Felix Stadler is a part-time faculty member at the Academy of Art and Design in Zurich, involved in organizing Wizards-of-OS 2004 and the nettime mailinglist.
revolver-books.de: "Felix Stadler's essays, the first research to be published within the "Note Book" project by kuda.org, aim to explore the relation between cultural production and consumption and the development of Free and Open Software.
From the first chapter: "Today, we are confronted with a strange, hard-to-categorize question: what is culture made out of? Our answer, I am convinced, will have a profound impact not just on future culture, with a capital C, but on the entire the social reality of the emerging network societies. Today, culture, understood broadly as a system of meaning articulated through symbols, can no longer be separated from the (informational) economy, or, thanks to genetic engineering, from life itself.
Historically, there have been two different approaches to culture. One approach to culture would be to characterize it as object-oriented, the other as exchangeoriented. The first treats culture as made out of discrete objects, existing more or less independently from one another, like chairs around a table, or books on a shelf. While such things can be arranged in relation to one another, their meaning and function remains the same regardless. One person can sit on one chair, no matter how many chairs there are in a room, or how they are arranged. The content of a book does not change when re-shelving it. The other view takes culture to be made out of continuous processes, in which one act feeds into the other, in an unbroken chain. Like “la ola”, the wave people do in stadiums when the game they are watching becomes boring.
By looking at the individual act in isolation, one cannot differentiate between whether someone getting up to stretch their tired bones, or they are participating in collective entertainment. The function and meaning of such an act are not self-contained in the act, but in its relation to others. It is not only what people do, but also, perhaps even more importantly, what happens between them, what flows from one to the other. The two perspectives create different sets of concepts for understanding culture: the timeless work of art versus the process of creation, the individual inventor versus the scientific community, the statement versus the conversation, the recording versus the live performance, and so on. These two perspectives, and the practices through which they are expressed, are currently coming into deep conflict with one another, hence the new urgency to the question: what is culture made out of?
