------- /Artists and free software - an introduction. An artist is an investigator. Always pushing the frontiers of the possible. The artist works to change our perception of the world. She digs into the medium and techniques she has chosen, experimenting and developing new ways and visions. Whether this is paint, stone or code, the process is the same. Nobody creates alone, as Virginia Woolf pointed out "Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice." But for the artist to create, this thinking in common must be available and shareable. She must be able to discuss and talk about it, use it, abuse it and expand it. Thus the artist's work will often enter into conflict with current copyright laws and, in the case of the digital artist, can be completely blocked by code that is protected or beyond reach. It is here that free software is so important for an artist. The capacity to intervene in the code, redistribute the interventions, to build with the blocks that other people have made available is absolutely essential to drive forward the creative process. Software moves from read only to read/write. A good example is the development of Pure Data [1] , a program for manipulating data and media. As needs emerge developers write the code necessary to resolve those needs, thus many authors have contributed to the ever growing library of code. A recent example are curves for animation - these are mathematical formula that have now been implemented in objects for Pure Data by Hans Christophe Steiner in collaboration with Golan Levin [2]. These curves are needed for an animation to "breath", for its elegance and beauty. If Pure Data had been closed code it would have been impossible to implement these curves and the artistic work is stopped or greatly delayed as one attempts to negotiate with a company to include your creative needs. Once implemented by the company it becomes another selling point. On the contrary, once implemented in free software these tools become available to the community, permitting everybody's work to reach a new level. Art is continual change and the only way to advance is together. No single developer can create everything from scratch. When you work with any software you are unavoidably involved in the process of testing that software. Simply to use it and comment on it, look for solutions to the problems, is to contribute to the development of that software. With a commercial software you are essentially working for the company, helping their profits and development that will only benefit users in the way that the software company decides. With free software your efforts contribute to the efforts of the community as a whole - nobody is profiting from your investigation, all are benefiting. Many artistic investigations suffer from a lack of funding. It is only in academia that the concept of investigation is considered valid and financed. This is a serious problem for any independent artist developing her work. The art world still only considers creation in terms of the finished product, the logic being that you sell the work and cover your development costs. But investigation, as the academic world itself shows, does not work so logically and discoveries can come in the most unexpected moments. Free software is making artistic investigation more accesible in the sense that, while not resolving rent and food for the artist, at least avoids license fees. As an example a license for the 3D modelling program 3D studio Max costs US$ 3 495 while Blender [3], a comparable program, is free and, in addition, connectable to other programs, reusable and distribuitable. Another example, this time in the field of hardware, is the Arduino [4] project - suddenly building physical interfaces has become much more accessible due to the open source nature of the electronics. This in no way means that the artist has to accept lower quality or unreliable work - the recent installation by Fernando Sanchez-Castillo [5] (a sculpture that responds to the sending of SMS) was developed by Alex Posada in Hangar [6] and used Arduino and its accompanying free software. It worked without a flaw for the 3 months of the exhibition in the Centre d'Art Santa Monica in Barcelona. Another example, currently used by Bjšrk in her concerts, is the ReACTable - an electronic instrument completely programmed with free software by a team from the Universitat de Pompeu Fabra [7]. Apart from the technical and economical considerations there is the question of ethics. The relationship between ethics and aesthetics is an increasingly important area of philosophical investigation for very good reasons. Our aesthetics - what we find beautiful or good - are indissociably linked to the world that we create. Divorced from ethics we plunge headlong to disaster. How do we think about the creation of beauty in the midst of an ecological disaster ? When the difference between the rich and the poor is ever more abysmal ? Can we find something beautiful that accentuates this difference, that contributes to the disaster ? Is a work made with free software more beautiful than one made with proprietary software ? The decision to work with free software is also an ethical decision, the expression of a desire to live in a world organised in a different way, where the artificial barriers that benefit only a few are eliminated. The barriers that do remain in the use of free software are of a purely intellectual nature - the capacity to understand and work with code, for there is no doubt that more is demanded of the user (Although this is changing greatly as free software reaches a new maturity, the Ubuntu distribution of Linux [8] especially has made free software accessible to the non-technical, "standard" user). For this reason it is so important that events, workshops and gatherings - like the Piksel festival in Bergen [9], Makeart in Poitiers [10] or the workshops organised by Hangar in Barcelona and at LABoral in Gij—n [11] - are organised that permit the circulation of knowledge and learning. These gatherings are just one of the aspects of the community based nature of free-software. Many coders never actually meet face to face but develop intense collaborations through mailing lists, IRC chat, CVS, Sourceforge.net and other internet tools. Labs like Hangar in Barcelona or CRAS in Paris [12] are also important meeting points and places where work can get done [13] and collaborations extended. Many people point out that Google is the programmer's best friend but this would be useless without the conscious effort that developers and users put into documentation - both in the code and in the form of howtos. Documentation is an absolutely essential part of working with free software and fundamental to maintaining and extending the community. Which is, after all, what its all about. [1] http://puredata.org/ [2] http://artengine.ca/~catalogue-pd/39-Steiner-Henry.pdf the mapping library is included in pd-extended package : http://puredata.info/downloads [3] http://www.blender.org [4] http://arduino.cc [5] http://cultura.gencat.net/casm/butlleti/hemeroteca/n28/sp/article_01.htm [6] http://www.hangar.org [7] http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/ [8] http://www.ubuntu.com/ [9] http://piksel.no [10] http://makeart.goto10.org/ [11] http://www.laboralcentrodearte.org/ [12] http://www.craslab.org/ [13] http://www.hangar.org/wikis/lab/doku.php (the first version of this text was written at the request of LABoral in July 2007 and then updated for publication in November 2007. Thanks to Erich Berger, HC Steiner and Aymeric Mansoux for comments)