How can the right to access to knowledge be held up against claims of copyright? How can we battle the terror of the mind produced by the current intellectual property regime?
Interfacing the law is an attempt to build a series of platforms, both in the sense of online interfaces and of public discourse, that allows us to experiment with, to openly discuss and to reflect while the next wave of court cases is waiting to happen.
It is urgent that we find ways to make the public debate transcend the juridical binary of illegal vs. legal, and claim political legitimacy for acting out the potential of digital publishing, and the possibility of sharing digital books.
Nadine Rotem-Stibbe and I focused on the semi-legal practices in the food industry. Mass-processed foods are often riddled with undisclosed and hidden elements. We are mostly ignorant of the processes involved in manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of our products, and the consequences of such processes. This is not a new grievance, carbon footprints, GM foods, Fair Trade, organic, animal right are all phrases that occur often in headlines, warning us against buying or using a certain product, or advising us to support a certain cause. Such advice, though probably well-meaning, not only leaves the consumer confused, but also takes away the consumers autonomy in making decisions and taking responsibility for the products they use.
FFF is an open product-database wiki which aims to fill the lack of easy access to what should be public knowledge. Empirical food companies are our main concern. Their disclosed control - whether with data, health factors or ethical behaviour - is beyond our imagination. However, even if the data were fully accessible, there would end up being masses of text and technical information, something that the average consumer, cannot, and will not, read - just like the terms and conditions. There is, therefore, a pressing need to simplify, decrypt and disambiguate the information by extracting the most relevant points while also maintaining transparency by ensuring that everything can still be easily accessed if one does want to go into depth. To better understand the bigger picture the information is broken down into three categories for each product; On the Surface, Grey Area and Under the Surface.
This publication is part of the Special Issue group projects of the Master of Media Design students from the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam. Experimental Publishing students who contributed to the publication and exhibition are: Emily Buzzo, Karina Dukalska, Max Franklin, Giulia de Giovanelli, Franc Gonzales and Nadine Rotem-Stibbe. For more content visit the official XPUB Special Issues.