Setting the stage for the OPEN SOURCE LIFE conference on Saturday September 4th: the historial premises of the Tabakfabrik in Linz (Photo: Susi Windischbauer / Ars Electronica)

The conference OPEN SOURCE LIFE, taking place on Saturday September 4th, is part of Ars Electronica Festival 2010 in Linz. OPEN SOURCE LIFE addresses questions around the different paradigm changes summarized by Ars Electronica under the title “repair society”, namely: Is life and work according to ideas from the development of open source software the vision of a sustainable future, a nightmare scenario of total transparency or something that’s long been common practice? Can Open-Source-Mindsets of the individual and Open-Source-Structures in societies and economies act as agents of positive change?

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Tina Modotti, Photo: Johan Hagemeyer (c) Galerie Bilderwelt Berlin

The exhibition “TINA MODOTTI – Photographer and Revolutionary”, which I had the honour of curating (together with Reinhard Schultz) is  on show at the KUNST HAUS WIEN until November 7th 2010. Modotti (1896 – 1942) created her photographic oevre mainly within 7 years spent in the Mexico of the 1920-ies. She became legendary for both her photographic sensibility and her involvement in the revolutionary movements of her time. The exhibition combines a retrospective of her work as photographer with documentation of her being part of the artistic-revolutionary subcultures in Mexico and Europe, her being close with artists like Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo or Edward Weston or writers like B. Traven or Pablo Neruda. We also produced a catalogue with essays in german and english.

The exhibition BADETAG KUNSTWAESCHE opened with a performance. Natascha Uccusic and Georg Hitsch (dasKabelwerk.at) documented the event, see the images on Flickr.

Ausstellung Badetag Kunstwäsche von coop.incontro

This is the first collective public project of the artist’s cooperative coop.incontro – titled BADETAG KUNSTWÄSCHE. A project for the kabelwerkARTspace, a gallery in the new quarter “Kabelwerk” in Vienna. Four members of coop.incontro present their works that all circle around the exhibition’s overall theme of “encounters”: Katja Uccusic-Indra showing her paintings from the last year, Alexandra Uccusic presenting recent paintings and drawings, Judith Nicolussi displaying her graphic works and collages. I am showing some photograpghy – 13 images from the series “Encounter Art” and two sets from the newly conceived project “The Alphabet of Photography”. The exhibition opens May 11 at 7 p.m. with a performance in which the exhibition setup is completed, with a certain reference to the setting of kabelwerkARTspace and everyday life of the inhabitants of this new neighbourhood. More info at coop.incontro

Florian Brody applies “Accomplishing more by doing less” and puts forward his message: Don’t innovate! By innovating in order to make things better, we at the same time win and loose. Brody promotes adapting a habitus of mindfulness and awareness. Knowing before we know it. Embracing the greek concept of prognosis and the corrsponding buddhist concept.

Poet Allen Ginsberg had talked about taking an old form and using it come up with a new form. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

In her framing talk Silja Graupe applies Asian Perspectives on concepts of enabling innovation, thus cherishing Chaos. Chaos acts as the context of a spontaneous encounter of “swift” and “sudden”, where they both assume meaning. But we are warned by this old asian saying: We cannot see the true face of mount Lu because we are standing on top of it. Thus prepared we move from space to BA and – as in Japan – we change slippers for each different room we go to.

Under the heading ENABLE! the LIFT@austria conference is looking at enabling structures for game-changing innovations. Markus Peschl from the University of Vienna in his framing talk points towards the metaphysics of innovation: Potentia – Actus – Emerge. Innovation happens when there is something latent which wants to break forth. For this to take place we have to give up control, nourish our love for details and awareness of weak signals and – most hard in today’s business environments – have to be able to wait.

Stefan Wiltschnig reminds us that we can 0nly act in a genuine way if we are clear about our intentions. Based on this we should consider adopting the “doing less”-attitude rooted in Chinese culture and – following C. G. Jung in this – appreciate the shadow of our movement.

Michael Bauwens of P2P Foundation points to the the emerging models dealing with the ciritical balance between giving away and making money. His Prezi “Everything open and free” shares the current landscape of change for Openess.

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Curating last week’s Creative Industries Styria Convention 2010 in Graz – staged by cis.at – allowed me to meet with some great minds and to reflect on this phase of paradigm shift in the creative industries currently under way.

Workshop Opening

The event brought two days full of inspiring input and experiences: Three workshops on Creative Semantic Web, Design Commons and Cloud Creativity, led by Steve Rogers from Google, Andrea Goetzke from New Thinking and David Sasaki from Global Voices. Followed by an evening with Science Fiction writer and activist Cory Doctorow. More on the results of the Convention as soon as the documentation is complete.

Convention 2010

With all good aspirations, which were maybe never really good, with all the great hopes, which were maybe all too naive from the beginning, which all the expertise, which was all too often obviously pressured not be objective, with great and encouraging pilot projects in Denmark and other countries – the summit of Copenhagen failed both the climate and humanity.

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