Disrupting Business at Art Meets Radical Openness Festival, Linz

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

The festival, under the theme "Autonomy (im)possible?", is dedicated to
art, hacktivism and open culture and organised by Us(c)hi Reiter -
servus.at, with the contributions of external curators: among myself,
Heath Bunting, and Margaritha Köhl, and the involvement of many other
people (read more here: http://www.radical-openness.org/2014/team).

Below is a summary about the Disrupting Business Conference Track.

## Disrupting Business at Art Meets Radical Openness Festival

The increasing commercialisation of sharing and networking contexts is
transforming the meaning of art and that of business. Business is
progressively adopting hacker and artistic strategies of disruption in
the field of social media and information technology. In the business
culture, disruption not only means rupture, but innovation and the
re-design of behavioural tendencies, acting in ways that the market does
not expect. The Wikipedia Encyclopaedia shows the example of 'new-market
disruption' caused by the GNU/ Linux Operating System, which initially
was inferior in performance to other server operating systems like Unix
and Windows NT, but by being less expensive and collectively improved,
in 2010 Linux was installed in 87.8% of the worlds 500 fastest
supercomputers. As pointed out by Tatiana Bazzichelli in her book
'Networked Disruption' (2013) and in 'Disrupting Business' (co-edited
with Geoff Cox, 2013), to investigate the progressive commercialisation
of sharing and networking platforms, it is necessary to understand
business culture from within. What is the challenge facing artists and
activists working on a critical dimension of networking? The notion of
disruptive business becomes a means for describing immanent practices of
hackers, artists, networkers and entrepreneurs, working consciously on
artistic, political and technological practices. Disruption becomes a
means for a new form of criticism.

Saturday May 31, 19:00-19:40
## Disrupting Business: Towards a Critique of Art & Activism
by Tatiana Bazzichelli
http://www.radical-openness.org/programm/2014/disrupting-business-t...

At the core of this presentation is Tatiana Bazzichelli's research on
business disruption as artistic and activist practice. Her hypothesis,
described in the book 'Networked Disruption' (2013) is that mutual
interferences between art, hacktivism and the business of social
networking have changed the meaning and contexts of political and
technological criticism. Hackers and artists have been active agents in
business innovation, while at the same time also undermining business.
Artists and hackers use disruptive techniques of networking within the
framework of social media, opening up a critical perspective towards
business to generate unpredictable feedback and unexpected reactions;
business enterprises apply disruption as a form of innovation to create
new markets and network values, which are often just as unpredictable.
Bazzichelli proposes the concept of the Art of Disrupting Business as a
form of artistic practice within the current economical and political
framework. The notion of disrupting business becomes a means for
reflecting on immanent practices of hackers, artists, networkers and
entrepreneurs, highlighting empirical and theoretical interconnections
and contradictions, as multiple layers of intervention.

Saturday May 31, 20:30 - 22:30
## Openness and Liberty as Business Disruption
Panel with Marc Garrett /Furtherfield, Karlessi /Ippolita collective,
Nathaniel Tkacz /MoneyLab. Moderated by Tatiana Bazzichelli.
http://www.radical-openness.org/programm/2014/openness-and-liberty-...

This panel traces the shift in the meaning of "openness" and "liberty"
in relation to forms of "business disruption". Since some years a
certain vocabulary of freedom and peer collaboration has been adopted by
the rhetoric of IT business and social networking. Do-It-Yourself,
sharing knowledge, hackability, and similar concepts first witnessed in
the underground interventionist realm of hacker culture and networked
art are today the core business for many enterprises. Many hackers and
activists have pointed out that the rhetoric behind Web 2.0 has been via
a progressive appropriation – and often, disambiguation – of hacker and
cyber utopias of the 1980s-1990s. In this panel activists and critical
thinkers reflect on the subject of co-optation of radical values by
business models, shedding light on the constant paradox of being
functional to the system while trying to disrupt it. Are openness and
liberty forms of business disruption by empowering flexible mechanisms
of revenues and the technical genealogy" of anarcho-capitalism?

# Insider Liberties: A Technical Genealogy of Cryptography by Karlessi.
From cypherpunks to WikiLeaks and beyond. We will trace a genealogy of
liberties' concepts and their technical implementations, leading from
the cypherpunk movement (1990s) to WikiLeaks. We will focus specifically
on cryptography as the key-concept in order to foster, and defend,
liberties. Cryptography is in some way a disruptive concept and
practice. In this endeavour, we only use archives, to employ a
foucaldian terminology (Foucault 1969), provided by documents widely
published on the Web. We don’t have any insider information, leak or
whistle-blown secret. Nevertheless, we are insiders via our methodology
because we are not stranger to this genealogy, we are part of it, we are
involved in the construction of digital worlds since before the Web. We
just use a vast amount of data and act as human filters to reconstruct a
reliable account in reasonably good time.

# Marc Garrett will discuss the critical intentions behind Furtherfield,
its online community, the physical Gallery space, and the new
Furtherfield Commons and lab space, and its role as a radical arts
collective. For over 17 years Furtherfield has engaged in Art,
Technology and Social Change. Through this grounded knowledge, he and
his peers have witnessed that the mainstream art world as becoming less
relevant, due its reliance on neoliberal values through its unregulated,
marketing economies. If we are to disrupt the powers these conditions we
need to build beyond our silos and offer valid forms of imaginative
emancipation, we need something closer to people’s actual needs. He sees
connections between Radical Enlightenment from the 1800s, to new forms
of critical theory and art activism as possible solutions, and this
includes the practices of Hacktivism, Situationism, Net Art, Media Art
practice, P2P culture and networked art, alongside punk, DIY and DIWO
culture.

# Open Organisation and Monstrous Markets: How to be 'Actually
Disruptive', by Nathaniel Tkacz
What does an open mode, an open form of organisation look like? What are
the specific problems that it responds to and how does it constitute
itself? The problem or challenge of openness is not at all new, and it
has always been well suited to certain neo-liberal 'rationalities'. A
lot of seemingly progressive aspects of openness (collaboration,
participation, merit, ad-hocracy, spontaneous organisation, forking, and
so on) are in some ways old arguments in new clothes.
Perhaps the biggest question, or challenge, for openness is its
relationship to the ideology of the market in neoliberal thought. This
presentation reflects upon the concept of openness as an emancipatory
project, questioning organisation structures, and beyond that, economic
logic. I finish by turning to recent market experiments in network
cultures, experiments that are both compatible with some liberal and
libertarian doctrines, but take the logic of the market in monstrous
directions.

More about AMRO Festival here:
http://www.radical-openness.org/