Open source for artists: alternative tactics for communicating ideas
by Basim Magdy

To fully accept the idea of an artwork that is distributed, exchanged and repeatedly modified in an open source pool, one needs to put aside the widespread understanding of authorship and the value of individual creativity. Marcel Duchamp once said, “The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act”. Utilizing open source tactics for a wider communication of artistic ideas and production to the online community, modifies Duchamp’s vision of “the spectator” as an interpreter into an active contributor to the process of creating and developing an artwork. More centralized models of interactive art, such as graffiti and public interventions that try to reach out to the public beyond the gallery or museum are usually restrained by their locality. On the other hand, interactive open source art projects take advantage of the Internet’s wide accessibility and new media’s low production costs to overcome such restraint. Open source offers an objective solution to the problematic conflict between the artistic presentation of ideas to the public and the way this public often sees art as an elusive practice. It proposes a generously communicative tool for public interaction and participation in large-scale art projects with the capacity to discuss diverse agendas and sustain numerous positions on them.  read more »

thoughts on open source and art
Abdel-Karim Mardini

Open source refers primarily to open source software; software whose source code is made freely available for everyone. However, the more encompassing definition considers open source as the practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's sources. Some consider it as a philosophy, and others consider it as a pragmatic methodology. Before open source became widely adopted, developers and producers used a variety of phrases to describe the concept; the term open source gained popularity with the rise of the Internet and it’s enabling of diverse production models, communication paths, and interactive communities. Subsequently, open source software became the most prominent face of open source.

The open source software model can allow for the concurrent use of different agendas and approaches in production, in contrast with more centralized models of development such as those typically used in proprietary software companies.

It would be interesting to look at how the current art scene interacts with that philosophy, consciously or unconsciously, to produce the different artifacts in different media (collages, music sampling, ...etc) whether by using open source tools to produce their art (The GIMP as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, Audacity as an open source sound editing software) or by interacting and contributing to the open source community. Several relevant initiatives come to mind. A major one is the Creative Commons organization which is devoted to expand the range of creative work available for others legally to build upon and share.  read more »