In January 2007, Enter Festival director Annette Wolfsberger suggested to Matthieu Margaruin of Mal au Pixel in Paris that both festivals host a Bricolabs workshop, thus also being able to share the costs of bringing Venzha Christiawan from Yogjakarta to Europe.38 A month39 before that Jaromil40 had given his consent to be part of Bricolabs, in the sense that for him it was a special network that was able to articulate broad views that he himself did not necessarily agree with. The second edition of Mal au Pixel festival, was held in April 2007, just before the first round of the French presidential election. It was organised by Ars Longa, Confluences, Mains d’Ouvres and the Institut Finlandais. Within this pre-election context, Mal au Pixel addressed the question of how artists, researchers and grassroots communities working in the field of media can contribute to understanding, critiquing, developing and inventing our political and social systems. Jean-Noël Montagné (Craslab) introduced his focus on open source movement and Bricolabs initiative as driven by the necessity to give other possibilities to citizens in their day life to face the actual global economic model. The conveners of this workshop, he said, along with many others, are currently developing novel means for exchanging knowledge between “Bricolabs”, distributed sites that explore the potentialities of pervasive information technologies in an open context. The central theme is that of “re-working”, “re-using”, and “re-purposing” existing infrastructures in order to develop novel forms of knowledge exchange between artists, technologists, and socio-technical theorists, as well as the development of new models for innovation in business and in society more generally. In his view: “We must start new democratic processes plainly integrating local and global contexts in economy, environment, education, science, culture etc, and plainly restoring the citizen as a major actor in the global community. We all know open source software, documents and recently hardware, and we just discover now that the open source concepts, techniques and ethics concern all schemes of human presence in this small and fragile planet. The Bricolabs laboratory is one opportunity to contribute to such discoveries and applications”. The workshop41 consisted of short presentations on the recent new possibilities of open source software, content and hardware and its promises for real democratic generic infrastructures (non branded, non IP) from your average electricity supply, your automobiles (OScar), your connectivities (mobile infrastructure). Bricolabs; a series of labs all over the world that work on shared objects, not so much through a shared philosophy. Apart from presentations there were two participatory strands: 1) a scenario workshop on what generic infrastructures would mean for you, your house, your street, your life, and 2) hands-on experience on employing GNU/Linux for digital artisanship and tactical media, hacking cheap game consoles.42 Jaromil on piracy
“I got into Bricolabs building software to let people produce things for themselves easily and recycling available hardware, this is the point of contact with Felipe Fonseca and the MetaReciclagem initiatives in Brazil. We should be careful about what we do ourselves and wonder - at every step - if we need more hardware in a world already full of it. Instead of spending resources on creating new objects we should, perhaps, first look to exploit and explore to the fullest what is already available. Then we need to create alternative infrastructures to run everything on every object.
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