rama@xicnet:~$ ls thesis/

Ramiro Augusto Cosentino

Artist and developer — art and technology, free media and radio, musical video games.

Barcelona rc at xicnet.com

burn station: from free software to free music

2013 — 2014
Burn Station: del Software Libre a la Música Libre — un caso de construcción de conocimiento y Cultura Libre Final thesis · Postgraduate in International Management and Policy in Culture and Communication · FLACSO (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences) · Buenos Aires, 2014

The thesis takes Burn Station — the free music distribution project I developed and exhibited internationally between 2003 and 2012 — as a case study in how free software builds knowledge and free culture. It argues that the tools and the politics of free software are not separable: that the same practices which let people share and rebroadcast code also produce new forms of social relation and exchange around information itself.

Rather than treating the project from outside, it contrasts the theory against fieldwork drawn from my own projects and those of others. It was researched entirely from material available on the internet, and written on free software throughout — Ubuntu Studio, LibreOffice Writer and Piratepad — practising the argument it makes.

In Spanish · PDF, 613 KB

Download the thesis (PDF) →