 All right, I'll get started It's great to see so many people here My name is Julia Velkova, and I'm from the Department of Media Studies at Soteturn University that's in Stockholm, Sweden and This is my first Blender conference and my relation to Blender is a little bit different than the one that Perhaps most of you in this room and in the conference have to it I'm not a Blender developer and I'm not a Blender user either But I spent the last three years studying Blender and the Blender Institute Open Movies as a cultural phenomenon and through that also the Blender community and to some extent the Blender ecosystem and I hanged frequently around here in Amsterdam during the making of Cosmos Loundramat in 2014 and 15 bothering people with questions about themselves and about their work or just bothering them with my presence and I was hanging several RSE channels as well and I spoke to some Blender artists and to a few developers I spoke outside that I spoke to more Blender artists and Blender users than to developers So perhaps my perspective is a little bit biased based on that but I spoke So to people both from the Blender Institute, but also Outside of it. I spoke to Blender artists from Spain from India from Russia France Germany and South Korea among others And I did this not because I just like Blender But because this was part of my doctoral dissertation project in media studies, which I'm about to complete Hopefully in the next months to come it takes very long time So today I'd like to present to you two things The first one is why would a media scholar want to study Blender? Because many people to whom I spoke in these years were struggling to understand What keeps me coming back and hanging around and asking questions when I was actually not making anything with Blender and some thought it I was sometimes something like a journalist But then it was also confusing because I would keep coming back But then you would not see anything coming out the newspapers or online forums. So it was really weird So I'll talk about that and I'll the second thing that I'd like to talk about is a Very small part unfortunately small part of what did I learn so far? And this will been really condensed form because I can just do so much in 15-20 minutes But I hope to be able to that we can continue talking later as well My final disclaimer My work is still to some extent a work in progress in terms of primarily my conclusions So if you feel that some of my arguments or what I'll say is not really Correct or you disagree could be improved. I would be really happy to have a conversation about it Finally, I've been putting some writing in progress on my PhD blog on this address So you can see there the long path of my confusion about what is Blender about based on my experience at the Blender Institute and my way out of this confusion so And what is Blender about is I think really the place to start in order to understand why is it interesting for media scholars and This question is both very trivial and not Because Blender is obviously about computer graphics and algorithms for making great stuff on screen. It is about art It is about design and architecture It's about character animation and games and VR It's about technical development. It's about free software It's about open movies. It's about sharing and it's about people And it's also about a Blender conference and each of the amazing projects that are presented here But to my mind about all these things and it's hard Blender is fundamentally about relationships And it is about creating and maintaining very tight relationships between two fields to different fields Which have been continuously separated in the past more than 100 years And that's the field of technology development and a field of art development It's between the separation between software developers engineers and scientists and artists or creators who experiment with computer graphics And also it's about the separation between artists and the tools of their production so creating and dissolving the relationships between these two fields and Maintaining the boundary between them is something That has a really long history in the development of media and society generally and it dates long before Computer graphics or software companies like Autodesk or Adobe came to the market or the idea of digital art and digital culture existed So what was interesting about Blender for me as a media scholar was to understand the ways in which Blender tries to glue together These two separate fields. How does this happen and what frictions emerge when doing that and what we can learn from that? And to be able to appreciate the way Blender does this gluing and see its significance in the longer history of media development I think we need to remember not just look that was the future or the presence But we also need to look back and to remember some history and I'd like to recall now some moments of history When the fields of technology production our production were separated and brought back together and by the people who did that So it is obvious to everyone I think in this room that technology is an object of work both for the engineer as much as it is for the artist And we also know that the artists in a technician were not always two different people working in two separate fields And until well into the 1800s artists used to produce their own materials on which that creative practice was dependent And they were doing that either themselves or they could have a direct contact with craftspeople who could produce and tune These materials for them and we can think here for example about the longer history of making musical instruments paints and canvases But also the early history of photography and film and animation back in the 1900s And we can think of the practice for example of the flesh of brothers and the passionate work Is there a whole family for over one year to create the early rotoscope? Or of the work of people like hope you've heard he works who were employed by Disney and created in the early 1920s characters like Mickey Mouse or technology like the multi-plane camera and The main points in this history is that technology and art were part of the same practice and part of the same field of Production they were not two separate things We know also that this separation came with moving towards industrial production in the 18th century and Accelerated with developing communication infrastructure in the beginning of the 1900s And there was both the demand and possibilities to create new forms of media Faster and in the larger scale and have them circulate much faster and made available to huge amounts of people And this is not even if this is long ago This is really not the similar in scale as to what happened later with the Internet and This technological development happened during and after the two world wars which also produced the entertainment industry Organized as a factory with Disney being one of the pioneers of this factory as well It remade the artists into a worker in this industry And it also created the engineer as a profession largely tuned to the needs of the military at that time And we had in this period the large move towards automation through the new machines crafted by engineers and The engineer became in a way the main designer of society Which was moving towards being controlled by machines and managers and here I'm talking about a 50s and a 60s and In this process artists were greatly excluded from the design of these new technologies and new technologies such as electronics mainframe computers and so on were made With a main purpose to calculate stuff and a calculation was needed to better control society warfare The economy and control the work in a factory. It was extremely rational in its design And it was not imagined at the time as a medium for creative and artistic work at all So artists would not also know much about electricity and signal transmission And they would not have access to these new machines such as the emerging mainframe computers for example to make them into a material for creative work and as a consequence artists were excluded from their traditional role of Being part of driving cultural change and from developing new materials in this world crafted by engineers and big calculating machines And a group of people who tried to change this situation and rethink the purpose of these new machines and the role of artists in their making and Possible use were initially a group of avant-garde artists and an engineer from Bell Labs Who found an organization founded the organization called? experiments in art and technology in New York in 1967 and Their main idea was to make the work of the engineer more human and more close to ordinary people in life and Repurposed the new electronic machines back into a material that artists could work with and one of the people who founded the Organization was Billy Cleaver an engineer from Bell Labs. I hope grew up in Sweden by way Who felt that engineers suffered from a detachment from reality producing designs and machines that were drifting without guidance from meaningful decisions and The EIT so the experiments with our technology organization Wanted to change this by merging the two fields back together the two fields of art production and technology production by working not with The preconception of the engineer or the artist about machines, but rather the result of the human interaction between both areas and The experiments that this organization facilitated were really foundational for the emerging multimedia and technological arts and Artists and engineers would start exploring together holograms lasers be video and computer graphics and for example Manfred Schroeder And computer scientists investigated the information and content of visual images together with an artist Leon Harman and C.G Pioneer can Milton to make one of EIT's most renowned works works called computer nude Which was a computer plot of a nude compiled from mathematical symbols And this was one of the first computer process prints in the history of digital graphics made in 1967 And it was exhibited in the first computer art exhibitions to be arranged in New York On the topic it was called the machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age in the Museum of Modern Art So these kind of projects really find the engineer into an artist who begins with an idea or a need and Then uses his special tools constrained by time and budget to bridge the creativity gap between theory and reality And the organization also tried to track the industry and there was partly one of the Really specific things about it because they worked with Xerox with IBM with Hewlett-Packard and with Bell Labs From where engineers and money would come for these creative experiments and in fact corporations were considered a Fundamental pillar in these artistic projects because the AT thought that corporations could extend their innovative capacity by providing artists access to their prohibitively expensive tools and artists would realize their vision Engineers would learn to do different things and look at things differently and companies would harvest the ideas and patents and Basically the EAT reclaimed the tools of engineers in particular Computers and big electronic media that was being developed at that time and here on this image You can see one of their projects, which was a Pepsi pavilion. They designed the pavilion of Pepsi in one These world expos I think it was this was for the expo in Osaka So they designed that they reclaim the tools of engineers As materials for the artists to work with making the artistic work relevant again in the new electronic technological development and The EAT would also be very public about what they did and they would share photographs drawing some technical diagrams in the form of catalogs after each collaboration project and they also had a newsletter and a matching service that aimed to connect artists with Engineers and support their collaborative projects with funding from the industry and They put together more than 4,000 engineers with artists over a few years to make projects that were sponsored by the industry And they did it not only in New York, but they had projects also in in Sweden in Japan and in India I think also in Finland and maybe some other places as well So they really wanted to transform the industry by showing how great it is when you have this collaboration between artists and developers and Sadly they lost traction in the 1970s because they ran out of money They I mean what they were doing was really Materials how they would go on I Mean there was no internet. There was no way to distribute things online and so on so all these projects despite They were a really great design and really great collaboration. They required massive investment in massive Massive amount of money And so I think that the Blender Institute did a very similar thing for 60 years later with digital media in the context of today today's internet culture and I was struck personally by the very great similarity which I found between the visions and approaches of the EAT and the ideas and visions that I encountered during during my visits at the Blender Institute The idea that artists and technologies should collaborate to create both new technology and new art as that happened through the open movies And of course there are some differences such as that the EAT were doing avant-garde and new media experimental stuff the so-called high art Or high culture stuff at that time And I think that Blender artwork is much more grounded and much more inspired by popular culture and the creative and entertainment industries But I've seen also some great variety that it's really hard to put borders to what you can what is Blender used about But yeah, so still there's a lot of similarities and another similarity that I found very fascinating was that In the work of the EAT their approach would be so the project will start from the artist who would approach engineers and ask Make a wish list of what they would like to get and the engineer was supposed in a dialogue with the artist to create Equipment for this particular project And yes, I said they were after that sharing stuff And despite the EAT faded out it still managed to create a traction that made the computer development industry and Entertainment industry to rethink technology is something more than automation of work Which was the main point in the 60s And there was a lot of effort for example by Xerox Park to create the graphical user interface And we got the first computer games later on and so on But the industry of the industry and respectively the industrial manufacturers of materials is not always in line with the interest of artists And the potential users of the materials So when we started getting scientists companies and entertainment industry working on developing computer graphics We got again a separation of our development and technology development And there were some companies that decided to invest in keeping technology and art together And those who focus mostly on continuing the project of automating work Of the 1960s So we got for example Pixar in the US or studios like the Blender's predecessor New Geo in Europe Who felt the need to keep this relationship between our development and technology development as tight as possible And we also got those companies that specialized in selling computer graphics software such as Adobe and Autodesk that came from a very narrowly engineering field that was trying to automate creative work And that's where the name of Autodesk comes from It was their first project was About trying to automate the desktop And they felt because they didn't have a computer graphics to do that And microsoft ended up doing that so they moved to automating architecture And but they didn't work with artists on developing their technology because What they cared about was about making software Automating work and software to sell And I think there's a big difference because we end up with two business models that separate again the fields of art and technology development And entertainment studios like Pixar for example bring artists and technologies together But they make it they aim at making films and selling them But they don't really sell their software or maybe this is gradually changing changing now but For most of the history this has not been the case And we got the software companies that cater for the broader user But they're with a very different and distant relationship between artists and those who make their digital tools So obviously I think that's seen in this historical context blender and the blender community have a rather special role Because blender goes back to merge the field of art development and technology development But the way in which this is done through sharing and free software Also offers possibilities to rethink of other business models and configurations that the industry might not have And if this says it has I think also very liberalist outlook You can make and sell films. You can make and sell software. You can make and sell training as we see happening And most importantly, you can do all this by and through keeping the relationship between technologists and artists And I think that sharing and the tools developed by the free software and free culture movements Like the gp licenses or the creative commons licenses here are also key mechanisms Which allow to create this relationship and to keep all these possibilities for doing not specializing in just One niche area to keep all these possibilities open And they give the means to an end in which the goal Is to bind together and keep connected art and technological production Which while not binding the community to any specific narrow field or business model like the big companies do So sharing and exchanging code artwork and training online I think is a fundamental mechanism to enforce relationships between people who have no connection to each other And this mechanism is triggered by giving artifacts to each other And no matter what our intentions we're giving away things Because it's cool because we're generous or because we want to hook a new client The consequence of sharing are that people get connected to each other and they keep sharing And in doing so sharing also becomes one of the main organizing mechanisms of the community And here sadly, I think we academics have done a great deal of bad work in portraying online communities as self organized With no hierarchy and no organization This is not true and in the blender community I think that sharing code and so far producing also open films And having rituals such as the blender conference Have been among the key ways to organize and keep the community together And sharing things generates also influence and for me One of the greatest influence in the community has been happening through the open movies And each open movie that the blender institute has made has been a huge contribution to the community Because of all the software the assets and the films that come out of it And this contribution has triggered each time new relationships between artists and technologists keeping these fields together And open movies are a demonstration of art of wealth Of skill and technology that is given to the community But I think that they're also a challenge to the community Because they set a standard and a goal and prompt to respond by making new things So sharing things online is not just a way to confront the industry And merge together art and technology development But it's also a mechanism to confront and organize the community internally too And we can have a discussion about that later if you want But we have people who see an open movie and find a useful blender and start using it and give things back By complaining about bugs or requesting new features or by hiring people to make them or by actually starting to code themselves And the nature and scale of these contributions and their quantity shapes to a large extent the degree of influence that one gets in the community So to gain more influence one needs to contribute or to share more Which results of course in more relationships and more art and more software and that's great And here it gets interesting also when we get money in the picture because when companies I think come invest and invest in blender That's great, but they also might suddenly reconfigure the balance of influence in the organization of the community Suddenly some people may get more influence and over code or over art development than others And I think this is just something to be aware about Another thing as we know as in other community there is a lot of friction over the direction of technical and artistic development And so I found it interesting to learn that when requests for features or complaints become too many or too controversial Making an open film is a great way to resolve some of these controversies and move on So I think that the open films have been very important in developing not just art and software But also in sustaining organizing and pushing the development of the community to But and here I'm going moving towards my conclusion Uh, there comes one question why there are no more people doing open movies And I've been talking to people who have tried to make open movies, but I failed or it has taken too much time They've run out of resources things have happened And I've been wondering why why why why And so far my conclusion is that to be able to get artists developers hardware money And to donate them as an open movie To give them away Requires a lot of capital that very few possess In the community and here I don't talk only about financial capital and money But also about personal capital in the form of connections powers to make people Do things access to the industry to an audience and to hardware The time and experience to organize a pipeline to find all the equipment needed and so on It also most importantly requires management skills And to really be able to manage and organize a project a fluid community and a team within a production So one thing that perhaps the blender community could reflect upon Is how to try to help people with fewer resources and fewer of this capital to do stuff And here I don't mean necessarily helping with more tutorials on blender or With more codes help with learning blender But here I'm talking about facing the reality of a production How to organize it where to get cheap hardware free or free hardware How to manage conflicts within a production and so on because a successful open movie is the one that is managed well And not just the one made with talented people and great software. So I think that's maybe The blender community could try talking more about management And organization of work so that we make project finished And another question and this is my almost next slide almost final slide Another question is why despite all the sharing there are no remixes of the open movies And why we don't see more remixes and uses of the artwork And I think that here sadly we end up in a cold reality of the consequences of this historical Hundred and more years of separation between the logics of the field of technology development and art production Because for developer using and extending the code is the most natural thing to do But for the artist, this is not the case Artists use Other people's work for inspiration and training But their main currency is creating original works with a unique signature The artistic field is simply much more autonomous That that of technology development and works with specific capital, which is the personal portfolio And the individual creative energy that one puts in his works So blender artists whom I interviewed said that they could use some assets But they would feel more comfortable with creating their own projects and original characters And remixing other artistic work usually does not give much to their reputation But it strengthens more the reputation of the original author because of the need to credit them So basically artists don't dare to remix because they don't gain as much from that as when they create something original When they want to build their creative capital, which we trade today in the creative industries So sharing assets and films becomes more a matter of making an artistic statement and putting it to circulate free online It's about free access rather than making new things out of it And this obviously keeps recreating this division between art and technology development Which blender tries and I think quite successfully has managed to erase through sharing And this is perhaps something to think about and see whether it can be changed in how So these were some thoughts and I'll stop here Probably there's a time for one or two questions, but I'll be very okay Then I'll be very happy to continue the conversation outside. Thank you