OPUS [Open Platform for Unlimited Signification] is an online space to promote imaginative and experimental works by a community of collaborators including authors, artists, media practitioners and the general public.
The OPUS project recognizes that the internet has transformed traditional ideas of authorship, of literary, artistic and creative works, and hence there is an increased need for a public domain or cultural commons space that allows people to engage in critical dialogue with each other and their works, through a process of sharing, collaboration and critique.
OPUS is an online space and a software which enables you to view, create and exhibit media objects, and make modifications on work done by others, in the spirit of collaboration and the sharing of creativity. OPUS users can work together to share, create and transform images, sounds, videos/movies and texts. All the media files in the OPUS Domain are free to:
view (see, read, listen)
download (the media objects)
transform (modify, or radically re-work them)
upload (redistribute them within the OPUS Domain)
OPUS and Free Software Culture
These freedoms are analogous to the freedoms to view, access, modify and distribute that are at the core of the culture of free software. The free software model of collaborative creativity is an inspiration for OPUS.
You can think of OPUS as a platform where media practitioners, artists, authors and any/everyone else, can present work, enter into collaborative and hybrid media experiments, and play with the meaning of media objects by transforming the downloaded media objects, which are in a sense a 'source code' to work with.
Unlike in software, however, whenever each object gets modified and recirculated, it does not come as a version replacing an earlier version. There can be no hierarchy of meaning and affect in cultural objects. This is why OPUS offers the concept of Rescension to understand the transformations of cultural material in a collaborative environment.
A Rescension is a media object that is newly created and uploaded on to the OPUS Domain by a pracitioner after transforming one or more media objects (Sources and/or other Rescensions) downloaded from the OPUS Domain.
[The word Rescension comes from the practice of exegetical studies and textual criticism, and is taken to mean a re-configuration and re-working of prior textual, or narrative materials in such a way that the pre-existing material is not effaced. A Rescension is either a re-arrangement of an existing text, or a re-working of an existing text, incorporating new materials, and/or deleting some old ones, or , a new edition with a substantive commentary or annotation.]
OPUS is a collaboration with Silvan Zurbruegg (main coding) with support from Bauke Freiburg (architecture), Pankaj Kaushal (coding) and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee (interface design)
Also see Mattew Fuller's analysis of Opus in his essay Digital Objects.
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