Platoniq (Spain)

Burn Station (2003 - 2009)

Programme: Tram N, public space Friday (20.03) Start 8:00 - 12:00; 15:00 - 19:00

A cultural co-operative system – is a group of cultural producers and software developers who have been operating in Barcelona since 2001. Inspired by the net and their ways of inhabiting it, Platoniq takes the Internet to the streets in an effort to publicise, create and share other ways of actively using information, knowledge and connected culture.
The Platoniq team explores public collaboration formats that apply the positive effects of free software and P2P systems to the fields of (self) education and citizen participation. Their work ends up generating innovative collective research methods and tools, as well as an extensive online audiovisual archive covered by free licences.
Their recent projects include Burn Station (www.platoniq.net/burnstation/), the Bank of Common Knowledge (www.bankofcommons.org) and S.O.S. (Science of Sharing).

Burn Station

Burn Station is a copyleft music distribution system. It is a GNU/Linux-based client-server system, but above all, it is a strategic project based on diffusion and distribution actions in physical spaces where visitors can browse, listen to and legally burn copyleft music from a wide range of European and South-American net labels.
Burn Station started in the year 2003 as a non-commercial project, an experiment in practical gift economics aiming to reflect on the understandings, sensibilities and entry of Open Source ideas into other social, cultural, and artistic practices.
Our main goal was to link a public familiar with music but who may not necessarily know the tools, the radios and the labels available freely and legally in the Internet. We thus invited net/fm radios and net labels to participate in open and non-commercial events for which they provide us with a list or a catalog of the files they would like to share as well as further Information or other material they deem/consider important. They could submit details about their history, their philosophy and their policy concerning copyrights .Our pragmatic goal was to enable the listeners to edit and burn their own data/audio
compilations within a legal context and in a public situation.
In the first 2 years of activities organised around the project we observed that personal contacts with groups or situations where an exchange was possible in a physical space is indispensable to spread out free content ideas and reach a non expert public. So that, we've created 4 mobile distribution modules which respond to differents needs and contexts:
Module 1: TAKE  AWAY . This module makes it easy to combine free distribution public actions with live music acts and/or dj sessions around the city, in a time-effective manner .
Module 2: SOUND SYSTEM. Inspired on the jamaican sound systems, this module allows for simultaneous free distribution actions and live music acts and/or dj sessions. 3 copying stations plus 300W of free culture!
Module 3: ARCADE. A stand alone module inspired upon the old school arcade game machines.
Module 4: SUITCASE. This module was developed with the intention of making burn station truly mobile: the suitcase can stay for a few weeks in a certain independent production centre (radio station, art space, etc.) and then travel to the next one, allowing for an easy upload of new content and a more in-depth exploration of the database.
In all of them, the system is managed by free software which has been programmed for the project and is published and distributed under the GNU GPL Licence.