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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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.

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 the realization filtering in that investment banking has returned to normal, states have failed to properly regulate the financial system and the next breakdown being already prognosed while crisis effects will linger a while longer, the expression “So Sorry” may be understood to encompass humankind’s inability to learn from failure. Darwin’s nightmare in a different guise.

The gesture of Ai Weiwei titling his current exhibition at Haus der Kunst in Munich “So Sorry” relates his wonderfully analytical and precise works even more to the crisis context, i.e. the current state of affairs, than they are by themselves already a commentary to what is going on.

His injuries and their traces in the media sphere point to an ambiguous unity of art, media and politics and present the artist’s body as the ultimate adressee of the “So Sorry” expressed unhealthy unity of the governmental and financial agencies.

The impact of small things or the ignorance of weak signals

The apologies of Tim Berners-Lee, wishing he had left out the // in URLs wisely point to the significance of small things and their impact over scale and time. Our days are full with small things that we should have left out or avoided or cut off, but as we pace forward it seems more important to keep the pace and not stop for tackling some minor detail along our way.

All too often those minor details later turn out to have grown in scale and impact, mostly in the form of problems. This applies to health issues – one dietary mistake should be not a problem, but if they add up … – as well as inefficient procedures or the first signs of tension and conflict building up.

It is all those weak (and sometimes not so weak) signals that we often tend to ignore, be it as individuals be it as part of larger systems, take the financical system. The present condition of work seems to be conditioning us on purpose to ignore those signals by means of pressure in all forms and from all directions, physical and psychic stress and information overload.

Seen under the aspect of system survival (and individual survival!) this tendency is more than counterproductive to our future existence. It also clearly diminishes us by taking away degrees of freedom as well as the ability to slow down and to listen. It robs us of those most valuable – and often most creative! – seemingly unproductive pauses in the hectic sequence of events.

So having been rid of typing the actually not useful // so often in our lives would have saved us enormous amounts of time while on the other hand, those moments of typing // might have served as a practical second-long meditation in the midst of seemingly over-efficient workdays. An element of poetic anarchy, a miniature manifesto for the freedom to linger around and do useless things.

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