André Breton, an autoportrait (ca. 1929) | Still image from Alphaville by Jean Luc Godard, 1965

AM: Firstly, I would like to ask how you came up with the idea to curate an exhibition that deals with natural sciences in relation to art and design and vice versa? What kind of inspirations and motivations are behind the exhibition?

JS: We’ve both been operating somewhere in the borderlands of design, touching on both art and science in our work. For instance, interaction and communications design, information visualisation or design research all call for transdisciplinary interest. We’re curious about exploring different systems and theories, and things like electromagnetics, or the brain – a bigger picture beyond one discipline. I think that design or art, for us, is about trying to develop strategies of understanding and showing. A lot like science. And it’s interesting to mix the different ways of looking at things, the ways of an artist and a scientist. Like André Breton [a surrealist theorist] said: “To change ways of being, one has to first change ways of seeing.” Or, we could also look at seeing from a Steinerian perspective and say that just like the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas. Rudolf Steiner considered this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations – looking at ideas as “objects of experience” and thinking as an organ of perception. I think we need design, art and science, and both the real and the imaginary, in the same stream of thought to understand the world better.

“We need design, art and science, and both the real and the imaginary, in the same stream of thought to understand the world better.”

AP: We think that the theme of mixing science with visual disciplines is definitely in the air right now and one of the reasons for this could be that you don’t need to be a scientist to have access to a profusion of information nowadays – as well as to tools to handle it. Different professionals are also very open for co-operation these days: it’s an adventure to jump outside your own field. The idea of Science Poems was very much inspired by existing design and art that deals with the topic of natural sciences. In addition to the contemporary examples, like designer and professor duo Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby and Marc-Olivier Wahler, the director of Palais de Tokyo – whom we’ve interviewed for the Science Poems book – we have many idols who have operated in the borderlands of design, art and science in the past. Having previously discussed the topic with Jenna, I got really into it after seeing Alphaville, a 1965 film by Jean-Luc Godard . Like Alphaville, in James Monaco’s words, “prefers to see the poetry of science rather than its mathematical logic”, we also wish to dig into the lyrical and visual sphere of science, making subjective interpretations and questions about it.

AM: Talking about the big picture and interdisciplinary thinking, Jenna, I remember that your MA thesis at the University of Art and Design Helsinki was inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture publication from the 60s and 70s. Stewart Brand’s catalogue aimed to give people the tools to better understand the world through different ways of affecting one’s environment. Has it had an effect on Science Poems, too?

JS: The Whole Earth Catalog has been inspirational to me when it comes to understanding what and how to design. It presents a lot of narratives of design in everyday life and provides means for the readers to find their own inspiration, shape their own environment and share their experience with whoever is interested. In practice, the catalogue contains information on different means for making things, listing artefacts from special-purpose utensils to informative books and courses, as well as early synthesisers and personal computers. So, instead of showing the end results – ready-made objects or products, like catalogues often do – it rather presents tools to spark ideas. Like my former boss at Arki research group would say, Brand’s catalogue is a classic example of “design for designability”. As a matter of fact, the Whole Earth Catalog has been described as a conceptual forerunner of web search engines. It blurs the boundaries of expertise and everyday, bringing information about different fields of activity closer to people of various disciplines. And this is what the Science Poems project aims to do, too – to function as a common point of reference (a boundary object) for interdisciplinary conversations about natural sciences, in this case.

Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 | A Wikipedia Reader by Mylinh Trieu and David Horvitz (eds.), 2008

AM: Being a graphic designer, I have noticed a tendency towards interdisciplinary thinking also in my own field. Glossaries creating connections between subjects from different sources have been a widely used approach in editing content to inspire people to look at things from a different perspective and to question certain “truths” or divisions into rigid categories. I assume that this linking of things partly derives from online practices, and using Wikipedia in particular. A publication called A Wikipedia Reader, edited by Mylinh Trieu Nguyen and David Horvitz, deals with this phenomenon by linking topics from different fields and hierarchy levels together. Wikipedia links subjects to each other in a way that breaks down certain traditional divisions and hierarchies – subjects with typically different value levels might appear on the same level… The ways to present information surely affect on how we perceive and use it. Operating mainly online, have you been thinking about these kinds of things now that you’re presenting something offline?

JS: Yes, the question about perceiving information and different value levels online, where everything is miscellaneous, is really interesting. There’s a risk that some bits of important information go unnoticed and, in time, vanish in the process of searching, copying and pasting. Or their original meaning might change when they travel through different contexts. For example, when someone googles ‘cosmology’ and finds our publication, or the stories about Cosmic Wonder art organisation and artist Yayoi Kusama, uninformed about the field of science, could they consider cosmology an art movement and write about it on their blog? The life of information is, definitely, one of the things we’ve considered during the Science Poems process – also from the point of view of us learning about natural sciences online. Another interesting issue to think about is the change of context from the online environment to a gallery space with limited access to Wikipedia, Google and other tools for interpretation. In the physical exhibition, we, together with the artists, can decide what kind of information to display next to each piece of work – and what to leave out. And making this publication, for us, is about linking the exhibition to a wider frame of reference and extending the show beyond the gallery. Umberto Eco recently used the expressions ‘the poetics of everything included’ and the ‘poetics of the etcetera’ when talking about lists, and I think we can easily say that Science Poems falls into the latter category. Our idea is to continue exploring the topic after the exhibition, too.

AM: Extending a show outside the gallery reminds me of Exhibition Prosthetics, a recent publication by Joseph Grigely which deals with the relationship of an exhibition and its catalogue. It argues that a catalogue can, in fact, be seen as part of the exhibition – instead of a mere extension.

JS: Last December, I met with artist Simon Starling who had done some research on the relationship between an exhibition and its catalogue for the MAC/VAL exhibition Thereherethenthere. He drew a parallel between putting up an exhibition and producing an exhibition catalogue, seeing the two activities equally important and integrally linked. He stated that books often carry research material, a sense of time and place, and/or a network of connectivity into the presentation of a work. He also said that in some instances the exhibition itself serves as an intermediary editorial process in the production of a book. I think this was a particularly interesting thought, and one that could be applied to the making of the Science Poems publication as well.

“We use both the print and web publication as symbiotic companions of the exhibition.”

AP: In our case, we use both the print and web publication as symbiotic companions of the exhibition. The website is a great tool for, as we suggested earlier, providing the audience with convenient access to the links related to the Science Poems project. We hope that people will come to see the exhibition because they read about it at www.ok-do.eu, and that they will go back to the website and read the book after seeing the exhibition, in order to go deeper.

Exhibition Prosthetics by Joseph Grigely, edited by Zak Kyes, Bedford Press 2010 | www.ok-do.eu

AM: Simon Starling’s work is indeed an intriguing example of looking at ways to open up processes behind art and design. His project brings to my mind a show, Archiving the Catalogue, that recently took place in Berlin. In fact, it was an open project space by artists Nicolas Y Galeazzi and Joël Verwimp. They had put up an experimental editing-laboratorium where the process of editing a publication was physically on display – exhibited as an ongoing and evolving work. This reminded me of the fact that editing is all about choices, and that there is in a sense no definitive truth.

JS: I remember there was a similar performance by Dexter Sinister at Proforma last autumn, where they organised a team to write, edit, print and distribute a newspaper twice a week during the event. The project was partly about how the news creates what we believe is true, yet its main idea was to show that the activity of editing a newspaper is as much about process as it is about product. And this is totally the case in our work with Science Poems, and the fact that it is our first publication makes the process even more interesting. There are so many things to consider and learn about: management, tone of voice, working with other writers, editing our own text, copyrights, physics, biology, astronomy. Equally, when making a publication out of personal interest, with no external guides or restrictions (other than not being able to afford more than 144 pages and having to get it ready for the exhibition in June) many things are based on our intuition. The book reflects the interests of Anni and myself, and is the sum of all the people involved.

AM: Are you interested in exhibiting the artworks connected to the scientific context where they derive from, or do you rather want to keep the connection more ambiguous, poetic? I was recently working for Extra-City, a Belgian museum arranging an exhibition dealing with Animism, an idea according to which animals, plants, rocks and so on have a soul.

The curators looked at the term from a contemporary point of view in order to question the dichotomies that modernism had associated with it. Glossaries with historical references presented next to the art works directed the visitor’s perception to a certain mindset but the curation still left space for different interpretations of the works. How did you find a balance between opening up the backgrounds of the works and leaving certain things open for people to interpret?

AP: The Science Poems exhibition aims to present artists’ and designers’ ideas about natural sciences. Some of them, like Miska Knapek, use scientific data very strictly in the actual production of the piece, whereas others have taken scientific ideas and made their own interpretation of them, like Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg. I guess the main principle of the exhibition is that it’s acceptable and justifiable to interpret, explore and discuss science with artistic tools and intuition. Our chat with Tomi Kokkonen, a philosopher of science (the interview is also included in the book) made us feel a whole lot more comfortable about it. With him we discussed how art could be used to bring new aspects of science and its subject matters within the reach of different kinds of people; by offering alternative perspectives to it and its relation to everyday reality.

“Some of the artists and designers in the Science Poems exhibition use scientific data very strictly in the actual production of the piece, whereas others have taken scientific ideas and made their own interpretation of them.”

The book contains additional information on the exhibition and the pieces as well as ideas OK Do has about science at the moment. I don’t think we believe casting light on the background of a work of art or an exhibition would create barriers to interpretation. Therefore, we interviewed all the artists and asked them to tell us where they are coming from with their work. In that sense, we are very much designers as well – instead of keeping the backgrounds and messages a mystery we like to dig them out and show them to the rest of the world. And when dealing with visual language, there will always be space for interpretation no matter how much you talk about it.

Dexter Sinister's The First/Last Newspaper, 2009 | Étienne-Jules Marey: Buse volant avec l’appareil qui signale les mouvements décrits par l’extrémité de son aile, 1873

AM: Anni, you mentioned that you have been inspired by existing design and art that finds itself on the borderlines of design, art, and science. Could you give an example of this and how it changed your thinking, especially in relation to Science Poems?

AP: One moment of revelation for me was when I first discovered the thinking of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. To be honest, at the university, I had been pretty much educated to find solutions for other people’s problems. Dunne and Raby turn things around by saying that designers should find problems instead of solving them. This kind of design attitude connects with art that practices social criticism, and since scientific development affects our society, art and design, they all go hand in hand. Dunne and Raby have written a book called Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. It’s a good example of a project which explores all of these disciplines at once.

AM: It would definitely be a shame if the abilities of designers were used only for commercial needs. Asking questions through design is something that I learned when studying in the Netherlands. There is a lot to learn from Dutch designers’ abilities to tackle social issues!

 How did you come up with curating an exhibition instead of, for example, writing articles or conducting interviews around the topic of Science Poems? What kinds of insights do you think that an exhibition as a means of distributing content can bring about?

JS: We think organising events like exhibitions or talks establishes a nice dialogue with writing about things. We like to learn by doing, documenting, and building something new on top of it. Sometimes, we also like to come out of our medium and meet people offline (haha), and exhibitions are great places to do that. The works of art on display stimulate discussion.

“We like to learn by doing, documenting, and building something new on top of it.”

While the digital world rearranges itself for each person and their current task, a physical exhibition is presented to everyone in the same way, through someone else’s lense, under a predefined topic. Of course, the interpretations may vary and people pick up things according to their own interests, but the starting point is the same – and it includes an element of surprise. The experience is also tied to a certain time and place, which makes it unique. Exhibitions can bring about interesting reactions and encounters.

Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Birkhäuser 2001 | Logo of the natural history museum of Paris

AM: How did you end up locating the exhibition in Paris?

AP: Paris was chosen because this year it has become one of our favourite places on earth. There are many reasons for that: Jenna was there for an artist residency, I fell for a French guy, we saw inspiring movies like those of Jean-Luc Godard and were also inspired by the aesthetics of science in France. I think our fascination is based on the poetic nature of French aesthetics and how it reflects classical ideas and history in which all new knowledge finds its roots. The graphic design of the Science Poems book has also drawn inspiration from that, as Åh, the designers of this book, also share our fascination.

Spread from an old French science book | Deyrolle magazine, 46 rue du Bac, Paris

AM: I noticed that most of the works in the exhibition are created by designers. Was it a conscious choice from you? And is this perhaps related to your interdiscplinary thinking – that it is not necessary to separate art and design that strongly from each other?

AP: It’s all about friends! We chose the exhibitors by intuition and the decisions took place very naturally, based on the pool of talented people we are so lucky to have around us. We are designers by training and have actually met many of the people more or less through our university. Having said that, we also believe in messing about with categories, roles and definitions – we think that renaissance spirit is good for both individual people and the whole world. Many people have multiple talents and interests and it’s interesting to take these to unusual contexts and see what happens.

Art vs. design is a topic that we’re generally very much into, perhaps because we are keen on doing art in a designer way and vice versa. We’ve had some good discussions about the topic with, for example, Paola Antonelli (article to be published soon). Right now, our aim is to explore this issue by doing and experimenting, and the Science Poems exhibition is one the first steps. The main thing for us, whether it’s about a commissioned or an independent project, is to mix analytical investigation with intuitivity and self-expression with social and critical activity.

JS: We like to think of art instructing design through presenting wild ideas that might seem utopian to begin with but, at their best, can lead into cultural production of new forms of practice. Dunne and Raby call it critical design. The interesting thing about art is that it enables displaying experimental artefacts to audiences without the need to put effort into production or marketing. Art materialises fantasies that keep on developing over time within the artworld – and outside it in various different hands and minds – never striving for definitive products so common to the design field. Like Duchamp said, “art is a game among all men of all eras”, and we take part in it with some Science Poems.

TileToy is an open source project that applies the flexibility of digital software to physical led tiles for imaginative uses.

2. Semi-professional design practices

Semi-professional design activity can be seen as design on demand; people getting exactly what they want by designing it for themselves. It can also be seen as pure enjoyment brought to some through problem-solving processes or aesthetic challenges. Whichever, rather than helping companies, semi-professional designers primarily help themselves and learn from each other online.

Developing artifacts and artifact modifications, semi-professional designers are comparable to lead users, characterized by Eric von Hippel in Democratizing Innovation (2005) as people who are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many. Operating in non-institutional contexts, they re-use, enrich and review predominant practices. From this viewpoint, semi-professional designers are also comparable to artists with courageous and hypersensitive qualities. Like artists, or scientists, they are looking for something that’s not there yet.

“Like artists, or scientists, semi-professional designers are looking for something that’s not there yet.”

A custom of endless reconstruction can be detected within semi-professional design practices, where nothing ever gets ready but keeps on developing over time in various different hands and minds. Semi-professional design ceases to exist when it turns into definitive products. Instead, it strives for prototypes; or fantasies materialised.

A certain aesthetic of incompleteness applies to semi-professional design. Tuomo Tammenpää also uses the expression ”clumsy aesthetics”, when talking about the design of DIY electronics and his TileToy project with Daniel Blackburn. “The clumsiness or the unfinished nature of artefacts underlines the act of crafting,” he points out. “Also, it refers to bringing forward the contents of devices, and thus opening them up for further examination and development.”

This is what Tammenpää and Blackburn’s TileToy project is essentially about: providing an open, versatile platform for people to develop imaginative means of use. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a set of physical led tiles that people can touch and play with. Both the source code and the hardware are available via open licences, allowing anyone to create their own applications and share them online.

In my classification of semi-professional design practices, TileToy falls into the category of open design. Promoting the ideals of free culture, open design builds on transparency and public collaboration – sharing ideas and know-how while receiving peer review and best practice techniques in return. The other four categories later to be explored in the Semi-professional design series are genotyping, personal fabrication, creative misuse and innovative repair.

Botanicalls is an open source DIY electronics kit for building a channel of communication between plants and humans.

1. Introduction

Empowered by digital takeover, the mass of intermediated ideas and social creativity entering the everyday life is making anyone a semi-professional in anything and broadening the field of design. Instead of concentrating simply on the interaction between a ready-made artifact and its user, design has increasingly spread out to domains facilitating semi-professional, interdisciplinary design initiatives in order to gain new insight – “design for designability”, as described by researcher Kari-Hans Kommonen.

Working with finite knowledge and an increasing variety of tools and networks, semi-professional designers often surprise with ingenious answers to questions only children would ask (see also Ulla-Maaria Mutanen’s Play Time column for Craftzine). For example, when Robert Faludi, Kate Hartman, Kati London and Rebecca Bray came up with the idea of Botanicalls, an open source DIY electronics kit for building a channel of communication between thirsty plants and their owners, a more utopist version of it, Growduino, was soon introduced on Makezine’s blog. Growduino is the work of a hobbyist who wanted his plants to water themselves automatically when he was away for holiday.

The open source development from Botanicalls to Growduino illustrates a spontaneous design process among strangers, possibly inter disciplines, and definitely somewhere in the borderline of the real and the imaginary. It shows how people with different skills and interests can come together online to share their work and to provide building blocks for other projects. Given some thought, in the right (or unexpected) hands, and with the right tools, ideas like Botanicalls or Growduino might eventually lead into something essential.

Semi-professional design practices are characteristically open and innovative. They are motivated by utility or recreation, and they range from developing things to modifying things. Looking at the evolution of artifacts within communities of people who are not full-time designers by profession or assemblies of design amateurs and design professionals, the Semi-professional design series attempts to acquire a better understanding of the effects that digital technology has and will have on design. It examines digital technologies firstly as means for sharing how-to knowledge, secondly as means for making custom artifacts and eventually as means for reaching new spheres of design thinking.

The Semi-professional design series is based on Jenna’s MA thesis (2008), Semi-Professional Design Catalog, at the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki.

1. The internet leaves no one creating in a vacuum.

You have worked on different Access to Knowledge and copyright reform projects. Is that what an openness evangelist does?

I go around telling everybody about the advantages of openness in cultural production. I have worked as a volunteer for the Creative Commons for five years now and people seem to be pretty religious about it – about open licensing. There are even figures like Richard Stallman (a.k.a. rms), the man who invented free software, who’s actually wearing a CD-ROM as a halo on top of his head when giving talks.

But you also have a background in traditional media. How did you get interested in free culture?

I made an interview of Lawrence Lessig on Danish national radio’s cyber culture programme Harddisken, where I was freelancing around the time of the publication of his book Free Culture (2004). I got really inspired by his thoughts as they promoted ideals that I had only been introduced through science fiction and cyberpunk before. Reading Lessig got me into thinking about ways to create agreements that would formalise the “hacker ethic” you see online – and make a system that’s closer to how copyright should be on the internet.

Free culture was also tackled in your documentary film Good Copy Bad Copy a few years ago. The film presents emerging creative practices, which build on remixing. How do you think the internet has affected visual and audio production?

To begin with, we are seeing a change from a society where people produce physical objects into a society designing immaterial products. Unexpected things are going to happen. Most importantly, the idea of a romantic genious starting his/her work from point zero coming up with something completely new and having a sacred right to that work doesn’t apply anymore. The internet makes ideas travel and leaves no one creating in a vacuum. It’s definitely easier for anyone to be creative nowadays. There’s so much shared culture. You take a bit of something from others and remix. The challenging part is “who really owns what”, as one character in the film puts it. It’s very human to want credit and respect for one’s work, but ownership is something different, which conflicts with immaterial works.

“The internet leaves no one creating in a vacuum.”

Do you see the roles of a professional and an amateur merging within these fields? Furthermore, is the dichotomy even meaningful anymore?

I believe that the difference between a professional and an amateur has to do with money. A professional makes money and an amateur doesn’t – but it doesn’t make either one better or worse at what they do. The concept of money is definitely challenged by the internet. If I think of myself, I’ve learned a lot of things by doing, and I like to collaborate with people just to do new stuff. I don’t need to be rich but I need enough money to have a flat and travel a bit. I think a lot of people are like that. They make some things for money and other things for free. And they are willing to share their knowledge, which makes them richer. Things always come back to them. The problem is that once you start assuming that you are better because you make a lot of money, there will be ten other people who are as good. I think that everyone should be able to communicate on the same level regardless of their income and help each other develop further.

2. Sharing knowledge makes people richer.

You work at Socialsquare tackling new ways of designing digital processes, products and tools. Do you think about the “pro-am phenomenon” (Leadbeater, 2008) in your work there?

At Socialsquare, we support inclusive design that is open for development by many people. It’s inspiring how several mass concepts (e.g. Firefox) have emerged from hackers playing with open source software. Drawing on that, we want to design processes, products and tools to further fruitful participation.

“Processes, products and tools should be designed to further fruitful participation.”

While the boundaries between professionalism and amateurism are blurring, new business models are needed. There’s a lot of talk on attention economy, experience economy, sharing economy, local economy and so on. What do you see as the new kinds of currencies emerging from the contemporary creative sphere?

I think that attention is the currency of today. However, people’s attention span is getting shorter as they get more links, tweets and all that stuff fed to them all the time. And they have a habit of swarming to certain topics – that’s what the Slashdot effect is all about. Sometimes they go all wrong. Being required to have an opinion on everything makes it easy to promote the wrong things as well as make misinterpretations. In other words, one can quickly engage with a lot of things yet he or she needs to decide what really earns their attention. So maybe we should talk about value as the currency of tomorrow.

How are people being recognised and rewarded on collaborative media platforms? How can the price of different contributions be calculated in remixed material?

They get respect, like for instance on eBay. On Wikipedia, you can see who’s the main architect of an article. The systems of reward and honour are intricate. It’s really difficult to formulate a good system – especially when it comes to things like films or books where you don’t have the source visible like in open source software. Putting value to ideas is difficult, yet we all need money. Also, people are obsessed with free stuff and many artists just want people to experience their creations. Today, one really has to give up control over copyright in the traditional sense and come up with new logics of earning.

3. Attention is the currency of today.

You are the Creative Commons public project lead in Denmark. Why do you support CC licensing? How do you think that copyright should react to the changes in creative practices and vice versa?

Creative Commons is based on free software licenses (GPL, etc.). It’s the first, the biggest and the most constructive system around. It builds on copyright (unlike e.g. the thinking behind Pirate Bay which has promoted abolition of copyright) and the group behind it is smart. I also like how the Creative Commons changes dynamically. It reflects on the community behind it instead of just fixing a law, which should always be obeyed even if it’s not in touch with its users.

Watch Good Copy Bad Copy, a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture by Henrik Moltke, Andreas Johnsen and Ralf Christensen at http://www.goodcopybadcopy.net.

It's Momus.

The Book of Scotlands begins with the statement: “Every lie creates a parallel world. The world in which it is true.” Does this idea refer to using fiction as a means to tell the truth or is it more about the importance of imagining alternatives, not settling for something that’s already there?

First of all, it describes a certain approach. One of my working methods over the years has been to pose as a bastard while doing virtuous things. For instance, I was over-educated for pop music. While actually being a moralistic Calvinist, I pretended to be a sinner just because it made the songs more interesting for everybody. In writing, the same manner appears in a milder form – I pretend to be a liar. By proposing that everything in The Book of Scotlands is a lie, I can tell various truths in an oblique way. To explain this a bit further, I use two strategies in writing. One of them is the Rorschach where I’m treating Scotland as a random blot of ink, playing with its different perceptions. Another one is the Japanese technique called Ma, or negative space, which is based on the idea of making a composition out of not objects themselves but the space between the objects. I write about everything except Scotland. And by looking at everything that’s not Scotland, I’m hoping to discover the true essence of the country. It’s like a child with a colouring book – instead of colouring the map of Scotland you colour the sea around it and finally Scotland appears as a blank space. I like to call it dancing around the subject.

“By looking at everything that’s not Scotland, I’m hoping to discover the true essence of the country.”

In the spirit of these working techniques, your book includes many visual and symbolic ideas. I particularly enjoy this one, Scotland number seventy-eight: “The Scotland in which all maps of the country are displayed upside-down and back-to-front to make everything fresh.” You also touch the future in e.g. Scotland fifteen: “The tremendously powerful Scotland which nanotechnology has made, by and large, too small to see.” In my view, your work with the book is very close to design. How do you feel about this interpretation?

As a matter of fact I was rather influenced by a design group called REDESIGNDEUTCHLAND. Ingo Niermann, the editor who commissioned The Book of Scotlands was actually part of this group. He had previously written Umbauland, a book on ten ideas for a better Germany applying design principles to the nation itself. Although generally considered more a writer than a designer, he managed to come up with a plan including a new grammar, a new political party as well as a system of assigning allotment gardens to unemployed people and retirees. So yes, I guess you might as well call my book Redesign Scotland. I find design interesting because it can be very utopian. Yet, when talking about design, people often pay attention to change more than continuity. And I think it’s very important to think about continuity.

Scotland as Rorschach. The Book of Scotlands, pp. 80-81.

The book also contains many musical and sonic references – sentences like “They were busy looking at each other with clicking metal eyes.” or stories about a band called Sonic Flower Groove after an album by the Scottish group Primal Scream. Would you say that you experience places through their sonic environment?

Being a musician I obviously have to pay a lot of attention to that. One reason behind the Sonic Flower Groove episode is that the first time I discovered Berlin was when I came here on tour with Primal Scream in 1987. So I was thinking what if it was reversed, that I was actually coming from Berlin and experiencing Scotland in the same way. And I guess that happened with many places, I discovered them as a musician. Music was a way to get my travel expenses paid.

How would you describe Berlin, your current home city by these attributes?

Berlin is a very quiet town. It has made me lose interest in pop music. The main sound on the streets is the birds singing. Germans like to see their cities as extensions of the forest and there are trees everywhere. And that’s very different from e.g. London where there is a lot of pollution and most of the sounds come from traffic or small speakers in every corner in every sandwich bar… And time is money. In that sense, Berlin is much less capitalist, much less toxic. And you can hear it. It’s a very avant-garde, experimental city. Even when you go to concerts you often end up listening to field recordings or the sound of a contact microphone being scraped up and down, sounds of ping pong balls or balloons. All this could be seen as utterly pretentious in many other cities but here you don’t have to have an aim or a commercial purpose in what you do. One can escape all sorts of obligations and necessities. That’s probably one reason why I have stayed here for so long.

Scotland number one hundred and three reads: “A computer makes a Scotland seem almost unnecessary.” Could this thought be applied to all distant places with internet access – like Finland, my home country, which you even refer to in the book (Scotland 136) – or is it rather a comment on a lack of identity?

Well, I think we’re seeing a crisis in national identity. I was quoted in a magazine saying that my true motherland is the internet. I feel like wherever I travel I’m always in this country called the internet. Or maybe it’s the operating system that counts – and I do almost feel a certain patriotism towards Apple computers. However, there’s another part of my identity that’s very Scottish. Whatever that is.

“I feel like wherever I travel I’m always in this country called the internet.”

Furthermore, Scotland number eighty-eight states: “I want Scottish people, rather than tourists, to be the curators of this culture…” Next to the developing “Scottish way of being”, how would you characterize living and working in Berlin?

I guess a Berlin way of being is collaboration between the Berliners and the immigrants – either the Turkish immigrants or the creative immigrants – who all work together to make the city enjoyable. Someone for example built this relaxed patio where we’re sitting here in Prenzlauer Berg. And like Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin obviously has different villages. My particular village is Neukölln where there’s a lot more immigrants than here. I really enjoy the Turkish markets and the exoticism in Neukölln. People are also a bit more economically motivated, though it’s pretty easy to live in Berlin not thinking commercially at all. Compared to Neukölln, Prenzlauer Berg almost feels like a white bourgeois paradise. And that makes me a bit uneasy. I feel a need to rebel against monoculture, yet paradoxically, when I’m in Neukölln I can embody the values of Prenzlauer Berg without feeling like it’s a cliché.

Momus at home in Neukölln, Berlin.

You have lived in major cities around the world. What makes you move, and what made you leave Scotland in the first place?

It’s just a pattern I established very early because of moving with my father’s work when I was a child. After studying in Scotland I left for London to make it in music – a thing that all the Scottish musicians do. London felt like a bigger version of Scotland where more things were possible. Since then, my whole life has been motivated by appetite for certain things in certain cities. I’ve been lucky not having to work and being free to go wherever, even if it has made me very poor sometimes. Tokyo is my favourite city in the whole world. If my books are successful, that’s exactly where I’m going to go next.

How does the change of living environment affect your work?

When I was in Japan I felt quite isolated because I was a foreigner and I couldn’t speak too much Japanese. I found that my Scottish identity was becoming more important there. The album I made in Tokyo even has these rather strange Scottish songs on it. Berlin has brought up the need to experiment with sound because that’s just what people do here. I can spend my mornings at home writing something and the rest of the day is free for discovering something new. Then again London was a very commercial city so I tried to be successful and make lots of money. Living and working abroad makes you realize how only half of your personality is your own to control and the rest is really open to influence. I mean, we’re all chameleons in some way and the environment does change you. There’s a dialectical process going on between the environment and your personality.

“There’s a dialectical process going on between the environment and your personality.”

Your blog, Click Opera blurs the boundaries between work and personal life as well as between different disciplines from design to music and social enquiry. I think it captures the essence of now. Do you have a working philosophy?

The current theme in a lot of my work is Scheherazade, the wife of the king in One Thousand and One Nights. Scheherazade was the only one of the king’s wives who he didn’t kill. And that was because she told stories. Everyday she told him a new story and left it in a very interesting place where she stopped so that he had to keep her alive to hear what happened next. I really like this idea of challenging yourself by pulling something out everyday, telling a story in public to stop people from killing you.

J.S.: What is the motivation behind Crashroots – producing music in an open-ended way and giving it out for free?

S.W.: I guess it started as part of the free culture movement. We believe that the time has come to apply the knowledge we have of open software design to music. Being open, we can take advantage of immediate release times and feedback as well as statistic-driven analysis of what people really want and what they don’t want. You get totally new views to music through being open about it in the making – wait five more years and it will be the modus operandi of the whole industry.

J.S.: So, Crashroots is all about sharing ideas?

S.W.: What we’re basically doing is that we’re picking up ideas floating around and repackaging them within an open community of music lovers. So, besides openness Crashroots is all about participation. It’s important to get people not only to listen to music but also to remix it, starting to engage and interact.

“It’s important to get people not only to listen to music but also to remix it, starting to engage and interact.”

J.S.: Like Jean-Luc Godard said, “it’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to”.

S.W.: Sure, and we believe that music gets better when people start putting out ideas at an early stage, getting others involved.

M.K.: This brings me to sampling, which is obviously an important part of the music making taking place on Crashroots. I’m intrigued by the fact that you encourage crediting the original tracks behind the samples even though their use is practically considered illegal. What’s your standpoint on the subject?

S.W.: I’m personally against copyright because I see music as a starting point for exploration.
M.T.: I feel like an archaeologist when I pick up a song. But while an archaeologist would place his discoveries in a museum for people to see them, we’re basically doing the same thing, yet bringing it to another level where people can actually rework the discoveries and give them a new life.
S.W.: If you think back, before recorded music a similar process occurred through songs sung to people in order to exchange them.
M.T.: We need to rethink the concept of owning and, through that, copyright. For example, I have been playing the drums since I was a kid. And how did I learn to play the drums? I just put on a Beatles record and copied Ringo Starr. So, basically I was sampling him. And this is how the millions of drummers the world over learned – by copying. Or think of Bernard Purdie, the drummer for James Brown, whose drum break in the song Funky Drummer has been sampled non-stop for 25 years now. Imagine him trying to claim royalties for these eight seconds. In the end, he didn’t come up with the part himself. What he did was that he went to Africa, heard the local music and translated it into his drumming.

J.S.: Crashroots really blurs the boundaries between production and consumption. Would you say that the main cultural product that Crashroots produces is the social process of making music rather than the pieces of music that come out of it?

S.W.: It’s the conversation first and foremost. Music in the end always carries a message whether you want it or not. And reworking culturally relevant things like that really hits the spot. As an example, if we take a track and do a mix in Berlin but someone in Minsk does another one and someone in Mexico does one, too, in between them there’s a conversation going on concerning the original sample – when it came out and all that. And that for me is the most important part. After that come the dancing people.

M.K.: Going beyond the site itself, who “is” Crashroots? For whom is it a brand or an umbrella to work under, in regard to, for instance, live shows?

S.W.: The thing is Crashroots completely turns around the closed old school record label model by saying that everybody is a member and only evaluating who’s an important member and who’s not over time. We have planned to do Crashroots concerts based on the idea that wherever we’re playing, we will invite all interesting Crashroots contributors from that part of the world to join us. And obviously get paid as well.
M.T.: There’s also another touring concept that we came up with which is something totally opposite: having a seven piece real life band playing the best songs from Crashroots live.
S.W.: We believe that these types of concepts are bound to be successful as the Crashroots fan base is really close to us, consisting mainly of people who make the music.

“Crashroots completely turns around the old school record label model by saying that everybody is a member and only evaluating who’s an important member and who’s not over time.”

J.S.: What if a song becomes a hit, how do you recognize and reward the people who participated in making it?

M.T.: Well, the best case scenario for the contributors would be that a label calls them up and signs them because they like what they’ve heard.
S.W.: And get the attention and publicity this other label can provide as this is what record labels are now – marketing channels. Additionally, on every release we give an opportunity for the artists to link to different kinds of support schemes: their Beatport accounts, online shops that sell their t-shirts etc. So basically, what we’re trying to do is to steer the flow of attention towards the artists who can then make the best out of it. We could obviously build an in-house shop but I think third party services are the way to go on the internet – don’t reinvent, just link it in. That’ll let the artists have their accounts and get the attention through us.
M.T.: And then there are the gigs and all that.

S.W.: We use the Creative Commons license so if one makes a hit from Crashroots taking my beat, Miguel’s bassline and his own melody, and gets signed to a major label, he’s obliged to ask all the parties and find a deal. And that is a human kind of process – not from lawyer to lawyer. I hope we can encourage deals like this to take place and get a community language going on – have records where you have literally ten people involved.

J.S.: Have you developed some kind of a business model for Crashroots?

M.T.: We only started Crashroots a couple of months ago so the business model isn’t quite set yet. However, we have been talking about the freemium model – giving all music files away for free and focusing on selling something physical, not meaning a CD or vinyl but some other means of embodiment.

M.K.: You see the freemium model applicable to musical content?

S.W.: Yes, we strongly believe that. For example, now we’re building up a community of people who take our music and actually use six hours reworking it in Ableton Live. Six hours is a huge time dedication! I mean you don’t even dedicate that much time to your partnership these days. So, that’s a really close relationship that we’re building. And if you give these people something of value, they’re actually very willing to pay for it. Think about a situation where we collaborate and I offer you something physical to put on your bookshelf as a token of the work. It looks amazing and has a purpose, and I think I can make you pay for it even if the price was a bit higher than a normal CD. I think that in order to make these models work, one needs to collaborate with artists and designers who can make physical things valuable and interesting. This model has been proven to work with software and even books but we have to prove it works now with music as well.

J.S.: At the moment, using Crashroots requires software for making music as there are no simple tools on site. So, the participation requires at least some knowledge and interest in music making. Do you see that as a good thing or would you rather like to see the roles of an amateur and a professional blurring or mixing within Crashroots?

M.T.: Some people have come up to say that they’re doing something with music for the first time on Crashroots, and I think that’s really cool. These people approach the subject with no preconceptions and might come up with something very interesting in the end.
S.W.: Apparently it takes a bit of literacy to do music and we would like to have semi-interested people doing it. Crashroots also has an underlying theme of cultural mash-uping. Our dream would be to release a song made by people from all different countries.

“Our dream would be to release a song made by people from all different countries.”

M.K.: How far does your personal influence as founders and “curators” of Crashroots reach regarding the end product, the music itself? What if the musical output of Crashroots turns into something you would consider bad? I mean, maintaining personal quality control must become impossible once the community grows beyond a certain scale.

M.T.: That’s a key question here: who decides what’s good and what’s bad. To be honest, so far 99% of the music has been good – to us and the community. And ‘good’ meaning also the things that were improved through the feedback of the community.

S.W.: The great thing about the platform we are using and building are its community-based voting tools. If you are constantly offering something the community considers bad you will be put on ‘pending’. But at some point, with, for instance, a thousand active users we will probably need to close down registration for a while. On the internet you need to keep your signal-to-noise ratio extremely high.

M.K.: But wouldn’t the closed community start to resemble the ‘closed label’ from the past again?

S.W.: With a thousand artists? That’s a huge difference. The thing is, the material itself is in the public so you can take our songs and start a new Crashroots with another community. But what we are trying to do here is not just about the music itself, but also the conversation. And conversation is small scale. When you go over ten thousand people you will end up in MySpace type of interaction, which is bad – it’s just too big. That’s why Twitter is so good: they manage to get down to those little groups of people. I would be proud to have an active community of ten thousand, not more. If you imagine every record label mutating into an open source music community, there will be thousands of them. Then you can specialize in hip hop, me in whatever type of dance music and so on. We just need to find a way to interact with each other.

M.K.: Compared to software, however, you are dealing with a much more culturally sensitive product.

S.W.: Yes. Even though it shouldn’t be. The thing is, looking twenty years into the future I strongly believe music will be generative. We will all be putting out our stems, all the parts a piece of music is built of, tagged with metadata. You could already build songs using algorithms saying “I need an aggressive bassline, a beat that is this and this tempo and this and this mood etc.” I, as a listener will bring my profile with me and the computer will adjust the music according to my listening habits. We won’t be listening to the same tracks anymore. And this is not that far; it’s already technically possible. It’s more a question of cultural adaptation. Then it will really be goodbye to Michael Jackson – the end of the superstar.

Booming Internet, 2000. Philip Kwame Apagya. Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

I first saw this photograph at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. It is taken by Philip Kwame Apagya, a Ghanaian artist whose work sets a contemporary twist on traditional West African portraiture through painted backdrops that reflect affluent international culture. Here, a man and a woman pose as boss and secretary right beside the Booming Internet (2000) – a reality beyond their means.

The photo evokes thoughts on access and context in the information age. It points out that not everyone has access to the internet, be it physical access or resources and skills for digital citizenship. And while it entails marginalization the ingenious tableau also hints at untrained, fresh approaches to the contemporary condition.

Drawing on shortcomings as well as low-cost modern technologies spreading in new areas around the globe, marginal media practices can generate potential ideas and initiatives. This happened in Kenya, where Morris Mbetsa, an 18-year-old self-taught inventor, came up with a mobile phone-based “anti-theft device and a vehicle tracking system” using the combination of voice, tone dialing and text messages over a mobile network to control some of the electrical systems in a vehicle. Read about the “Block & Track” system and other mundane inventions on AfriGadget, a booming blog dedicated to documenting Africans using creativity to overcome everyday challenges.