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### transcription from recorded interview

Rotterdam, April 2007
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Florian Cramer: are you familiar with platoniq? because they are in Barcelona really on the fore front ... the burn station, yeah well it's a combination of f
ree software but this I would say it's also really one of the features of free software or of open source, that it removes the strict barrier 
between users and developers because it is software that is very open to hacking, it's very open to completely wild configurations, can be muc
h more tailor made, much more specifically deployed, installed, configured than most proprietary software and this is also... you don't have t
o be a hardcore developer or programmer to build a custom application with free software. And I think this is also what we see in the art fiel
d right now so, for example you can use an audio editor like pd in order to build completely different stuff with it and build robots with it 
, to use it for light sensor coordination... You can also use hardcore low level unix command line tools as glue, as building blocks. For me t
here is a... coming from Germany I think is also true for the Netherlands, maybe even for Spain; there is one really good analogy, when I was 
a kid in the nineteen seventies there was an ideological battle between kids about toys because either you could have Lego or you could have P
laymobil and what is the difference between Lego and Playmobil. Playmobil got you everything out of the box , yes you have figures and you hav
e things like for example houses or cars you could get for example a playmobil pirate ship and the complete pirate figures and the ship you ju
st had to build together a pre configured set of things ... you get a very fast out of the box pirate ship. While with Lego or the classical L
ego the approach is that you get bricks and then is upon to your own imagination to build something so you could also build that pirate ship w
ith Lego. Other point is that with Lego is much harder because you don't get the thing out of the box is not a shrink rapped you have to have 
some technical construction skills to pick the right bricks and then build the ship but is ultimately much more flexible you can turn the pira
te ship into another ship or into a car or something completely wild. I would say is the same with free software and proprietary software. Fre
e software really is like Lego that means its also harder requires...has a higher? learning curve : you need to invest more, you need to learn
 more skills in order to productively use it and you don't get the instant out of the box gratification. The nice coherence, the nice wrapping
 that you have with proprietary software but specially for experimental artistic practices the free software model, the Lego model is really p
owerful because it gives you more freedom to build what you have in mind an not what the software industry has in mind.

elpueblodechina: How do you see the relation between Free software and the market, because there are some areas of Free Software like the CMS area that is powe
ring consumption models, how do u see this?

Florian: well it's totally clear that most free software development today is market driven and basically, why is it market driven because despite this
 Lego flexibility there are some commercial (grate-killer?) applications and there is just a lot of economical interest in it so for example m
ost of the internet infrastructure actually works on free software for example the whole Domain Name system runs on free software, most mail s
ervers, ftp servers , web servers are free software, there are also proprietary ones but in relation you would see about two thirds of interne
t server infrastructures are based on free software. Or in embedded devices for example if you have tvs setup boxes they often run linux insid
e, even if you don't see it from the outside, its just a generic digital video recorder or something like this but it's a linux box. If you ha
ve internet routers, dsl modems often they're just linux devices so there is a real commercial interest in them and those companies for them o
ften it makes sense to invest in free software development because they have commercial interest in that so lets's say, a company like (road c
om) is developing a router they're selling the box but through linux they get this software for nothing, maybe they need to apply some tricks 
because of the linux licensing model, they need to publish these tricks and gave them back to the public and this is how all the system works.
 Or a company like IBM. IBM has focus actually on Linux and Free software and the free software development, no it's a completely commercial c
ompany with very large economic interest and the billions of dollars that they put , that they make as 

00:06:00 
revenue in cash flow, but the point for them is that in the 1990s they restructured themselves from a product company to a service company so 
what happens is that a company goes to IBM and says for our company we want to have a mail server, we want to have a webserver we want to have
 a calendar server and so on and IBM just installs it and you get IBM machines that run these services and you pay quite a fee, you pay 10000 
dollars a year and this infrastructure is running, for a costumer of IBM it makes absolutely no difference wether those machines run LINUX or 
wether they run IBM or other proprietary UNIX so for IBM there was simply no commercial gain and continued to develop their own operating systems so 
they say, for our business model in fact we make more profit if we put free software onto our computers because we sell integrated services. This als
o works for the server division of Hewlet Packard for example but it doesn't work in other fields of the software industry and mainly in PC desktop c
omputing, because in PC desktop computing you really have the model of software as a shrinked wrapped product, as something that you buy in a box. If
 you buy Microsoft Office if you buy something like 'in design' or any Adobe product, Photoshop, whatever, it's really a box that you buy and install
. This is not the business model for most let's say, non-consumer software, most server software is not sold that way, but through server's contracts
 this is why for those companies the server software, doesn't make really a difference wether the software is free or not and using free software sav
es them money and makes them more competitive but for this consumer model there is really different and i think this is also the explanation why in o
ur areas, linux and free software really has made huge () but not on the desktop because this is really a field where companies cannot make money, ca
nnot really make money with linux desktop software 

(the economic model of free software)
It is very capitalist, yes of course because companies like Red Hat or IBM, they make billions with Free software but then if you look on the other h
and how many developers really are there employed and get payed and what do they get payed in comparison with what they would get payed in a company 
like Microsoft or Oracle or let's say (BIO) or whatever then of course there is also let's say this is the dark side of Free Software is that there i
s a lot of exploitation going on. You have free developers who in many or most cases make unpaid development and that gets commercially exploited on 
a large scale 

pueblo: a developer friend said the other day, 'we have to develop at least at the same pace as proprietary software' so i wonder if this is also a conseque
nce of a sort of developer's mind)

florian: well, the problem with software it's almost and specially with operating systems is almost like a political system, that means, you choose to live in
 one or the other. This is also why people get religious or ideological about software and operating systems because once you choose your software pl
atform you make a pact with the devil it means that you entrust all your data, your digital work to that software platform you are using and you also
 have to invest trust into the fact that your operating system will survive the next 10 years for example or that for example if you use this audio e
ditor to record my voice that you would be able to retrieve those recordings and edit them again in a couple of years and not that the whole operatin
g system and the file formats goes out of business, so people get religious about these things and because they get religious and because they make a
 choice and it's really it's like, in other media systems either you use VHS or Betamax or now, the contemporary example, you use blue ray or hd DVD,
 the one system is not compatible to the other, once you use one software platform you are pretty much tighted to that, because of that free software
 needs to deliver a complete package, it really means, in order to be a full alternative it also has to deliver a complete set of applications which 
basically or ideally people can solve all their problems. Because for example if you wouldn't have an audio editor as free software then it would mea
n you would have to boot into another system maybe use even another computer just to make an audio recording. This is why Free Software development h
as a pressure of keeping up with the whole software industry, because otherwise it could very quickly happen that people would say, free software is 
nice because it gives me more freedoms but ultimately I cannot do all my work with it and this is why I'm only using it as my secondary system and yo
u really don't want to use secondary systems if you are a computer user, you want one to settle for one system and in order to be a primary system fr
ee software needs to be a complete package 

pueblo: inside free software what would be the most advanced area or what would you be more interested

Florian: Let's say, it's hard to tell what is most advanced in completely objective terms of course that's always a matter of your critical opinion but I woul
d say, something like...if there is an issue of free software then is the relation between users and developers. Free software is very developer-cent
ric, it is software made by developers and the classical saying is well 'a developer has to scratch an itch' , a developer has a problem in order to 
fix it , he or she writes a piece of software and this is pretty much the logic of free software development. So, I would say the strength of free so
ftware is that the developer community is also the user community or viceversa the user community consists almost completely of programmers and devel
opers and that is stuff like for example kernels, networks, stacks, programming languages, server software, version control systems, text editors whi
ch also programmers need, basically programmers tools or network tools, administrator tools because there, the use of an administrator tool is a netw
ork administrator and the network administrators are in most cases are also developers. So the network administrator sees a bug in a program or wants
 a new feature, he or she can add it herself in most of the cases. The opposite scenario would be something like for example a video editor or a clas
sical audiovisual software. There you often have the case that the user base doesn't have developer skills, that the separation between a user culture and a developer culture is higher than in other fields of software. That also explains, I think why audio visual software for linux or written as f
ree software is also somewhat developer oriented. If you think of something like pd that exists as free software but is also a development platform a
nd by working with this you are developing patches and you become automatically into something like a code developer of the whole thing. But you don'
t really have a program like for example CUBASE for linux, or doesn't exist as free software
15:07

or exist some programs but they are really immature, very incomplete, not really competitive. Because these are really user-centric pieces of softwar
e and this is also I think is related to this Lego comparison what basically free software has to do, it has to be , it has to be hackable, ideally i
t has to educate or attract its own user community that also is contributing to the hack value into the development of the whole system. It really ha
s to remove those barriers between the usage and the programming. In fields where this distinction is very high, I would say it is less successful an
d that also considers the whole area of classical desktop user software and if you look at the programs that are developed as classical shrincked wra
pped user software they often are commercial developments and that is for example Open Office, the Mozilla browser also the Gnome desktop. When I say
 commercial that might sound like a contradiction but it is not, you can have commercial free software, so for example Open Office is almost exclusiv
ely developed by engineers, paid engineers of Sun and Mozilla is a foundation that is paid by most of the software industry, why is that the case, we
ll for the software industry it is very important that Microsoft doesn't have the full control over the browser market because if they have full cont
rol over the browser market they can re define the web standards and that means that only if they for example, have proprietary html extensions or no
w Microsoft with the Vista operating system has launched new attempt of replacing flash with their own technology which is deeply embedded into their
 windows Vista, so the whole software industry except Microsoft has a high interest to keep the web as an open platform. This is why the main investo
r into the Mozilla development is Google. Google pumps in a lot of money, millions in fact into the Mozilla development . Because if Microsoft had th
e monopoly over the browser market they could for example chain their search engine 
 
17:59

completely to the Microsoft internet explorer and the window's operating system so that you would get only the best... google would not longer be com
petitive against Microsoft because Microsoft would automatically with every windows installed people would use their Microsoft search engine, with ev
ery internet explorer installed. So that's why google has an interest into Mozilla, although they are not making money with the browser themselves. T
his is the example where classical user software is developed and where there is a rather, a disconnection between users and developers but it's agai
n, it's really a case where the software industry itself develops Free Software out of the market interest. 

pueblo :So you were finding more interesting this area where users and developers are more together because of, why is it actually the hackability of it?)

florian: Yes because I think it creates more interesting software if we stay with the example of cubase versus pd, you can use Cubase and it's very simple to 
get into that or for example Logic notator, would be another example of a similar program but ultimately you can only produce pop music with that you
 cannot produce experimental music, it's made for people who want to make a techno track or produce a new Britney Spears album and then if you want t
o work more experimentally with that software you hit a wall and our experience also here at Piet Zwart has been, the more we try to find software th
at lends itself to experimental artistic work, the more attractive free software becomes, because Free Software often has this experimental qualities
 that through this hackability, through this extreme modularity, though this extreme possibilities of configuring and tailoring, you can do things th
at are not foreseen by the software company(...) Another good comparison would be if we not speak of toys like Lego or Playmobil, cameras!, think of 
a point and shoot camera and think of a highly modular single lens Reflex camera, maybe even a middle format camera, so with the point and shoot you 
get a compact camera that does everything out of the box and you just press the trigger. And many photographers also artistic photographers prefer to
 work that way. I mean I'm not (dispairaging?) a point and shoot camera could be useful camera for many tools but then you might get into areas of ph
otography where you want to have more control, creative control and tinker with it you might want to unscrew the lens you might want to put a differe
nt lens on it you want to create a different shutter you might want to have manual control of the exposure of the aperture and then you want to have 
a camera that is not the point and shoot but something that is, let's say highly technical and also has a steeper learning curve but for most photogr
aphic artists, this is the camera they work with this is why they work with a single lens Reflex ,with Nikon or a (Hasselbladt) or a Laika rather tha
n with a point and shoot and I would say that this is a good analogy also for Free software v/s proprietary software specially on the desktop.

pueblo: what do you define as art in this context or what is for you the most interesting art

Florian: I would say, particularly interesting as artistic practice in connection to Free Software is of course digital art and net art because this is a form of art that doesn't just use a computer as a tool but also as its medium, so there is a double bind that 22:55
what you use is also a medium versus let's say just using Photoshop in order to edit 
a photograph and ultimately work on that photograph but that is not related to the computer itself that also means that the employment of the compute
r technology in computer art it's very advanced and also tries to be a critical reflection, now I would say, which is also true for our study program
 here that in computer arts there are really, there has been a paradigm shift, also a generation shift in the 1990's with the advent of Net Art, comp
uter art used to be high tech laboratory arts, highly funded often by educational institutions or high tech labs or multimedia labs and it used to be
 a field that was very proprietary in terms of the technology that was employed, because traditionally audiovisual software is just incredibly expens
ive and incredibly commercial and incredibly proprietary and if we talk about things like video codecs and so on it's all highly proprietary stuff. W
hat changed with net art in the 1990's is that it was for the first time a Do it Yourself electronic art, because suddenly computer technology had be
come cheap and accessible and it was possible to make low tech computer art at least in western countries and today you can really go to flee markets
 and buy your computer equipment for 20 euro and make a computer installation with that so that this whole obstacle has gone away. Also the internet 
as an open platform really changed the rules of the game because the internet as an open information architecture, when the first website appeared we
ll it's based on HTML an open code and on every internet browser you have a button 'view source' so the web, you could say is in a way, not strictly 
speaking but technically speaking, it's an open source architecture because you can see the guts, you can open it and you can look how it is made. an
d this is precisely how the first generation of net artists like Jodi for example worked, they look at the code of websites and they started to play 
with it and they got unforseen results and this is how they developed their aesthetics. So that was completely in contradiction with how electronic a
rts used to work before specially in those high funded media labs because there you normally had a work logic or you would have equipment that costs 
up to millions of dollars and you would have a strict work divide between artists and technicians, artists and programmers so the artist would develo
p an idea and then the programmer technician would implement it and with this whole Do It Yourself almost punk like Do It Yourself culture that came 
into being with net art back in the 1990s these rules of the game changed and for the first time you had something like a critical tinkering, hackeri
sh art and it's just that Free software lends itself very much to this kind of aesthetic approach. Almost all the net artists back in the 1990's work
ed with either mac OS or windows and if you look at this kind of art today this has really changed in the last few years more and more people are wor
king with Linux and Free Software and there are now whole festivals which are also bottom up, non institutional festivals dedicated to Free software 
and electronic arts, for example the Piksel festival at the BEK.no center, the Bergen center of contemporary art , the Make Art festival in France th
e quadruplex festival in England, the dorkbot events, there is a whole culture and I would say it's almost something like maybe a second or third gen
eration of electronic artists who come also from net art tradition. Net art, software art tradition but just because they have this hackerish approac
h they also like hackerish software and it seems to me... 
27:12
It's also a development behind our study program that we use, we work on mac os in the beginning and now we suddenly, without ever having fondly impl
emented this as a policy we are suddenly we are I would say 90 percent Linux even amongst the students and they don't do it because of political corr
ecteness but they go into Linux because that is easier to do in Linux if i want to script something in Python and combine it with pd I know how to do
 it in Linux and then they reboot and that seems to me a very interesting recent development. 

pueblo: I also see that your approach to education is very different to traditional media education because traditionally media education was very commercial
ly oriented so how do you see this shift?

28:10
Florian: I wouldn't even say that is necessarily anti commercial what we do because for example our students when they learn low level Linux administration an
d configuration, they also are then very skilled when they work let's say as web designers to understand much more of how a web server work and also 
do a much more skilled work let's say in a media company, also being able to perform administrative tasks on a web server or understand how to use sc
ripting languages and not to delegate this to a programmer so it is also commercially useful tools but what the philosophical approach that we have i
n this program is, we want students to have a really thorough understanding of media and that means a thorough cultural political and technological u
nderstanding and again Free Software lends itself to such an approach because it's software which is not shrincked wrapped which is not a black box w
here you see under the (hood)... also if you are not a programmer just installing, maintaining it, configuring it you get much better understanding o
f how software works, how computers work so again it's like working with a modular haselblad camera versus the point and shoot also for our particula
r programmatic approach in media education that makes sense, just like in photography school you chose the haselblad over the point and shoot we are 
choosing Free Software over proprietary software.

pueblo:Do you see this as a political decision?

Florian: Well it certainly is I mean I switched from mackintosh to Linux already in the late 1990s also for technical reasons well, for sure just being used t
o Free software I cannot stand a point and click license agreement anymore I simply do not have the tolerance anymore. I do not have the tolerance to
 maybe have to install pirated software in my computer. I don't want to do this, I hate this and it is for me self understood that I get free systems
 and security upgrades on my system. It's just I wouldn't want to go back well just like a photographer that wouldn't want to go back to a point and 
shoot and let's say, see the analogy is really good because let's say you have better lens technology and while the point and shoot photographer has 
to buy a new camera but if you have a haselblad camera you just have to buy a new lens and it's the same with Free Software. But beyond the technical
 reasons I am also a critic of copyright and I always have been in fact and that goes back to the 1980's and I do not believe that our current system
 of so called intellectual property is sustainable or makes any sense I have a very strong political opinion there that of course goes hand in hand w
ith what Free Software is doing.

pueblo:Do you see your educational program as having a political agenda as well?

Yes certainly I mean , we do not want students to buy into a positivist new media ideology. This totally mindless thing of always using the newest an
d grates and latest technology and also this very questionable ideology of that somehow the technology becomes smarter you get, you think of such pas
swords as artificial intelligence, artificial life, the semantic web or stuff like that I think that's all really nonsense. It's really about questio
ning those hypes and those business models, again I must say this is also a solid capitalist skill, if you see through those hypes then you don't bec
ome a victim of something like a dot com bubble because you have a more realistic estimation of what computer technology can do and what it cannot do
, so we don't have to be

33:15
let's say extreme political left to push this agenda but it's also a very pragmatic politics that just makes sense to learn so we are really not one 
of those courses where you just play with high tech toys in order to adore them but we have an agenda of thinking where does this technology come fro
m and what is the real use of a computer what are its social issues if you think of stuff like privacy, surveillance, control, control paradigms embe
dded into the technology and the way the technology it's designed and there it also becomes somewhat political if you decide no I don't need the grea
test and latest laptop to be in this program but you can work with a 5 year old machine and do something very simple, something that would be conside
red horribly technologically outdated or simplistic in other media programs. It's again like a photography program that doesn't say well you need the
 latest camera and the newest digital photography technology but you can build your own camera obscura and maybe this way make much better photograph
s than wit the latest tech toy and working with a camera obscura you also really learn about the basics and essence of photography.

pueblo:Do you see other examples of this programmatic agenda?

We are very rare, we are a very weird example of that although I am confident I mean I am very self conscious , we are all very self conscious of tha
t we think that we are ahead of other media programs and that others will follow eventually. I just saw when I was at the festival (DEAF) and I just 
saw another very large media school presented their own open source program, they say well we have all this audiovisual toys and now we just start to
 a little bit to use ubuntu because there is an audio editor that is interesting for us, so there is no philosophy behind it, no agenda behind it, no
 concept behind it, that's not what we do for us is more embedded really into a philosophy of media and media education. Other schools which are comp
arable would be for example the new media program in Zurich with knowbotic research and also Felix Stalder is a tutor there which is one of the main 
theorist in the field of net art and net art culture and open source platforms and open architectures so there I see similar approaches . Or also in 
Italy in Florence the program of Tomasso Tossi goes into a similar direction. Then partly in Bauhaus University in Weimer they have interesting appro
aches but yes I think we are pretty much ahead in the game of usage and philosophy of Free software I can be relatively confident on that other progr
ams may not have taken it to the same length as we have done it .