Memory_Archive_Database v 3.0¹

In 1968, in a report to the Rockefeller Foundation during a residency at SUNY Stony Brook, Nam June Paik argued that 97% of all electronic music was not recorded and that "a simple measure would solve the whole problem. An information center for unpublished electronic media should be created."² Of course, at the time, this meant such a center would "provide a xerox copy and a tape copy of musical pieces, at the request of performers, students, and organizers from all over the world." Still, convert analog to digital, and the dream lives on, perhaps more vibrant than ever, of a universal archive, with access to everything by anyone anywhere at anytime.

For the past 25+ years, museums and other cultural institutions have been trying to figure out, first how to automate their information systems--create computer-based databases--and, more recently, how to provide the public access to this "automated information."³

The New Technologies To The People® System 

By Jacob Lillemose 

In 1999, when the art and technology festival Ars Electronica awarded The Golden Nica, first prize in the ”.net” category, to the programmer Linus Torvalds for his development of the Linux operating system, it was pointing in general to the relationship between free software and art, and more specifically to the affinity between free software and that part of contemporary art which is concerned with software’s constantly increasing influence on social, economic and political conditions.  Like Linux, this part of contemporary art works against the proprietary software industry’s standardization, repression and rationalization of the software culture, and instead explores alternate possibilities for freeing the software culture through more open, expressive and speculative processes.

By Daniel G. Andujar*

In the last few years, copyright has become a controversial issue. On the one hand, current information and communication technologies have generated a new social reality in which both old situations and new sceneries coexist. Undoubtedly, these transformations have also produced a crisis on the prevailing systems of distribution and cultural management. Societies have enough mechanisms to adapt themselves to their own processes, but we must ask ourselves if the current dogmatic legislative apparatus is prepared to confront these changes. On the other hand, the recent pressure that collective copyright management societies have exerted on our legislators, so as to make sure that the new laws on intellectual property will safekeep their interests, has intensified this debate. Specialists express their opinions on this subject even on the paparazzi TV shows, and of course, a few of them may suddenly show their preference for one of the options with the sole purpose of taking advantage of this situation. This is not just one more ephemeral topic. It's in fact an open confrontation between those who control and defend leisure industries -culture's big business-, and those who demand an urgent revision of the prevailing system and a reformulation of the notion of intellectual property in a new "free-culture" context.

This confrontation has already begun. Its tracks can be found everywhere and they are broadcasted without control through an increasingly complex system in which one can hardly identify central and peripheral zones, transmitter and receiver, means and messages.

Daniel G Andújar

El tema de los Derechos de Autor se ha convertido últimamente en motivo de polémica y discusión recurrente. Por un lado, las actuales tecnologías de información y comunicación, han generado una nueva realidad social en medio de la cual se desenvuelven tanto situaciones previas como nuevos escenarios. Lo que no podemos dudar es que estas transformaciones han puesto en crisis los modelos de distribución y gestión cultural dominante. La sociedades tienen mecanismos suficientes para adaptarse a sus propios procesos de cambio, pero no podemos evitar preguntarnos si el aparato dogmático y legislativo vigente está preparado para afrontar estos cambios. Por otro lado, la reciente presión que las entidades de gestión de derechos colectivos de autor realizan sobre nuestros legisladores, para que nuevas leyes sobre la propiedad intelectual garanticen sus intereses, ha intensificado aún más el debate y la discusión en torno a esta cuestión. Los especialistas en uno y otro sentido surgen como los tertulianos en los programas del corazón, y por supuesto siempre aparecen quienes súbitamente se suben a uno u otro carro con el único propósito de sacar rédito de la situación. No estamos hablando de una moda pasajera, nos estamos refiriendo directamente a una confrontación abierta entre quienes controlan y defienden la industria del ocio, el gran negocio de la cultura, y quienes reclaman una revisión urgente del sistema imperante y una reformulación de la noción de propiedad intelectual en un nuevo contexto de ‘cultura libre’.