From the clashing of models to the sharing of values: an approach to digital cultural production fromFree Culture creative practices

An ethnographic approach to the 'Free Culture' movement in the context of an interdisciplinary study on creative practices, participation and digital media.

Free Culture (Lessig, 2005) is a global Internet based movement embedded with various initiatives that advocates a transformation of cultural production through the development of regulatory frameworks for cultural products creation, circulation and consumption based on p2p networks models, open source and free software movement (Stallman, 2002).

Free Culture Forum, Barcelona, 2011

Free Culture Forum, Barcelona, 2011

Creative Commons Film Festival, Barcelona, 2012

Arros Movie

[No-Res]

Free Culture mobilizes people in the “creative class” (Florida, 2002) and generates different local events, as the annual Free Culture Forum or the Creative Commons Film Festival in Barcelona.

Strong based internet movement that defend the neutrality of the net and its basic structure: end-to-end and openness as key principles for technological and cultural innovation.

The core of Digital Culture is creativity .

Creativity is not defined by a product (“symbolic goods”) but as a process that entails collaboration, remixing and sharing.

Corporate enclosure restrict the emergence of creative ideas.

Governments have a role to play in ensuring internet neutrality and fair acces to anyone .

Citizens must be aware that the neutrality of the net is something that has to be continously worked.

It is not a movement “against” the market.

It does not propose not to pay for cultural products.

It is concieved as a “Forum” for reflection upon and debate about the cultural work in the era of digital reproduction.

- How the “field” of Cultural Production is and can be transformed by the digital.- Which is the role of “Cultural Production” in relation to culture at large.

It is not (only) a question of “ideology” and “belief” , but it is about practices of creation, practices of regulation and practices of consumption: about ways of doing things.

Culture is not a “movie” but producing a movie is making culture

Culture is not a commoditybut for making movies you need money

Culture is community building :

A movie is not only a creative process, is a participatory process, a cultural event.

As in popular culture, cultural events are done by people for the people. The process is the goal, not the product.

ARROS MOVIE

DIGITAL CULTURE = POPULAR CULTURE

A Creative Commons militant film:

“We believe in approaching film from a new kind of production paradigm: one based on media democratization. Another way of producing is possible.”

Redefinition of the relationship producers-publics: transparent, personal, present, based on real commitment.

ACTIVIST FILMMAKING

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Not in order to see if FC or CC is “in reality” an alternative and sustainible mode of production.

Not in order to see how or if two models –market or procomun- are clashing, merging or co-existing.

But to grasp what is at stake in their practices, debates and narratives

What matters... and which are the values “they” and “we”

share...

Not in order to see if they are wright or wrong.

There are many ways of understanding creation, participatory practices and the market in Digital Culture. The ethnographic question of this reserach is to explore them

The promises and discomforts in digital culture are expressed in terms of opposition between social and market models (Benkler, 2006), between profit and common good motivations (Banks and Potts, 2010) or as contradictory digital and pre-digital logics (Lessig, 2005).

Creativity enters the contemporary discussions of making and doing things (Ingold, 2007) and is seen as the new organizing principle for its transformative capacity to locate opportunity in “unusal” spaces: knowledge, ideas, relationships, global and local communities (Hartley, 2005).

Digital Culture makes it imperative that the concepts of participation, culture and creativity be reassessed and repositioned at the center of public policy, bussiness models and social movements.

But the cultural forms that these concepts take and produce are not fixed in the technology nor it is a question of historical impulse or social drive, but what our daily doings perform.

Political action is embedded in daily practices of doing things and doing things in specific ways.

what is creativity?

which values are at stake?