1. Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art
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ABSTRACT
THE TERRAIN OF THE REMIX
EMERGENT ART AND ARTISTS
In the first book to discuss the global politics of creativity in a digital age,
Carolyn Guertin takes a uniquely Canadian perspective to explore
emergent models of authorship. Her wide-ranging study roams from highbrow conceptual art to vernacular video in a quest to understand the
process of the creation of new media forms by international artists who use
technology to challenge established modes. These new practices mark the
death of creativity and the rebirth of a new self-reflexive creative practice.
Redefining authorship within remix culture, the book identifies the
potential in the social nature of electronic works to foster a genealogy of
new creative practices – from sampling to mashups to digital
anthropophagy – on a global scale. After first exploring creative practices
by Western artists, the final third of the book explores creative practices in
the East that have been unfettered by copyright restrictions. Wildly
influenced by boatloads of Western cultural artifacts, the new forms might
be born of Western garbage, but are transformed into something entirely
new via productive mistranslation and digital anthropophagy.
The dominant mode of creative practice in the 21st century is the remix, the
act of resituating one or more existing works in a new context. Remixing is
a conversation, a critique and a protest all wrapped up in a single package.
The remix seeks to explore the social nature of creation through the
(sometimes hostile) act of appropriation and re-integration. This book
explores a variety of different kinds of remix techniques, including:
Sampling
Mashups
Remakes, adaptations and intertexts
Capture, streamed or visualized data
Surveillance Art
Hacks
Data mining
Temporal manipulation
Creative cannibalism
Digital anthropophagy
Productive Mistranslation
A selection of the artists and works discussed in the book include:
Addictive TV, Beam Up the Bass
Christen Bach, Bear Untitled: D.O. Edit
Michael Banowitz & Noah Sadona, This Aborted Earth: The Quest Begins
Perry Bard, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake
Alan Bigelow, Brainstrips
Josh Bricker, Post-Newtonianism
Jim Campbell, The Library
Cao Fei (China Tracy), iMirror
Katarina Cisek, Highrise, The Thousandth Tower, & Out My Window
Jordan Crandell, Heatseeking
Danger Mouse, Grey Album
Brendan Dawes, Don’t Look Now
Rod Dickinson & Steve Rushton, Who, What Where, When, Why and How
Atom Egoyan, 8 ½ Screens
Hasan Elahi, Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project
Omar Fast, CNN Concatenated
Feng Mengbo, Long March: Restart & Q4U
Stephen Fry, MyFry
Steve Gibson, Grand Theft Bicycle
Khaled Hafez, The Video Diaries
JODI.org
Carmin Karasic, FloodNet
Adeena Karasick, All the Lingual Ladies
Scott Kildall, Paradise Ahead
Raphael Lozano-Hammer, Surface Tension
Manu Luksch, Faceless
Kevin MacDonald, Life in a Day
Dayna McLeod, That’s right, Diana Barry. You needed me.
Lev Manovich, Soft Cinema
Christian Marclay, The Clock
Eva and Franco Mattes, Catt, & Synthetic Performances
Mauj Collective
Mez
Miao Xiaochun, Last Judgment in Cyberspace
Movie Bar Code
Huma Mulji and Shilpa Gupta, The Aar-Paar Projects
Ni Haifeng, Of the Departure and the Arrival
Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, No Ghost Just a Shell
Pirates of the Amazon
Pratchaya Phinthong, Alone Together
Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez, Digital Anthropophagy: A Manifesto
Rashid Rana, In The Middle of Nowhere
Raqs Media Collective
Evan Roth, FAT (Free Art and Technology) Lab
Lindsay Scroggins, Wonderland Mafia
Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith, Pixel Pirate 2
Cornelia Sollfrank, Female Extension
Bill Spinhoven, It’s About Time/The Time Stretcher
Florian Thalhofer, Planet Galata
Thomson and Craighead, Time Machine in Alphabetical Order
Ubermorgan.com, Amazon Noir
Camille Utterback, Liquid Time
Wang Jianwei, Connection
Dan Warren, Son of Strelka, Son of God
Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al, The Impermanence Agent
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It then establishes a tri-part criteria for understanding how and why those
aesthetics or remix techniques work.
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Ambivalence and Authorship
The Third Space of Authorship
The New Prohibition
Following the death of creativity, Digital Prohibition maps the rise of three
new aesthetic practices in new media in an age of perfect copies. The first
is interruption (which includes a process of stoppage and repetition), and
marks a shift from the old creative model’s focus on content to a processoriented work of art. It is a work that opens an image or text to create a
space for critical engagement. The second, disturbance, which brings
together an action with an event, is a new kind of aesthetic activism –
artivism or tactical media – for the socially networked age. Looking at the
psychic and social consequences of technology and aesthetics, this section
explores the importance of performance in an age of consumer culture for
the creation of tactical media as an agent of new political practices and
events. The third practice is that of capture/leakage, which is a meeting of
performance with documentation. In an age of information overload,
everything is potentially subject to capture and to surveillance. At the same
time, once the data exist they are always already potentially leaky; the
more tightly information is controlled, paradoxically, the more likely it is
to be released out into the data environment. In the spirit of protocol and
data, documentation is coming to the fore as a new art form in its own
right.
Part One: The Aesthetics of Appropriation
Interruption (stoppage + repetition)
Disturbance (action + event)
Capture/Leakage (performance + documentation)
Dynamic Data and Augmented Bodies
Part Two: Authorship
From Karaoke Culture to Vernacular Video
‘Aberrant Decoding’ and Atactical Aesthetics
Google Empire: Smart Art, Intelligent Agents
Real Time
Part Three: Creative Cannibalism and Digital Anthropophagy
Digital Anthropophagy
Translation: Performing the In Between
‘Productive Mistranslations’ (China and Pakistan)
Conclusion
RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2012
www.PosterPresentations.com
Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith
(--THI
CONCLUSIONS:
PRODUCTIVE MISTRANSLATIONS
More and more, by stepping outside of the venues of commercial culture
and mass media, artists and activists around the globe are seizing the
materials at hand and repurposing their tools to their own ends. The art that
they make or the movements that they start are designed to foster dialog.
Mass media culture belongs to no one and is all too easily coopted by
powerful forces to be deemed trustworthy any more. The future of culture
depends on people translating the materials in their midst into materials
that enable them to tell their own stories and to share embodied
perspectives. Science fiction author Neil Gaiman says, “We have the right,
and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our
stories” (quoted in Jenkins, 2009, 109). Digital media, social media, and
the powerful digital tools we have at our fingertips enable us to do just
that. Digital prohibition is upon us and, just like those crazy speakeasy
times in the early days of the twentieth century, people’s creative
expression will not be denied and, for a time at least, we have some of the
most powerful distribution tools ever invented at hand and free to use.
Activism does not happen in digital spaces, but digital technol- ogies and
social media enable people to gather and express themselves, and to share
their art. Dutch artist and critic Florian Cramer says in his article “The
Fiction of the Creative Industries” (2011),
For young people, TV has been killed by YouTube, the music industry by
mp3, DVD profits by bittorrent, newspapers by the web. But even more
significant than these shifts of consumer technology was the digital
revolution of production. Most musicians no longer need a record label,
but can master their music on a laptop. Thanks to the last generation of
inexpensive digital cameras, cinematic films can now be shot and edited at
home by freelancers. Writers no longer need publishers, but often are better
off self-publishing via print-on-demand and e-books. In all these areas,
“creatives” become allrounders. Division of labor is decreasing, not
increasing, with many industries, big agencies and highly staffed bureaus
becoming dinosaurs of the past.
In those dusty bureaus a whole new mode of creative expression has
quickened into life and will not be silenced. Creativity does not care what
medium it is expressed in, but the availability of digital tools is fostering a
creative renaissance – despite draconian copyright laws – that will not stop.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Continuum International Publishers, London and New York
Hardcover, Paperback and Kindle Editions
978-1-4411-3190-4 pb
April 2012
CONTACT: Carolyn Guertin, PhD
Email: carolyn.guertin@gmail.com
Website: https://mavspace.uta.edu/guertin/portfolio/
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