CrLucrativeMedia

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[edit] Lucrative Media: ownership and authorship of public space.

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The Great Chartist's Rally on Kennington Common, 10th April 1848

During the first Cartographic Congress, London 2003, Stefan Szczelkun gave a socio-historical tour of Kennington Park ex-common: a site of popular protest by Chartists, Republicans, Methodists and dissenting groups of all kinds since before the Norman conquest of Britain.

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Pre-1854 map of Kennington Common, from the collection of Stefan Szczelkun.

This map of the park pre-enclosure, in the early 19th Century shows an ad-hoc boundary, crossed by a road, assymetrical; a coloured-in drawing of the negative spaces between private houses, roads and public thoroughfares. Non-commodified, non-landscaped, open to use and interpretation by anyone, the park was identified as a threat to authority, to be brought under spatial and symbolic control.

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1914 Map of Kennington Royal Park, post-enclosure, from the collection of Stefan Szczelkun.

In 1852 the King enclosed the common. It became a Royal Park, patrolled by royal guards. The park was 'landscaped' and trees were planted in straight lines forming a border, with Victorian monuments and fountains scattered around, seemingly at random. What was formerly a negative space of non-ownership between roads and houses became an aesthetisized space for specified leisure experiences.

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Kennington Park today, taken during the Cartographic Congress tour of Kennington Park ex-common.

The park is not so different today. Legislation such as the Criminal Justice Act 1998 was designed to outlaw gatherings of more than 10 people, especially where music is involved, and more recent anti-terror or 'public nuisance' bills propose even more restricted use of these notionally 'public' spaces.

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Kenninton Park's now-delapidated 'Victoriana'; monuments to nothing, from Stefan Szczelkun's collection.

Stefan Sczcelkun's detailed research (recorded and transcribed here: http://bak.spc.org/kenningtonpark/ ) made a compelling hypothesis, that the Victorian monuments scattered through the park were not, in fact, scattered at random. Rather, he suggested, these peculiarly un-attributed objects, without plaques or dedications were placed strategically a short distance from sites of particular historical significance or psychic intensity. Like the magician's trick to distract the audience's attention by flourishing his wand while pulling the rabbit out of his trousers with the other hand, anonymous chunks of Victoriana, now fallen into disrepair, were placed just far enough from the sites of public executions and mass rallies to misdirect attention and focus from those emotive and resonant sites.

Observing the changes on the map, the modifications of historical use and interpretation of the space only begins to describe what the enlosure of Kennington Park ex-common meant. This continual process of privatisation and commodification of public space was not only about spatial control. The enclosure was as much an attack on the interpretation of that space; the ability of the people who used the park to collectively imagine new uses for it and stories about it.

It is this act, the enclosure and commodification of the interpretation of public space that many artists have identified and tried to challenge when working with concepts of 'locative media'. Locative media, as it is often described, engages and represents our interpretations of spaces, often using cartography, or technologies such as Global Positioning Systems and other location-sensing devices to augment the use of digital media with an indexical link to a location. This practice is also often coupled to the use of new 'open' licenses, through which these media can be shared 'freely' in the public domain. As the argument goes, we may not be able to directly change the material relations of the ownership and control of space, immediately returning it to the status of a 'commons', but if the imagination and interpretation of the space can be made public, perhaps collective action, and even change of the material ownership will follow.

The use of these 'open' licenses for 'locative media' and associated practices follow the development of Free and Open Source Software as a parallel development model to proprietary software production. There have been many attempts to construct similar lisencing agreements for other areas of cultural production. The foremost of these licenses is the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org), which offers lisence users a range of options as to which rights they wish to reserve for the re-use of their work: that they require attribution, insist on solely non-commercial re-use, or that the user shares derivative works under the same lisence.

The proposition made by many locative media projects, that interpretations, annotations and mediated subjective experiences of a location can create a new public domain of information-augmented space is compelling. However, authorship and ownership may be synonymous in terms of intellectual property, but not so spatially. When we are talking about a 'commons' of intellectual property, a 'creative commons', does it mean the same thing as when talk about the history, use and interpretation of somewhere like Kennington park?

Clearly not. The Creative Commons are a reaction to antiquated legal definitions of intellectual property, providing more sophisticated and complex descriptions to enable 'humans' (via lawyers and machines), to stake their claims to their informational producs more efficiently. On the net, where the informational products of a million authors are exchanged, re-used and transformed in a tumultuous stream of value, these subtle legal descriptions are a way of facilitating financial or reputation-based remuneration for immaterial labour. The 'commons' on the other hand, are a space of non-ownership, free for use and interpretation by all.

It is appropriate that this acceleration and transformation of value should be initated by the 'creative' industries. In the recent history of urban regenration, the use of artists as the vanguard of gentrification is now a well established process1. Investigation into the affective labour and enthusiastic self-exploitation of artists by Anthony Davies and Simon Ford describes the artist as a willing scab on the picket lines of precarious, de-unionised information workers.2 Worse, this facility for self-exploitation is often developed and honned through the artist's mediation and representation of the 'public' with which they purport to engage, and in many cases, simply use as objects in some self-aggrandising aesthetic arrangement. Those few that are conscious enough to recognise their role in this grotesque process seek impunity by applying 'creative commons' or related licenses to their artworks, an act which in itself has no bearing on the process of value creation and exchange in the art and property markets.

The Creative Commons licenses may introduce greater efficiency in describing ownership of intellectual property and in the regulation of immaterial labour, but while opening up markets and proposing matrices of accounting for the slightest transactions of affect, speech and thought, they do nothing to address the labour relations in which that property is produced. For example, these licenses make the assumption that all exchanges of intellectual property should be mediated by the threat of litigation, while ignoring the fact that most people either have no recourse to a fair legal system, or are understandably reluctant to engage with legal processes that in most cases dispense justice for the wealthy and influential. Untroubled by such social or political concerns, the Creative Commons mundanely facilitates the limitlessness expansion of value creation into all spheres of human activity.

This conception of a 'creative commons', spatialised by 'locative media' seems less an aspirational return to the free interpretation and imagination of public spaces, than an ever more precise delineation of their ownership and authorship: an endless series of micro-enclosures, minute plots of intellectual territory, staked out by law.

• - SaulAlbert, October 2004

1See David Panos, Create Creative Clusters, Mute 28, Summer/Autumn 2004. http://www.metamute.com
2See Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, The Surge to Merge Culture with Economy, Copenhagen Free University, 29 September 2001 - http://www.copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk/AD01.html (05/12/04)