Hacklabs
Description
"Hacklabs are, mostly, voluntary-run spaces providing free public access to computers and internet. They generally make use of reclaimed and recycled machines running GNU/Linux, and alongside providing computer access, most hacklabs run workshops in a range of topics from basic computer use and installing GNU/Linux software, to programming, electronics, and independent (or pirate) radio broadcast. The first hacklabs developed in Europe, often coming out of the traditions of squatted social centres and community media labs. In Italy they have been connected with the autonomist social centres, and in Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands with anarchist squatting movements." (http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses)
Discussion
"Hacklabs however have been absolutely fundamental to the development of FLOSS in recent years, especially in Europe and South America, and have provided a clear political and ethical orientation in contrast to the somewhat confused and often contradictory political and social perspectives articulated in the other communities and contexts of the wider FLOSS world.[22]
If livecoding is one of the most emblematic artistic manifestations of FLOSS, hacklabs have become one of its most emblematic social forms. Whilst they may not occupy identical trajectories, they nevertheless overlap and compliment one another in many significant ways, and central to this is their shared principle of ‘enabling the possibility of production by others’. This is an issue of distribution, not simply distribution at the level of product, in the way of piece of software can be easily distributed for example, but at the level of practice. The practice itself is inherently distributive, for it integrates the distribution of the knowledge of how to produce into that which it produces." (http://www.metamute.org/en/All-Problems-of-Notation-Will-be-Solved-by-the-Masses)