Dear Spectres,
last weekend the exhibition Anna Kournikova
Deleted By Memeright Trusted System - Art in the
Age of Intellectual Property opened its doors at
the PHOENIX Halle in Dortmund, Germany. PHOENIX
Halle until 1998 used to be part of the gigantic
steelworks of Phoenix-West and since 2003 is used
by Hartware MedienKunstVerein as a venue for
media art exhibitions.
The exhibition which will be on view until 19
October 2008 is curated by Francis Hunger and
myself. It is part of the collaborative project
Work 2.0 - Copyright and Creative Work in the
Digital Age jointly developed by HMKV and
iRights.info.
The exhibition features 26 projects by
AGENCY (BE), Daniel Garcia Andújar (ES), Walter
Benjamin (US), Pierre Bismuth (FR), Christian von
Borries (DE), Christophe Bruno (FR), Claire
Chanel Scary Sherman (US), Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ),
Fred Froehlich (DE), Nate Harrison (US), John
Heartfield (DE), Michael Iber (DE), Laibach/Novi
kolektivizem (SI), Kembrew McLeod (US), Sebastian
Lütgert (DE), Monochrom (AT), Negativland and Tim
Maloney (US), Der Plan (DE), Ramon Pedro (CH),
David Rice (US), Ines Schaber (DE), Alexei
Shulgin Aristarkh Chernyshev (Electroboutique,
RU), Cornelia Sollfrank (DE), Stay Free (US),
Jason Torchinsky (US), UBERMORGEN.COM
Alessandro Ludovico Paolo Cirio (CH/AT/IT), a.o.
Check out www.hmkv.de for detailed information.
I wrote the following text for the exhibition
catalogue which will be published in early
September 2008.
A timely coincidence with Florian's recent
posting on the museum of the stealing of souls
...
Greetings,
Inke
www.hmkv.de
www.iRights.info
--
Inke Arns
Use = Sue
On the Freedom of Art in the Age of 'Intellectual Property'
You can't use it without my permission ... I'm gonna sue your ass!
(Negativland Tim Maloney, Gimme the Mermaid, music video, 4:45 min., 2000)
The words above are yelled by Disney's Little
Mermaid in the furious voice of a copyright
lawyer in the music video Gimme the Mermaid1 by
the band Negativland and the Disney animated
filmmaker Tim Maloney. Made for Black Flag's song
Gimme Gimme Gimme, this video shot in the early
1980s aesthetic is deliberately sited - as a
quasi-political aesthetic statement that also
diametrically opposes the prevailing Zeitgeist -
at the start of the exhibition Anna Kournikova
Deleted By Memeright Trusted System - Art in the
Age of Intellectual Property.
1970s/1990s: Plunderphonics
Negativland is a Californian 'plunderphonics'
band that was founded in the late 1970s and works
with collage and sampling techniques. In 1991 it
released the non-commercial single U2, which
included samples from the U2 song I Still Haven't
Found What I'm Looking For, and led to copyright
litigation by the Island Records label on behalf
of the rock band U2. Although Negativland tried
to describe their usage of the samples as 'fair
use', they were obliged to recall and destroy the
entire pressing. The costs of the trial brought
the band to the brink of financial ruin.
'Plunderphonics', a term coined by the Canadian
musician Jon Oswald at a Toronto conference in
1985, is used to describe music consisting
exclusively of samples of other music.2 For
Oswald, 'plunderphonics' are conceptual pieces of
music made up exclusively - in contrast to
current sampling methods - of samples of a single
artist, for instance material (typically vocals
or rhythms) by James Brown. Oswald's
non-commercial album Plunderphonics of 1989
contained twenty-five tracks 'compressed' in this
way, each one consisting of material by a
different artist. Among other songs, Michael
Jackson's Bad had been broken down into the
smallest musical units and re-assembled under the
title Dab. Oswald minutely listed every sample on
the cover of his album. The cover of Dab was a
'revealing' montage of the cover of Michael
Jackson's album Bad. After the Canadian Recording
Industry Association threatened Jon Oswald with
uncompromising litigation (and, as a consequence,
financial problems) for copyright infringement,
he was forced to destroy all the records not yet
in circulation.3
1960s: Cut-Up
The 'Cut-Up' technique served as important
inspiration to Oswald's concept of
plunderphonics. Brion Gysin and William
Burroughs, whose book Naked Lunch had just
appeared, invented Cut-Up in the Beat Hotel in
Paris on 1 October 1959. The technique involves
randomly cutting up found written and audio
material then re-assembling it according to
chance.4 Some of the resultant sentences contain
amusing nonsense, while others appear to have an
encrypted meaning. Gysin and Burroughs also used
tape recorders, and dragged the recording tape
across the recording heads manually, with the
result that entirely different sounds and words
were suddenly to be heard. 'It was as if a virus
was driving the word material from one mutation
to the next',5 and Burroughs found it appropriate
