The journey towards being a FOSS-only artist through Debian GNU/Linux

Track: Debian in the Arts

Type: Other

Room: Auditório

Time: Jul 26 (Fri), 17:00

Duration: 0:45

We walked through the information age towards the fourth industrial revolution and are now facing what has been described as “the age of surveillance capitalism”. Liberty is again being threatened and computer software pervades every single act of our daily routines. Even our sense of self is at stake when e-book readers and TVs can gather more information about our feelings, emotions and reactions than ourselves. Who are we anyhow? In a somewhat marginal, far-from-the-mainstream trend, programmers and enthusiasts work on a different direction, one that is closer to what the roots of this digital revolution were about. Thanks to these warriors we are now able to run a 100% free computer system on our homes, one that does not subjugate us, a freedom respecting, collectively developed and transparent environment with which we can do our computing our way, with no big brother to pull our strings and rob us from our will. In this talk / concert we will present how far FOSS has come as general purpose workbench and discuss about how a musician, artist and engineer struggled for two decades in the search of a platform to perform his craft that doesn’t compromise his freedom and ethics. Even though we still face many challenges ahead (fragmentation and lack of hardware support to name a couple), like an empty canvas to a painter, a Debian-powered computer in 2019 allows a sound designer to create textures, rhythms and ambiences, to bend time and space, to manipulate reality.

This talk/performance is targeted to users and developers interested in helping to pave the way for GNU/Linux as a creators’ platform. Art is freedom, music is freedom, our hearing capabilities and sensibility to sound is what kept us alive as a species in our caves at night, hundreds of thousands of years ago, and it is time to fight again.

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