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The three year old current culture exchange program between the state of Karnataka, India and the region of vastra Gotaland, Sweden has kept developing and does incorporate collaboration in many art and culture fields today.

Nätverkstan was part of the initiating process concerning this collaboration and is still an active actor in Bangalore.

KMV, the film, culture and media production centre based on sociala entrepreneurship in Bergsjön, a suburb in Gothenburg, has since a year back started to cooperate with Nätverkstan and Mediaverkstan.

During the Bangalore International Film Festival a joint seminar by KMV and Nätverkstan was held with Leif Eriksson from Nätverkstan as the key speaker. The seminar, held at the Department of Information in Bangalore, attracted a large audience consisting primarly of youngsters and young women, most of them active as film makers, or studying film and media production in Bangalore.

The seminar emphasized new ways of funding feature film in the ongoing digital paradigm shift  as well as a case study on ”Bloody Boys”,  the feature film produced by KMV. Topics in the seminar included issues concerning how the film was financed, how amateurs and residents in the suburb collaborated with top actors and crew from the professional part of the swedish film business. An intense discussion was initiated raising questions about filmproduction, social entrepreneurship and media production catalyzing social change.

Another aspect of the discussion also included new ways of nonlinear collaborative postproduction work in the digital flow-work. ”Bloody Boys” was also screened during the fim festival and was sold out on every screening and did receive intense media attention.

Text by Leif Ericsson, film producer and Nätverkstan

The seminar is a cooperation between Nätverkstan and KMV in Bangalore, India. Se more posts here on the exchange in Bangalore.

For a long time Region Västra Götaland has been a model region in Sweden with its offensive cultural policy. But what’s happening now?

Cultural critic and Chair of Nätverkstan board, David Karlsson, puts the light on the regional cultural policy in an article posted in the daily Göteborgs-Posten last week.

On Thursday November 17, the Cultural Affairs Comittee of the Region took two important decisions; a new Cultural Policy Strategy, and a detailed budget for 2012. As the Cultural Policy Strategy is a visionary and analyzing document, probably the most powerful cultural policy document in the country, the budget is depressing reading. It shows nothing of the visionary, or interest for the art and culture outside the traditional art form limitations.

The whole question falls back on the leadership of the region. Does anyone know where Region Västra Götaland is heading?

Download the article (in Swedish) here: vgr_debatt.pdf. 

The stage is like stepping into a living-room. In the center under the lamp a couch, an armchair, a small wooden table with an ashtray, a photograph, a lamp, a rug underneath.

The audience sit around this centered placed stage. The play is Edward Albee’s drama Who’s afraid of Viriginia Woolf and it’s almost like you are part of the play, as if you are inthe middle of Martha’s and George’s sorrow and cracking marriage.

On another stage we see the play Stones in His Pockets by Marie Jones, a story placed on Irland with an Irish filmmaker dreaming of coming to Hollywood. Two actors play all the roles in this comic yet with sad undertones with an amazing presence. The stage is empty, no properties, a black curtain behind where only the light shows that the room is changing. It’s fully booked.

Tallinna Linnateater, Tallinn City Theatre, has seven stages in a building originally from around 15th century. There is the stage in ”Heaven” (up in the attic) and ”Hell” (down in the basement). Each stage with a different character, different possibilities and challenges. Outside in the courtyard a stage is set up for summer theatre.

Tallinn has seven theatres in a city with around 400.000 people. Linnateater is fully booked with a yearly audience booking of well over 100%, Ruudu Raudsepp, Manager of Public Relations, tells us. Just in comparison, Göteborgsoperan (Opera in Göteborg) has a yearly booking of 85%, which has to be considered good. This means around 250.000 people visit Göteborgsoperan each year. Another example is Dramaten in Stockholm, one of the most prominent stages in Sweden, that showed figures in 2010 of yearly booking of 85% (a rise from 2009 showing 78%) which means 290.000 visitors.

These figures say nothing of quality; for example urgency of the matter in the plays chosen, or acting qualities. But still, the figures in Estonia are interesting. In a country of around 1,3 million people, it’s said that around 800.000 up to one million people see a play at one of the many theatres in Estonia during a year. This means that nearly everyone go to the theatre, young as well as old, at least once during a year. Any theatre director would look at these figures with envy.

Trans Europe Halles – meetings that matters

During four days, 27 – 30th October, around 100 people from different Independent Cultural Centres throughout Europe have met in Bordeaux for the 72nd Trans Europe Halles meeting. This network (founded in 1983) gather more than fifty multidisciplinary and socially engaged member centres. Most centres are located in buildings from industrial heritage and have taken important action in challenging the established cultural policy.

This meeting was held at TNT – Manufacture de Chaussures in Bordeaux, France. The theme of the meeting was Neighbourhood / Voisinage. The meeting was organised together with TEH Friend organisation ARTfactories/Autre(s) pARTs and supported by TEH:s three-year network project Engine Room Europe.

About TNT

TNT opened in 1997 in a former shoe factory, and supports artistic research in the performing arts. Originally devoted to the theatre, it opened to other disciplines such as dance, music, visual arts, poetry, etc. These relations can last from a month to two years, through residencies or long-term projects. TNT tries to develop new ways of working, in its programming as in its functioning, in the choice of the artists, as in the working modalities, in the relations with the public as in the economy of the projects.

About ARTfactories/Autre(s)pARTs

The organisation ARTfactories/Autre(s)pARTs is a common platform for reflection, research and action, transmission and solidarity for the development of art centres that organise their practices and experiments around the relationship between arts, territories and populations. ARTfactories/Autre(s)pARTs is based in Toulouse, France.

Kulturverkstan is not a member of TEH but took part of the meeting as a guest. Networking is always a good way to reflect upon what’s possible, get inspired, review your own work and talk with people with common interests. This network is also interesting to us as we always look for interesting internships for our students.

Some snapshots

The meeting was a mix of formal and informal meetings, information and interaction, meeting with artist, brain-gym and artistic work. Among other things we took part in two different workshops:

The workshop ”Cross-Boarder Exchange” set out to explore the relationship between people with common ideas, but different national contexts. In this workshop we discuss challenges and possibilities of these exchanges, starting with two examples from Kulturfabrik in Luxembourg and La Grainerie in Toulouse, France. They both shared their experiences from recent cross-boarder projects and the discussion that followed centred around issues such as regional identity, European funding and the benefits of proper evaluations. The over all outcome was the positive encouragement from the participants with experience in cross-boarder exchange. That even though communication can prove to be very challenging and a lot of the budget needs to be spent on travelling it is still a very rewarding experience that your organisation will benefit from in a number of ways. The workshop leader was Dušica Parezanović from the centre REX, in Belgrade,Serbia.

Another workshop introduced ”Holacracy, a new way of Governance”. The term ”Holacracy” refers to a practice of structuring, governing and running an organisation. One of the interesting aspects of this model was the concept of doing what’s ”workable”. To not spend to much time on finding what’s perfect before you try it out. Inspiration comes from software development and open source where you launch a Beta-version and get immediate feedback to make it better.

Travelling to a European meeting often give you the opportunity to also meet colleagues from your own country. We spent some time with the Swedish members Röda sten, Konstepidemin, Kulturmejeriet, Subtopia, Culturen and Not Quite. Carl-Oscar Sjögren, artistic director for the performing arts company Drift, took part of the TEH meeting to launch, and gain inspiration on, his new project; to open an international art centre in an old abandoned mine. The mine is called Ställberg and is situated in the Swedish forests of Västmanland in a mine district that was closed down some 30 years ago. Since the TEH network constitutes mainly of cultural centres in buildings that was once used for industrial purposes, Carl-Oscar had the chance to meet with a lot of people that had pioneered the same roads he is now about to discover.

In Autumn 2012 the TEH meeting will be held in Gothenburg, hosted by Röda sten and Konstepidemin. Nätverkstan/Kulturverkstan will most certainly take part in some way!

EVENTO2011

Parallel to the TEH meeting  the second edition of EVENTO in Bordeaux offered a series of interesting exhibitions and art projects. EVENTO2011 has invited Michelangelo Pistoletto and his foundation Cittadellarte as artistic director and brings many local and international artists together under the theme ”Art for an Urban Re-Evolution”. The aim is to encourage us to reinvent the city and how we live together.

We visited some of the interesting spots:

ONCE UPON A FUTURE (STEALTH.unlimited + arc en rêve centre d’architecture Bordeaux) is a fictional account of a possible utopia for Bordeaux in 2030, inspired by citizen’s initiatives. This fictional narrative takes the form of a large mural created by a number of graphic designers and graphic novel artists. We have learnt from history different consequences of imposed utopias, in this work the artist are trying to use the concept of utopia in a ”more pragmatic and less theoretical, more immanent and less transcendent: a hybrid of utopia, somewhere between desire and reality”. Walking along the mural, taking part of all these different ideas and desires my reflection is that the notion of utopia or future at least tells us a lot about the present.

”This is how we came to eat sugar”

Musée d’Aquitaine (Aquitaine is the south-western region of France, along the Atlantic Ocean and the Pyrenees mountain range on the border with Spain)

This museum with it contents Pistoletto uses as a portrait of the past that help us to prefigure the future: Slavery, immigration and other things that we have built our societies and economical growth upon. Six international artists – William Kentridge, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Marzia Migliora, Michael Blum, Shilpa Gupta and Wael Shawky – create a link between the museum collections and elements of refexion on contemporary society.

Our last stop was at a space-specific art project where an artist has worked together with people living there creating a garden, a stage and a café. Everyone in the neighbourhood has been invited to use it for their ideas.

By: Karin Dalborg & Malin Schiller, Kulturverkstan

Below:

1. TNT, and 2-3. Once upon a future

If you enjoy star-spotting, Göteborg is the place to be in at the moment. The exhibition hall at Svenska Mässan is filled to its rims with well-known authors, writers, journalists, publishing houses, book-stores and others involved the art of words.

The Nordic Book Fair just started, this year with the theme Three countries – one language, that is the german speaking literature is in focus.

Nätverkstan is there with an exhibition place for the over hundred small cultural journals that we work with. This is probably the most important event for these journals. Tonight at a glamorous party at Storan, the Cultural Journal of the Year will be nominated.

”To see how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves”

In the latest issue of Economist (Sept 10th–16th 2011) you can read how digitization is transforming the book industry. What has been known in newspaper and music world since late 1990s is now heading towards publishers. This year sales in the first half of the year of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books.

As an example, watch the bookshelves, Economist say. IKEA is introducing a new version of the classic bookshelf ”Billy” next month, a shelf not necessarily for storing books, but a deeper one with glass doors to use for ornaments and other things.

Digitization has given new life to old books. Harlequin has digitized more than 13.000 of its books and the firm has started to publish romances as only e-books. Amazon is selling more copies of e-books than paper books. Digitization has for small publishers showed a way out of the difficulty of managing inventory. If you print too many books, many of them will be returned by stores. Print too few and publishers will get a problem of costing more than it tastes to reprint.

There are two important jobs for publishers:

”They act as the venture capitalists of the words business, advancing money to authors of workthwhile books that might not be written otherwise. And they are editors, picking good books and improving them. So it would be good, not just for their shareholders but also for intellectual life, if they survived”

Nätverkstan has started Samladeskrifter out if these exact ideas: to make small publishers’ and authors’ books available over time and possible to read in different digital formats. It’s both a digital tool for small publishers and authors to make books available on Internet, and a sales window towards the market. Building this has been an interesting roller-coaster ride through a book industry in transformation.

Read more here.

Rain has been pouring down about once every hour today. Heavy rains. The weather forecast has been followed with extreme care at Nätverkstan, glued by the radio most of the day and running outside to try to follow the clouds’ movement.

But half an hour before screening the first of three shows of art- and experimental films on outdoor screening, the clouds disappeared and the sky was blue. Around sixty people had gathered in the restaurant at Lagerhuset, sitting outside to have a drink and see art film. And as the sun set out the coastline in the West and it finally got darker, curator Åsa Falewicz presented her project Where Dreams Cross and her film put together by a set of nine films produced by different artists.

Screening windows for art- and experimental film are changing. The white cube is not any longer the only place where experimental moving images can – or will – be shown. Where Dreams Cross wants to explore new exhibit places for art film and video with the aim to reach a wider audience.

Nätverkstan Borderland has started in line with these ideas. We want to explore more screening possibilities for art- and experimental film, and are starting both open outdoor film screening together with an online window. And today was the nerv-racking start of a series of three shows. Tonight Åsa Falewicz with Where Dreams Cross gave it all a flying start!

The project is a cooperation between Nätverkstan Medialab (Medieverkstäderna), School of Film Directing at University of Gothenburg, Pustervik and Where Dreams Cross. Medieverkstäderna has cultural strategic funding from Region Västra Götaland.

Facebook is said to be valued to around USD 50 billion, Twitter to around USD 10 billion, and The Huffington Post was  recently sold to AOL for the sum of USD 350 million. What’s new about this? The value created was mostly by people working for free.

Read the article At Media Companies, a Nation of Serfs in New York Times by David Carr on, you could say, the world’s unintentional entrepreneurs.

The second day in Bangalore started with a meeting with Shyamal Mehta, one of the co-founders of TechJini, a company with a very impressive track record when it comes to mobile applications. He showed us no less than 25 iPhone applications, ranging from business and travel to news and games applications, many of them built for foreign companies.

TechJini could absolutely be interesting for us, since they already built a store front for an American childrens book publisher, including inbuilt reader. They have also built store fronts for OEMs.

The third day we met with Zunaa, a relatively new company, only five months old but already having eight people employed and currently hiring four more. The shared offices, and some services, with a few other companies, among them an online advertising agency, in a very posh building. The attitude here was more laid back and in some ways more like home. Perhaps it is a telling sign that Zunaa’s flagship application is the popular Indian game Tiger and Goat, available in Apple’s app store for two dollars. But they have also developed a blog service, connected to the users google account, Voar.

The mobile application development branch is practically exploding in Bangalore. On the fourth day we attended the Mobile developer conference, arranged by Silicon India. The conference was unfortunately sponsored by Nokia, a very evident fact that nobody could miss. As an example, one of the keynotes turned into a product presentation for Nokia’s latest line of communicators. That was actually quite hilarious, as the keynote speaker asked the audience if any of them had owned a Nokia communicator. About half of them raised their hands. Impressed, the keynote speaker asked them how many enjoyed the experience. Nobody raised their hands, not a single one. People started laughing about the situation.

But the first four keynotes and the following panel debate were very interesting and gave a good perspective of the present mobile application market and what to expect form the future. Some important topics that were raised:
-    Cross platform compatibility. The situation here seems much more diversified than in Sweden, with no OEM dominating. Having your application ported to several operating systems becomes more important.
-    UI/UX. The market is evolving and the user interface and experience is now as important as the functions of the application.
-    Business models are changing every 12 months.
-    The life span of an application before it needs major function and/or UI updates is 3-5 months.
-    Few mobile application development companies have the stamina to stay in the business after the first critical 12 – 18 months.

For the future we can expect applications that takes advantage of the mobile handsets inbuilt core technology, like sensors, gyroscope and GPS. We will probably see more kinds of sensors in the phones. Locality seems to be a trend and we should probably expect more location based ads, as well as a development of money transfer functions beyond mobile banking.

The conference was filled to the last seat with mostly young developers. Unfortunately, and probably due to Nokia’s sponsorship, the sections dealing with iOS and Android development very much smaller than the one dealing with QT, Nokia’s newly acquired cross-platform application framework. Although we had registered late and paid the 500 Rs entrance fee online just the night before, we managed to sneak into the iOS section after some haggling.

The keynote there was very basic in nature, an in itself interesting fact. Apparently, judging from the following questions, many developers had come there almost as a sort of extra curricular activity. That really shows the hunger for knowledge within the development sector here in Bangalore.  We couldn’t help wonder how many Swedish engineer students that would take their Saturday off school to attend a full day, paid conference – sharing knowledge they really should be getting as a part of their education.

Outside the iOS auditorium we met Indpro, a Swedish mobile application development company, based in Bangalore since the last 3 years. This is probably becoming more and more common, as many customers in the field of applications already are foreign companies. For long time relations, it makes sense to establish a local presence or partnership, just like Nätverkstan are doing with NamNätverkstan.

The night before the conference, we had updated our project specification and took the chance to discuss it with some of the attending developers. Many were interested but very few seemed skilled enough to make serious offers. At the end of the day it was still a very worthwhile experience for us, to be hurdled directly into the epicentre of Bangalore’s emerging mobile application development scene and to learn more about the challenges it’s facing, and what the market looks like.

Text: Carl Forsberg, Nätverkstan

It may sound like a futuristic, or even slightly crazy project, to travel from Gothenburg to Bangalore in search of a developer that could build a framework iPhone application, a white label, for Swedish cultural journals. But we did it anyway.

Nätverkstan has been providing services like accounting and distribution to cultural journals for over a decade. We were among the first organizations in the cultural sector in Sweden to host our own web server and we have always tried to use new technology to empower the small-scale publisher. It is about time we find a way to get the cultural journals their own applications. And we need to find the right solutions, cheap but still meaningful and user friendly.

Why Bangalore? Are there really no able developers in Sweden? Of course there are, and we have talked to some of them. And we have learnt a lot, especially by hosting our own online bookstore, Samlade skrifter. But through Västra Götaland’s strategic cooperation with the Karnataka region, we have been able to assist in the development of our first international subsidiary company, NamNätverkstan, based in Bangalore. It is our aspiration that the project to develop applications for Swedish cultural magazines could be our first cooperation. Our colleague in Bangalore, Anand Varadaraj, has been immensely helpful in setting up meetings.

And it was in Bangalore that the IT-revolution really started in the 80s. Try googling Infosys, if you haven’t already heard of them. In every nook and corner of Bangalore, young engineers, many of whom started their career at Infosys, now emerge as entrepreneurs of their own. Many of them work in the explosive mobile sector. For an organization looking to learn more of mobile applications and to develop for their clients, like us, it feels like coming home.

After an early morning arrival, some hours of sleep and a late breakfast, we set of to our first meeting with a company, Mobisy.  From what we could learn from their website they had developed a really interesting platform called Mobitop, enabling them to port standard web development script languages to all the major mobile platforms. Impressive indeed! We were equally impressed with their young CEO Lalit, who immediately understood our needs and raised a few interesting questions of usage and further development.

To be continued…

Text: Carl Forsberg, Nätverkstan

I was invited by The Goethe Institute. They have arranged a trip for journalists, publishers and other persons connected to the publishing world. Our group was a very international with guests from Pakistan, Palestine, Ukraine, Malta, Qatar, Tajikistan, Myanmar and Norway. The persons in the group were very interesting and we learned a lot from each other. With a little bit of luck there will be some cooperations in the future. Nätverkstanwise my main task for this trip was to look at the current debate about the digitization of the bookworld. Some conclusions:

Digitization is here.

It was the main topic of many, many discussions. At the fair they had a special subfair about digitization. It was called Hot Spots and the main theme had the title “Where Content meets Technology”. Before the fair actually started there was a conference in cooperation with O’Reilly media and their annual conference Tools Of Change. The programme was very impressive and many of the discussions where spot on for the Swedish debate.

Two years ahead of Sweden.

The international (mainly the US) development in the book market is two years ahead of Sweden. Here can you have a look at the changing consumer patterns, new devices and other future trends. This does not mean that what’s happening in the US will happen here, but it will give you some indications. The figure about actually selling e-books was probably the most interesting. The expectation for the US Christmas market is that e- books will have a market share of 12% of all sold books. And it’s increasing. The reason is simple: Reading devices.

Ipad is still #1.

At one of the Hot- spots there where an exhibition of reading devices. For a tech- geek it was like Christmas. Many Korean and Chinese companies showed their latest products. Sadly enough they where not so impressive. The Ipad is still #1 in each and every way.

Magazines/ journals for the iPad

This morning my wife woke me up with the question: Do you want the morning paper or the iPad? Of course I wanted them both. But this will not be the question in the years to come. At this year Frankfurt Book fair many of Germanys leading morning papers had iPads at their stand. The result wasn’t too impressive. My main conclusion is that they have not used this new format enough. It’s still the traditional morning paper, but on a led screen. But to be fair, the iPad was released April this year. The future is here, but the very interesting is still yet to come.

But what about the books?

Jonathan Franzen. Freedom was the major book on this fair. After reading the first 200 pages I must say: Believe the hype. It’s like the film American Beauty, but on acid. It has everything that made The Corrections one of my favourite novels. But Franzen is few years older and a more mature writer.

Trends/ hype. The next big thing after Stephanie Myers Twilight epos is “Vampire erotic with sex”. When Myers is a little bit puritanical, the next writers in this genre are not.

But my best buy at this book fair was made outside the gates. Our guide Stefan took us to a small antique bookshop in the centre of Frankfurt. There I bought a signed copy of Theodor W. Adornos Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien. Thank you Stefan for showing me the long tail!

Text & photo: Olav Fumarola Unsgaard

As one of more than thousand developers from all over the world that attend the Filemaker annual conference I can choose between over 80 sessions in little more than three days. Unfortunately I can´t attend every session I find interesting; there are just too many going on at the same time. Today at nine, just after breakfast, I have to decide whether to attend a session named Improve Quality, Reuse Code, and Program Efficiently or another named Speaking the Same Language. Understanding Your Client and Helping Them Understand You. Two very interesting topics but I have to choose one before the other. The first one is compelling but the second is more what I need, to be honest.

The main theme this year Connect with your world is well mirrored in the schedule and you find sessions on PHP, SQL and ESS but, again, Filemaker Go is the talk of the day. With Filemaker Go on an iPhone or iPad you can reach your Filemaker solutions from any place but the office. That makes sense. I bought an iPad and I am impressed. It’s way better than I expected it to be. In Sweden you have to wait until fall to get a piece but when it comes it will be a big hit. I am Sure!

I attended a very scary session called File Maintenance and recovery: tools and Best Practices. The speaker was Alexei Folger and she was awesome. Really bad stuff can happen with files but there are some good techniques and strategies to prevent a disaster. But it was a bit creapy to here in a theatrical voice ”…and then you are in big trouble!”

Devcon is an International conference with developers from different parts of the world but the typical attendee is American, actually. At least you can say it’s an Anglo Saxon world. I have seen or talked to people from Britain, Australia and New Zeaand but not from the Latin world or Asia. There is a lot of attendees from Japan.

Its´s striking how big Filemaker is in the US. I learnt that Filemaker is used in schools, universities, really big coorporations and in govermental offices. On a high percentage.

Tonight we enjoyed a dinner at the USS Midway in the San Diego Harbor. The ship was on duty as late as in the Dessert Storm. Dinner was served on the actual flight deck and during the Californian sunset we listening to live music zipping a drink or could hear docents telling stories how it was once up on the time… One of the best moments so far.

This morning I finally got my suitcase from the airport. It was lost in Frankfurt during the stop over and I had to buy new clothes every day while waiting for the trunk to arrive to my hotel. The downtown hotel, by the way, is something extra. Its very old with an interior like those in a horror movie but with a very helpful staff.

To morrow is my last day in San Diego!

Written by Christian Stensöta

Christian Stensöta is a colleague at Nätverkstan in charge of database and Filemaker solutions for the cultural and civil society field. He is visiting the Filemaker Development Conference 2010 in San Diego, USA, August 15-18.

Devcon:
http://www.filemaker.com/developers/devcon/

Filemaker Go:
http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-go/for-ipad/

Horton Grand Hotel:
http://www.hortongrand.com/

It was a Grand Opening!

On four giant screens we could see the a thin and charismatic man given us the facts: the numbers are great, the future is bright. A big Wheel in the Sky. The speaker was the president of Filemaker Corporation Dominique Goupilon in his keynote speech. A fairly short but intense opening speech was followed by appearances of the company´s engineers. One after the other they went on stage to describe new features and the crowd was ecstatic!

Chief engineer Andrew LeCates made some entertaining presentation of FilemakerGo, a new and promising product on the IOS platform. Filemaker on iPhone and iPad. This is the most interesting aspect of Filemaker for the moment and I am going to attend every session on that topic during the conference.

The opening session was over and time to party. Live music, food and drinks and lot of networking. Tomorrow agenda is packed with sessions from 8 in the morning until 10 in the evening and I can hardly wait…

Written by Christian Stensöta

Christian Stensöta is a colleague at Nätverkstan in charge of database and Filemaker solutions for the cultural and civil society field. He is visiting the Filemaker Development Conference 2010 in San Diego, USA, August 15-18.

Have a look at: http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-go/for-ipad/

”The Era of Information Protectionism”.

This is how you could describe the time we live in, states Lars Ilshammar’s, Director of Labour Movement Archives and Library. What was before part of the public domain is today productified; knowledge becomes a product. How, for instant, he questions, is it possible that all the old heritage of the written documents, photos, films are hidden in the basement of the library and not accessible for the public? And then, when it’s decided to make old material public and documents, where the copyright is no longer a limit, are scanned to be digitized – a new copyright is created. Why not let this be what it is – owned by the public domain?

His suggestion is that a policy on Memory is done from political level, giving the guidelines on how to handle all the cultural heritage in, what from Swedish could be translated to Memory Institutions, referring to all institutions dealing with our archives and libraries.

Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, Professor in Library and Information Science (Bibliotek- och Informationsvetenskap) at Uppsala University, takes us back to the Bern Convention from 1887 where the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) first took form. And the interesting evolving process to the modern IPR, where apparently Stockholm – the place for today’s seminar – were hosting a discussion on the IPR in 1967 that showed to be a complete turn in the Swedish position. The Bern Convention was set up by the exporters of culture, i e those who produced culture, and those who imported. Sweden was at the time of the Convention mainly an importer and argued for free IPR. While countries like France and UK, the old colonizing countries, where producing culture arguing for stricter rights for the creators. It took until 1967 for Sweden to change position.

The IPR’s where in the beginning about the creator, author, artist, and not until 1960s did it also include the investors or producers. These two are often mixed in the discussion, and it’s necessary, PhD in Civil Law and Legal Informatics at Stockholm University, Katarina Renman Cleason states, to find a balance between on one hand protection and the other accessibility.

The right of the individual is a base in a democracy; Publicist Arne Ruth begins with, and continues, as is the right to the commonage. What will this look like in the future?

The seminar, held in Stockholm on May 24th, was the second step in a three-step process of discussing the public domain and IPR. The first was a report written by Cultural Journalist Mikael Löfgren. The third is a seminar on September 22 where Google is invited in the discussion. The seminar was arranged by Nätverkstan, National Library of Sweden, Göteborg Book Fair, Foundation for the Culture of the future, and Region Västra Götaland.

This sunny day in Stockholm, people from the music industry gathered at Hotel Rival for the Creators Conference arranged by Swedish Music Information Center, The Swedish Society of Popular Music Composers and Society for Swedish Composers.

The focus was added value in the digital world, the attempt was to lift the question from Intellectual Property Rights to look broader; which way might we go in technical choices, what new business models might we see in the future, and what is the role of the middleman within the music industry? Mark Fischlock, the moderator for the day, early on stated that we seem to have underestimated the digitalization and we have for a long time tried to impose old models in a new system. He got a lot of agreeing nodding from the eight-headed panel, and American Intellectual Property Law Attorney, Bennett Lincoff, was quick in hooking on to this, saying that we need a completely new business model for the music industry that can deal with the challenges imposed by the Internet.

Other things said was things like ”We have to find solutions where money goes directly to the Artist”, ”People are willing to pay if the money goes to the right thing”, ”How do you get a fair deal between the producer and distributor?”, ”There is no interest in pipes, you are interested in the content they are providing”, ”The real problem is the lawyers who seem to be stuck in old structures”, ”Let’s face it: We are all cutting and pasting, we have to be less focused on IP”, ”It’s a difference between free or feels free on the Internet”. Many points were made by legendary manager Peter Jenner (Pink Floyd, The Clash and others), who stressed that the industry needs to change and money go directly to the pockets of the Artists. The distributors, like the record-companies, publishers, just grab too much of the pie and this will, and has to, change. Another important point made was the lack of political interest in digitalization as a whole in Sweden.

A bit of a sad remark is the reminder that the music industry in Sweden has to take a serious look at the equality question. Are we to believe that the talented, brilliant, famous musicians, singers, composers, and directors of organizations in this field are only men? In today’s Stockholm paper Dagens Nyheter an article put the light on the music industry being very male-dominant, while among the theatre institutions things have changed. A few years ago a survey showed theatre institutions to have almost only men as directors, something that now had changed to a 50-50 percent men and women in top positions. For everyone who read today’s paper and then went to the conference, sadly got the situation in the music field confirmed. In each panel of eight people, only one in each was a woman. Maybe the Internet and new models in distribution may have an impact on changing this male domination, letting young talented women find alternative ways?

It’s difficult to confirm an exact figure, some show about seven hundreds different cultural journals are produced in Sweden covering areas like Art, society, philosophy, feminism, environment, design, literature and much more. This wide flora of voices in the societal debate has been seen as an asset, even a vital condition, in Swedish debate and democracy. With the journals interest and knowledge in specific areas, and deep analysis combined with reflection, they are often the first to highlight processes, discussions, injustices, trends, and social issues. And the larger newspapers are soon to follow. Not that everything published is liked by everyone, but it’s an important voice, a vital piece in the democratic puzzle.

The situation for these journals is somewhat peculiar. 134 journals sent an application to The Swedish Arts Council last year, 103 printed cultural journals and 16 Internet based got a small state support for production. It’s a support designed to cover loss. Practically this means that to be obliged for this support you must show a minus on your account, an economic loss, each year. Not difficult at all. In fact, hardly any of these small journals have money enough to pay all the people involved. They are produced in a combination of voluntary and professional work. Nevertheless, this has for years held them in a tight economic grip. If you would make a small profit, you loose the support. So, there is no incentive to try to build a strong economy. Finally the Department of Culture is suggesting that this condition of loss is abolished from the support. It’s been quite contradictory in the dialogue with the journals, a new decision would aslo go more in line with the era where state and regional institutions talk about, and often require, external funding such as sponsorship or other solutions.

The Swedish Arts Council has during the last two years been vague as to how and if the production and development support will be changed due to proposed changes from the Government, especially due to changes proposed in last years Culture Bill. And it’s still a big cloud of uncertainty. We are now into the first quarter of an annual year and many, as for instance the Cultural Journal Workshops, don’t know if they will be able to continue their work or not. Plans made and activities have to wait for the decision that has not yet been taken.

A necessary step is distribution. Another area in limbo, where the Swedish Art Council is signaling this should not be of state responsibility anymore. With the small numbers of subscribers and small portion of sold numbers each month, a reality these journals face, they are not the most attractive pieces for a bookshop to keep on the shelves. You can argue for democracy or the important input these make on the debate climate in Sweden. If they don’t bring in money, they will not be put on the bookstore shelves. This suggests for a specific solution for distribution and marketing of small-scale journals, something that has been done. Nätverkstan has since 1998 held a support from the Swedish Art Council, that from 2005 grew to be quite substantial, to build up and offer distribution network, register solutions and marketing. Now the future is uncertain. For Nätverkstan it’s of course sad. It’s a core activity. Over the years a strong distribution network of 387 bookstores, museums, and other retailers around Sweden has been built. For the cultural journals it’s very serious. It will result in very few or no distribution channels. And what for? It can hardly be the money.

The budget post where cultural journals are found in the state budget is called ”Culture, media, faiths and leisure” (my translation, in Swedish: budgetområde 17, Kultur, medier, trossamfund och fritid) and was last budget year 10.3 billion. Cultural journals got around 22 millions in production- and development support in 2009, which is 0,2% of the budget post. Distribution support was last year 1,550 million SEK, a disappearing small part of the same post.

Read about the consequences for the Cultural Journals if the distribution line is cut in the report newly published by Nätverkstan: konsekvenserna.pdf.

Read more posts on cultural journals, such as Cultural Journals in Sweden and ”Time for culture” • The Swedish Culture Bill or at the debate at the site of Förening för Sveriges kulturtidskrifter (the Association for Swedish Cultural Journals).

The Culture Bill, Tid för Kultur (my translation: Time for Culture) can be downloaded here: a7e858d41.pdf.

New IT-solutions as how to download music and film legally, how to create animated movies with your personal photos, upload videos and cut and add music to it, or streaming a video direct from your mobile to the web, are growing immensely fast. Innovative ideas on what you can do on internet are created and uploaded in a pace that is hard to follow. Is the cultural scene following? Who is taking the lead to explore new ways of communicating, showing, exhibiting, buying, networking with the Artistic scene and cultural entrepreneurs on Internet? What IT-services are needed for the Arts?

Read two articles in the Daily Svenska Dagbladet on Sunday Oct 4, ”Den nya IT-vågen” (”The new IT-wave”) and one about the newly produced book ”The Youtube Reader” (English) called ”Youtube liknar inget vi har varit med om” (free translation: Youtube doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before).

Just look at these web-services, the twenty-five Swedish IT-companies mentioned in the article: Spotify, Voddler, Booli, Jaycut,  Videoplaza, Bambuser, Animasher, Agency9, Peeralism, Saplo, Textflow, Pixlr, Soundcloud, Xcerion, Burt, Twingly, Polar Rose, Bloggy, Fileride, Jalbum, Stixy, Momail, Laterthis, Squace, Dashnotes.

Swedish Government recently presented the new Culture Bill with suggestions of changes in the national cultural policy from 2010. The suggestions follows to some extent the work done by The Committee of Inquiry of Cultural Policy and their report presented earlier this year (read more here and here). Some suggestions were expected as the transition of responsibility from the state to the regions, where regions and local politicians are expected to take a larger responsibility of culture in their areas of responsibility. The suggestion has been criticized, mainly with the question of who does then take responsibility for a cultural policy equal for all citizens? The risk is that every region will act differently, some politicians put a lot of money to culture, while others in other regions will put less to Art and culture.

One worrying point in the new Culture Bill is the suggested changes of the support to cultural journals and literature. One of the basis of Swedish democracy is the many voices expressed in the myriad of cultural journals. They concern society, Art, literature, environment, human rights, feminism and all sorts of topics. Some of these get support from the state to secure their publishing, with the argument that many voices are important in society. The changes suggested by the government threaten these journals existence. Not only by cutting funding, but also by the suggestion to change the definition of what can be seen as a ”cultural journal” from a more general definition including societal journals to one more specified focusing on the Art forms. Will be interesting to follow.

Many newspapers and journalists have of course reacted of this. Read some of these (in Swedish) in Göteborgs-Posten, Expressen, and for a long list of points made look at Föreningen för Sveriges Kulturtidskrifter (FSK).

The pile of books this summer is growing. There is so much to read! Here, some old and new books on cultural and creative industries, artistic practice and economy, cultural policy, situation for Art and Artists, black identity and post-colonial analysis, the new global and Free market and so forth.

Bill Ivey, ”Arts, inc. How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights” (University of California Press 2008). Bill Ivey was Chairman of National Endowments for the Arts (NEA) in USA 1998-2001, and is now founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University. Interesting about Bill Ivey’s experience as Chairman of NEA and how Art and Artists enrich our lives, but where neglect from the governement as well as the market is endangering the future.

David Throsby, ”Economics and Culture” (Cambridge University Press 2001).David Throsby is Professor of Econimcs at Macquarie University in Australia. The book behind the circle-model put forward by Department of Culture, Media and Sports in UK in 2007 (look at this post) is this one, and with very well analysed material on the two grand entities: Economics and Culture.

Daniel H. Pink, ”A whole new mind. Why right-brainers will rule the future” (Penguin Group 2006). For a review read the one by Associate Professor Lane B Mills at East Carolina University. Daniel H Pink has written several books on the changes of work in the world, where this one focus on the rise of right-brain thinking in modern economics. The book has inspired many, and was recommended by Sian Prime as a source for inspiration for the models used at the Creative Pioneer Programme at Nesta in UK (read the following interview with Sian Prime from 2006).

Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey, ”Engaging Art. The Next Great Transformation of America’s Cultural Life” (Taylor & Francis Group 2008). Seems in line with the above mentioned topics.

Chris Anderson, ”Free. The future of a radical price” (Hyperion 2009). The editor in chief of Wired Magazine and author of ”The Long Tail”, about the change of market in a globalized world, how an online market creates niche markets and – the topic of this new book – how prices online tend to reach zero which forces a new line of thinking on products and what is a sellable product.

Franz Fanon, ”Black Skin, White Masks” (Grove Press Inc 1967). Franz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, studied medicine in France, specialized in psychatry and wrote several books on the African struggle for liberation. The book was first published in 1952.

In 1871 a big fire destroyed most of Chicago City. Three hundred people died, 100.000 became homeless (total inhabitants at the time was 300.000) and the material damage was devastating. Queen Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland at the time, felt, say the story, such compassion with the inhabitants of Chicago that she quickly decided to send a large box of books with the thought that all their literature must have gotten burnt up. What she didn’t know was that Chicago didn’t have a public library and hadn’t had one. With all these books arriving from across the ocean, something had to be done and the city quickly decided to build the first one.

The Swedish right-wing politician Valfrid Palmgren was a lady in forefront. She had a remarkable career and was, one of many things she achieved, 1905 the first female Amanuensis at the Royal Library in Stockholm. In 1907 she went on a long trip to USA to investigate the idea of public libraries for all. In USA libraries was seen as a civic right, placed in the center of cultural and educational politics. She was quite cultural conservative, it’s said, at the same time as she fought philanthropic values and saw it as her task to bring the idea of public libraries to Sweden. Literature should be accessible to everyone, and is a right beyond questions of class, was her idea and she hoped libraries could act to mitigate class differences. Libraries should not be led by politics, market or religious ideas. The librarians should therefore be people with education and expertise. Back in Sweden after her trip over the Atlantic, she within four years founded the first children and youth library in Sweden in 1911.

In Chicago, the city in 1991 built a ten floor high new public library on South State Street, this is, I am told, the world’s largest. True or not (there are many things we are told during the visit in Chicago are the biggest, widest, largest). Nevertheless, it’s an incredible building; the architecture is post-modern with reminders of old pompous eras, the collection of literature impressive with books, journals, magazines, audio for every taste.

Read the article written by Swedish cultural journalist Ingrid Elam in Dagens Nyheter of Valfrid Palmgren (in Swedish), published in June 2007 as a reflection concerning the then newly formed the Committee of Inquiry of Cultural Policy, with the task of revising Swedish cultural policy. You can also download it here: allmanna-bibliotek-en-borgerlig-ide-dn. Read posts on the Swedish Cultural Policy here, here and here. And libraries and entrepreneurship here.