Julia Velkova

At the intersection of commons and market: Negotiations of value in open-sourced cultural production

This article explores the way in which producers of digital cultural commons use new production models based on openness and sharing to interact with and adapt to existing structures such as the capitalist market and the economies of public cultural funding. Through an ethnographic exploration of two cases of open-source animation film production – Gooseberry and Morevna, formed around the 3D graphics Blender and the 2D graphics Synfig communities – we explore how sharing and production of commons generates values and relationships which trigger the movement of producers, software and films between different fields of cultural production and different moral economies – those of the capitalist market, the institutions of public funding and the commons. Our theoretical approach expands the concept of ‘moral economies’ from critical political economy with ‘regimes of value’ from anthropological work on value production, which, we argue, is useful to overcome dichotomous representations of exploitation or romanticization of the commons.

Repairing and developing software infrastructures : The case of Morevna Project in Russia

This article discusses how alternative software infrastructures can emerge out of frictions, failure, and repair in the attempts of media creators to evade piracy. Using a case from the geographical fringes of Russia called Morevna Project, and theories of infrastructures and repair, the article suggests how repair can lead to the slow, mundane and fragile formation of what I refer to as ‘situated’ digital infrastructures for cultural production. While pirate-based media production can push creators to search for and develop alternative infrastructures, the latter emerge as fragile frameworks that are constantly threatened from collapse and suspension. The continuous work of integrating diverse interests across local and online media-related contexts and practices becomes an essential stabilising force needed to perpetuate these infrastructures and prevents them from falling back into oblivion.

Data that warms: Waste heat, infrastructural convergence and the computation traffic commodity:

This article explores the ways in which data centre operators are currently reconfiguring the systems of energy and heat supply in European capitals, replacing conventional forms of heating with data-driven heat production, and becoming important energy suppliers. Taking as an empirical object the heat generated from server halls, the article traces the expanding phenomenon of ‘waste heat recycling’ and charts the ways in which data centre operators in Stockholm and Paris direct waste heat through metropolitan district heating systems and urban homes, and valorise it. Drawing on new materialisms, infrastructure studies and classical theory of production and destruction of value in capitalism, the article outlines two modes in which this process happens, namely infrastructural convergence and decentralisation of the data centre. These modes arguably help data centre operators convert big data from a source of value online into a raw material that needs to flow in the network irrespective of meaning. In this conversion process, the article argues, a new commodity is in a process of formation, that of computation traffic. Altogether data-driven heat production is suggested to raise the importance of certain data processing nodes in Northern Europe, simultaneously intervening in the global politics of access, while neutralising external criticism towards big data by making urban life literally dependent on power from data streams.

Efficient Worker or Reflective Practitioner? Competing Technical Rationalities of Media Software Tools

The work of creators of digital media today is profoundly reliant on the use of specialised software. Yet, software is not merely an instrument of labour. The current hegemonies of society are incorporated in the technological design of tools, explicating what Feenberg (2009) calls technical rationality. Different production frameworks can embed distinct forms of such rationality depending on the goals of their creators. Drawing on theories of knowledge and feminist theory of technological development, Forsler and Velkova present an analysis of the production frameworks of three different manufactures of software tools for computer graphics, both industrial and user-driven. The chapter contributes with a conceptual theoretical model of how these frameworks are underpinned by different epistemological assumptions and competing visions of media practitioners.

Ethnography of Open Cultural Production: From Participant Observation to Multisited Participatory Communication

Ethnography of Open Cultural Production: From Participant Observation to Multisited Participatory Communication