As Jenseits is giving a lecture in Paris, I get to visit Robin (the beau of my friend Carolina). He lives in a great apartment, from which one can actually see the Eiffel Tower.
While still living in Amsterdam, Robin would do programming for arts installations. Robin has made it a requirement, that if you work with him the code will be open sourced. By doing so, he has turned into one of these mythical creatures who gets paid to do open source.
Now Robin works at the CiTu institute, a collaboration between Universities Paris 1 and Paris 8, working with the students and the projects of its director, Maurice Benayoun. Somehow, Robin still finds time to work on many open source projects, mainly around audio and video editing. Because he uses these projects in his work for the university, Robin can afford to work on these projects in his time on the job.
As a recent initiate in the world of programming and the socio-economics of open source, hanging out a day with Robin is fascinating. Starting the day with coffee and writing documentation, enabling a larger infrastructure for the production of media art.
And he likes tight pants.
I love the story where he reverse engineers the synchronisation of sound to a movie reel by doing an OCR on the scanned film: Unusual workflow
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I guess this story is representative also of a period where artists are having a much harder time finding funding through state funded arts bodies; as there is still some money in universities that is where they will go.
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That, and the consistent ‘Bologna-isation’ of art education: Ricardo tells me all teachers at Portugese art schools are now expected to hold PhD degrees.
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