symposium

Managing Openness

On november 28, I joined the symposium, Add Comment: Designing Critique in Public Forums organized by Casco, co-organized with ArtEZ The Arnhem Academy of Art and Design and Vinca Kruk on the (im)possibility of critique within the structures of current web-applications.

During the first talk by Mia Jankowicz (a curator and art critic based in London/Amsterdam), it occurred to me how the perspective of “openness” has shifted because of 2.0 environments, how it is being managed as a scarcity. Mia presented several (art) projects that deal with different ways of opening up information to the public. In these cases it is decided when, how and to whom openness to information is offered. In this case openness is an act of control, openness is managed as an exclusivity.
Instead of making information available as in creating openness, how could one go about producing openness, not designing it preemptively into the software and its associated gestures? Also another question is whether openness is actually a scarce good on the web?