open source as performance art
I have been writing about gifts as signals. Some is about personal gifts - the presents people give to one another and about how these are signals of their understanding of the relationship, and of their and the recipient's identies. The last part is about public gifts and in particular, about the parallel that has been drawn between the public gift customs anthropologists have observed in archaic societies and the process of open source development.
This analogy, while it has a nice historical and exotic feel, is rather forced. A closer match, both in cultures spanned and key features fited, to artistic creation and performance.
The most interesting issue is around autonomy and control. Many programers on open source projects have day jobs, in which they program. Why program at night? Here they can choose how to contribute.
Community based theater is in many ways similar - here people work very hard, contributing time, energy, money to be part of a performance. Some do it because they get to star in it - but that does not explain why others choose to take on the roles of stagemanager, lighting grip, and the other behind-the-scenes roles. People say they enjoy being part of a production, that they like community theatre, that they think it is a good thing for the community. This seems very similar to the open source motivations.
Do we think of performing in a community theater production as a gift? Sometimes we think of being in the audience as a gift! "Jan's performing in that awful play again tonight and i hear the theater's been nearly empty. We should go, it won't be that long, and she'll be ever so grateful." And sometimes, a community performance can truly be a wonderful gift to the community.
We need to understand the economics of art (used very generally) and attention better. In a traditional gift economy, the gifts were resources: X has utility when it is used. When I give X away I lose that object and the utility of using it. With art, and especialy performance, the audience is necessary for the existence of the art. The experience is recirocal to the extent that the audience in someways is giving a gift to the performers and the performers are giving a gift to the audience.
This analogy, while it has a nice historical and exotic feel, is rather forced. A closer match, both in cultures spanned and key features fited, to artistic creation and performance.
The most interesting issue is around autonomy and control. Many programers on open source projects have day jobs, in which they program. Why program at night? Here they can choose how to contribute.
Community based theater is in many ways similar - here people work very hard, contributing time, energy, money to be part of a performance. Some do it because they get to star in it - but that does not explain why others choose to take on the roles of stagemanager, lighting grip, and the other behind-the-scenes roles. People say they enjoy being part of a production, that they like community theatre, that they think it is a good thing for the community. This seems very similar to the open source motivations.
Do we think of performing in a community theater production as a gift? Sometimes we think of being in the audience as a gift! "Jan's performing in that awful play again tonight and i hear the theater's been nearly empty. We should go, it won't be that long, and she'll be ever so grateful." And sometimes, a community performance can truly be a wonderful gift to the community.
We need to understand the economics of art (used very generally) and attention better. In a traditional gift economy, the gifts were resources: X has utility when it is used. When I give X away I lose that object and the utility of using it. With art, and especialy performance, the audience is necessary for the existence of the art. The experience is recirocal to the extent that the audience in someways is giving a gift to the performers and the performers are giving a gift to the audience.
posted by Judith at 12:45 PM
1 Comments:
The whole gift economy literature has been under-explored from an open-source framework. I recently have been reading Mauss' book "The Gift" to explore some of these issues and one thing that's missing within the open-source domain is the notion of reciprocity and the implicit power relations in the practices of online gift-giving/open-source economy. It seems like the examples that you have presented here with regard to community theatre emphasize the sense of collective goods that comes from participation in this kind of free-labor way. In a gift economy framework, it seems that anthropological work has emphasize the exchange of symbolic capital between discrete pair of individuals, which is much different than acting towards some kind of collective good. i do like the metaphor of performance art for open source and have been toying with notions of improvisation in these matters...but haven't gotten very far.
:)
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