It was highly ironic that a crowd of people opened up every box and drank the FREE BEER on display at the opening reception of "Radical Software: Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground", an art exhibition that opened last week at the California College of Arts' Wattis Institute. Gallery guests saw the sign and assumed the beer was free!
"Radical Software", whose title comes from the 1970s video magazine of the same name, brings together the work of local and international artists who have defined the course of the free information movement bridging art, technology, politics, and lifestyle. The exhibition includes both contemporary and historical works from artists and collectives including Ant Farm, Berkeley Community Memory, VideoFreex, Timothy Leary, Josh On, and Superflex.
From the exhibition press release:
"At the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, Stewart Brand -- former Merry Prankster, founder of the 'Whole Earth Catalog,' Global Business Network, and Long Now Foundation -- made his often-quoted claim that 'information wants to be free.'"This exhibition will combine artworks, experimental film and video, documentary material and artifacts that trace the countercultural discourse that made Brand's assertion possible: from its early manifestations in the postwar bohemian underground to its adoption as a basic principle by a new generation of artists, hackers, and activists."
The free software movement, with roots in the Bay Area, was inspiration for FREE BEER (now in version 3.0). The project was originally developed by the Danish collective Superflex and students of Copenhagen IT University.
At the opening reception of "Radical Software", Jakob Fenger of Superflex explained to me that FREE BEER applies the free software/open-source concept to beer. "The beer is free as in free speech, not free beer… it plays on the quote by Richard Stallman, founder of the open-source software movement". Stallman said that to understand free software, "you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'".
By using the open-source concept with an analog technology, Superflex hopes the application of open-source will expand beyond computer software. The beer is designed to be free for production, not free for the taking. Stallman has even told the collective he hopes they make money from the product. I later asked Fenger what he thought about the ironic display of beer-taking: "for me it showed that there was a demand for beer more than a wish to understand the concept of free beer. However it was great to see that they liked the beer."
Check out the exhibition and be sure to try FREE BEER. The recipe is published under a Creative Commons license, so you're welcome to enjoy a fresh batch (in an open-source way).
"Radical Software: Art, Technology, and the Bay Area Underground" is curated by Will Bradley and cosponsored by Wired. The show is on view from November 28, 2006 to March 24, 2007, in the Logan Galleries at the San Francisco campus of CCA.
Also at the Wattis Institute: "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" and Michael Stevenson's "Central Bank of Guatemala". And on Tuesday, December 12th, Ant Farm member Chip Lord will be presenting current work and discussing Ant Farm in the context of "Radical Software".
