[Reader-list] OPUS

[Monica Narula]

Dear List members and Friends,
(please feel free to copy and redistribute)

We are happy to announce the launch of OPUS, (Open Platform for 
Unlimited Signification) as an online
adjunct to the documentary installation  - Co-Ordinates: 
28.28N/77.15E : : 2001/2002 - presented
by us (Raqs Media Collective) at Documenta11, Kassel.
Opus (Release Candidate) went public on the 8th of June, 2002, 
co-inciding with the opening of Documenta11.

The URL for Opus is www.opuscommons.net

What does Opus stand for?
Opus is an acronym for "Open Platform for Unlimited Signification!". 
Most importantly, it is an online space for people, machines and 
codes to play and work together - to share, create and transform 
images, sounds, videos and texts. Opus is an attempt to create a 
digital commons in culture, based on the principle of sharing of 
work, while at the same time, retaining the possibility (if and when 
desired) of maintaining traces of individual authorship and identity.

To read more about the principles and background of Opus, go to -
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/record.html


How Opus works (what can you do in Opus)

Opus enables you to view, create and exhibit media objects (video, 
audio, still images, html and text) and make modifications on work 
done by others, in the spirit of collaboration and the sharing of 
creativity. Opus is an environment in which every viewer/user is also 
invited to be a producer, and a means for producers to work together 
to shape new content. You can view and download material, transform 
it and then upload the material worked on by you back to the Opus 
domain. Each media object archived, exhibited and made available for 
transformation within Opus carries with it data that can identify all 
those who have worked on it. This means that while Opus enables 
collaboration, it also preserves the identity of Authors/Creators (no 
matter how big or small their contribution may be) at each stage of a 
works evolution. In this way, we hope that Opus can be come a model 
for a practical realization of the idea of a Digital Commons of 
creative work on the Internet.

To read a manual of OPUS  - go to -
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/manual.html


The Idea
The basic ideas of the Opus project is to create a community of 
creative people from all over the world, who want to share and gift 
to each other the images, sounds and texts made by them for general 
public usage. Opus will give people the chance to collaborate and to 
present their work to an online community of practitioners and 
artists willing to work outside the increasing global domination of 
intellectual property regimes in cultural production.

Once you have published your y in Opus, each act of uploading by you 
becomes an opportunity for others to take your work as a starting 
point for transformation, for a new rendition, for a rescension. Opus 
users will also be able to give their comments and reflections on 
your work through the discussion forums that will grow around each 
project within Opus.

Opus is inspired by the free software movement and is an attempt to 
transpose the principles that govern the creation of free software on 
to general cultural production. Opus follows the same rules as those 
that operate in all free software communities - i.e. the freedom to 
view, to download, to modify and to redistribute. The source(code), 
in this case the video, image, sound or text - the contents of media 
objects uploaded on to Opus, is free to use, to edit and to 
redistribute. Needless to say the 'source-code' of the Opus software 
is also free to use, edit and redistribute. Opus users are governed 
by a license that protects them from their work being taken out of
the commons and into the regimen of proprietary protocols.

To read the license that frames Opus - go to -
http://www.opuscommons.net/templates/doc/license.html

OPUS : A brief history

Work on Opus  began in September 2001 and the Beta version was 
uploaded in April 2002. Opus is launched
into the public domain with the opening of Documenta11.

When we (Raqs Collective) began to think through the ideas that 
gradually crystallized to form   Opus, we
were searching for a platform that would enable inter-media and 
hybrid media practices to find fruition within a frame of open ended 
collaboration. We were interested in trying to evolve a way to 
combine our interests with video, our background in documentary film, 
photography and sound, and our growing engagement with 
hypertextuality and free software culture as a result of our work 
within the Sarai Initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing 
Societies, Delhi.

At an immediate  level, the ideas that were at the core of the Opus 
project developed out of our need to create an online context for a 
set of offline installations. (like , for instance, Co-ordinates : 
28.28N /77.15E : : 2001/2002, which is showing at Documenta11) which 
we wanted to open out to a wider community of creators, so as to 
enable instances of further collaboration; and out of our thoughts on 
the notion of the 'Digital Commons', from which arose a text A 
Concise Lexicon of/for the Digital Commons which contains many of the 
founding ideas of Opus.

In the realization of the process of creating Opus we were joined by 
several others who made the Sarai Media Lab their home for many long 
days and nights along with us, sharing in the delight of discovering 
fragments of archiecture that worked, or a metaphor that made sense, 
and above all with the energy that they brought to every detail of 
the coding and design of Opus. Opus  would not be a reality without 
the active collaboration of all the people who worked on it, their 
skills and their imaginations.

Many metaphors, images and ideas have made their way into the making 
of OPUS, from a biological laboratory,
to a polyamourous matrix, to an understanding of the way in which 
parents relate to children, from kinship
and lineage to the growth and evolution of epic narratives and 
ancient texts. The traces of all these remain in varying degrees.

Sarai (www.sarai.net) provided the background of being an 
intellectually and creatively stimulating space
while all of us worked on Opus.

CREDITS
Conception	- Raqs Media Collective

Architecture - Monica Narula, Bauke Freiburg, Silvan Zurbruegg

Coding - Silvan Zurbruegg, Pankaj Kaushal

Interface Design - Joy Chatterjee

Design Co-ordination - Monica Narula
Design Acknowledgement - Rana Dasgupta
Documentation - Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Bauke Freiburg

License -	Lawrence Liang, Jeebesh Bagchi

Produced by - Raqs Media Collective
at the Sarai Media Lab, Sarai/CSDS,
Delhi, 2002


Acknowledgements
Knowbotic Research, Zurich
Hochschule f¸r Gestaltung und Kunst, Zurich
Dept. of New Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
Society for Old & New Media, Amsterdam
Documenta11, Kassel
Everyone @ Sarai, Delhi

We invite you to contribute, create and share in the further 
development of Opus. We believe that your
participation in Opus will strengthen and revitalize the digital commons.

If you have more enquiries about Opus - write to
info at opuscommons.net
raqs at sarai.net
-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai:The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.sarai.net