Open Formats

The anxieties of inaccessibility are starting to be addressed not because of artistic projects (it is amusing to me, if no one else, that artists seem more concerned with producing content and then worry about the form after it has been released to the public), but because of legal/commercial concerns. Massachusetts lead the way (lead in that it made it a very public and commercial issue) by adopting the OpenDocument format (for a number of reasons), but it always makes me wonder why artists submit to proprietary formats (like Storyspace). Do artists not realize that in adopting a proprietary format they are giving over control of their content to engineers and coders governed by commercial interests?

If a company is going out of business, it really has no reason to preserve the works of the few artists that are intensely concerned about the accessibility of their works (for the sake of commercial imagination, lets say that “few artists” can be any amount less than ten thousand). What happens to the artistic works then? Unsupported and inaccessible, the artists are left with the equally unappetizing possibilities of reverse engineering the format (a technical project of indeterminate difficulty that would probably be a challenge to many Computer Science majors) or leaving their content to die in obscurity. We’ve long had this problem with other forms of literature (has anyone ever really liked microfilms?), but I don’t think the same problems of proprietary format plagued the microfilm industry (though perhaps this is a lack of imagination on my part).

So perhaps my underlying question (I have a habit of circumnavigating these without ever making a stand about them – how defensible! Gamer theory anyone?) concerns the relationship between techie and artist. Why aren’t there more artists that have the engineering skills necessary to produce content production structures (dreamweaver, frontpage, storyspace, etc.)? Though perhaps that is too easy of a question. Perhaps a harder question involves the distance between the artistic community and the techie community, especially in digital groups. Why is there not more demand from the artistic community for tools and production structures that are based on open formats? Why has Apple cornered the mainstream market on creativity when they only use formats that are proprietary? Perhaps that, too, is not quite the question I want to ask.

One more attempt – with the anxiety that seems to emerge from artistic communities concerning future compatibility or inaccessibility of digital formats, and with a (seemingly) obvious solution to these anxieties staring these concerns in the face, shouldn’t artists demand tools that use open formats? Are artists supporting their own temporality by succumbing to readily available tools, instead of demanding higher quality? Is this a simple case of supply and demand (there is no demand, hence no supply, though I can’t believe it’s that simple), or is there something else at work that I’m missing?