Get on your digital soapbox!

**MEDIA RELEASE - For Immediate Release: I August 2007**

Get on your digital soapbox!

Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) are holding a series of FREE public forums as part of still/open Program during September in Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane as part of their emerging technology labs. The forums are running;

Melbourne   6pm, 5th September 2007 @ Digital Harbour
Perth           6pm, 10th September 2007 @ The Bakery ARTRAGE Complex
Brisbane     6pm, 14th September @ The Judith Wright Centre

The forums will explore recent projects by internationally renown guest thinkers: Alessandro Ludovico (Italy) a publisher, media artist and editor in chief of Neural (http://www.neural.it/), Andy Nicholson (Australia) a free software hacker, new media activist and part of the Engage Media collective (http://engagemedia.org/) and Beatriz da Costa (USA) an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works with open science (http://www.beatrizdacosta.net/). Creative Commons Australia will open the floor for discussion of Open Source Culture.

Open Source Culture is the growing global phenomenon of creative practices of sharing content for others to rework, reuse and redistribute. It has created a digital collective media culture and cult like following where everyone from teenagers to grannies are getting involved. It has moved from the programming sphere into the general and business communities; the purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion and MySpace for $580 million by News Corp. and Google highlight just how much value they can have.

Open Source Culture aims to empower the user and challenge the power of the media giants. Currently a conflict is occurring between the owners of online "user generated" infrastructures and those who use them. User submitted and generated content often is moderated by the site or organization it is uploaded to, giving absolute control to the powers that be to do as they wish with the content submitted. By its nature Open Source Culture brings up many opinions and questions including; how open is Open Source Culture? Is it user friendly or financially beneficial to the big players? How might artists make use this cultural movement? And [insert your own question here] will be part of the discussion in the still/open forum.

The forums are presented as part of ANAT's emerging technology labs, which are responsible for the hugely successful reSkin program.

For media information and availability of the facilitators for interviews please contact Amanda Matulick on 8231 9037 or communicate@anat.org.au or for more information on the forums and still/open please visit www.anat.org.au/stillopen/blog/forums/.