As early as 1996, the internet artists' group Etoy made its theme the fact that it cannot offer the art market traditional products. At first, it dealt with the problem by unashamedly declaring its support for its sponsors from the computer and telecommunications business, until, in 1998, it found an even more radical solution to its financing difficulties: Etoy declared itself a joint-stock company, and since then has been selling Etoy shares. This quasi-economic model is an effective demonstration of the topic debated in a discussion group at Viper, the Basel festival for video and new media held at the end of October: that the medium of the internet forces people – or gives them the chance – to work out alternative financing possibilities. The discussion group was organized by the recently founded Basle project www.copyleft.cc in close cooperation with the »Forum für Neue Medien« (Forum for New Media) with Annette Schindler at its head.¹

Philip Wölki, who works in Hamburg and is the manager of www.bitfilm.de, and Denis Barut (Nyon), a representative from www.madeinmusic.com, presented two economic models, in which the notorious New-Economy future tense once more proved its enormous resilience: bitfilm.de distributes digital films that don't cost anything »yet«; and www.madein music.com says it has a functioning micro-economy for the use of digital music – however, it was hard to rid oneself of the impression that things are not really running properly »yet.« Dietmar Bruckmayr and Cornelia Sollfrank represented the artists' side on the podium. The discussion became heated at the question of whether artists should some day be financed through micro-payment (the dreadful future tense once more hanging over the panel and audience). Sollfrank asked whether it was all that desirable for one's livelihood to be dependent on mini-contributions from an anonymous community. Walter van der Cruisjen, who was leading the discussion, probed further, and a tug-of-war arose between the two exponents of digital art. In the nineties, as co-founder of the Digital City Amsterdam, and then co-founder of the media lab www.desk.nl, Van der Cruisjen came to radical terms with the specific conditions that the Net first offered in the way of financing possibilities. For example, desk.nl was a commercial Web company – admittedly working with Linux – whose profits van der Cruisjen used to help finance cultural projects, among them the mailing list Nettime. Sollfrank became known through the net.art action »Female Extension,« and has carried out pioneer work in the area of cyber-feminism as the founder of the »Old Boys Network.« This makes her reservations – or, more cautiously put, her disquiet – about the idea of financing one's own work via the Net all the more interesting. Sollfrank stressed the fact that she became an artist through the normal channels of grants and prizes.

Building up a community has become a quantity that is hard to analyze. This is especially problematic because the notion of what a community is has become vague through its appropriation by the New Economy. A real collective practice, such as in Amsterdam in the nineties, has turned into something that is constantly in danger of becoming an unfulfillable business plan. The musician Dietmar Bruckmayr, who lives in Linz, summed it up, but unfortunately only after the event, on his home page www.fuckhead.at/didi: it isn't more firms and models that are needed, but more content – more content on anti-capitalistic strategies, of course.

The organizers of Copyleft.cc want to lend their support to a strategy like this: Copyleft.cc is intended to become a platform that on the one hand provides information on the Copyleft principle, and on the other builds up a community that makes its art works freely available to the public. The direct model for this is the French organization Copyleft Attitude, found in early 2000 in Paris, which offers a »Licence de l'art libre« on its home page (http://artlibre.org). In view of this objective, the discussion at Viper was a basically convincing first reflection on the possibilities and difficulties of Copyleft's own project. That is a start.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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