About: This book takes an inventory of the art of collaborative practice, surveys the landscape of new, cooperation-enhancing technologies, and renders the inner workings of cooperative processes as a new model for social movements. Civic participation is on the decline, but, online, more people work together than ever before. Activists contribute citizen journalism. New media artists create social online tools and urge others to participate. Knowledge collectives gather information in large, open repositories. Free culture – with all its file-sharing applications – is blossoming.
Contributors Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz link the debates about web-based, cooperation-enhancing technologies to the broader world of political activism.This book and its accompanying DVD emerge out of intensive debates at the Free Cooperation conference in 2004 at the State University of New York at Buffalo facilitated by Scholz and Lovink.The Art of Free Cooperation includes a DVD with a feature-length film collage, narrated by Tony Conrad, illustrating the principles of free cooperation through the visual language of science fiction movies, additional texts, interviews and highlights from the international ‘Free Cooperation’ conference, organized by the editors, that led to this book.
Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz (eds), The Art of Free Cooperation, New York: Autonomedia, 2007. ISBN: 978-15-7027-177-9. Paperback & DVD, 192 pages, $20. This publication is based on an event of the same name organised by the authors in Buffalo, New York, in April 2005.
See also www.freecooperation.org.