Open Sources: Creativity and Code in the Digital Age
Michael Century
Connexions : Art, Media, Networks, edited by Annick Bureaud and Nathalie Magnan, Press of the
Paris, Ecole des Beaux Arts, 2002

"As a potential enabler of an activist information culture, open source or free software has implications far beyond its instrumental utility. At stake may be a deeper, more enduring understanding of how to identify and enhance real value in the increasingly complex technical co-dependencies between people and information technologies. The open source "meme" helps reveal the social and cultural construction of computing and communication technologies more generally " (pag.1)

"Digital Cinema. Two recent parallel trends are to be noted. The first is the effective accomplishment of the photo-realistic synthesis of live action by digital systems; as theorist Lev Manovich parodoxically puts it, “Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements” [13]. The second is the recent commodification of the so-called high-end systems, as computing platforms become cheaper, and all the packaged software products provide essentially the same benchmark features. These applications give small scale producers the techniques only large studios could afford just a few years ago, making the points of discrimination between them less a matter of generic capabilities and more the custom development unique to each production. The major digital studios,
like Pixar, ILM, Dreamworks, Disney, devise proprietary code to enable features not available off-the-shelf, but as this proprietary legacy code becomes harder and harder to maintain, the main players in this industry have begun to explore a co-operative basis for competition, based on open source software development. [14] (4)