not

Once a critical mass of people express interest, anybody can offer to teach the class. A small committee moderates the final steps of the process, including finding an instructor and scheduling the course. However, committee members typically step down after several months, making room for new committee members to join and keeping the system as open to transformation as possible.

Telic co-directors Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton decided to discontinue Telic’s long-running program of exhibitions, performances, lectures, happenings, etc. and concentrate on The Public School.

We started the public school in our basement to be in conversation with the exhibition space (open to all kinds of conversation: agreement, contradiction, influence, etc). After about 6 months, we were nearing 5 years of exhibitions and we felt that the school was more exciting for us to do than the exhibitions…it allowed us to work with people whose practices we wanted to support (practices that were conceptual, process-based, research-oriented, or other flavors of non-object centered practice, things that weren’t widely recognized as art, and so on) in a very easy and organic way. The gallery and exhibition context, on the other hand, imposed all kinds of expectations that were rarely very useful for those practices. Even an exhibition that shows something in progress requires this level of exhibit-ability that was more of a distraction.

Also when we swapped the gallery for a school, we swapped a number of terms, which had their own effects: an exhibition maybe became a class, the audience became…students? When a student goes to a class, they go with different expectations and they are prepared to engage with the others and the subject in a different way. They are prepared to stay longer, ask questions, argue with others, etc.

We could work with projects that were still only an idea and help them come into fruition; we could work with projects that have been going on for 10 years; we could work with vague constellations of thought or people that barely amounted to a project. All of these possibilities made it exciting for us to switch models and start operating as a school.

There are so many art worlds, it’s difficult to answer this question…I think the public school provides a certain kind of resource or space, maybe like a cafe or a bar or a library that allows for art and non-art, for juxtaposition of people and territories and ideas. [..] And I always imagine how huge Los Angeles is, and how small our new space is, and really can’t understand the relationship when the scales are so astoundingly dissimilar.

The galleries here are pretty conservative and the young people and students coming out of schools and others who don’t participate solely in the commercial art market are pretty ambitious, energetic, and creative and so they just make their own contexts for doing things.

I don’t think it’s sustainable, but file sharing is resilient. That part is sustainable if what’s meant is something that will weather bad economies, legal threats, changes in technology, etc. AAAARG probably won’t. But I don’t think it matters; it’s not trying to be the new library. That said, I don’t think it will disappear, I don’t think anything ever does. The word promiscuity for the digital object I think is a really good one.

I think pdf readers are going to be another real problem because they will demonstrate that pdfs are a market, a useful copy of the real thing. (parenthetically, I love when people upload highly personalized scans. I much prefer these to fresh ebooks). As ebook readers demonstrate a market, then sites like AAAARG become intolerable because they sit right in the middle of that market and maybe demonstrate how that market is built through the production of scarcity and highly controlled supply. But like I said it never goes away. People have been scanning and sharing books for a long time.

Verso letter?
My response was “Of course we’ll comply. Cease and desist letters are no joke, especially when backed by 3 million per year in sales.” I’m in the camp that it’s not only about copyright, so I’m not going to refuse to budge. It’s about sharing and exchange of knowledge, so if someone asks that I take it down, I will. But I wish it were the author who would ask. I prefer to think more about the desires of authors and readers. Publishers have other stakes.

There’s obviously nothing natural about property, copyright, restrictions placed on distribution, etc. The kind of sharing that people find themselves wanting to engage in, if it becomes normalized, can suggest possibilities for other ways of thinking about these things (which don’t always rely on cease and desist letters, defensive postures, and territoriality).

That’s why I’m also more enthusiastic about taking a positive approach to all of this – its not about fighting copyright or standing up to publishers or something

act of sharing itself constituted a kind of conversation. Focusing too much on the comments leads to a reductive idea of conversation, although I have visited sites with great comments.

The issues section instead becomes a kind of conversation, because people add texts into other people’s issues. Also it is a way to articulate your own argument through selection, omission, etc. The “shared issues” are less predicated on “here is my collection” and more on “I wish there was this collection, but I don’t know what would go in it”. That moves it to something before the presentation/ exhibition/ publication stage — to the earlier, discursive stage.

From Wikipedia: “small is beautiful” and “make each program do one thing well”.

aaaargu zacali v zime chodit cease&desist listy od roznych
vydavatelov (Verso, Uni of Columbia Press, Macmillan, IMO, atd),
je zaujimave sledovat ako sa situacia vyvija.
tu su dva rozhovory (asi jedine ktore doteraz vznikli) so Seanom
Duckrayom, ktory aaaarg.org rozbehol:
http://blog.sfmoma.org/2009/08/four-dialogues-2-on-aaaarg/
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-with-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/

pre zaujimavost – archiv diskusie uzivatelov aaaargu
po cease&desist liste od Macmillan… spolocne prisli s novym
riesenim:
http://mitochondrialvertigo.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/the-aaaar-org-discussion-of-the-macmillan-threat/

co je priznacne, Sean viedol niekolko rokov v Los Angeles galeriu,
ktora sa postupne pretransformovala na otvorene vzdelavacie centrum
The Public School, ktorej odnoze vznikli uz v dalsich styroch
mestach. niektore workshopy ktore robia vzniknu prostrednictvom
‘issues’ ktore vytvaraju uzivatelia aaaargu, takze obe iniciativy
su uzko prepojene. ale vsetko spomina v rozhovoroch.

tu je celkom pekna komparacia niekolkych projektov zdielania
ebooks…

Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

dalej, dnes som sa dozvedel o Silent Library, komunite v Madarsku,
ktora skenuje a zdiela knihy. po tlaku od vydavatelov (okolo 2005)
presunuli web do Ruska. kamarat ktory je clenom mi dnes pisal:
12:57 < pht__> vstupom je odporucanie existujuceho clena, predstavenie/dovod, a korektura 1 ocrkovaneho scanu!
12:58 < pht__> velmi uzavreta komunita s vysokou vstupnou barierou, ale je tam hrozne vela “povodneho” obsahu
12:58 < pht__> a hlavne out-of-print madarske knihy
13:00 < pht__> hlavnym problemom vydavatelstiev bolo, ze sa tam shareovali cerstve bestsellery v textovej forme :)))
13:01 < pht__> http://index.hu/tech/net/slp0826/
13:02 < pht__> Only 75 copies in 1000 of a a printed title survive fifty years. Concerning their endurance the electronic books are more vulnerable, but their unrestricted copyable and convertible qualities ensure the eternity for them in the common cultural treasury of mankind – so long as culture exists at all; the Silent Library Project and related enterprises make some contribution to its existence.
13:06 < pht__> tiez to len dal dole admin pod navalom C&D lettrov
13:06 < pht__> tiez pise ze ked mu niekto konkretny napisal, tak knihu odstranil
13:08 < pht__> a vylucili veci z wild-inetu
13:08 < pht__> len vlastne scany/ocrka
13:08 < pht__> a normalne stovky ludi citaju tie veci a opravuju ocr chyby :)
13:13 < pht__> najpopularnejsia kniha je asimovova before foundation po madarsky, s 14000 dloadmi
13:14 < pht__> v top5 je aj madarsky autor s 10k
13:16 < pht__> v slp je okolo 7000 textov
13:21 < pht__> na tomto slp je uzasne, ze tie texty su vsetky opravene+prekontrolovane
13:21 < pht__> ze to nie je len klik klik upload klik
13:22 < pht__> tu je clanok ale neda sa to moc citat
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//index.hu/tech/net/slp0826/&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8
13:23 < pht__> vzniklo to ze si chalan naskenoval par knih a dal ich online
13:23 < pht__> a par kamosov zacalo posielat scany tiez
13:23 < pht__> sa pise v tom clanku

skoda ze mi nevyslo sa v Prahe stretnut s Kennethom z ubu.com,
ale ten ma k teme tiez vela co povedat..
napr:
Goldsmith’s syllabus includes Uncreative Writing, Interventionist Writing and Writing Through Art and Culture in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Class tools are appropriation, theft, stealing, plundering and sampling. Cheating, fraud and identity theft are all encouraged. For Goldsmith the classroom, is a free space into which ethical queries can be conducted in a safe environment.