opensourceartschool.com

Dear all

I’m a tad cyber challenged in the banlieus of Paris so will lurk quietly on this until I get back to OZ.

am still extremeley interested so hope to contribute more in the autumn

cheers

mayhem

My apologies for being the late Ian Milliss, just too much end of year work to do. I also did not have this in mind a week ago but it fits in with so many other things I’m working on that it deserves to be followed up. Well done Ben for taking the initiative.

I agree with David that an OSAS would be neither an alternative nor a rival to the conventional art schools, like him I see it as a clearing house for info on art schools and art school alternatives, a place to find a wider range of art resources, art information sources and viewpoints, history, theory, art activities of all sorts. In other words a way to get educated about art in as wide or as narrow a way as you might choose. And I emphasise education, the acquisition of information and knowledge and hopefully wisdom, rather than the acquisition of credentials.

And it is interesting how this has sprung from Art Life, now busily claiming credit on the principle that you should never be modest because if you don’t claim credit then someone else will. Of course we commentators claim credit for the modest success of Art Life on the principle that we are what people read, not the reviews which are merely there to trigger the shit fights. See comments further down.

Being practical as well as cynical as well as idealist I want t get straight to the point about a few things. All activities like this have four components:

1. a producer
2. a medium
3. content
4. an audience

And unless all are functional you will fail. As David says that’s not the end of the world, we can all walk away with nothing lost but a bit of time. But we may as well try and even if we fail we may lay the groundwork for some others to succeed, I’ve been involved in a lot of projects that ended up like that in my time.

Producers
Open source projects are of course by definition the product of many hands and minds all contributing in different ways. However, despite the naïve beliefs of some people, they have to be highly organized to succeed. There is an enormous body of debate stretching back at least a decade on the issues involved in the necessary organization. For anyone interested you can start to get an idea of the complexity of issues involved if you look at the organizational pages of Wikipedia. Obviously we are not talking about operating on that scale but the same issues exist at every scale. If there is interest I’ll put together a whole post at a later date about the debates in the management of interactive and cooperative web based projects. The short version is that too much management will kill involvement and too little will kill involvement and your credibility. The immediate solution is just to get on with it in a few achievable project areas setting up ad hoc procedures as required while being aware of potential formal frameworks. In case anyone wants to get all romantic and bullshitty about freedom etc etc etc it should be pointed out firstly that the reason the extreme right is always in favour of formlessness (small government, deregulation, freedom in the George-Bush-in-Iraq sense of the word) is that it makes it easier to exploit and bully people and secondly that it makes sense for us to learn from the history of similar projects rather than reinventing their disasters. Some level of structure and moderation that defines equality will defend the rights and involvement of everyone. It helps if you assume a level of good will on the part of everyone involved (always difficult when you consider the way the ArtLife trolls drive away all but the very thick skinned like us).

In the shortest term while we work some general ideas, the way Ben is proceeding by giving posting rights to whoever contacts him by email is the right way to go.

Medium
As Ben pointed out early on, blogger is not the best way of going about this, but it is OK in the short term. We should set up a few links, or rather some posts full of links , to similar projects in existence elsewhere.

The next step would be to set up a CMS based web site with a blog section discussion forum, links to developing projects, wiki area for proposals and ideas for projects etc. There are endless numbers of models for this now in existence. A fairly elegant example is the Ubuntu Linux site - check out the community tab for some excellent solutions to the organization issues mentioned above.

Content
At the risk of sounding complacent, this is an issue that is going to have to solve itself. We have projects of our own, there could be other content from the most banal ie the existing art schools, but with comments added by whoever wants to, art classes by artists, the real studio system ie working as an artists assistant, all the way to things like the University of Openness and icols. I suppose I would draw the line at people cyber squatting and using up our bandwidth for projects with no discernable relevance. Other than that I think it should self regulate ie we should have a system for reviewing and rating contributions, in other words you can do anything but you will have to be prepared to cop criticism for it. This is the part where everyone involved would need to work to involve others, if content doesn’t grow it all won’t happen.

Audience
Or students or whatever you want to call them. The issue here is how to get them to visit the site and use it or even get involved in creating it. The key to this is interesting and/or useful content and getting as much publicity as possible through the media, through structuring the site for best google results, and through word of mouth.

“The more our resources, needs, pleasures, and experiences are socially and legally defined as “property,” the more the state is authorized to infiltrate our lives and regulate disputes of ownership. This is happening in the realms of leisure, work and, as stated earlier, international relations. Current consumer technologies of music and image make reproduction inevitable so, as we see when high school kids are busted to make an example, legal and repressive measures are the only way to enforce ownership. In the case of transgenic seeds, farmers sign contracts foregoing the right to reproduce, save, sell, share or give away any of a product which, if used as directed, will reproduce itself. The leading holder of patents in agriculture, Monsanto, has investigated and harassed over 500 farmers in the U.S. for breach of this property agreement which is very similar to an MTA but with much more draconian consequences.[12] A fundamental tenet of membership in the WTO and of all U.S. and E.U. trade agreements with developing nations insists that the trading partner establish and enforce intellectual property regimes consistent with those in the global north. One of the reasons that the U.S. is so eager to help multinationals get transgenic agriculture rooted in the extensively rural global south is that it is practically a one-step process to drive patents and IP into the most basic register of their life and economy.”
from
http://www.caedefensefund.org/reflections.html

just elaborating on what you said about everyone having to produce and modify the curriculum, it could be that “enrolling” in the open source art school might involve a compulsory contribution to the curriculum, with the initial “students” (we would all be students right?) providing material which would then be rewritten by future students as part of their course work, (course work would be literally just that, working on the course). It seems to me that blogs and discussion groups would be the obvious place to start with a view to making the open source art school as accessible as possible (I mean that in a practical rather than intellectual sense, course content would obviously be left to those who fiddle with it).

Thanks Ben for setting this up. I am not sure where to begin. I guess the best place to start is to throw up some thoughts.

Its been great to see some positive response to the idea over at TAL and also interesting to watch the doubters turn up straight away. Interesting times. Its strange I never thought we would see ourselves trying to start something like this. Obviously we all feel committed to the idea of it working in the true sense of Open Source ie, no gatekeepers (moderation is a question though) - but I am wondering if a remedy to the guru/ cultish perception that might occur is to have some, or most of the content go into a pool anonymously. This would really dampen down the cult of personality side of things and give space for people to come and go as they please - but a list of real names could be displayed somewhere else as members if people chose to make that association, with email address’s to facilitate real world projects if people thought that was appropriate. And large pre-existing projects may have authors names attached - say in the instance of Ian’s wicki on Australian Art History etc I also have had a few brief chats with Andrew Frost about creating an archive somewhere on the web of artists documentation and catalogue writing.

For me one of the most exciting aspects of the idea is the opportunity to do things that would never be possible in an Art school environment within a University at the moment - such as say, engage in a series of long walks in the desert as a valid experience - - or do a difficult canyon in the wollemi or go to the caves on the nullabor. I know this sounds like an outdoors club or something, but why not ? I know one can do this anyway but framing some of these activities within this context might be really productive - the Otira project set up by Julain Stephenson and the Physics Room in Christchurch was a great example of this kind of thing. http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/oblique/otira/document/ though the web design looks a bit faded.

Increasingly within University environments these days its very hard to organize these types of more open ended projects because they become tied up in red tape. However its not my personal intention to set up an replacement for the traditional setting (though for some it might be a valid replacement and for others this might be a strong motivation), others might be much more militant on this question.

I do think though that institutional logic in the tertiary sector, in its increasing compression has a daily tendency towards a limited way of thinking about things, is rooted often in scientific positivism, has lost its ability to analyze and critique its own power relationships. I don’t want to dwell on this because at the end of the day for me this is about the process of Art.

I see another important potential of the OSAS as a storage house for points of view - links to resources and info on the web, an archive for Artists writing - a portal into the community - a way of re-injecting a bit of madness, a highly radicalized educational model as an artform. If through its open source nature it turned into the opposite - a highly conservative space, then I guess the answer is simple, I would simply go elsewhere with no regrets. The really alarming horizon I think for all of us is things like what is going on in Singapore with its biennial - fascistic forces cynically grabbing a stake in contemporary Art in order to appear to be open and mask their oppressive system. One of the reasons I seem to be a defender of Capital A art is precisely because of this contemporary syndrome of mask and camouflaged you know the score when people start telling you that this add for a chocolate bar is a great bit of Art etc when we know that Art is something vastly different to the desire to sell chocolate bars or go to Film school for that matter.

The space for a virtual gallery is totally doable.

I am reminded of Richard Greysons project the ideal work. What appears might involve a lot of fiction a lot that is unjustifiable and unaccountable. One of the things I like about web pages is that it only takes one hyperlinks to end up in a space that has a completely different perspective - if the whole thing is open to everybody, it will grow different branches with vastly different viewpoints. Some may be entirely pragmatic answers to a problem and others might be way out there on the margins. One of the things about ICOLS that is so enjoyable is the way you are free to put in content without satisfying but Bronia and Suzy also facilitate projects. ICOLS might be a nice adjunct to this particular adventure or a bridge into a kind of practice. http://www.icols.org

Some have talked about the idealistic nature of the project - indeed it is, but this is only a problem when you rigidly hold fast to a particular idealistic aim and feel disappointment when it doesn’t turn out as expected - I am fully prepared for this thing to be a total farce, a drunken bit of madness, an embarrassment - or as I think it will be, a little bit of fresh air.

cheers

d