The Commons

Much of Liverpool is built upon a former commons

The commons are resources over which there are no legal right of exclusion; such as the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ideas we share through the languages we speak. Culture, and creativity itself can be thought of as a commons-based peer production.

The commons have been slowly depleted in Europe, since their legal formation in the middle ages. The drive to expropriate the commons, to convert resources into various forms of public or private property has accompanied state democracies as they rolled out ‘public’ projects, or followed the dominance of the ‘market’ as an ideological force.

Simply stated, property is created with the guarantee that an individual -or legally defined body- can exclude others from the use or benefit of that resource. The commons on the other-hand, are a collective resource over which we all have rights of access.

The historic idea of the commons has been re-animated through a recent corporate drive to expropriate knowledge as an intellectual property; throught the development of Free, Libre or Open Source software [FLOSS] to contest proprietory software; the defense of environmental and genetic resources against private interests, in fact through an extraordinary range of otherwise disparate spheres connected to the public domain.

As artists, we are frequently caught-up in processes of public celebration and ‘regeneration’ through the instrumental use of culture; or, encouraged through the traditional structures of arts distribution to restrict access to our ideas and products.

By animating a discussion located in the idea of the commons, we want to explore the structures and forces through which visual art and culture are made legible. The commons are not a universal value, but a contested set of expectations; the commons with its distributed events, are a vehicle for exploring those expectations.

All events start at 2pm. and last approximately one hour.

9th October 2004: 2.pm

The Civil Court in the newly restored St George's Hall (1854)
David Berry and Giles Moss from the Libre Society

St Georges Hall is one of the largest, and finest, neo-classical buildings in Britain; built to promote civic pride in a town (at that time) otherwise dominated by commercial architecture. The building contains Great Halls for meetings, festivals, exhibitions and concerts, but it also houses the magnificent Crown and Civil court.

A Civil Court dispenses justice based on Common Law, a judicial system founded on precedent and common knowledge

In the Libre Society manifesto (Item 4) David Berry and Giles Moss state:

"Unlike physical objects, concepts and ideas can be shared, copied and reused without diminishment. No matter how many people use and interpret a particular concept, the creators' use of that concept is not surrendered or reduced. But, much money is to be made when creative flows of knowledge and ideas become scarce products to be traded in the market place. Thus increasingly, intellectual property law is providing profiteers with vast accumulations of wealth. Indeed, immaterial labour (based on information, knowledge and communication) has now replaced industrial manufacture as the main producer of wealth in the age of technological capitalism."

Assemble at the front entrance near the statue of Lord Beaconsfield and you will be escorted to the Civil Court

St George's Hall is opposite Lime St Station

16th October 2004: 2pm

St John's Gardens (1904)
Jane Longmore, historian.

St John's Gardens is miraculously the only open space to have survived from the Great Heath, part of the extensive Commons which formed the east bank of the former pool, of Liverpool.

Jane Longmore is a historian working on the economic history of Liverpool in the, she has been interested in the ’primitive’ expropriation of common land during the 17th century to the current resurgence in public/private ownership and commons based resources.

How do we keep these forces in balance to ensure a richly creative culture and society?

Assemble around the statue of William Gladstone
St John's Gardens is behind St George's Hall and 3mins walk from Lime St Station

6th November 2004: 2pm

The only registered Commons in Liverpool, at Wavertree.
Activist Mike Lane of Whistleblower, followed by a tour of historic Wavertree by Mike Chitty of the Wavetree Historical Society

Mike Lane is a local activist and campaigner in Kensington one of the poorest areas of Liverpool. Kensington has been designated as a New Deal for Communities (NDC) zone and received £62 million in public money to help economically regenerate the area. Mike feels that this money is being used to slowly decant the working class community to enable the City Council and its private sector partners to complete the intended gentrification of Kensington.

Assemble near the Lock-up on the Common: a traffic island triangle bounded by the High Street, Mill Lane and

from Liverpool Town Centre 15min by bus no.
Information on Wavertree

13th November 2004: 2.pm

The Hornby Room of the Central Library (1875)
Colin Dyas, Development Manager of Liverpool Vision

The Central Library evolved from the Free Public Library established in Liverpool after The Public Libraries Act became law in 1850. The Act enabled local councils to fund a "Public Library or Museum of Art and Science or both" and for the first time, ordinary people could enjoy common rate-paid access to the world's storehouse of knowledge, art and literature.

Colin Dyas is Development Manager of Liverpool Vision an independent company established to bring together key public and private sector agencies to produce a strategy - the Strategic Regeneration Framework (SRF) - that guides the regeneration of Liverpool City Centre.

Assemble in the Hornby Room, off the Picton Reading Room in the Central Library.
The Central Library is on William Brown Street 4 min walk from Lime St Station, between the Walker Art Gallery and Liverpool Museum

The events are archived at the commons, for more information on the Biennial