My Lawyer is an Artist: Free Culture Licenses as art Manifesto

One of the main mechanisms behind free software relies on a set of rules that prevent improvements and changes to become inaccessible. Building up on these principles, artists and designers are now creating works as free software art, open source art or “art libre”.These works are distributed using free culture licenses and offer the same freedom as free software in terms of appropriation, study and modification. In this presentation, I will show that due to the explicit rules provided by these licenses, what is often introduced as a new form of artistic freedom of production and distribution, is in fact a networked evolution of constrained art creation that finds its root in the works and experiments from artist collectives such as Fluxus, the Surrealists and OuLiPo; artists and designers exposing these mechanisms at the root of their creation are in fact turning legal documents into artists’ manifestos.