As I get ready to take part in the Transmediale/FLOSSmanuals book sprint for the “Collaborative Futures” book, I thought it was relevant to drop this blog post about an older interview about FLOSS and art.

A bit ago Dominic Smith of CRUMB interviewed me about my practice in relationship to Open Source and Free Culture. This interview is going to be included in a forthcoming 10 year anniversary book about CRUMB’s activities. Posting this slipped through the cracks, but you can find it here (along with a snippet below):

So there is ‘Open Source’ the Noun, and then there are 2 different versions of the verb ‘Open Source’, ‘to Open Source’. So you’re working on a project and you release it Open Source, that’s to Open Source a project. But the other version of to Open Source is a certain kind of reverse engineering, it’s kind of hostile or confrontational, and it’s to Open Source somebody else. I was open sourcing Sherrie Levine in a sense. So I think that a lot of my work comes from that appropriation and that’s a starting point.

A short interview video with Michael Mandiberg shot and Edited by Dan Eckstein (daneckstein.com) in March 2009, with Music from Au Revoir Simone at Eyebeam and Postmasters Gallery NYC.

From the dialog:

I’m Michael Mandiberg. I am an artist, designer, and educator, and I am a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, which is an Art and Technology Center in Chelsea, Manhattan.

As an artist I am pretty omnivorous. I have a background in photography, so it is pretty image based, but I was also a really really good bad high school poet. So I am particularly interested in words and their meaning, and their nuances and their poetic value. So I am always looking at the world around us visually, informationally, and culturally, and politically for inspiration

Some of my more recent work involves the laser cutter, cutting paper and books, making sculptures and drawings. The laser cutter takes the information from the computer file, and it uses a laser to cut that shape out of the material being cut, which in this case is a newspaper.

A few of my recent works are at The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, which is a show at Postmasters Gallery. One is called Old News, which is a stack of New York Times into which I am cutting daily the phrase “Old News” into it. The other is DATA BASE, which is an Oxford English Dictionary with the phrase “DATA BASE” cut into it.

The show itself is about the promise and the failed promise of technology, and its potential to connect people or not connect people.

Graham Parker stopped by for a studio visit, and we had a great conversation. The highlight was when he told me to “choose my words less carefully.” In the description he writes:

First in a series of studio and show visits with contemporary artists. I’ve known Michael for some years – probably since a friend directed me to his Shop Mandiberg project. He’s recently been a research fellow at Eyebeam and is having an open studio there soon – mostly showing off work he has been producing with a laser cutter. He invited a few people along to do some studio visits in advance of that and I happened to have my camera with me when I went along. He’d set up a lot of work in one of Eyebeam’s main display spaces, so the effect was much more like a solo show than a regular studio visit.

I asked Michael to talk me through a few pieces on camera and he generously agreed to do so – despite having no time to process what we’d just been talking about in our visit. It’s mainly shot under existing lights with a few stills dropped in, so the footage is a little grainy in places, but it should give an idea of what he’s up to.

How many website hits to date for Real Costs?

How many downloads of the software (.xpi)?

To be honest I hate counting hits and downloads. It inevitably reminds me of popularity contests and other things that are obsessive and psychologically dangerous.

That said i do think that these things are somewhat useful. In particular I am interested in tracking the number of times it has been bookmarked on delicious, though I think that my digg score is almost irrelevant because of the pure geekery that takes place on digg. I am a geek but my work is often too theoretical. I have been trying to make my new work more diggable so-to-speak.

If you know, how “global” is Real Costs? IE, do you know how many “countries” are represented in the panoply of hits you get on the site?

Again, I’m not so focused on hits, but I can say that the airplane sites that the script works on are truly global. Delta, Air France, El Al.

Or at least those were some of the sites that it worked on most recently. It is a constant struggle to keep my code current with the code of all of those airplane websites. Everytime they change their HTML/CSS I have to correct my code to reflect this

The scientist you worked with (P. Timon McPhearson Ph.D.), what was his role in the project?

Timon made sure my science was ad accurate as itcould be. He guided me to key information resources like WRi. And he researched detailed information on the amount of carbon a tree really offsets one of his colleagues who is a carbon sequestratuon researcher.

Where are you with the next version? Are other projects pressing, or are you still pretty committed to this project? Just curious, not going to write about this…..

I made a google mashup that calculates the cost of travel on dollars and carbon based on the car and the price of gas. I have been waiting to launch it.

Howmuchitcosts.us

Any other worthy factoids?

While air travel accounts for 2% of world carbon production, recent estimates put worldwide computer use at an equal 2%