Because their business is not our culture

oXcars 2009,  Clip (1minute)

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The oXcars 2009, the Movie (45 minutes)

oXcars 2009, The Movie (english subtitles) from eXgae on Vimeo

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For the second year, during one week, Barcelona is set to become the World Capital of Shared Culture. Over  a hundred participants from all fields of culture will take part in the oXcars free culture Awards Ceremony and a week-long program of events.

As things stand, our access to knowledge is threatened and obstructed in the name of “artists”, but most artists in the digital age do not support these restrictions. Times have changed. The Internet allows the horizontal exchange of culture and information, and the means of cultural production and dissemination must adapt to the democratic potential of these new developments: certainly not the other way around.

There is more than economic dividends at stake; we are talking about the very way of understanding culture and the right to access to information (which, we mustn’t forget, has been hard-won over centuries of struggle). We are also talking about our memory, which, in this digital and communications age, is constituted by digital information and forms of communication.

The oXcars  bring down a monopoly.

We don’t want to contribute to nurturing generations of cultural parasites, we are in favour of culture that is alive, participative, productive. We, civil society, demand the ‘lost profits’ from all the knowledge that is being withheld and kept from public use in the name of private profits.

The current financial crisis has shown that we are living in a system that expects us to look after the interests of banks and multinationals, in the hope that one day they’ll let us work for them in a return for the crumbs of their profits. The philosophy of free culture, inherited from the free software movement, is the best empirical proof that a new kind of ethics and a new way of doing business are possible. It has already created an operational new form of production reminiscent of artisan or trade traditions, where the author-producer does not lose control of his or her output, and does not need the mediation of big monopolies. One that is based on autonomous initiatives in solidarity with others, on exchange according to each person’s abilities and opportunities, on the democratisation of knowledge, education and the means of production and on a fair distribution of earnings according to the work carried out.

After the success of the first oXcars in 2008, which was backed by the document “Greed Breaks the Sack”, which was circulated in the press and through hundreds of online forums and sent to 287 politicians, and made it patently obvious that the culture of our time is the culture that all of us build, share, and enjoy, the oXcars is back for a second year. To recognise, celebrate and spread the achievements and potential of all kinds of culture based a free culture philosophy.

The oXcars, the Show

The oXcars, it’s obvious