User:Cristinac/Proposal

Tentative Title

Introduction

A general interest that I have seen develop alongside my practice has been that of the dichotomy between open and closed information sources. Whether the divide is realised by physical obstacles (location for example), digital obstacles (DRM), or economic reasons (tickets as impediments to access a conference or festival), it is often illusory. As most dichotic splits, there is ambiguity in the space between them. There are for example, torrent websites that allow you to download material as long as you are able to maintain the download-upload ratio. As starting points, I am interested in offline and pirate sharing cultures, which do not necessarily subscribe to a social contract.

There is a growing number of information activists who are thinking about curating and making information accessible to a larger audience. One of them is Sebastian Lütgert, the person behind textz.com. The project began back in 2001, when he decided to put up a collection of texts he had acquired from various sources. The textz.com website quickly became a popular resource, which subsequently attracted the attention of Suhrkamp Verlag. The website was forced to shut down in 2004, but recently reappeared under the guise of an alternative reality game. On it, the visitors can find a link to the torrent file containing the complete source code of all published and unpublished versions of textz.com, including all texts, from around 1999 to 2006, as well as a set of instructions on how to find out the password needed to unzip the archive.

Lütgert proposes an interesting model of distributing the material. He is creating a boundary around the files, that strengthens their protection against unwanted authorities and simultaneously invites the visitors to engage with the archive in order to prove their interest. The effort that the participants are putting into finding the code becomes the currency that they exchange for access. The collection is not free anymore, but needs to be earned.

Another example that is related to the topic occurred at the 'Ideographies of Knowledge' conference in Mons. While speaking about the Advanced eBook Processor v2.2, Nikita Mazurov made a remarkable observation. After recounting the situation of one of the Russian developers that had been working on the project, he put up a jpeg file that showed a link. He did so in order to avoid directly referring to the http address of the processor, whose promotion is prohibited by law. The simplicity of Mazurov's solution almost had a comical aspect, but it also raised questions about alternative methods to circumvent intellectual property conflicts.

These two instances of creating obstacles to accessing free content provide the introduction to my proposal.

Description of the project:

Inspired by the zip sharing system that Lütgert adopted, I propose to create a platform that creates compressed book packages whose contents are unknown. Based on a recommendation system, there will be a possibility for the user to contribute their own books to the collection, but not to retrieve specific titles.

Relation to previous practice

In the previous two thematic projects, the topic of subversive methods of escaping the proprietary ball and chain emerged. For the CAPTCHA project, I was rebuilding books by turning each line into glyph-images that were unreadable by machines, but still meaningful to the human eye. The process was automated and realised through python, which helped generate the new lines, order them and place them in a temporary database. During this project, I started considering alternative uses of the image generator, which seemed to be a possible, if unpractical, way of circumventing the DRM system of digital books. A user interface around the code that gives them an option to upload their own text file and create a CAPTCHA database from it to share with others or put up on their own website was considered.

The connection with the subject became more pronounced in the Encyclopedia of Potentialities, which was dealing with the greyness of the 'open' European patent database. A patent is an agreement between the state and the inventor, which obliges the latter to provide insight into how their invention functions in exchange for the guarantee that their work will not be copied. While the primary reason for the existence of patents is increasing communal knowledge, there is a paradox that emerges from a situation in which transparency excludes access.

Relation to a larger context

'Sharing economy' as expanding buzzword Public Library projects

Thesis intention

Creating an alternative interface to a publicly shared online library that is based on user recommendations. Recreating the serendipity of book finding that is so common to physical libraries. Creating a secure channel for content to travel freely.

Practical steps

• Putting together a collection of books (curation)
• Looking at various forms of distribution and recommendation-systems
• Setting up the platform

References

• Radical Tactics of the Offline Library
• Secrecy, Authorship and Nuclear Weapons Scientists
• Knowledge Capital Osaka
• Bibliotecha
• Dead drops
• Personal Portable Library
• Pirate Box
• Telekommunisten