Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
ally the entire electronics industry is funded by private investment. Oc-
casionally, we see public investments like Small Business Innovation
Research (SBIR) grants in the United States, but they are rare. We
could summarize the situation in the electronics world as follows:
“private money pays for originals; payback comes from replication.”
In the world of art, the situation is reversed, and in public art, even
more so. The summary for public art is this: “public money pays for the
original; the original is the payback.” Open sourcing public art can add
an even greater payback, as future artists can build on the work of their
predecessors.
Today, reproducing art is no longer a serious challenge. Paintings can
be forged well enough that ordinary people are fooled, and any kid with
a computer can duplicate music or movies. If the only thing that makes
a Monet a Monet is that the guy holding the paintbrush was named
Monet, then the argument of whether the methods of creation need to
be secret is over. The greatest forger can paint all day long, and she'll
never make a Monet. Like Marcel Duchamp submitting a urinal to a
gallery in 1917, the art lies in the act of creating the art, not the physic-
al object itself.
Public art, where an artist is paid to create art that is installed in a
public setting, like a park or city plaza, has the same characteristic: the
identity of the artist makes the art. The funding for public art usually
comes from public sources, such as municipal governments or neigh-
borhood advocacy groups, or occasionally private philanthropists for
the benefit of the public. Public art tends to be site specific and unique;
we don't want replicas of Anish Kapoor's giant shiny bean (“Cloud
Gate”) in Chicago duplicated in every city around the world. Leo Vil-
lareal's LED installation on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco needs the
bridge to hold it up; it wouldn't work in Phoenix, Arizona, where there
is no water, never mind bridges.
Some public art is already being open sourced. For the last few
years, I have worked as part of New American Public Art, a group of
five artists in Boston and Philadelphia, that open sources all the art we
create. We've found that open sourcing public art is harder than it
seems. Open sourcing our code and electronics designs is easy, but
most of our art has large mechanical elements that are largely undocu-
mented. As we're building, we make a few pencil sketches, but they're
