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Cedeño Montaña, Ricardo. 4 movements of 12 colours in procession. 2010. Processing

Source codes: first movement, third movement, four movement, second movement

Today the production and distribution tools for media have to be free and open. Free and open software have brought a new perception towards these tools. Steadily, we leave pyramidal and individual forms of ownership and production in media to openly share materials, ideas, and procedures in social surfaces without centres. To embrace collaborative forms of production is a breakthrough in media (art, design, and production). Free software allows collective knowledge and aesthetic to surface. These expressions have been largely, neglected by close and feudal tools because they are thought as poor quality. We’ve been conveniently convinced that only the industrial and formal knowledge in media production is proper. This idea has pervaded the media arts and the designs as they remain mainly focused on spectacle and effects.

Knowledge has to run free across the very media. People have to remember how to collaborate if we are to change our world. But digital media are meant to fragment and to be used by mere machine bureaucrats in a state of frenzy consumption. Artists and designers! WE have the duty to denounce and expose this. WE need to defranchise the production of images, narratives, experiences, and objects. WE have to believe it is possible to overcome to supremacy of the bureaucrat system with single ideas and single tasks. WE ought to appropriate these tools before they appropriate us. WE need to fight the self-referential trend of the open media, if WE are to see the variety of the possible. WE need to open art and design and a first step to free art and design.

Popular is to be consumed.

Popular is to be comfortable.

Popular is to be right in the middle.

Popular is to be standard.

Popular is to be in.

Software libre significa que usted controla lo que su computadora hace. Software NO libre significa que alguien mas controla eso, y hasta cierto nivel lo controla a usted. Richard M. Stallman

El uso y difusión de software libre no es un asunto de dinero, sino de ética.

Traducción por ricardo cedeño montaña al Español de la definición de software libre dada por Free Software Foundation (FSF).

El software libre se refiere a la libertad de los usuarios para correr, copiar, distribuir, cambiar y mejorar un programa. De forma más precisa, esto significa que los usuarios de programas tienen cuatro libertades esenciales.

1. Libertad para ejecutar el programa para cualquier propósito (libertad cero).
2. Libertad para estudiar como funciona el programa y cambiarlo para que haga lo que usted desea que haga (libertad uno). Tener acceso al código fuente del programa es condición para esto.
3. Libertad para redistribuir copias del programa y así ayudar al vecino. (libertad dos).
4. Libertad para distribuir copias, a otros, de la versión modificada del programa (libertad 3). Haciendo esto usted puede dar oportunidad a una comunidad entera para beneficiarse de los cambios. Tener acceso al código fuente del programa es condición para esto.

Richard Stallman. 1985

Machinic is about actualizing one instance of a series of combinatorial productive options which already lie on the matter. In that sense the quality of being exists on the matter and not before it, in order words the way the elements and materials are combined and formed is not given in advanced but exerted during the actualization of the process. To separate matter and form, as if they were different entities, divests matter of its productiveness. It is to think of it as dead. The productive assemblages of matter demand of the creator an attitude in which form is not externally imposed to the material but it is teased out of the matter. In a machinic production, a series of processes bring the material to a fluid and fertile state for the emergence of a form.

To listen on-line:
machinic midi data. Ricardo Cedeño Montaña. 2010. Duration: 8:00
[audio:http://www.pktweb.com/drnn1076/sound_works/machinicmididata.mp3]

Noisecraft data. Ricardo Cedeño Montaña. 2010. Duration: 4:50
[audio:http://www.pktweb.com/drnn1076/sound_works/noisecraftdata.mp3]

To download:
machinic midi data 14MB

noisecraft data 8.5MB

A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks.[1, p.36]

Every machine is part of system of machines and all of them integrate a constant current. This current has no starting point nor end, it is just a collection of connections that flows. Thus, a machine is perceived through the fractures it creates in a flow. The fractures frame discreet portions of the flow, therefore machines have inputs and outputs (other flows), and in the middle a particular flow is processed. If there is something to say about a machine is that it fractures a collection of flows. A machinic attitude in media must then make evident the fractures rather than to hide them.

1. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 1983

The director of French intelligence had no scruples about their morality. It was rather that he inevitably found the exercise depressing. Nothing, he had discovered long ago, revealed quite as completely the emptiness, the banality, the squalor of most lives as did that harvest of the electronic scanning of an unguarded soul [1, p.270].

The recent explosion of people-led media contents in the Internet has led some to claim that the availability to freely exchange videos, photos, news, and comments in on-line platforms is making us to enjoy a state-of-grace not seen before, a media democracy. Now, we, ‘users’, are part of the media as we feed and actively participate in it. I share, partly, this enthusiasm. However, I distrust the so-called freedom and openness that are being actively promoted. I called this phenomenon the open media (OM). It is ‘open’ because everyone with access can introduce material and it is ‘media’ because we ought not forget that the logic of mass media still is hidden behind the spot.

Mass media are highly industrial and sophisticated means of technological communication that allow a central and hierarchical organization, like a state or a company, to widespread a package of contents. Ideologies and desires are the most common of these massively distributed contents. Traditionally, mass media have been closed and the audience do nothing else but to consume. The ethic and aesthetics of mass media respond to the popular taste.

The open media are empty vessels filled with the content of its consumers. These media are opened for they openly offer a general structure and each user produce its own version. However, the open media do not belong to the users, rather they are used by the owners of the media as part of it. The users are programmed to constantly feed the media with pictures, opinions, and videos. These myriad of materials are as empty as the media itself. In the OM we do care about ourselves and about our desire to be for short instants on the spot. In the OM we spend (waste) our time in front of a digitally enhanced looking-glass. There is anything else to be seen there but selfish banality.

1. Collins, Larry and Dominique Lapierre. The Fifth Horseman. New York, NY:Avon Book. 1980.

HI, I’m glad to share the presentation of the machinima seminar I’ve been conducting in the master programme in Digital Media in Bremen and Bremerhaven.

This seminar titles: Do-it-yourself media: about machinima and other hybrid beasts and tackles DIY, machinima, and hybrid media as means to research in grass-roots digital media practices.

• Do-it-yourself (DIY) the low budget practice with high expectations, is a form of both media resistance and participation. Nowadays, DIY has become a de-facto attitude towards media, everyone is utterly a media producer and operator of machinimas, game mods, mobile apps, blogs, wikis, online radios. All these expressions have steady challenged the traditional mass media structures of content’s control. DIY addresses at the cultural impact that concepts such as appropriation, repurposing, openness, and remix have on the nature of digital media.
• Machinima describes a relatively recent species of moving image that results from the mixture of playing video games and producing movies, a hybrid that silently in the underground but massive realm of video games has lured and inspired thousands to enter its territories. In the late 1990s, devoted video game players started to use video game software for experimental movie production. This is a marginal practice that utilizes recordings of gameplay to make short and simple narrative movies.
• Hybrid media. What has made possible the apparition of the hybrid media? Which role plays the automation of several media languages and techniques in the computer, in the appearance of such hybrids? How could be described the aesthetics of these hybrids? Should we be afraid of them? Thus, this stream looks at the machinic combination of media in rhizomatic surfaces.

Hola,
Un giro en Milán.