[Essay] Jacob Lillemose fortæller i dette essay om Daniel Garcia Andújars installation X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People System og om baggrunden for dette værk Af Jacob Lillemose Foto: Århus Kunstbygning Udstillingen X-Devian. The New Technologies To The People System blev vist i Århus Kunstbygning fra 12. maj til 10. juni 2007 www.aarhuskunstbygning.dk

Udstillingsbillede fra Århus Kunstbygning

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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.
On a more indirect level, Ars Electronica’s choice of Linux also emphasized another relationship between free software and this contemporary art, i.e. the idea informing both that software is not just a question of programming, but of producing culture - of understanding and using technology as a means of engaging in a social context. According to the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Richard Stallman, free software is about ”practical material advantages” but also about ”what kind of society we want to live in, and what constitutes a good society”. 1 Stallman himself imagines an extremely collective and creative society founded on the freedom to ”use, study, copy, modify and redistribute software”. For him, the free software’s fundamental abolishment of intellectual property rights represents a chance to structurally and conceptually ”reprogram” society for the better, and this is an opinion he shares with much of contemporary art. Read the rest of this entry »

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Presented with advertising video in the exhibition, and during the Irational Action Weekend in Dortmund Judging from the aesthetics x-devian looks like your standard commercial proprietary software. With its minimalistic »X« and slogan reading »With over 150 innovative new features, it’s like having an all-new computer«, the stylishly designed black-and-white cover effectively signals that this product means business — which it does. However, the content and not least the ethics of the product is explicitly opposed to the software culture promoted by neo-liberal corporations like Microsoft and Apple. As a bootable operating system (i. e. it does not need to be installed on your computer but can be run directly from the portable disk) based on GNU/Linux, x-devian is involved not in the business of capitalism but of free and shared culture. The system represents a comprehensive conceptual and practical reconfiguration of the economics of mainstream software culture. To use it, no investment in expensive software or hardware is necessary. Just insert the disk - which your can order for free at the X-Devian website - in your personal computer and you are ready to “go free”. Thus with X-Devian Technologies To The People invites the common user to experience and reflect upon the alternative wonders of Free and Libre Open Source Software, the true social and political »evolution of the species« in the computer age. (Jacob Lillemose)

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• 1998
• DVD

Presented on a monitor » Like every other company Technologies To The People (TTTP) is highly aware of (the value of) its public image and how this image is presented through different media. In this promotional video a number of international tech-economic experts praise the values and ethics of TTTP. However, originally the experts were not hired and paid by TTTP but by its market rivals — global corporations like Dell, Microsoft, and so forth. The promotional video strings together sequences hijacked from corporate PR videos and the abstract concepts they use to deliver ultra-positive descriptions of their companies’ imagined role in the world. Thus, it adopts the language and visuals of business to promote the rival notion of a human-centred and common culture, subtly and humorously confronting the viewer with the question of which of the two cultural economies one wants to define ›freedom‹, ›the future‹, and not least ›access to technology‹. (Jacob Lillemose)

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• 1998
• DVD

Presented with DVD Footage of a swinging suspension bridge with a car on it is accompanied by a heavymetal guitar riff. Suddenly the driver is seen to switch off his car stereo, the music stops, as does the swinging of the bridge, and one hears birds singing. All is peace. The guy looks into the camera and with a silly grin on his face says, »Sorry.« The video is a smart piece of advertising, a precise illustration of the way irational rocks our mental and physical infrastructures with a delicate balance of danger and humour. The video was originally used by a corporation dealing with technology. (Jacob Lillemose)

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