[iDC] Re: social machine

[Francis Hunger]

Regarding what Adam said on artist fees I just would like to add the 
impression, that a lot of festivals live from students work (who in turn 
are paid by their parents or are state subsidiced so to speak). This 
often seems to return a certain quality of works which might be fresh on 
the one hand and repeating issues, topics and cultural techniques again 
and again on the other hand, maybe because of lack of historical 
insight. Last year I was involved in the readme 100 festival and its 
approach at least tried to address some of the problems which Adam 
mentioned.

There was no single winner. From about 100 submitted proposals, 5 texts 
and 5 software projects where choosen to get a "grant" (or however you 
want to call it) to actually produce them. The festival itself consisted 
of the presentation of the finished software pieces/ texts. This of 
course was a highly risky experience, insofar as the brilliance of a 
proposal does not nescessairily lead to a decent result. In most cases 
it did. Regarding the texts, readme 100 had the already described 
problem of presenting long papers. There were 2 remote talks via skype, 
something I would like to continue in the future. Especially the 
interview format worked well via skype.  Mitchell Whitelaw (from 
Australia) was also telepresent through a short self introductory video 
he shot and we downloaded in advance.

Finally worth to mention is, that there is no jury statement in the book 
which was produced afterwards - I remember it was discussed as a 
possibility. We simply felt, that jury statements are to general, saying 
a lot and nothing at the same time. An idea of former readme 
publications was picked up again, which worked out quite well: Single 
jury members or a collaborating combination of two people wrote short 
features (via wiki), introducing each of the artist statements and 
theoretical texts which are printed in the book.

so far...

Francis