Lectures Program

Week 1 - 02/09/13 - Kickoff

10:30 - 11:30 - Introductions The inaugural lecture of the weekly studium generale will give short introductions to the domain and specialisations which fall under Open Source. You will be informed about the courses, resources and partners of the programme, meet all the staff, as well as get some insight on the infrastructure as a whole, the idea of the domain as community and pilot within WdKA.

11:30 - 11:45 - Q & A (questions / concerns / critique / comments)

11:45 - 12:15 - Guest Lecture: Christian Fiebig

The first guest lecturer will be Christian Fiebig. Christian Fiebig is recent graduate whose body of work is becoming increasingly more layered, open, and technologically infused. His projects ‘Computer Augmented Crafts’, and ‘Impulsive Furnishing Unit’ rethink the front-end of production technologies, yet to get there he was thrown into the dark, messy, and often frustrating back-end of the technology. As a designer, rather than a technologist, Christian will discuss his own insights lessons learned from his projects, the value of improving your digital literacy and transition from making working props to working prototypes, and how he defines openness in his work.

12:15 - 12:30 - Q & A (questions / critique / comments)

12:30 - 14:00 - Open Lunch - Potluck Picnic

To kick off the community atmosphere, and to get to know your fellow students in an informal social setting, we will have a potluck picnic. A potluck is a gathering where each person or small group prepares food to be openly shared among the group. Bring a dish and a blanket.

14:00 - 17:00 - Claim the Studio!

Considering the core of the minor revolves around experimental studio practice, we first need to claim some studio space. The former Crosslab space in the 2de inberieding has been arranged as a dedicated working space for the domain as a whole, but what’s in it, where things are, and how it will function is up to you. To facilitate the claiming space and the transformation from ‘2de inberieding’ to ‘Open Source Studio’ an open ended workshop for each minor has been planned. By the end of the week the official opening of the ‘Open Source Studio’ with a toasted with a drink.

Digital Craft Workshop - Impulsive Furnishings (i.e. setting up the studio space by means of CNCing table-tops, lasering studio signs, assembling shelves or installing 3d printers)

Data Design Workshop - Mining the Class (i.e. finding and visualising useful (or useless) class data by means of plotting or printing posters, vinyl stickering the windows, or creating new visuals for the domain wiki and blog.

Open Design Workshop - Beg, Borrow, Steal, & Distribute (i.e. accumulating and sharing knowledge, skills, books, blueprints, tools and materials by means of a physical library, or distributed library accessed through the domain wiki and blog)

Week 2 - 09/09/13 - Free and Open

• Guest: Aymeric Mansoux
• Host: Aldje van Meer
• Keywords: internet, free software, open source, free culture, definition, diffusion, defusion

Aymeric Mansoux: Free and Open. The Internet is revolutionising our creative process. Practically speaking, the making of software, art, music and design can be shared and improved by local and global communities using the network to exchange, collaborate and learn from each others within and beyond legal constraints and restrictions. Of course, from an art and design history perspective, this evolution of both cooperative and collaborative practices did not happen over night. However one particular transformation in computer culture proved to be an effective catalyst for these changes. Indeed, at the turn of the 21st century, free and open source software has successfully demonstrated the impact of novel ways of sharing, distributing and working online by allowing the reuse, copy and adaptation of software source code. Within the last 15 years this culture inspired many other disciplines and communities who appropriated these ideas to form a general approach to open source outside of software practices and eventually provided the ground for the free culture movement to grow. In this lecture we will look at what source code is and what it means to make it open for others. Next to that we will explore the diffusion of the open source idea in other subcultures and we will study the transformation of the free software definition into the free culture definition.

Week 3 - 16/09/13 - Big Data / Data journalism

Big Data / Data journalism

Week 4 - 23/09/13 - This is mine, maybe you can have it

• Guests: Deanna Herst & Aymeric Mansoux
• Host: Aldje van Meer
• Keywords: authorship, history, licenses, copyright, copyleft, copyfree

Deanna Herst: Title Description (The notion of authorship and copyright through history: How does the author role has been changing and (re)defined through ages, where does copyright come from, who benefit from it, etc)

Best Practice en/of iemand van Creative Commons

Aymeric Mansoux: So you want to make your stuff "open"? Right... One of the greatest strengths of a free software license such as the GPL is the copyleft mechanism. Relying on both copyright and contract laws, copyleft licenses enforce a mandatory sharing of the modifications made to the software, thus making sure improvements will be available to the public and not locked down in a proprietary closed source system. At the opposite copyfree/copycentre licenses, also known as permissive licenses, such as BSD-like licenses, impose far less restrictions on the sharing of such modifications as well as the integration of the software into a closed source systems. Beyond the realm of software, licenses focussed on cultural expressions, such as music, movies, texts and images, also comes with different flavours. For instance the project Creative Commons proposes different choices when it comes to choose a license whether a creator wants to enforce a copyleft-like system or forbid derivate works or commercial usage. Said differently, free culture and so-called open content licenses form a happy mess that is very often confusing for both their supporters and detractors. In this lecture we will debunk some common myths and misunderstandings attached to such licenses. Last but not least we will see concretely how to use them and what impact they have on the works they are attached to

Week 5 - 30/09/13 - Data Data Data

• participating culture - (businessmodels) -
• Autonomous prespective on DIY culture, Hacking spaces -

Week 6 - 07/10/13 - Crafty Hacks

collaboration with Hacking minor:

• Hacking & Crafting;
• Craft Debate: Discussing the urgency of craft in contemporary culture
• Historical perspective: Glenn Adamson
• Activist perspective: Betsy Greer
• Technological perspective: Unfold
• Hacking; Ine Poppe
• Inviting students from hacking

Week 7 - 14/10/13 DATA DATA DATA

• Jonas Lund (PZI student, best practice) presentation about art API, from scraping to writing an API, ranking algorithms, appropriation. - 30 minutes (ov)

In the ‘Api to the rescue’ talk we will be exploring the power of algorithms for artistic production by looking closer at the Art World API. The Art World API is a REST based api (application programming interface) that gives you easy access to the connected art world database consisting of artists, curators, institutions, writers, publishers, museums and more. What motivated the creation of the Art World API, how do you go about making your own API and what are some of the things that this particular API can be used for.

• Over Open Data (dry information) - 15 minutes - Peter Conradie?

Week 8 - 28/10/13 - No Lectures

Monday 28th October, no lectures

Week 9 - 08/11/13 - Mystery Lecture 2 Worm (ov)

Presentation week

• closing lecture(s) chosen by students on friday 8th of november

• location to be confirmed

Old Stuff

Bits to be merged with above and the rest to be trashed.

• Impact of standard copyright and contract laws on networked media
• Piracy
• Subculture and copyright (memes)
• Proto-copyleft art and design practices
• constraint and system art
• aesthetics of participation
• Ready made tools are for ready made solutions
• Maps, visualisation and navigation
• openness and business strategies
• sharing is caring
• activism and social awareness
• DIY, DIWO and DITO
• crowdfunding and the commons
• open data
• manipulation (darkpatterns)
• defcad