conversations

the pastoral

The pastoral

Creative Australia in a digital world

Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo has been trying to facilitate a broader conversation in the blogosphere about creative Australia around the 2020 Summit. He supports a call for fundamental rethinking of the purposes and aims of arts and cultural policy argued for by Ben Eltham at the Centre for Policy Development. If we are faced with an entrenched bias in funding to major performing arts companies, then the 2020 Summit's focus was on traditional arts funding.

Though there is a need to value the arts and to argue for a more sustainable future for the sector, this came at the expense of ideas development in areas such as architecture and built environment (a key link to the sustainability agenda), design (a key link between creative and other industries, from manufacturing to services) and the emerging area of digital content and the creative economy. Stuart Cunningham said in New Matilda that:

I was intrigued that when mention was made of "digital content", it was mostly assumed that this meant infrastructure or digitising the content of cultural institutions. These are both crucial aspects of the digital agenda, but the key point is that there is a whole new industry sector emerging out of the convergence of communications, culture and social innovation. By 2020, Australia should be participating strongly in a rapidly expanding digital economy..... And understanding the "creative economy" means grasping the fact that there are more workers in creative occupations outside the creative industries than inside them. Creative skills are needed right across the economy. Digital content creation is set to become the general purpose technology of the 21st century.

If we need to move away from the ‘cultural heritage’ industry that is merely interested in digitizing the past, then we need to avoid Amercian technoculture , with its cyberutopiane ffusions about an egalitarian, chaotic system, ruled by self-governing users with the help of artificial life and friendly bots.

the 2020 Summit pretty much failed to explore the implications of creativity in the post Napster digital world of the internet; a world of BitTorrent, high speed broadband, peer-to peer sharing, Flickr, MP3 players and YouTube. The file-sharing---60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers--- has happened outside of the economic systems of distribution established by the recording , television and film industry. So what does this mean for Creative Australia?

Harvey on memory and desire

I'm off to New Zealand for 2 weeks holiday. You can follow the progress on junk for code. In the meantime we have David Harvey on desire and memory:

My favourite line from Balzac is “hope is a memory that desires” and that was how I wrote Spaces of Hope, around that idea. Everybody has a memory, but memory can become nostalgia when it’s left on its own; nostalgia is not hope. Hope is memory that’s mobilized around desire. So the question is what do we desire and how do we want to desire it? For me, that is the crucial aspect of everything we do. So if I focus on Balzac, to whom I return again and again, I might conclude, “wow, yeah, that’s what’s it about, I desire things, but I can not do this absent of the memory.” As Walter Benjamin says about memory, “memory is not history, its something that flashes up, in moments of danger,” it somehow or other animates things.

In his post Mob Rules (The Law of Fives ) Charles Pesce draws an interesting picture of a network by describing how a Meraki Mini works. This was a closing keynote at the Web Directions South 2007 conference that was on in Sydney in 2007. Pesce says:

Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance – and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors – it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another – all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network. Only one of the Minis needs to be connected to the Internet as a gateway; the others will find it and route traffic through it. The Minis are small – and they’re also cheap. For just $49 dollars US, you can order one complete with an Australian wall wart. That’s cheaper than most access points out there, and because of the mesh networking, it does a whole lot more.

What this means is that we all have the capability to create our own large-scale, low-cost wireless networks within our grasp. Meraki is already proving this in San Francisco, where Google and Earthlink had been fighting the telcos for years to get a city-wide free wireless network installed. Since February, Meraki has been offering free Meraki Minis to anyone in San Francisco who wanted to donate a little of their own broadband to a free municipal WiFi network. Lately that network has been growing by leaps and bounds – no easy feat in a city which effectively broken up by a series of large hills.

And thus a self-organizing network is formed outside the control of the telcos; a network in a era when the mob rules. So the emphasis is on the how the mob uses the networks , and how networks change because of the mob.

the suffering humanities

Stephen Buckle has an op-ed in The Australian that addresses the sad situation of the humanities in Australia---on the road to humanities faculties fit only for a banana republic. He says that the former:

Howard government made no secret of its preference for subjects of a narrowly utilitarian nature and, accordingly, the humanities suffered funding starvation, not to mention open contempt, hence the recurring series of funding crises that afflicted arts faculties: crises engineered by the government and aided by opportunistic university administrations....It may be supposed that the Australian Research Council's grants scheme alleviates the problem. In fact, it exacerbates it.... In effect, then, the grants culture is a backdoor way of radically downgrading most humanities academic positions into full-time teaching positions.

It does so through the time-honoured method of divide and conquer. Forced to compete against each other for the small pot of funds, academics are divided them into the haves and the have-nots. The haves have the best working conditions, the promotions and the power. The have-nots, including an increasing army of casuals on semester by semester employment contracts, do the coalface labour. The old ideal of collegiality has been replaced by a class system.

He adds that the:

For the humanities, the largest problem is that the system is deliberately hostile. This is obvious from a simple perusal of the ARC grant application form, which makes it clear that research means team-based research, organised into a hierarchy of chief investigator, co-investigators and research assistants, the whole supported by an equipment and infrastructure budget. This structure makes sense in the sciences but is nonsense in the humanities' world of individualised investigation.Research assistants have their uses, but only up to a point. In the end, one has to read and write things for oneself: humanities research is not fact accumulation but the development and defence of a point of view.

Sally Potter's Orlando

I watched Sally Potter's film version of Virgina Wool's Orlando on DVD last night. Potter's film alternates genders and identities against shifting historical-cultural backgrounds as it follows a young noble's journey from the Renaissance to the modern era, first as a male and then as a female.

From memory Woolf's text equates instability of identity with instability of language and chart the social constructedness of gender to show that one's subject position as woman or man is only provisional. I recall that it was a complicated text to read, open to many interpretations, and that it invited us, as readers, to read the text against itself.

creative industries

The Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) has proposed that Australian creative industries are comprised of the following six industry segments:
1. Music and Performing Arts
2. Film, Television and Radio
3. Advertising and Marketing
4. Software Development and Interactive Content
5. Writing, Publishing and Print Media, and
6. Architecture, Design and Visual Arts.1
Cultural sector organisations (such as libraries, archives, galleries, museums and peak arts organisations) are also included.

user-led content creation,

Axel Brun's Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage starts from the position that the term ‘production’ is no longer accurate to describe the creative, collaborative, and ad hoc engagement with content for which user-led spaces such as the Wikipedia act as examples. He argues that this is true even where we re-imagine the concept of production as ‘user-led production,’ ‘commons-based peer production,’ or more prosaically as the production of ‘customer-made’ products. He says that:

Users who participate in the development of open source software, in the collaborative extension and editing of the Wikipedia, in the communal world-building of Second Life, or processes of massively parallelized and decentralized creativity and innovation in myriads of enthusiast communities do no longer produce content, ideas, and knowledge in a way that resembles traditional, industrial modes of production; the outcomes of their work similarly retain only few of the features of conventional products, even though frequently they are able to substitute for the outputs of commercial production processes. User-led content ‘production’ is instead built on iterative, evolutionary development models in which often very large communities of participants make a number of usually very small, incremental changes to the established knowledge base, thereby enabling a gradual improvement in quality which—under the right conditions—can nonetheless outpace the speed of product development in the conventional, industrial model.

Bruns uses produsage communities to refer to this decentralized creativity and innovation.