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JukeBox

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 2 months ago

tips från Lena Mattson

 

An Artel but not a label.

 

Collective JukeBox is an open free audio "workspace", which has began in1996. Since the beginning, the project has taken different forms - an audiocompilation to an audio intervention group, to since '98 the development ofa project of a networked juke-box - with the concept of a "co-op systemserver"- 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

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