Malmö, 4 October 2005
Unsworn Curatorial announcement
The Orgsmobile Showroom at Mal au Pixel 2006
Open Source Vehicles, Executables and Cargo Culting Cooperation
Orgsmobile.org is a non-profit organisation that is creating the world's first open source car. Unsworn are happy to announce and produce the first major event showcasing Orgsmobile prototypes and documentation at the Mal au Pixel festival, this April in Paris.
The theme of the Mal au Pixel or PixelACHE festival is the "Dot Org Boom", the non-profit grassroot new media revolution. The essential ingredients of this rapidly growing phenomenon are open source community, open content initiatives, media activist networks and myriads of NGOs around the world.
At www.orgsmobile.org designers, artists and open-source enthusiasts relentlessly research and collaboratively contribute to the Orgsmobile, the first dot org vehicle. As co-curators of Mal au Pixel we have chosen to focus on the Orgsmobile because it is an initiative that pushes the limits of Dot Org thinking and also problematise the concept of the Dot Org Boom.
Orgsmobile.org are greatly inspired by the success of open source and open content development styles. By stubbornly pursuing this analogy of open software development and pushing it into the domain of hardware the Orgsmobile endeavor opens up for a discussion beyond the do-good consensus of many open source gatherings. The Orgsmobile is, however, not a parody of open source projects and grassroots development practices. While working the Orgsmobile mechanics run into severe difficulties and limitations of software-style distributed collaboration. But they aim for a very practical goal and sincerely believe that innovative and useful concepts and products will emerge from this seemingly impossible project.
The Orgsmobile community is also producing fresh views on what "building" and "distributing" could mean in the context of open source hardware. While the digital material can quickly be losslessy and infinately duplicated we still are not blessed with the presence of Star Trek-style replicators for physical objects. This points towards possible futures of distributed potentiality: instructables, recipes and executables.
The Oversteerers of Orgsmobile.org have set their aims high. Their goal for the Mal au Pixel exhibition 2006 is to drive an Orgsmobile from the grounds of Org Industries in the Kingdom of org to the showroom in Mains d'Oeuvres in Paris, France. To accomplish this they are currently recruiting new mechanics.
Welcome to Paris for the automotive feat of the 21st century!
* Cargo Cult, an idiom meaning any group of people making obeisance to something that it is obvious they do not comprehend.
Wikipedia SAYS: "The classic period of cargo cult activity was in the years during and after World War II. The vast amounts of war materiel that were air-dropped into these islands during the Pacific campaign against the Empire of Japan necessarily meant drastic changes to the lifestyle of these islanders as manufactured clothing, canned food, tents, weapons and other useful goods arrived in vast quantities to equip soldiers—and also the islanders who were their guides and hosts. When the war moved on, and ultimately when it ended, the airbases were abandoned and no new "cargo" was then being dropped.
In attempts to get cargo to fall by parachute or land in planes or ships again, islanders adopted a shallow version of the same practices they had seen the soldiers, sailors and airmen use. They carved headphones from wood, and wore them while sitting in control towers. They waved the landing signals while standing on the runways. They lit signal fires and torches to light up runways and lighthouses. The cultists thought that the foreigners had some special connection to the ancestors, who were the only beings powerful enough to spill such riches. By mimicking the foreigners, they hoped to bypass them.
In a form of sympathetic magic, many built life-size mockups of airplanes out of straw, and created new military style landing strips, hoping to attract more airplanes. The cultural impact of these practices was not to bring about the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war, but to eradicate religious practices that had existed prior to the war."