My Open Source City

Last weekend I attended Open Sourcei City, a festival exploring open source practice in the production of media art and music, a collaboration between folly and Sound Network.

I was there to help out, but one of the perks of this type of job is that you get to attend the event and I certainly appreciated the opportunity to listen to the enlightening talks, attend the evening performances and observe the workshops.

Here are my highlights...

On Friday afternoon there were a series of talks on open source practice which kicked off with folly's  very own Phil Chandler presenting folly's Digital Artists Handbook. He shared the difficult editorial decisions folly and members of GoTo10 had to make concerning how open a resource it would be and the consideration of fees and verification of 'expertise'. It was an excellent introduction to the project.

Daniel James of 64 Studio presented the handheld computer that comes with opensource music software that he is working with Samsung in developing...and had he been looking the other way long enough I would have taken the chance to slip it into my bag - it was fancy and fun and I can't wait for them to hit the UK market. The programmes he shared such as indamixx also looked really easy to use and accesible.

Tom Chance then gave a presentation concerning the philosophy of free culture, challenging the dominance of copyright laws, reviewing the Creative Commons licensing laws and copyleft culture, taking in philosphers such as Kant, Locke and Marx along the way and really challenging my world view! It was a fantastically presented, thought-provoking speech which resulted in a great discussion afterwards. We folly-types got the privilege of quizzing Tom further over the evening...I'm sure he appreciated it :)

We were then treated to an enlightening talk about access-space and grown your own media lab project. I think the best point from this was a question raised by the whole event which was getting people to understand WHY open source is a good thing and then HOW they can get their hands on it.

On Saturday night I got to have a play with Simon Blackmore's Web Stream Boat, which really did feel like it was floating down the information, er, canal as you navigated the live mp3 web-streams - a lot less intimidating way to interact with the internet than the fast paced 'information super highway' which we know so well. And it looked fabulous, which unfortunately I did not manage to capture very well photographically, best to look at Simon's website.

There were also performances from Mark Pilkington, AdHoc and Oxa. The performances were a mix of video projections and experimental 'electronic' music, often described as sound art - hard to pigeon-hole but enthralling, energetic and inspiring...certainly got my foot-tapping :)

On Sunday morning, whilst nursing a well-earned hangover, we were treated to a talk by Rui Guerra about mesh networks, sure to have you raiding your bin for some souped up wireless access! A really interesting debate concerning organisation and hierarchy in open culture and new methods for working together - a difficult line to tread but not to be cynically discounted.

I really hope this is something that we can build on next year, it really was a worthwhile and enjoyable weekend. Well done to all those involved :)