Olivia Plender, Machine will be the slave of man but man will not slave for machine (2005-2008), Installation view, The Great Transformation, image courtesy of Norbert Miguletz 2008, © Frankfurter Kunstverein

 

Disclosures

 

Taking its cue from creative commons and open source initiatives on the Internet, Disclosures, which I co-curated by Mia Jankowicz, aimed to examine what openness might mean in both online activity and in cultural production at large. Disclosures took the form of an international conference, a library, and a series of artists’ commissions and events.

 

Openness was understood as an ethos and as an organisational strategy whereby rigid hierarchical social structures are replaced by more flexible, network-inspired working methods. Accordingly, Disclosures looked at ways in which the organisational methods of radical social and political action groups – particularly those for whom the Internet is a key tool and platform – could be applied to, or might inspire, the way cultural organisations are run.  It also considered the widespread use of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) as the technological underpinning of openness and models of collective authorship that re-negotiate the relationship between author, reader and text, or artist, viewer and work. Bringing together theorists, Internet activists, artists and tactical media practitioners, Disclosures investigated openness as a fundamental principle in the production and distribution of knowledge.

 

 

Disclosures II: The Middle Ages

 

The next phase continues these reflections in a historical, rural context. It does so by creating connections between organisational methods in open field farming and in cultural work inspired by open source. This field of work embraces practices that make knowledge, expertise and research publicly and freely available. Its workers are dedicated – artistically, ethically and politically – to disclosing and sharing information that often stimulates critical thinking and, in some cases, leads to reforms. In this way, they are often opposed to both the logic and the power of the conventionally competitive market economy.

 

This aspiration to stay outside the capitalist economy, both financially and ideologically, is one ideal that links pre-Enclosure agricultural commons to modern day cultural commoners. If the respective contexts – one pre-dating private property and the other conscious of the consequences of the market economy – are hardly comparable in any usual sense, this common aim allows us to relate them in terms of shared economies, mutual benefit and collective action across time and context.

 

In Laxton, Disclosures II: The Middle Ages will reflect upon the open field system, its social advantages and economic viability historically and today. It will use these considerations as a backdrop to debate contemporary concerns around food production, and the use, ownership and control of land, including issues around biotechnology and its associated patenting.

 

 

Anna Colin

Exhibitions Curator, Gasworks