Collective JukeBox 4.03 in Milano

[jerome joy]

Collective JukeBox 4.03
http://collectivejukebox.org/

1-30 April 2004

Opening in Milano: 3rd of April



w/ Museo Fotografia Contemporanea
Villa Ghirlanda
Cinisello Balsamo
Italy



An event for the opening of this place: SOUNDSCAPES
organized by Dino Lupelli for Fondazione Arezzo Wave Italia


----------------------------------------------------
Collective JukeBox
http://collectivejukebox.org/
http://jukebox.thing.net/
http://homestudio.thing.net/

An Artel but not a label.

Collective JukeBox is an open free audio "workspace", which has began in
1996. Since the beginning, the project has taken different forms - an audio
compilation to an audio intervention group, to since '98 the development of
a project of a networked juke-box - with the concept of a "co-op system
server"- in the parallel of the actual "sound-systems" interfaces (as the
juke-box machine, ie). Collective JukeBox (CJ) is not an audio archive
about soundart and music, neither a netlabel for mp3 musicians, but an
"artel" (common cooperative). The CJ project is opening a system in
cooperation to favour invention, innovation, production and circulation of
artworks based on sound recordings. As a shared "studio" and as a commensal
place, the project is growing up a playground and it's based on
pollenization. From a participating action (to upload his or her own audio
contributions), each one can offer to the other participants and to the
audience "connected" via public interfaces to the project, some listening
propositions and exchanges about individual and collective
experimentations. Far away from mediametry and from music industry, and of
course from ordered, exclusive and selective commercial fields, the project
proposes a re-appropriation and a revitalization of the means of a social
art activity. This way of developing is initiating a free space without
selective esthetical principles and without "individualistic" reputation.
In actualizing the concept of "transduction" (propagation by connectivity,
dissemination and immersion) (ontogenesis vs ontology), the project pushes
to become a "plein air" space (in the open, open-air) connected to daily
life and not a specialist closed one. The project is gathering today more
than 550 participants and is offering more than 1500 different propositions
to listen to.

The project is continuously evolutive with different public and "work"
interfaces "connected" to an autonomous and self-managed database (as an
audio repository), and its system of development is really close to a
system of "groupware". From the co-op system ("materialized" by a future
server's engine), the database will propose as one goes along an audio
content (as today) which can be extended to other mediatized playgrounds:
streams of audio patches and modules (with max/msp, pd, and other audio
programmings open softwares), texts' streams, and perhaps later images'
streams. The contents are only depending on the participants, identified or
unidentified, deliberately and intentionnaly, who can propose too to
develop and to realize multiple possible "interfaces" connected to the
networked database: juke-box machine, streaming radio, streaming softwares,
home-jukebox, and so on, which can determinate different "apparatus"
(sound-systems, internet-systems, programmings-systems,
realtime-systems,...). In this way, the interfaces will be self-managed as
the same way than the contents, corresponding to the possibilities to
develop "playgrounds" as spaces for free and dynamical areas where
production, diffusion, presentation, documentation, distribution,
actualization, evaluation and discussion are completely integrated in the
same time into these open systems, with new articulations: syndication,
implementation, encapsulation, immersion, open source, downloading forms,
capacity of transfers, realtime feedbacks with auto- and co-regulations,
and so on.

Collective JukeBox has began on internet for building the network of
contacts between a lot of artists (and non-artists) to build a place of
exchange and of conversation, and very quickly, the project has requested
the construction of interfaces for the exchanges and for the public
circulation. These interfaces has first appeared into the "real world" with
singular actions and a consultation board: a cd-player juke-box, which is
representing today the "sound-system" of the project, before the
finalization of the "internet-system".

Collective JukeBox opens a new resistant space for sound and digital audio
emergent practices. The project is free and all contributors can take part
in this project, without previuos selection. Only the "engagement" of them
can permit to activate the project, with sending audio contributions to it,
with no limitation and with evaluating the proposed interfaces. The project
is functioning as a forum, and the participants can make the project moving
and taking suitable form and action if it's required or desired. Until now,
the audio database (557 authors with 1487 audio contributions into the 4.03
version) is only accessible on the juke-box machine, - so into different
places where the project is presented -, potentially in the wideworld. But
for favoring the alternative development of the project, the
internet-system, represented by the concept of "co-op system server", will
permit a non-stop access to the project, for the contributors and for the
audience.

This contributive system is not a documentary project or a "record"
(discographique) catalogue, but proposes a generating and collective space
submitted to any aesthetic selection and invested by many and many artists
- The artists specially carry out now special contributions for the project
or send works whose the presentation is the most of time not-compatible
with the traditional and "normal" modes of presentation (concert, and so
on) -. Those ones take part in freely by sending to the project their audio
and musical contributions, and the Collective JukeBox Project ensures the
visibility and the listening. The free mode of consultation and the sine
qua non activation by the listeners allow the installation of a
user-friendly space for the public, as a cafe or a cafeteria or an
"audio-lounge", with a juke-box machine. The project opens not only a "
forum/room-like " and a space of "scan" (artistic scan), but also a
permanent laboratory. We could bring closer these spaces to the model of
the "bazaar" (according to Eric S. Raymond) or of "the autonomous zone"
(according to Hakim Bey) or better of the "hybridous forums" (according to
Bruno Latour and M. Callon, and specially to William Turner), in the
direction where this model answers to the reality of evolution of the
adaptive and co-operative systems.

This initiates as from the beginning of the project, a networked community
(an "artel", a self-managed and evolutive community group), which can
develop immersive social activities with art production and "occupations"
behaviors ("acapamentos", translocal tactics and situations), without the
traditional constraints of the other well-known context which is working
with an authorized, delayed, selective and competitive spirit. If this
project is growing up since several years, this fact must be considered as
an necessary alternative way the artists involved in have been waiting for,
without fictitiousness and factitiousness. This alternative is surely bind
with the development of the telematic networks, with the proposition to
develop new organizations of immaterial datas and tanks, as "real-time
databases" for creation. These new initiatives are expecting an efficiency
and an impact not into a frame of capitalization, or of a new
(neo-)liberalism for art - that can seem to be one of the actual negative
critics one made about the relations between technologies and art, because
of the proximity of this kind of projects with telecommunications' and
informations' technologies, viewed by the most of art professionals as a
new devil against art or most of time as a new speculation field (cognitive
capitalism) -,  but rather into the perspectives of favourized artistic
cooperation and circulation. This can be developed in parallel of the
dominant medias (exhibitions, labellization, musical industry, and so on)
which became more and more exclusive, and based on competitive
presentations and productions in art, without actually generating emergent,
"desired" and exciting situations. It seems that another "economy" is
opening. This kind of economy is already existing on internet (Linux, GPL,
...) and is progressively emerging in social life (exchanges based on
solidarity, local exchange systems, ...).

Collective JukeBox (CJ) project is developing itself into the frame of
other different open projects, collective and multiple, in gathering and in
emulating "transducer" interfaces between art development & research, and
engineering & expert structures (research centers, companies, research
labs, and so on). The CJ project is leaning on these groups (as for example
forumcoop, forumhub, radiolabo, tiramizu, apo33, ici, agglo, and so on),
made up of mailing-lists, audio-active non-profit organizations, formal or
informal "chipboards" or conglomerates, and constituted as a kind of
"engine" platform for developments around the project and for relations
with outer situations and discussion partners.
The forums gathering artists, developers and programmers, become active
workshops and studios, the mailing lists and the chat sessions become
spaces of debates and discussion, the zones of down/up-loading activities
become shared studios (augmented and linked homestudios), the "files"
replace symbolic artwork (streams vs "objects"), the objective is not any
more the address to a potential public (to speak to) like a wheel of a
"spectacular" system and of a "mediametrical" scale, but the installation
of "workspaces", productive spaces being based on codes of bijective
exchanges (p2p), transitive and even completely co-operative ones.

The art field is an exchange place, a stream and a cooperative field to
build "critical" and "political" situations.
These activities, very different between them about their actions' and
organizations' forms, are escaping to the classical matrix of social and
artistic analysis. These activities are in a break with, or better are
functioning in parallel of the traditional activities' forms, which are not
contested by such of project. This is speaking about "emancipation"
(freeing) which is developing here and there spontaneously, into different
collective networked projects around telematics, programmings and
self-managed databases, which are in the same time, not inevitably
identified as artworks. It's about resistance and situational multiplicity,
with no imposed revolutionary  or counter-program, even if this seems to be
close to some Debord's manifestoes as for example with the concept of
"construction of situations". It's really about a new relations with
reality.
On this point, we join the last view of Pierre Bourdieu, a french
philosopher and sociologist, when he wrote two years ago just before his
death, that the stakes today are to "build collectively collective
situations of invention".  This sentence fits completely as a kind of
"program" for the Collective JukeBox project.


Jerome Joy
http://jukebox.thing.net/labo.html (Labotext)
March 2004.


Realization: ICI Editions, Ludovic Lignon, http://icieditions.org/
Server: The Thing NYC, http://bbs.thing.net/


:



: