The Forum d’Avignon is an annual meeting of invited guests, heavily from the French culture industries, with a handful of Internet people sprinkled in, and interesting international representation. It is a high end conference for sure: beautiful hotels in beautiful Avignon, a welcome reception in the historic and ornate Town Hall, dinner in the Palais de Papes — the Palace of Popes, a visit from Pres. Sarkozy in a couple of hours. The sessions themselves are held in a long hall lined with seats facing one another. The overall topic this year — the 4th annual Forum — is “investing in culture.” The sessions consist of group interviews in the middle.
James “Jamie” Boyle is here, I’m very happy to say. He speaks tomorrow. They sat me next to him at dinner last night (yay!) and among other wise things, said that conferences always have narratives. It’s not yet clear to me what the narrative for this Forum is, although I have apparently been asked to play the role this afternoon of The Bringer of Discomfort, or possibly, He Who Should Be Heard Once and then Ignored.
I am very appreciative to have been brought here (expenses paid). And I am double appreciative to be one of the relative few people who are given a chance to speak. But I have to say that this conference cries out to be an unconference.
Antoine Gosset Grainville makes a case for investing in culture.
Urbanist Charles Landry says that culture needs to move into the center again because of the rapid pace of development and globalization. The right question is: What is the cost of not thinking about culture, art, design, green, etc.? So, of course we want a lot of artists. But we also want interesting and provocative art.
Vincent Frosty (investor) has looked at who is investable and at 50 cultural projects. They’ve found that cultural and non-cultural investments are treated roughly the same.
Charles: Urban engineers think of city-making in terms of creating infrastructure, vs. the sensory experience of cities. Hardware is not the totality of life. The engineering approach can sometimes be insensitive, although engineering is a wonderful discipline. E.g., Chicago Millennial Park that transformed a parking lot. A city is a place of meeting, transacting, exchange, etc. Cities are aiming at reinventing the art of conviviality. That’s how culture is reinvigorated. This is intangible, confounding accountants. Creative city-making is a paradigm shift. The best cultural policy: 1. Link us to enlightenment. 2. Life our spirits; empowers us. 3. Entertains us. 4. Employability. 5. Economic impact.
[Why is it not clear here that when it comes to culture, the Internet is the new city? It is where culture is happening and accelerating, even though from the outside it looks like a warren of pickpockets, drunks, and prostitutes.]
Vincent: My policy guidelines: Open to partnerships. Sustainable beyond the creators.
Charles: I looked at 6 European cities. All have used culture in one way or another. Often they use old buildings. Culture is increasingly embedded into the economy in subtle ways, and new forms of working that are less hierarchical.
Vincent: Demand is strong for culture. But culture alone is not going to get us out of the economic crisis.
Charles: We want to create conditions in which ordinary people make the extraordinary happen.
Vincent: Viviendi has made cultural enrichment a target by which executives are measured.
Now new people come to the panel. David Throsby is an Australian economist. Jochen Gerze is an artist. Syhem Belkhodja is a Tunisian choreographer.
David: How do economists regard culture? “Cultural capital” has economic and cultural value. Expenditure on culture is an investment in culture. Now we can use the methods of economic analysis. Five examples: 1. Bengarra Dance Company in Australia turns aboriginal people’s stories into contemporary dance. It’s a risky investment, but the payoff is that it contributes to the viability of the dance company, plus the obvious cultural payoff. 2. A new museum (“M9″) in the city of Maestra next to Venice, with cultural benefit plus economic payoff in increased tourism, etc. 3. Skopje in Macaedonia is investing in the old bazaar in its historic center. Local businesses benefit, with an important social payoff because before the investment there was a lot of inter-ethnic conflict there. Now it’s a social space. 4. In Papua New Guinea, basket weavers using traditional methods are making products sellable on the international market, especially empowering women. 5. The National Theatre Live project in the UK transmits live performances to cinemas all over Europe. Finally, we need a model of the cultural economy that puts the core creative artists at the center. [Liked this until that last point. I would have preferred a networked model, rather than the concentric circles David displayed.]
Jochen: Much of what we’ve heard this morning is true and useful. But we’re making a mistake by basing ourselves on the Renaissance view of art in which you bid people to stand in admiration of a work and keep their mouths shut. Democracy informs our cultural practices. E.g., I did a year-long project called “Two Three Streets,” an artistic project in the public space. Today’s art always raises the question of whether it is art. So, we invited people to spend a year rent-free in exchange for contributing to a common text to be written, and to change a street in three cities in the Ruhr area [?]. 1,500 people applied from all over the world. 78 [?] participants were accepted, between ages 17 and 90. Changing a street in a disadvantaged part of town…that is not an art project. For a year, 800 people participated in writing a shared text. The Net brought them together, 16 languages, 3,000 pages. It sold out. An ebook is being prepared, and instead of being sold for 80 euros it will cost around 8 euros. In 1837 Novalis said: “Perhaps one day we shall write, think and act in common. Someday perhaps an entire nation will create a work of art.” Some have stayed on to continue the community work of this project, not as art but as an economic, social, and cultural project. Art can affect an entire culture, but not necessarily by artists. It is like aspirin that dissolves into the entire system.
Syhem: The elections in Tunisia have made it harder than ever to talk about culture. Women had some freedom under the old dictator. 28 yrs ago when I started dancing, women could not participate in politics, but we could have our own cultural spaces. It was hard because it is an Islamic culture, but you just had to cheat a little, and talk about entertainment or majorettes rather than dance. To my dismay, after the revolution I realized that perhaps we’d been naive and they’d exploited us. In 2002 I organized a contemporary dance festival, working with Martha Graham and others, and I called the whole dancing clan and …[translator fails]. I’m a moderate, modern Muslim and think that women are free. [Sorry, but the translator is incomprehensible.] In 2006, I said we have to make it free of charge. 24 Koranic channels today. I respect the decision of the voters, but out of 4M voting, only 1.6% voted for the Islamicists. It’s not a lost cause. [The French speaking audience applauds. But the translator pretty much gave up. [Afterwards my friend and moderator Eric Scherer vouched that she was fantastic. I wish I could have understood it.]]
Moderator: Jochen, what do you think the potential role of art is in learning democracy?
Jochen: Whatever happens has an impact on art. Art cannot survive unchanged in a changing world. Art is not there to accompany life. It has to be part of an honest dialogue; we have to get away from the tiresome culture of privilege.
Syhem: New tech is great, but what about the ethics for someone who speaks out? Thanks to the new tech, the Tunisians are holding their heads high. We were pioneers without any foreign help. It’s important that we not break the link [not clear to me which link]. You have to understand influence. If there’s a move away from your values in Egypt, or Libya, but you have to remember there are values out there. It’s not through oil and petrodollars that you can convince people of your values.
Moderator: Today we have the Greater Paris plan. [He introduces someone without naming him, and he's not listed in the program.]
Person: Greater Paris is a paradigm shift. It is a fruitful encounter bringing together an economic side — clusters of businesses and universities — and then the transport cluster. We have links between suburbs and habitat. Housing has to be intelligent. Culture is going to be like the blood feeding the different organs.
An possible explanation of the observation of neutrinos traveling faster than light has been posted at Arxiv.org by Ronald van Elburg. I of course don’t have any of the conceptual apparatus to be able to judge that explanation, but I’m curious about why, among all the explanations, this is one I’ve now heard about it.
In a properly working knowledge ecology, the most plausible explanations would garner the most attention, because to come to light an article would have to pass through competent filters. In the new ecology, it may well be that what gets the most attention are articles that appeal to our lizard brains in various ways: they make overly-bold claims, they over-simplify, they confirm prior beliefs, they are more comprehensible to lay people than are ideas that require more training to understand, they have an interesting backstory (“Ashton Kutcher tweets a new neutrino explanation!”)…
By now we are all familiar with the critique of the old idea of a “properly working knowledge ecology”: Its filters were too narrow and were prone to preferring that which was intellectually and culturally familiar. There is a strong case to be made that a more robust ecology is wilder in its differences and disagreements. Nevertheless, it seems to me to be clearly true (i.e., I’m not going to present any evidence to support the following) that to our lizard brains the Internet is a flat rock warmed by a bright sun.
But that is hardly the end of the story. The Internet isn’t one ecology. It’s a messy cascade of intersecting environents. Indeed, the ecology metaphor doesn’t suffice, because each of us pins together our own Net environments by choosing which links to click on, which to bookmark, and which to pass along to our friends. So, I came across the possible neutrino explanation at Metafilter, which I was reading embedded within Netvibes, a feed aggregator that I use as my morning newspaper. A comment at Metafilter pointed to the top comment at Reddit’s AskScience forum on the article, which I turned to because on this sort of question I often find Reddit comment threads helpful. (I also had a meta-interest in how articles circulate.) If you despise Reddit, you would have skipped the Metafilter comment’s referral to that site, but you might well hae pursued a different trail of links.
If we take the circulation of Ronald van Elburg’s article as an example, what do we learn? Well, not much because it’s only one example. Nevertheless, I think it at least helps make clear just how complex our “media environment” has become, and some of the effects it has on knowledge and authority.
First, we don’t yet know how ideas achieve status as centers of mainstream contention. Is von Elburg’s article attaining the sort of reliable, referenceable position that provides a common ground for science? It was published at Arxiv, which lets any scientist with an academic affiliation post articles at any stage of readiness. On the other hand, among the thousands of articles posted every day, the Physics Arxiv blog at Technology Review blogged about this one. (Even who’s blogging about what where is complex!) If over time von Elburg’s article is cited in mainstream journals, then, yes, it will count as having vaulted the wall that separates the wannabes from the contenders. But, to what extent are articles not published in the prestigious journals capable of being established as touchpoints within a discipline? More important, to what extent does the ecology still center around controversies about which every competent expert is supposed to be informed? How many tentpoles are there in the Big Tent? Is there a Big Tent any more?
Second, as far as I know, we don’t yet have a reliable understanding of the mechanics of the spread of ideas, much less an understanding of how those mechanics relate to the worth of ideas. So, we know that high-traffic sites boost awareness of the ideas they publish, and we know that the mainstream media remain quite influential in either the creation or the amplification of ideas. We know that some community-driven sites (Reddit, 4chan) are extraordinarily effective at creating and driving memes. We also know that a word from Oprah used to move truckloads of books. But if you look past the ability of big sites to set bonfires, we don’t yet understand how the smoke insinuates its way through the forest. And there’s a good chance we will never understand it very fully because the Net’s ecology is chaotic.
Third, I would like to say that it’s all too complex and imbued with value beliefs to be able to decide if the new knowledge ecology is a good thing. I’d like to be perceived as fair and balanced. But the truth is that every time I try to balance the scales, I realize I’ve put my thumb on the side of traditional knowledge to give it heft it doesn’t deserve. Yes, the new chaotic ecology contains more untruths and lies than ever, and they can form a self-referential web that leaves no room for truth or light. At the same time, I’m sitting at breakfast deciding to explore some discussions of relativity by wiping the butter off my finger and clicking a mouse button. The discussions include some raging morons, but also some incredibly smart and insightful strangers, some with credentials and some who prefer not to say. That’s what happens when a population actually engages with its culture. To me, that engagement itself is more valuable than the aggregate sum of stupidity it allows.
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(Yes, I know I’m having some metaphor problems. Take that as an indication of the unsettled nature of our thought. Or of bad writing.)
EatBees has a couple of very interesting posts (12) about bricolage in Morocco.
Bricolage is usually romanticized because it is a way those without resources can, through their inventiveness, make something out of scraps. But, EatBees writes about how a friend convinced him that as a integral part of Morocco’s economy, it isn’t just a sign of the culture’s inventiveness:
Bricolage…is a desperate response to a system in disrepair. My friend sees it as a sign of Moroccans’ misfortune, not as something to celebrate. Perhaps it is even a factor in perpetuating the breakdown, by accepting it as normal and multiplying it into the future. More professionalism is needed in Morocco, my friend would argue. The solution is to reform the broken-down system and do things the right way in the first place. However, this requires a material investment that is not being made; and bricolage is an engrained habit that will be hard to break.
Tucows is participating in the Canadian copyright consultation process. Rather than submitting a comment written in the usual lawyerly prose, Elliot Noss, Tucow’s CEO, asked me to write up something about copyright in my usual imprecise and incoherent prose. I like Elliot a lot, and I care about copyright, so I wrote about the argument that without strong copyright protection, creators won’t have an incentive to create. The piece is now posted… [The next day: I absolutely should have mentioned that this was a commissioned piece. I.e., Elliot paid me to write something, and posted it unaltered.]
The RIAA has won a ruling that the DMCA‘s provision that forbids backward engineering software to see how it work applies also to musical recordings. The ruling forbids any attempt to figure out the melody, arrangement, or chord progression of any copyrighted song, whether that figuring out is done mentally, at a keyboard, or using software. It also forbids graphical displays based on the music, including the psychedelic visualizations that come with many music players or the tapping of feet to beats embedded in a copyrighted work. An exemption has been made for those with perfect pitch, although they are not allowed to transmit or communicate the internal structures of music that they have mentally decoded.
The RIAA has also announced that it will sue to protect all who claim unique musical contributions to the culture. As a result, Pat Boone now owns the Motown sound, John Lennon owns singing above one’s natural range as a way of expressing emotion, Cat Stevens owns singing below one’s natural range for the same purpose, and Van Morrison has been awarded custody of any two-chord song to which musicians improvise while high enough on marijuana that they think other people are enjoying it.
An RIAA spokesmen expressed delight with the ruling and the new set of protections: “We think we’re now within sight of producing the last two or three original songs, and then the entire culture can call it a day.”
Flavorwire posts about a project studying microcommunities that takes online flamethrowers as its topic:
The premise is simple; to showcase kids and their homemade flamethrowers. However, the concept behind the premise isn’t as cut and dry. Not just a music video, the ode to flamethrowers and the kids who make them is also the focal point of a case study being conducted by the Web Ecology Project, Tim Hwang of ROFLCon/Awesome Foundation and Sawyer Carter Jacobs, bassist for Family Portrait. Together the research team, which formed while working together at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, are using the video to highlight the “often overlooked universe of micro-communities flourishing in the nooks and crannies of the web.”
I’m a Tim Hwang fanboy, so I’m looking forward to what the project comes up with. You can vote for including a panel on microcummunities (with flamethrowers as its example) at SxSW.
On the other hand, I’m old, so I look at the video and say “HOLY MOTHER OF CRISPIES, YOU KIDS PUT THOSE THINGS DOWN THIS INSTANT!!!”
Seriously, someone should take these kids to a burn ward as part of a Scared Flame-Retardant program. And then Smoky the Bear ought to give them a singed-knuckle sandwich.
First, he says that the four most-taught Shakespearean plays are all tragedies. The tragedies are — he says — about how men screw up the world. And in the four most-taught ones, the women generally kill themselves or are otherwise disempowered. We should be teaching the comedies, he says, because they’re about how women make the world livable.
Second, he objects to calling Shakespeare’s language “old English.” Actually, it’s young English, full of play, lacking rules, inventing itself.
