Media Mutandis: Surveying Art, Technologies and Politics

This 300-page publication documented and assessed the inaugural season of media art - NODE-London 2005 –(‘NODE’ - Networked, Open, Distributed Events). I was invited to be one of the contributing, commissioning editors for a 100-page section critically reflecting on one of the 3 main events, ‘Open Congress’. Taking the motif of Open Source software – source, modify and redistribute – appropriated as method and metaphor, I applied this to my editorial practice.

Hence, to document the Congress and consider how its questions were addressed, sub-sections looked at:

1. The key texts on Open Source software production
2. How these were adapted at the Congress for thinking about art production
3. How those adaptations and the Congress itself were evaluated

(1) and (2) comprised existing texts e.g. ‘The Open Source Definition 1.9’ and commissioned texts e.g. by Toni Prug and Felix Stalder, while (3) comprised texts written in response to an invitation to Congress participants. In all, they represent the first anthology of texts on Open Source (and) culture; an introduction to the underlying premises and points of debate in their application.

I wrote an introduction to the section, along with a 3500-word article addressing the question of how Open Source applies to non-digital / unique works of art. These I contended atypically propose an ethic of material recycling; it is often easier to modify ‘originals’ than to copy them in, contradistinction to computer code.

The publication pioneered a Print On Demand (POD) distribution model; readers order on-line and the book is downloaded and delivered locally.