Sarai New Media Initiative: OPUS - Open Platform for Unlimited Signification

[anna balint]

[i could not login the site and see the works, did anyone try and found the login box? greetings, anna]

Sarai New Media Initiative <monica at sarai.net>

OPUS - Open Platform for Unlimited Signification

Dear List members and Friends,
(please feel free to copy and redistribute)

We are happy to announce the launching of OPUS, (Open
Platform for Unlimited Signification) as an online
adjunct to the documentary installation  -
Co-Ordinates: 28.28N/77.15E : : 2001/2002 - presented
by us (Raqs Media Collective) at Documenta11, Kassel.
Opus will become public on the 8th of June, 2002,
co-inciding with the opening of Documenta11.
The URL for Opus is www.opuscommons.net

What does Opus stand for?
Opus is an acronym for "Open Platform for Unlimited
Signification!". Most importantly, it is an online
space for people, machines and codes to play and work
together - to share, create and transform images,
sounds, videos and texts. Opus is an attempt to create
a digital commons in culture, based on the principle
of sharing of work, while at the same time, retaining
the possibility (if and when desired) of maintaining
traces of individual authorship and identity.
To read more about the principles and background of
Opus, go to -
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/record.html

How Opus works (what can you do in Opus)
Opus enables you to view, create and exhibit media
objects (video, audio, still images, html and text)
and make modifications on work done by others, in the
spirit of collaboration and the sharing of creativity.
Opus is an environment in which every viewer/user is
also invited to be a producer, and a means for
producers to work together to shape new content. You
can view and download material, transform it and then
upload the material worked on by you back to the Opus
domain. Each media object archived, exhibited and made
available for transformation within Opus carries with
it data that can identify all those who have worked on
it. This means that while Opus enables collaboration,
it also preserves the identity of Authors/Creators (no
matter how big or small their contribution may be) at
each stage of a works evolution. In this way, we hope
that Opus can be come a model for a practical
realization of the idea of a Digital Commons of
creative work on the Internet.

To read a manual of OPUS  - go to -
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/manual.html

The Idea
The basic ideas of the Opus project is to create a
community of creative people from all over the world,
who want to share and gift to each other the images,
sounds and texts made by them for general public
usage. Opus will give people the chance to collaborate
and to present their work to an online community of
practitioners and artists willing to work outside the
increasing global domination of intellectual property
regimes in cultural production.
Once you have published your y in Opus, each act of
uploading by you becomes an opportunity for others to
take your work as a starting point for transformation,
for a new rendition, for a rescension. Opus users will
also be able to give their comments and reflections on
your work through the discussion forums that will grow
around each project within Opus.
Opus is inspired by the free software movement and is
an attempt to transpose the principles that govern the
creation of free software on to general cultural
production. Opus follows the same rules as those that
operate in all free software communities - i.e. the
freedom to view, to download, to modify and to
redistribute. The source(code), in this case the
video, image, sound or text - the contents of media
objects uploaded on to Opus, is free to use, to edit
and to redistribute. Needless to say the 'source-code'
of the Opus software is also free to use, edit and
redistribute. Opus users are governed by a license
that protects them from their work being taken out of
the commons and into the regimen of proprietary
protocols.

To read the license that frames Opus - go to -
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/license.html

OPUS : A brief history
Work on Opus  began in September 2001 and the Beta
version was uploaded in April 2002. Opus is launched
into the public domain with the opening of
Documenta11.
When we (Raqs Collective) began to think through the
ideas that gradually crystallized to form   Opus, we
were searching for a platform that would enable
inter-media and hybrid media practices to find
fruition within a frame of open ended collaboration.
We were interested in trying to evolve a way to
combine our interests with video, our background in
documentary film, photography and sound, and our
growing engagement with hypertextuality and free
software culture as a result of our work within the
Sarai Initiative at the Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, Delhi.
At an immediate  level, the ideas that were at the
core of the Opus project developed out of our need to
create an online context for a set of offline
installations. (like , for instance, Co-ordinates :
28.28N /77.15E : : 2001/2002, which is showing at
Documenta11) which we wanted to open out to a wider
community of creators, so as to enable instances of
further collaboration; and out of our thoughts on the
notion of the 'Digital Commons', from which arose a
text A Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons
which contains many of the founding ideas of Opus.
In the realization of the process of creating Opus we
were joined by several others who made the Sarai Media
Lab their home for many long days and nights along
with us, sharing in the delight of discovering
fragments of archiecture that worked, or a metaphor
that made sense, and above all with the energy that
they brought to every detail of the coding and design
of Opus. Opus  would not be a reality without the
active collaboration of all the people who worked on
it, their skills and their imaginations.
Many metaphors, images and ideas have made their way
into the making of OPUS, from a biological laboratory,
to a polyamourous matrix, to an understanding of the
way in which parents relate to children, from kinship
and lineage to the growth and evolution of epic
narratives and ancient texts. The traces of all these
remain in varying degrees.
Sarai (www.sarai.net) provided the background of being
an intellectually and creatively stimulating space
while all of us worked on Opus.

CREDITS
Conception	- Raqs Media Collective
Architecture - 	Monica Narula, Bauke Freiburg, Silvan Zurbruegg
Coding - 	Silvan Zurbruegg,	Pankaj Kaushal
Interface Design	 - 	Joy Chatterjee
Design Co-ordination - 	Monica Narula
Design Acknowledgement	 - Rana Dasgupta
Documentation -	Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula,
Bauke Freiburg
License -	Lawrence Liang, Jeebesh Bagchi
Produced by -	Raqs Media Collective
at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai/CSDS,
Delhi, 2002

Acknowledgements	
Knowbotic Research, Zurich
Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich
Dept. of New Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
Society for Old & New Media, Amsterdam
Documenta11, Kassel
Everyone @ Sarai, Delhi
We invite you to contribute, create and share in the
further development of Opus. We believe that your
participation in Opus will strengthen and revitalize
the digital commons.

If you have more enquiries about Opus - write to
info at opuscommons.net 
<http://us.f121.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=info@opuscommons.net&YY=78069&order=down&sort=date&pos=2
> and  raqs at sarai.net 
<http://us.f121.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=raqs@sarai.net&YY=78069&order=down&sort=date&pos=2>