FeCvsForTheCultureIndustry

From UoWiki

The application of statistical and mathematical methods in the field of economics to describe the relationships between key economic forces such as capital, interest rates, and labor in the 'soft' econoimes of art and cultural production first becomes necessary when we recognise that their various non-munitary systems (reputation, sponsorship in kind, 'participation') are simply efficient ways of regulating information-based labour.

[edit] notes on cultural project management

We've described this collection of resources, venues, artists, organisations and projects as a 'map', and have imagined our activities spatially spread all over London over a set period of time. But the use of these resources - my sofa where I can sleep someone for 2 days, your video projector which is available for 8 days in September, his venue for our seminar, or that wedge of cash from a funder is potentially a more dynamic field of exchange than can be represented by the two, or three, or even four dimensional space of a map.

What we're talking about making with this map is a more like a CVS1 for the culture industry. So often, when funding enters the subtle economies of voluntary labour, it polarises people into 'funded' and 'unfunded', 'artists' and 'technicians'. This not only distributes the available finances inequitably, it also completely subverts the reputation economy that enables the unfunded activity to occur in the first place. Whoever can present themselves as the centre of the creative process (the artist) wins all - which is then rolled through a crass fame economy into the institutional representation, then the national representation, and so on.

By creating a system which accounts for the otherwise unacknowledged forms of exchange that actually drive cultural production, we're not doing anything revolutionary. Quite the opposite - this accounting reifies those exchanges as cultural value, but their transparency, or rather their visibility keeps the efforts and energies of the 'participants' from being rolled into the inaccessible speculative value of the 'artist'. Like a LETS system, your effort becomes an investment on which you can trade.

Free Software is the paradigm for how a strongly coded representation of investments made can become the core of an independent mode of production that is symbiotic, but not reliant on commercial and governmental software production. Of course, this happens already in most successful cultural industries. In film you work your way up from being a lowly runner to doing more interesting work and achieving more recognition, then eventually you are able to capitalise on your investments to do the job you want and get paid well for it. But in film, this relies heavily on a highly structured accounting system - the credits. Every minor role, every extra, every third grip and assistant to the second cameramen is credited, as well as all sponsors, hosts and helpers. This even happens to a lesser degree in art practice where attribution, copyright and curatorial effort is strongly compensated financially and in reputation terms, even if it is overly weighted towards artists. But media art is a different story - its flux of technological, artistic and administrative processes are too heterogeneous to use the limited matrices of value available to commercial 'contemporary' art practices or commercial film making.

'Collaborative practices', the 'creative commons', 'open art'.. these forms are often based on a mythical communal ownership that uses the rhetoric of the 'commons' while the real investments of effort are hived off into a reductive, speculative economy that is only accessible to the named few.

I'm thinking about our cultural CVS in terms of Free Infrastructures. Just as CVS is the infrastructure for strongly accounting for the authorship and investments of programmers, the production of our cultural work can make an approximation of this process for the authorship and investments made in the production of a series of events, artworks and exhibitions.

This is a horrific outcome, but somehow pushing the limits of authorship to their logically coded extremes maybe clarifies what the values we're playing with are, and what is simply primate politics.

1 The Concurrent Versions System (CVS), also known as the Concurrent Version System and the Concurrent Versioning System, implements a version control system: it keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, typically the implementation of a software project, and allows several (potentially widely separated) developers to collaborate. CVS has become popular in the open-source world. The developers of CVS release it under the GNU General Public License. -- definition from Wikipedia.org

• -

SaulAlbert for Uo Economic Observatory, 07/03/2005