“Over the last twenty years, audiences for museums, galleries, and performing arts institutions have decreased, and the audiences that remain are older and whiter than the overall population. Cultural institutions argue that their programs provide unique cultural and civic value, but increasingly people have turned to other sources for entertainment, learning, and dialogue. They share their artwork, music, and stories with each other on the Web. They participate in politics and volunteer in record numbers. They even read more. But they don’t attend museum exhibits and performances like they used to.”

The text above is a statement from the preface of The Participatory Museum: a book/guide to working with community members and visitors for cultural institutions. All the more alarming is that the statement is actually based on research done by the National Endowment for the Arts on arts attendance in the United States. Nina Simon (also the principal of Museum 2.0) decided to write The Participatory Museum as a practical guide for museums and other cultural organizations to help them become more connected to and entwined with their community. As she continues in her preface:

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Incubate festival gives its visitors the chance to take part in the program itself. During Open Source Arts visitors can show their own art, make their own radio program, show their own films and perform their own choreographies. Starting today, anyone can hand in material for the radio station, which will then be broadcasted during the festival between 11 and 18 September 2011.

For the first time, Incubate gives its visitors the opportunity to stand in the shoes of the promoters and the curators. Beside the broad program with many cutting-edge artists that Incubate offers, the public can express its own art form and add it to the festival in the Open Source Arts program. This is part of the discussion what the visitor should or could contribute to a cultural event. Incubate previously opened up its business plan to the public on the Internet, and let the visitors choose what they wanted to pay for a conference on piracy.

The Incubate Open Source program consists of the following events:

- Open source expo
- Open source radio
- Open source film program
- ‘Space that must be filled’ (dance)

Check out the events page on our website for more info and how you can participate in these open source projects.

On September 12, Charles Leadbeater opened the Incubate festival week with a lecture on social innovation and the role the arts can play in this process. What’s the role of a changing arts practice in a changing society? Watch Charles Leadbeater’s innovation lecture above.

Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He is Tony Blair’s favorite corporate thinker. He has advised companies, cities and governments on innovation strategy and drew on that experience in writing his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity. This book charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.

After Charles’ keynote lecture, a panel of experts from the fields of arts, economy and politics took place. The panelists in the discussion were Wim van de Donk, Dick Rijken, Bas van Heur and Wout Withagen. Roy van Dalm moderated the panel. Watch the panel discussion below.

This blogpost is in Dutch, because the article it refers to is also in Dutch.

In de huidige editie van De Groene Amsterdammer is een interview te vinden met Matt Mason, de keynote spreker op de Incubate Pirate Conference op 17 september in Midi Theater Tilburg. Het artikel is getiteld ‘We zijn allemaal piraten’ en gaat over de ontstaansgeschiedenis en ontwikkeling van piraterij. Het laat zien hoe ver piraterij is doorgedrongen in onze cultuur, en naar mening van Mason, niet meer zal verdwijnen. De vraag rest dan nog: hoe hiermee om te gaan? Het hele interview is te lezen op de site van De Groene Amsterdammer.

“Een van die goede dingen is het land waar Mason nu woont: ‘Amerika is gesticht op een mentaliteit van piraterij. Schijt aan de Engelse koning, we doen het hier op onze manier. Dat libertarisme zit nog steeds in de Amerikaanse cultuur. De term Yankee is afgeleid van het Nederlandse woord janke, dat piraat betekent – Europeanen noemden Amerikanen piraten omdat ze structureel internationale eigendomsrechten negeerden. Zoals China tegenwoordig Amerikaanse producten kopieert. Het is precies de manier waarop Amerika ooit zo snel industrialiseerde: door Europese auteursrechten te schenden.’”

“De jeugdcultuur was door de geschiedenis heen altijd een soort R&D-lab waar je op een betrouwbare manier verschillende denkwijzen kon uitproberen. Door de manier waarop jongeren het internet gebruiken, gaat dat niet meer: de een organiseert dansfeestjes in een loft in New York om zo het systeem te veranderen, anderen hacken de CIA en geven de aldus gevonden informatie door aan WikiLeaks. Tegelijkertijd zijn typische aspecten van de jeugdcultuur, zoals muziek en stijl, niet langer gebonden aan lokale en nationale grenzen omdat kwaadaardige marketeers zoals ik als gieren boven op de trends zitten. Reclamebureaus zijn altijd op zoek geweest naar betekenis in de cultuur, maar we zijn nog nooit zo meedogenloos geweest als nu. De pogingen van de grote merken om zich al zo vroeg mogelijk te associëren met een nieuwe trend leiden tot een zeker nihilisme. Hipsters zijn niet meer geïnteresseerd in het systeem veranderen, ze zeggen alleen maar: ik draag een merkloos T-shirt, man.”

Tickets voor de Incubate Pirate Conference zijn te koop via deze site. Om de toegankelijkheid te waarborgen en om aan te sluiten bij het thema Piraterij, heeft het festival ervoor gekozen het Pay What You Want principe te hanteren. Hiermee beslist de bezoeker zelf wat de waarde is van de conferentie en een dergelijke maatschappelijke discussie.

On September 12, Charles Leadbeater will open the Incubate festival week with a lecture on social innovation and the role the arts can play in this process. Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He is Tony Blair’s favourite corporate thinker. He has advised companies, cities and governments on innovation strategy and drew on that experience in writing his latest book We-think: the power of mass creativity. This book charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.

In 2009, Charles Leadbeater wrote the essay ‘The Art of With’; a most interesting and highly recommended text on the practices of the (avant garde) art and how it stands in opposition to the art and the world of to and for:

Often in the name of doing things for people traditional, hierarchical organisations end up doing things to people. Companies say they work for consumers but often treat them like targets to be aimed at, wallets to be emptied, desires to be excited and manipulated.

The arts, and the modern avant garde in particular, has stood in opposition to this commodified, regimented world of to and for. The arts offer a space for contemplation and reflection, challenge and controversy, higher meanings and deeper purpose. Yet in its way the modern art world and modern arts institutions embody the principles of to and for just as powerfully as the modern factory or school.

The modern, iconoclastic avant garde starts from the idea of separation and specialism. To produce good art, artists have to separate themselves off from the society around them – physically, emotionally, morally, socially – the artist as a self-styled resistance fighter pitted against the trivialising distractions of popular culture. The untrammelled imagination of the avant garde artist is one of the last redoubts against bourgeoise, traditional, commodified culture.

Further on in the essay, Leadbeater goes on talking about the resemblances and role of the web within this context; how the art and the web of with drive innovation:

The appeal of the web, however, stems from the way it connects to and amplifies the idea of with in other areas of life. The working ethos of open source communities, Wikipedia and the web more generally is a culture in which people work with people. In the world of the web the main principle is that you can freely communicate with anyone you need to regardless of title or hierarchy.

Innovation invariably comes from a version of with: creative collaboration and conversation in which people share and blend their ideas. With should be the guiding principle of politics in liberal communities: politicians working with people to find solutions to shared problems. People want a more gown up, bottom up, conversational politics rather than being spun messages or broadcast to from on high.

Download the full essay by Charles Leadbeater here in a pdf file. The text is licensed under Creative Commons. Presale for the Charles Leadbeater lecture & panel has begun. Tickets are for sale through the website of Incubate.

In September 2010, The Asylum will be a guest at the Incubate Festival in Tilburg. The American company has become notorious in recent years for making their so-called mockbusters, cheap pirated versions of major Hollywood films.

These mockbusters are immediately released on DVD, even before the original movies screen in cinemas. Besides a large number of claims and lawsuits, the studio also enjoys a large fan base.

The Asylum’s way of working fits perfectly with the central theme of this year’s Incubate; piracy in the arts. Besides various readings and discussions on the subject, Incubate has also compiled a very diverse film program around this theme under the title ‘Pirate Cinema‘.

Watch an interview we did with David Rimawi (Sales and Distribution at The Asylum) on their company, there method of production, business model and piracy below:

During the festival week visitors can enjoy the pirated counterparts of The Da Vinci Code, Snakes on a Plane, Transformers and Alien vs. Predator among others. One of the highlights is the European movie premiere of Titanic II. The film premieres in the U.S. on August 24 and will be featured in a cinema in Europe for the first time during the Incubate festival on Thursday, September 16.

All screenings take place in the Filmfoyer Tilburg and are free. Check out the whole Pirate Cinema program at www.incubate.org/2010/event/19

“Seriously I thought it was a spoof when i saw it at the rental store”
“it was hilarious in the stupidest way, Don’t BUY JUST RENT“
“This movie is way more fun than the movie that it obviously rips off”
(user reviews imdb.com)

Piracy in the arts is the overarching theme of Incubate 2010. This theme is visible throughout all different parts of the festival program and will be especially investigated at the Pirate Conference on Friday September 17. Tickets for the conference are sold seperately from the festival tickets through incubate-innovation.org and you determine the ticket price. Arrr!

Here’s an interesting talk we found on Ted.com by Johanna Blakley. Blakley is the Deputy Director of the Norman Lear Center (a media-focused think tank at the University of Southern California) where she spends much of her time exploring the impact of intellectual property rights on innovation and the ownership of creative content. In this speech Johanna explains how the fashion industry actually benefits from the lack of copyrights in terms of not only creativity but, in the end, even sales as well. She therefore suggests that other creative industries should take an example from fashion by incorporating the fashion industry’s copyrightless way of working and then create their own model from there.

At the Incubate Pirate Conference on September 17, Xavier Le Roy invites Mårten Spångberg to discuss copyright from the perspective of performance arts: how to deal with re-usage, re-interpretation and re-enactment? Xavier and Mårten will discuss three different subjects within the context of piracy: dance/ownership, theatre/war-machine, and invention/art.

Mårten Spångberg (1968) lives and works in Stockholm as essayist, performance critic, dramaturg and choreographer. For the discussion at the Pirate Conference, Mårten wrote an article as an introduction to his views on piracy:

Piracy And Desire, Lack Is Strategic

One can think of two kinds of breaks with the confinements proposed by the law. Prison break, a breach with a conventional and continuous imprisonment without exception results in the subject always looking over his shoulder waiting for the law to catch up. The subject will inevitably return to his original imprisonment where he also will feel relief. The prison break operates on the basis of breaking through and leaving a trace, whereas a clean break implies a shift of discourse, i.e. the prison guard will not even know that the subject has disappeared out of the field of vision. The result is identical, but after a clean break the subject will continuously look over his shoulder hoping that at least somebody will appear. A clean break implies sovereignty, a lonely place without anybody to gossip with.

Piracy can be considered as simple prison break, a crossing of a conventional restriction in order to get away with some or other thing, or simply obtaining value. It can also be understood as a clean break, especially considering digital media where a copy is not destabilizing value. Is it however possible to instead consider piracy not only as strategic endeavor, but rather as operations either on structural or tactical levels? We would like to understand piracy as concept, as a heterogeneous huddle of incompatible connections raising questions that cannot be answered within our present predicament or as a cluster of mutating lines carrying the potentiality of ungrounding established capacities of dualist-based discourse.

The language apparatuses that define present political contexts have over the past twenty-five years lost its deterritorializing agency, i.e. any political emergence or social movement can but be canonized due the dominant discourse of Western representational democracy, hence the multiplicity has made itself invincible. As long as tomorrow is designated by yesterday’s idioms, difference can only operate on levels of degree, in particular in a reality where capitalism has become omnipresent.

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We are more than pleased to announce that Roy van Dalm will moderate the panel after Charles Leadbeater’s keynote speech at De NWE Vorst on September 12. Roy van Dalm helps cities and regions define economic and cultural strategies. Through workshops, seminars and dialogue tables Roy guides city and regional authorities, cultural institutions and development boards in defining an authentic and competitive identity.

Roy worked with the Richard Florida Creativity Group for 3 years. Currently he is working with Charles Landry on the roll out of an in-depth creativity index for cities. Roy van Dalm is a senior lecturer at HAN University of Applied Sciences, a research fellow of ARCCI and guest lecturer at over 10 universities and academies.

Roy’s knowledge is based on over 15 years of work as an economic research journalist. With a team of seven Roy van Dalm worked on profiling 80 European cities for the weekly Slimme Steden (Smart Cities) series in Het Financieele Dagblad – the leading Dutch economic newspaper. 50 cities were selected for the bestselling book Slimme Steden.

The panel will consist of of experts from the fields of arts, economy and politics. Panelmembers are: Charles Leadbeater, Prof. dr. Wim van de Donk, Dick Rijken, Wout Withagen and Bas van Heur. You can get tickets for this event at the Incubate website (Dayticket Charles Leadbeater). Let us know you will be attending at LinkedIn.