: Producer and associate of Punchdrunk
Saul Albert: Artist and co-founder of ‘The People Speak’ and nm-x.org

ANDREW KEEN is a Silicon Valley author, broadcaster and entrepreneur whose acclaimed new book ‘Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing Our Culture’ presents an antidote to the prevailing assumptions around Internet cultural democracy as championed by Charles Leadbeater. Andrew is a prominent media personality who has appeared on CNN International, NPR, and BBC Newsnight. He has written for The Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian, and has been featured in many publications including Time Magazine, the Financial Times,  the Sunday Times, & the Independent.

ADNAN HADZI is undertaking a practice-based PhD, ‘the author vs. the collective’, that focuses on the influence of digitalisation and the new forms of (documentary-) film production, as well as the author’s rights in relation to collective authorship. This is interdisciplinary research that combines sources and expertise from the fields of media and communication, computer studies and architecture. The practical outcome will be a online database drawing on the current regeneration process centred around the Laban dance centre in Deptfort, London. The databse serves as a platform for artists and filmmakers and as such enables to store and share the documentation of the regeneration development.

ALEX FLEETWOOD is an artist and producer of Hide & Seek, London’s first pervasive games festival. He is a collaborative associate of Punchdrunk Theatre Company and along with other artists and creatives will be exploring audience participation within alternate reality gaming as part of the PlayTime Lab at this years London Games Festival Fringe.

SAUL ALBERT, our esteemed compere, is an artist, coder and writer known for his open source ethos and advocacy of collaborative, self-organised structures. Instrumental in establishing projects such as the University of Openess, nm-x.org, Node London and others, Saul is co-producer of The People Speak, which is currently re-inventing funding models with  ‘Who Wants to Be..’. Based on the ask-the-audience feature of the popular TV game show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ it helps large groups of people to make suggestions, discuss an issue, and to vote on each step in a creative decision-making process.

In association with the PlayTime Lab at this years London Games Festival Fringe. http://www.londongamesfringe.com/

The People speak gameshow is uploaded to the Deptford.TV database.

How to Buy a Woodland (Albany Theatre)

October 9, 2007
7:30 pm	to	9:30 pm

On the 9th October 2007, London based art collective ‘The People Speak‘ conducted a radical experiment in live entertainment. ‘Who Wants to Be?’ mixed democratic decision-making, interactive animation and improvisation into a dangerously spontaneous game show.

Video on Archive.org

Using a computer vision voting system designed for use by hoards of rowdy people, the audience at the Albany Theatre in Deptford decided that what they really wanted to do, after all was buy a piece of woodland together!

An excited crowd gathered at the Albany Theatre, where they were wowed by the whirling crystal ball of money, which sat, enticingly at the front of the auditorium. By the end of the first 45 minutes, the audience had decided to use the £1000 to buy something that could be shared by everyone who had put their money in the hat.

The second half was spent coming up with ideas for what that could be. The suggestion that we should buy and share an animal turned into a real controversy, with some saying it would be cruel to keep moving any animal – ‘even a goldfish’ between 100 people.

Eventually, the animal idea was vetoed, and instead, someone proposed that we buy a nice bike and a digital camera, and then using Google calendar and other online tools, plot a relay route between all of the audiences homes, and document a massive relay cycle with photos and blog postings.

Then someone suggested land: after discussions about a dodgy-sounding timeshare in Spain and a squatted old boat in Deptford Creek, the audience fixated on the idea of buying a woodland together. The final vote was between buying a woodland, the bike and camera blog, and doing some guerilla gardening together.

This time, the woodland won by a comfortable majority, so everyone’s names and emails were collected, and the practical and legal challenges of buying a woodland for an entire audience began!

Eventually, we discovered that woodlands are really expensive because of legal work, and that you can’t just buy one – they need looking after. Then we found a fantastic company called Woods for All which enabled us to buy shared ownership in the woodland for the audience – while actually doing something good for the environment by making sure the wood is looked after.

Each audience member was allowed to choose a share in either Taldrum Wood in South Wales, or Spring Wood in Devon – both spectacularly beautiful woodlands.

Only 13 months later – a deed of ownership arrived in the mail! Many thanks are due to Gary Moore from Woods for All for making it happen. Here’s a scan of ours:

During the Jihlava filmfestival in October 2007 Adnan Hadzi presented the converge project and gave a workshop for documentary filmmakers on how to publish their videos with free and open source software. The text “Now deal with it” is published in the reader of the Institute for Documentary Film.

Have you broken up with the celluloid and instead got hooked to the web? The workshop is of particular interest for any film-makers, musicians and web people Enthusiasts keen to learn how to get their work online.

The workshop introduced tools,technologies and available services for encoding, uploading and sharing films, podcasts and video blogs online using free and open source software such as Broadcast Machine (RSS feed,Democracy Player, iTunes Vodcast). Participants where shown how to use x.264 technology (portable video devices iPod,sony PSP, Archor etc.),demonstrating how one can encode and prepare movies with free and open source tools that can be taken home.

Now deal with it!

This text is published under the creative commons sa-by license, for the full license see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

Collaborative projects are co-shaped by all the people taking part in them in terms of not only expertise and fields of interest, but also cultural back-grounds, viewpoints, personalities and temperaments. My research in new forms of documentary film-making at the Media and Communication Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London focuses on the aspect of collaborative production methods for (documentary) film, one outcome is the Deptford.TV project.

The Deptford.TV project generates an online public space where contributors can discuss the regeneration process and the transformations this brings to specific, physical public spaces. This online public space exists as a weblog on the website http://deptford.tv. Video-blogging has been discussed as a form of collective documentary-making.

“In relation to the use of online (found) footage the term ‘collective documentary’ becomes highly relevant, on the one hand emphasizing the intention of telling something significant about real life events, on the other hand telling that the work is made as a result of several people working together, not as an organized team defined by a given task, but rather as a small community with shared interests.” (Hoem, 2004:6)

Hoem goes on to argue that blogs provide “an individual base for entering a community” (2004:7): on the one hand maintaining a blog is an individual activity, whereas on the other hand the process of blogging often becomes part of a collaborative effort where diverse people contribute different types of content in multiple ways and on different levels. According to Hoem blogs are blurring “the boundaries between production, distribution and consumption” (2004:7), whereas they necessarily redefine notions of media literacy so

as to “reflect(s) an awareness of both the consuming and the producing aspects of media technology.” (2004:7)

This text looks at how the participants of the Deptford.TV project perceived 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?

Every single contributor feels that personal attribution is important as it protects their identity as creators of either content or context, and allows them to track down their input as well as any ‘transformations’ their contribution might undergo through being reused, re-edited or remixed. Elvira, one of the collaborators, points out that Deptford.TV can fluctuate as a group, which is why it cannot be used as an umbrella. At the same time, she feels that once her material goes on the public domain it belongs to whoever wants to watch and/or use it. She thinks that this process of sharing is there to enhance creativity as it reduces the limitations imposed by mainstream litigation.

Hoem sees video-blogging as collective documentary-making. In his paper “Videoblogs as Collective Documentary” he states that “in relation to the use of online (found) footage the term ‘collective documentary’ becomes highly relevant, at one hand emphasizing the intention of telling something significant about real life events, on the other hand telling that the work is made as a result of several people working together, not as a organized team defined by a given task, but rather as a small community with shared interests.” (2004: 6)

“The most successful online environments seem to be those which are designed in order to make it possible to post information at different levels, socializing new users into the systems publishing-culture. Blogs provide some of these socializing effects providing an individual base for enteringa community, blurring the boundaries between production, distribution and consumption. […] It is important that our notion of media literacy reflects an awareness of both the consuming and the producing aspects of media technology. This is an area where textual blogging already seems to prove its potential. Maintaining a weblog is primarily an individual activity, but since production is closely connected to media consumption blogging often becomes part of a collaborative effort where a number of people might contribute in a multitude of ways. […] When making video online the most important aspect of collective documentaries is that the raw material is provided by a number of persons and the collective editing-process where the concept of re-editing is essential. Before we look into the different stages of the videoblogging process we have to consider the basis for an online community fostering the kind of collaboration needed in order to promote media literacy through the making of collective documentaries. We may consider collaboration as communication where there are no clear distinction between senders and receivers of information. Nevertheless, all communication has to begin with individual producers who provide some kind of context, transforming data into information by creating relationships between data (text, images, video and sound). Through our experience of different sources of information we construct knowledge in interaction with others by sharing and discussing the different patterns in which information may be organized. In the end knowledge is the basis for wisdom, the most intimate level of understanding. Wisdom can be reckoned as a kind of “meta-knowledge” of relationships achieved through personal experience.” (Hoem 2004: 7)

Deptford.TV requires that each individual contributor undertake part of the responsibility. This means that ‘amateurs’ are taking control of domains that were strictly reserved for the professional ‘classes’ of media-producers. “Whether in music file-sharing, radio broadcasting or the writing of fanzines, the amateur media producer is intimately involved in dominant cultural practices, at the same time as they transform those practices through their own ‘autonomous’ media.” (Atton 2005: 15)

“Documentary makers must refuse to sacrifice the subjectivity of the viewer. […] Make sure the viewers know that they are watching a version of the subject matter, not the thing in itself. […] it would make the documentary model a little less repugnant, since this disclaimer would avoid the assertion that one was showing the truth of the matter. This would allow the system to remain closed, but still produce the realization that what is being documented is not a concrete history […] It is this nomadic quality that distinguishes them from the rigidly bounded recombinant films of Hollywood; however, like them, they rest comfortably in neither the category of fiction nornonfiction. For the purposes of resistance, the recombinant video offers no resolution; rather, it acts as a database for the viewer to make his own inferences. This aspect of the recombinant film presupposes a desire on the part of the viewer to take control of the interpretive matrix, and construct his own meanings. Such work is interactive to the extent that the viewer cannot be a passive participant.” (Critical Arts Ensemble, 1996)

Following the Critical Arts Ensemble’s argumentation, one could say that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction film is misleading, since both use the same language, both manipulate the moving image. Non-fiction films follow the same narrative patterns like a fiction films. Documentary films most often end with a conclusion and a “show down” prepared by the filmmaker from a montage of sequences. Creating a database which would provide access to the rough material as the film’s ‘source code’, as well as allow the contributors to share this material through an open content license, could liberate the

medium of documentary film and facilitate innovative forms of interactive, many-to-many documentaries.

Society got familiar with mass media as a one-way channel of communication. Nevertheless radio, the first mass medium, originally was a two-way communication channel. In the early 1920s Berthold Brecht saw the potential of radio as a medium that could support a two-way political discussion program format. Brecht believed that the collective approach to production could be applied to both radio and film.

Berthold Brecht was enthusiastic about the potential of radio as a liberating medium when this was first invented in the early 20th century. For Brecht radio was a two-way communication device: a receiver as well as a transmitter. The first radio sets were indeed designed as both receivers and transmitters. In his letter to the German Director of Radio Broadcasting in 1927 Brecht wrote:

“In my view you should try to make radio broadcasting into a really democratic thing. To this end you would already achieve much, for example, if you were to cease production only on your own for this wonderful distribution apparatus you have at your disposal and instead allow it to make productive topical events simply by setting up and in special cases perhaps by managing it in a skillful, time-saving way. […] In other words I believe that you must move with the apparatuses closer to the real events and not simply limit yourself to reproducing or reporting. You must go to the parliamentary sessions of the Reichstag and especially to the major court trials. Since this would be a great step forward, there will certainly be a series of laws that try to prevent that. You must turn to the public in order to eliminate these laws.” (Silberman 2001: 35)

Brecht wrote the radio play Lindberg’s Flight for an interactive many-to-many radio event, which opened at the Festival for German Chamber Music in Baden-Baden on 27 July 1929. The play’s subject was the first flight over the Atlantic Ocean by pilot Charles Lindberg, in May 1927. Lindberg’s Flight pictured the flight as a struggle of technology against nature, and as an achievement of a collective rather than an individual. The audience was participating in the role of Lindberg. Brecht was showcasing “how the medium itself can transform social communication through its technological advantage: the ear is to become a voice.” (Silberman 2001: 41)

Brecht’s vision never materialized. Instead, radio became a one-to-many medium, distributing content controlled by centralised radio stations to the masses of audiences.

Today, digital networks provide new possibilities for liberated media practices through the use of Free Software. Since art and ideas never develop within an art-historical vacuum but always feed on the past, free culture ideals promise to make our cultural heritage accessible to everybody to re-read, re-use and re-mix as they like. According to Armin Medosch: “Without open access to the achievements of the past there would be no culture at all.” (2003: 15) His project Kingdom of Piracy, a book and a CD software package, was released under Open Content licenses and it was free to use, share and edit. One of the softwares found on the CD is the Dyne:Bolic, a Linux distribution used for the Deptford. TV project, as discussed later on in this chapter. An ever increasing amount of recent and current art projects require that artists work collaboratively with programmers in order to create such projects. They also often require the use of controversial technologies such as file-sharing or concepts of computer viruses. Such projects are of course, more often than not, criticised by the media industry as giving ground to piracy.

“This is not piracy, as industry associations want us to believe, but the creation of open spaces in a number of different ways; they facilitate freedom of expression, collective action in creation and political expression and the notion of a public interest in networked communications” (Medosch 2003: 18)

“The Internet is not simply a more efficient way of maintaining subcultural activity, it is potentially a space for its creation and recreation on a global scale: it remains an invitation to a new imaginary.” (Atton 2005:8 )

Over the last few years “Free Libre and Open Source Software” (FLOSS), a form of collaborative software development, has grown rapidly over the digital networks. “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

The users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Linux is one of the most famous FLOSS developments. Linux is a computer operating system which can be installed for free on any computer without having to pay for it, unlike the commercial mainstream operating systems like Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS. All its source code is available to the public and anyone can freely use, modify, and redistribute it.

“A useful starting point is in the political philosophy of anarchism and Proudhon’s well known formulation, “all property is theft”. But even if we accept this axiom, with what might we replace it? Murray Bookchin (1986: 50) has proposed that we consider “usufruct” as a counter to property rights. […] usufruct should be contrasted with property. Where the latter implies the permanent ownership of resources, usufruct is a temporary property relationship based on utility need which meets the demands of communality […] The continuing history of Linux is a significant working model of usufruct. […] It is anarchism in action” (Atton 2005: 101-102)

The Open Source and Free Software movements share the source code of their programs under a copyleft license. In the same way, collective film-making web interfaces will share the film ‘source code’, that is, the rough material plus the meta-data created by logging and editing this material. Such web-interfaces and technologies like File-sharing challenge the notion of traditional broadcasting: on the one hand the production and distribution processes merge together; on the other hand the audiences can participate actively by undertaking a role that has always, within the frame of traditional media production, been exclusively reserved to producers. These changes challenge expectations of the film as a finished, linear product, and of the audiences as passive consumers of culture and/or entertainment.

File-sharing is thus seen as controversial because of its key role in this blurring of old concepts; what was earlier seen as stable commodity forms and circuits of distribution are now turned upside down, what was once seen as a delineation of stable roles for the human actors involved is now severely called into question. (Andresson, 2006)

Why would mp3 files necessarily replace retail CDs, for example? Wouldn’t they rather replace radio? Why would avi files replace retail DVDs? Wouldn’t they rather replace a visit to the video rental shop, or two hours of Sky Movies, or — for that sake — the free DVD that came with Sunday’s newspaper? Why shouldn’t the public broadcasting services not be fileshareres, as the tax payer already payd

The end of this text is a remix out of the collectively written reader “Deptford.TV diaries”, the original text can be found on http://Deptford.TV with many thanks to Jonas Andersson, Maria X, Andrea Rota, James Steven and all the collaborators:

Nowadays, everyone knows that anyone could copy that file, yet the industry persists with

even more vitriolic rhetoric. The genie is doubtlessly out of the bottle, and we are faced with a public which is more aware than ever of the controversies at hand, whilst being

increasingly skilled in getting what they want — for free.

Communality, collaboration and public sharing here constitute a living, long-established, interesting challenge to the conventional financial system — and a sphere which can still

promise profit and growth. The Asian counterfeit economy (real piracy!) is a thriving, semi-hidden counterpart to the corporate economy — and the gains from this pirate economy are often more beneficial to the world’s poor. When it comes to copying of so-called ‘immaterial’ produce, the collective gain is so high that also those with modest margins of sustenance can afford to share that which is only multiplied and never reducible: culture, ideas, knowledge, information, software.

It is, however, illusory to believe file-sharing is entirely altruistic. It is highly motivated by personal gratification and notions of comfort and instantaneity. Scratching the veneer of most human behaviour this is of course a far from unexpected finding. Still, most people would argue, through the simple physical phenomenon of aggregation sharing generates something which could certainly be described as a ‘greater good,’ something which the agents involved can make continuous use of and take pride in — in fact, they often

even describe it as altruism.

When we freely share content on the Internet, we are currently bypassing the established forms of the market place — generating, in effect, new systems of exchange. Appropriation and consumption are just that; it is all about the uses of media content*; turning it into something else, or using it beyond the means dictated by the producer. We could therefore ask ourselves: is cultural appropriation piracy?

Rasmus Fleischer and Palle Torsson — the authors behind the influential ‘grey commons’ speech — insist on talking about file-sharing as a horizontal activity;

“Digital technology is built on copying bits, and internet is built on filesharing. Copying is always already there. The only thing copyright can do is to impose a moral differentiation between so-called normal workings and immoral.” (Fleischer and Torsson 2006)

To put it bluntly: People collaborate, copy and share because they can. Now deal with it.

Bibliography

Andersson, Jonas (2006) “The Pirate Bay and the ethos of sharing” in Deptford.TV diaries. London: Openmute

Atton, Chris. (2005) Alternative Internet. Edinburgh: University Press.

Critical Arts Ensemble. (1996) The electronic disobedience. New York: Autonomedia

Hoem, Jon. (2004) Videoblogs as “Collective Documentary”. Vienna: Blog Talk conference.

Medosch, Armin. (2003) Piratology. In Kingdom of Piracy (ed). Dive. Liverpool: Fact. pp. 8-19.

Rasmus Fleischer and Palle Torsson. (2005) ‘grey commons’ speech at Chaos Communication Congress 22C3 in Berlin.

Silberman, Marc. (2001) Brecht on Film. London: methuen.

Bitnik media collective is hacking the opera. Maria X wrote about us in furtherfield.org:

On Friday April 9 (2007) I was at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich for the opening of the Opera Calling project. Opera Calling is an exhibition and performance created by the Bitnik media collective and artist Sven Koenig, to be running at the Cabaret Voltaire till the 2nd of May.

Entering into the (maybe not very Dadaist…) refurbished space of Cabaret Voltaire, I follow the steps down to the crypt to visit Opera Calling. The first thing I see is a forest of cables and phone receivers: 100 white phones are attached to the ceiling, while their receivers are bouncing down into the gallery space. Moving through the upside-down phone forest I can see two computer screens in a corner, with information flashing on them. Occasionally I can hear the familiar sound of dialling a number, and a phone ringing. Listening into a receiver I find that, most of the time, I can listen to the opera… That is not some recorded opera concert played back to the gallery visitors: if one is familiar with the programme of the Zurich opera, s/he will soon realise that s/he can actually listen to the performance currently taking place at the Opera House! Of course the sound is very ‘dirty’ but, well, that Friday we did actually listen to La Boheme -along with everybody else in the Opera House. The difference was that we didn’t pay for a ticket, nor did we have to physically visit the Opera House. Instead, the opera itself called out to reach us, visitors in the Cabaret Voltaire, and Zurich residents in their homes…

The artists describe Opera Calling as ?an intervention into the cultural system of the Zurich Opera.? What they have done is secretly place bugs within the auditorium of the Opera House, and redistribute the performances not through public broadcasting, but through calling up individuals in Zurich, on their landlines. As soon as the opera performance starts, a machine calls out Zurich phone numbers. If a Zurich resident replies, what they can hear is a computerised message explaining what they are about to listen to, and then a live transmission of the performance taking place in the Opera House. The visitors of the gallery space witness this interaction: they can see which phone number the machine is calling, and what the outcome is: will someone answer? Will they hang up? Will an answering machine come up? Will the person on the phone listen to the opera? When someone at the other end of the line picks up the phone, the telephones in the exhibition, like the telephone at this person’s house, are connected to the opera.

Bitnik and Koenig talk about exploring ?the usefulness of as an artistic strategy of production.? Opera Calling definitely is a hacking project: it hacks through a quite rigid cultural and social system, aiming to open this up to the general public. Andrius Kulikauskas uses the term ‘social hacker’ at a paper published in the Journal of Hyper(+)drome to describe a person who encourages activity amongst online groups, and is willing to break social norms in order to do so.
[ ?Social Hacking: The Need for an Ethics?, Issue 1, September 2004] I suggest that this is exactly what the OC artists do: by performing a real, but also symbolic act of hacking (the sound of the live opera transmission becomes so transformed, that there is no way someone who intended to visit the opera in the first place would decide to go to the gallery and listen to the performance instead. In that sense, hacking into the Opera House becomes less a ‘stealing’ of the performance and more a symbolic act that makes a point around issues of open culture) the OC artists come up with an idiosyncratic solution to what they consider a problem: the ‘closed-circuit’ opera culture that seems to be preserving a class system due to the, prohibitive for many, cost of the opera tickets.

Kulikauskas describes the hacker approach as ‘practical’, ‘nonstandard’, and ‘unexpected’ [ibid], and I think that these adjectives very much describe the OC project: it employs simple, practical means like bugs built from cheap, readily available technology, to perform what definitely is a nonstandard action (how often does the opera call you at your home?…) with unexpected aesthetic outcomes. I thought that Opera Calling is an excellent project, as it cleverly appropriates the found content and social symbolism of the opera to create a new piece that can stand both as an artwork and as an act of social intervention. Within this context, becomes completely disengaged from any negative connotations that it may carry and, to my eyes at least, turns into a playful act of uncanny transformation and original creation. What I missed in this project though is the involvement of the home-audiences and gallery-visitors in this action as something more than what they would be if they were in the Opera House – that is audiences /witnesses. I think that OC has a potential in terms of audience intervention, communication, and community building, which it cannot fulfil as a ‘sleek’ gallery-based installation. I hope to see many more ‘dirty’ versions of it in the future…

The story so far according to an email update I just received (29 March 2007): `’For the last two weeks Opera Calling has retransmitted ten live performances of the Zurich opera to 1489 households in Zurich. The Zurich Opera claims to have found and destroyed 2 bugs. With the Opera in frantic mode and an unknown number of bugs still to find the *spectacle* continues…??

The mindsweeper on fire. The mindsweeper project is on hold. In the afternoon of the 15th of September a fire broke out in the generator area. A third of the boat is destroyed. You can find rough material documenting the project in the Deptford.TV database.

HMS Ledsham was built in Poole for the Royal Navy after World War II (completed in 1954) and did service on the Suez Canal. It is entirely wooden and is an excellent and rare surviving example of triple-carvel construction shipbuilding.

She was subsequently decommissioned, passed around; lost its bridge and upper structure in a storm; was stripped of most of its remaining fittings – wiring, plumbing and copper sheath – and abandoned on the Greenwich Reach of the Thames, where it suffered considerable rain damage (rain in cities is acidic and very bad for wood.)

The vessel was salvaged in 1998 by a group of friends who saw it had possibilities as a venue, and got together to invest their time and money in it. The vessel was renamed The Mindsweeper, and moved to its present location on Deptford Creek

The front deck was plied over – to prevent further rain damage – and the main upper-deck/venue-space was constructed of steel and glass and roofed over.

The rear deck was temporarily roofed over, but suffered further damage during a fire in September 2007. In 2008, The Mindsweeper was accepted onto the Registry of Historic Ships as a vessel of historical significance to the nation.

check out the mindsweeper blog, tymon dogg’s movie & his blog