by Roger Malina
An Open Observatory Manifesto
by Roger F Malina
We live in a world of tele-surveillance; more and more our own environment and our own selves are being observed and monitored. There is a proliferation of new devices and technologies that are used by ourselves, for instance for medical examination of our bodies, or by others to observe and control our behaviours. These devices are also used to observe the universe and the earth, and allow us to understand and even predict the dynamics and processes at work.
Our ideas about privacy are evolving, as well as the systems of intellectual property. Massive data bases are being accumulated in all fields of human activity as well as observations of the world. Some of this data is openly accessible, most of it is in closed archives. There are large inequities both in data collection and data access depending on how individuals and groups find themselves in different situations across the digital divides.
Even within developed countries there are large impediments to accessing the data that has been collected about ourselves and our own environment. Most science is carried out in ‘ghettos’ of experts. There are science producing communities and science consuming communities. Governments and commercial organizations create intentional barriers to the diffusion of data. We live in a cargo cult, enjoying the products of research but without contributing to the knowledge construction or understanding. In a real sense most scientific knowledge is locked up as securely as the medieval Bibles that were chained to the pulpit and only accessible to the initiates.
We live in a dangerous age. The impact of the human population on the earth’s eco-system is driving a variety of anthropogenic changes, from climate change to eco-system transformation. We live in an age of species extinction. Our response can either be one of catatrophism, or of a cultural transformation to learn to manage the planet and maintain an equilibrium that allows sustainable development.
I would like to advance a new human right and a human obligation:
1. Each of us has the right to the data that has been collected about ourselves and our own environment.
2. Each of must contribute to the knowledge construction by collecting and interpreting data about our own world.
Most scientific data collection is funded by public tax payer funding. The public has a fundamental right to all data collected and funded by the public.
If we are to change our culture quickly enough to transition to a sustainable one, we must adapt rapidly and we must have the local knowledge to enable this.
I am not calling for a new amateur science, but rather an intimate science that involves billions of people in understanding the world around them and their impact on it.
There are encouraging developments worldwide in People’s Science and Citizen’s Science movements. The hacker and “make” communities are appropriating numerous technologies for social uses, locative media and mobile phones are becoming interfaces to the world, from personal health applications to local knowledge resources. Open innovation initiatives, distance learning networks and other shared resource movements lead to new ways of learning and researching in the digital age. Many artists in the art-science and art-technology movement function as “New Leonardos” helping to create the transformational renaissance that will be needed for us to lean to manage “Spaceship Earth”.
The right to data and the duty to collect data are part of this necessary cultural transformation. We own the knowledge we create.
In this LEA blog, we call for examples of work by artists and scientists, citizens and scholars that are part the burgeoning open observatory movement.
Brief biography
Roger F Malina is an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille CNRS in France and Executive Editor of the Leonardo publications circulated by MIT Press. Malina also serves as Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Leonardo, The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and President of the Observatoire Leonardo des Arts et Technosciences in Paris. He is Co-chair of the International Advisory Board of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, a member of the International Academy of Astronautics and co-chair of their Committee on Space Activities and Society. Since 1982 he has served as Executive Editor of the journal Leonardo. He writes on the relationship between the arts, sciences and technology.
Posted by: Lanfranco Aceti
For those that are interested and would like to help find examples of “open observatory” projects I started this twine as a community resource
http://www.twine.com/twine/12hmsdqsf-1t5/open-observatory
would be interested in hearing from people running related projects
roger malina
By Roger Malina on 2010 01 13
Check out the related article
Intimate Science for the Naked Eye: The Role of Artists and Designers(*)
By Rejane Spitz
http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/intimate_science_for_the_naked_eye/
By roger malina on 2010 01 18
OpenEarth - Deltares Wiki
A sustainable interaction between mankind and the dynamic natural system provides a great number of hydraulic and environmental engineering challenges. The paradigm to confront these challenges one-project-at-a-time, while attractive from a budget management perspective, results in grave inefficiencies in the development and maintenance of the basic elements that are invariably involved: data, models and tools.
Hardly any project is by itself of sufficient scale to comprehensively develop easy accessible high quality data archives, state-of-the-art model systems and well tested practical analysis tools under version control. As a result research and consultancy projects commonly spend a significant part of their budget to set-up some basic infrastructure, most of which dissipates again once the project is finished.
OpenEarth is the open source initiative to archive, host and disseminate Data, Models and Tools for marine & coastal scientist and engineers. It aims to remedy the above-described inefficiencies by providing a project-superseding approach.
To facilitate steady and continuous development and growth of these building blocks even beyond the man-made boundaries of projects Subversion repositories are utilised for storage, back-up and version control of raw data, scripts and source code. Products are shared freely via various web based tools. As a result research and consultancy projects no longer need to waste valuable resources by repeatedly starting from scratch. Rather they can build on the preserved efforts from countless projects before them.
OpenEarth is, amongst others, supported by the concerted effort of professionals from Deltares (formerly Delft Hydraulics), Delft University of Technology’s Hydraulic Engineering and Environmental Fluid Mechanics sections and UNESCO-IHE. It is currently the central platform for data and knowledge management in the research programmes Delft Cluster - Northsea and Coast, Building with Nature and MICORE.
By Roger Malina on 2010 01 31
Online Strategies provides training in using open sources, particularly the Internet, for effective and efficient information collection for OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) applications.
By OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE on 2010 02 05
SEE the new media curating list for a discussion of OPEN MUSEUMS
Hello again New-Media-Curating,
In addition to the other mischief we like to cause individually, Jon Ippolito and I are co-authoring a book for MIT Press, due out Spring ‘11 on collecting and preserving new media art <end shameless pitch>.
I include below a brief excerpt from the book relevant to our discussion this month on commissioning variable media art. In it, I’m proposing a new model for an archive of new media art I call “the Open Museum” and describing perhaps a new way that commissioning could be seen to function in that.
I was originally inspired along these lines by the V2 arts organization in Rotterdam that had a stipulation in which new media works commissioned for their lab space must remain open-source within the lab space for future commissioned artists. It got me thinking, why not take that great idea a couple steps further…..
“Students, scholars, and the public can currently access images and records –representations - of artworks held in museum collections, but they cannot access the collections themselves. The Open Museum takes advantage of the unique property of new media that allows one to share the original without diminishing it. In the Open Museum, the source code and other files for digital artworks from the collection are free for users to download, study, use, and re-mix into new works. In this way, even the casual student can peer under the hood and examine the inner workings of these artworks in the way that previously only privileged scholars could with traditional material collections. .......
Intellectual property law was created to balance the private need with the public good. It grants authors and artists exclusive rights over their work for a limited period (not a short period, sometimes 90 years after the artists lifetime) after which the rights in the work move into the public domain. The artist has time to find ways to earn a livelihood from their work and this is seen as an incentive to create in the first place. Why then, could not public museums act as stewards of the public good and compensate the artist earlier rather than later by commissioning works for the Open Museum, after which they apply Creative Commons licenses and release the work to the public. The museum would earn their renown not for the quality of art they obtain in exclusivity, but for the art they obtain and then give away. The artist gets money up front and still owns their work. And the public is served by waiting months rather than decades to gain access and rights to use the work in question.”
Two more items.
Within the Berkeley Art Museum’s net art portal, we were able to include *some* of the function of the Open Museum - an open-source net art archive. Call it a baby step.
(see http://netart.bampfa.berkeley.edu and scroll down to NetArtchive)
An earlier post to this list (from Leigh I believe; I lost the email), outlined how public institutions in Scotland are now using their muscle to gain IP rights in works they commission. While public art funding and IP are quite different between the UK, US, Canada and elsewhere, I wonder if the Open Museum provides a more positive spin on how public institutions could partner with artists with regard to the disposition of IP in commissioned works - or - is the Open Museum just another step toward big brother taking everything?
What do you all think? What are the ways in which commissioning new media *could* work in addition to how it already works? What are your dreams?
Richard Rinehart
———————-
Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
bampfa.berkeley.edu
———————-
University of California, Berkeley
By roger malina on 2010 03 14