Posts Tagged ‘open source’
Open Source Lighting
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Open Source Religion
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008Spiritual expression, and the religious organizational formats in which context it will take place, is always embedded in a social structure. For example, we could say that the tribal forms of religion, such as animism and shamanism, do not have elaborate hierarchical structures as they arose in societal structures that had fairly egalitarian kinship based relations. But the great organized religions, which arose in hierarchically-based societies, have intricate hierarchical structures, monological conceptions of truth, and expectations of obedience from its members. The Protestant Reformation and its offshoots took on the many democratic aspects which corresponded to the rise of a new urban class under merchant and industrial capitalism, and the many offshoots of the new age movements have clearly adopted contemporary capitalist practices of paid workshops, trainings, etc … (i.e. taking the form of spiritual experience as a consumable commodity).In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.
[SNIP]
An open and free approach to spirituality would not likely accept proprietary approaches to spiritual knowledge. It would expect that the code and texts are freely approachable, even modifiable. It will not accept the copyright protections of spiritual texts, nor their unavailability. The pathways to spiritual experiencing would not be hidden from sight, but publicly available. The methodologies would be available for trial and experimentation.
A participatory approach would mean that everyone would be invited to participate in the spiritual search, without a priori selection, and that the threshold of such participation would be kept as low as possible. Appropriate methodologies would be available for different levels of experience.
[SNIP]
Equipotentiality suggests that we should not judge a person according to one purported essence, say, as a spiritual master or an enlightened being, but as a wide mixture of different skills and abilities, none of which by itself elevates that person to a higher human status. Rather, the skill of any social system is to draw out the best out of each individual, so that he can engage his skills and passion to a task of his own choosing. One of the possible interpretations of this principle is that enlightenment or spiritual mastery is just one particular skill, a particular technique of consciousness. It is important, it deserves respect, others can learn from it.
However, just as a great sportsperson or great artist is not necessarily overall a better human being, neither is a spiritual master, as the history of the last view decades has elaborately shown. Furthermore, guidance from such a master must be specific, an invitation for practice and experience, a witnessing on his part, but not in any way a fixed authority on the lives of any followers. Individuals are free to explore this guidance, but the individual, and the communities, are still in charge of building collective spiritual freedom, without a priori fixed path. The corollary of self-selection and communal validation are also clear. No spiritual path can be imposed, the individual freely chooses the particular injunctions he wants to follow or experiment with. Nor are individuals or communities bound to any particular tradition, though they can still choose to work with such a particular framework.
[SNIP]
In this way, a new collective body of spiritual experiences is created, which is continuously co-created by the inquiring spiritual communities and individuals. The outcome of that process will be a co-created reality that is unpredictable and will create new, as yet unpredictable spiritual formats. But one thing is sure: it will be an open, participatory, approach leading to a commons of spiritual knowledge, from which all humanity can draw from.
Freedom of Information, Act
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008It has been a while since I have written anything here. Lots of posting but mostly other people’s words. The main reason for this has been a personal shift in how I spend my free time. While blogging has for several years now been my primary hobby, that has shifted in recent months. I have been relearning a skill/instrument that I gave up a number of years ago, the turntable.
Last weekend I played my first set in public. It was quite well received. A mix of ambient/minimal techno and classical. The electronic music I played was all composed to be freely distributed. Licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial distribution license, the music was made to be free.
The idea of truly free information, in my opinion the foundation to a truly free society, is slowly gaining ground. In music and software circles, the model of the mega-corporations are seen for the inherent failure they represent. The technology has evolved beyond the capacity for an institution to control its distribution. Fighting a war against consumers is a losing battle.
There are free software alternatives for every major commercial piece of software from word processing to image manipulation to web browsing to operating systems and more.
The group I was playing for has been producing all night music and dance events for over 12 years on an open source model. Planning procedures are maintained on a wiki, the entire organization is run by volunteers and everything from food, to music, to entrance to the event is given freely. Donations are asked for but in no way required.
In the theatre an open source model is still very much in its infancy. Charles Mee is one of, if not the first playwright to truly embrace open source ethics and aesthetics in his works.
As he says
Sometimes playwrights steal stories and conversations and dreams and intimate revelations from their friends and lovers and call this original.And sometimes some of us write about our own innermost lives, believing that, then, we have written something truly original and unique. But, of course, the culture writes us first, and then we write our stories. When we look at a painting of the virgin and child by Botticelli, we recognize at once that it is a Renaissance painting—that is it a product of its time and place. We may not know or recognize at once that it was painted by Botticelli, but we do see that it is a Renaissance painting. We see that it has been derived from, and authored by, the culture that produced it.
And yet we recognize, too, that this painting of the virgin and child is not identical to one by Raphael or Ghirlandaio or Leonardo. So, clearly, while the culture creates much of Botticelli, it is also true that Botticelli creates the culture—that he took the culture into himself and transformed it in his own unique way.
And so, whether we mean to or not, the work we do is both received and created, both an adaptation and an original, at the same time. We re-make things as we go.
Another aspect of Free Theatre appears to be opening up as well. While many companies do pay-what-you-can nights, a theater in Ohio is trying that theory out for the whole run of its current production.
Available Light is opening Sheila Callaghan’s Dead City here in Columbus in about 2 weeks. This show is a really big deal for us. Aside from being a beautiful play that we’re all really excited about, it’s also our first show to receive significant public funding, it has the largest cast we’ve put on stage, and it’s in a space that’s costing us about 3 times what we usually pay. (Frequent readers of this blog will remember that I am very ambivalent about that particular fact.)However, instead responding by playing it safe on other fronts to compensate for the big risks we’re taking, we’ve decided to try another big experiment. We’re making all tickets to all shows for everyone all the time “Pay What You Want”. That’s right, just like Radiohead,Trent Reznor, Saul Williams, Paste Magazine, and a small crop of restaurants.
Free culture is on the rise. It is being written into the very fabric of our larger culture. Much like free(read renewable) energy will replace finite resources like oil and coal, so too will free (read open) culture replace finite and “owned” culture.
its just a matter of time.
