Open Source and Software as Culture

Film Studio with Fake Tree

The last keynote here at ISEA2004 has now begun. I'm actually watching this on the big video screen in an adjoining room (the film studio) because otherwise I'd run out of power on the laptop. The positive aspect of this is that I have far more space around me - but in exchange I'm breathing second-hand cigarette smoke. Makes you appreciate Queensland's anti-smoking laws all the more!

So, on to Matthew Fuller's keynote, then. He's interested to look at art methodologies as they occur increasingly outside the domain of art systems (galleries, magazines, schools, etc.); further, these may also serve as ways of understanding software.

He points out that the 'new' virtues of creative industries (innovation, collaboration, ...) are not so new, and makes the point that there are still others cleaning up after the creatives. He contests this divide into creatives and non-creatives.

Instead he suggests the idea of the 'general intellect', coming out of Hardt & Negri's work and Marx's Grundrisse. The more people's creativity, people's participation in the general intellect, becomes important to economic life, the more there is a chance for this to change the way we live.

The concept of the general intellect is a useful background for the discussion of software. It can be found in the capacity to take bits from here and there, combine cooperatively with the aim of creating something new. It is also a useful backdrop to the idea of art.

He compares the general intellect to the weather - not a noosphere, not a directed intellect, but the total combination of all information, innovation, and ideation which exists in the world, influencing and inflecting one another. It is part of an ecology of cognition.

Hmmm. I must admit I'm not getting too much out of this talk. Perhaps I'm just talked out - or perhaps this is the kind of talk I've always found particularly unsuited for conference presentations: very dense and useful only if you're intimately familiar with the theory referenced here already. It's simply not user-friendly.