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
to use in his first text collages a report on the
state of virus research.
1950s/1980s: Détournement, Plagiarism
A further historical strand - that of
Situationist détournement (reversal, turning) and
Neoist plagiarism - stretches back to the French
poet Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse,
1846-70). In his Poésies (1870), he wrote:
'Plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the
idea of progress. It clasps the author's sentence
tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false
idea, replaces it with the right idea.'6 Florian
Cramer points out that Lautréamont's concept of
plagiarism became the Situationist détournement
in the 1950s and then, thirty years later, was
retranslated into 'plagiarism' by the alternative
anti-copyright cultures.7 The 'Festivals of
Plagiarism' staged in 1988 and the subsequent
year defined plagiarism as the 'conscious
manipulation of pre-existing elements in the
creation of "aesthetic" works. Plagiarism is
inherent in all "artistic" activity, since both
pictorial and literary "arts" function with an
inherited language (...) Plagiarism enriches
human language.'8 The analogue media such as
photocopiers, printed T-shirts, VHS and audio
cassettes used at the Festivals of Plagiarism
(which for their own part plagiarised the Fluxus
festivals and the Neoist Apartment festivals)
resemble those of Mail Art, which worked with
collages and photocopies. This movement, in which
amateur artists interested in Dada and Fluxus
were networked, emerged from Ray Johnson's New
York Correspondence School in the 1960s. While
Mail Art, and in particular Neoism, sought to
undermine the concept of originality by the act
of deliberate repetition, it was astonishingly
the case that 'none of the participants reflected
upon the unlimited capability to copy and
plagiarise digital information.'9
A Broad Culture of Appropriation
The late 1980s were possibly too early still for
such a step to be taken. The examples described
above (which were, admittedly, obscure to the
larger public) represent a broad culture of
appropriation in the twentieth century that using
images, texts, recordings and other fragments of
culture speaks about precisely the same culture -
almost in the sense of a 'close reading'. The
most prominent representative of this culture of
appropriation is Pop Art, which was founded in
the late-1950s by Richard Hamilton in Great
Britain and by Andy Warhol, among others, in the
USA. This artistic movement, which counts as a
precursor of the postmodern, deployed and
appropriated images of the Western world of
consumerism and merchandise. In the Soviet Union,
the 1970s saw the analogous development of
so-called Sots Art that made use of the visual
arsenal offered by the world of Communist
merchandise and propaganda. The protagonists of
the US-American 'Appropriation Art' of the 1970s
and '80s produced deliberate and strategically
considered copies of works by other artists (for
instance, Sherrie Levine's After Walker Evans,
1971) in order to undermine concepts like
originality and authenticity. 'Found footage',
for its part, describes works of film that
incorporate and manipulate existing film material
(examples include work by Martin Arnold, Douglas
Gordon, Oliver Pietsch). Radical concepts of
appropriation are formulated in the early stories
of Jorge Luis Borges as well as in the
poststructuralist theory of intertextuality,
published in 1966, of the literary theorist Julia
Kristeva: 'Any text is constructed as a mosaic of
quotations; any text is the absorption and
transformation of another.'10 Both explicit
intertexuality (that is, chosen as conscious
strategy) and implicit intertextuality subvert
the nineteenth-century Romantic concept of the
artist-genius autonomously creating from within,
and replace this notion with a more contemporary
concept for which the reception (and processing
of the existing) is more important than the
production of what is genuinely new.
Intellectual Property as the 'Oil of the Twenty-First Century'
In a post-industrial society production is no
longer confined to material goods (such as steel
and coal) but increasingly extends to immaterial
goods. However, a significant difference exists
between the two: immaterial goods like knowledge
and information can be reproduced without
impairment, which is not the case with material
goods. But in order to be able to function within
a value chain, the distribution of these
immaterial goods must be restricted - namely with
the aid of patent, copyright and trademark law.
All these instruments are forms of 'intellectual
property'.Mark Getty, the founder of Getty
Images, which as the world's leading provider of
stock images (alongside Corbis) owns over seventy
million digitised images, therefore aptly
described 'intellectual property' as the 'oil of
the twenty-first century'.
As a 'hotly contested factor in our economy as a
whole',11 copyright law is in the process of
becoming the market-regulating instrument of
post-industrial society. The consequences of this
development are considerable: 'The expansion of
copyright law is leading to an unparalleled
concentration of resources in the hands of
globally active quasi-monopolists in the media
and IT markets.'12 The philosopher Eberhard
Ortland therefore compares the question of future
access to 'intellectual property' with the issue
of access to water, a resource necessary to life.
'The question of who controls access to the
immaterial goods and data streams - and to which
conditions access in a particular case is linked
- will become one of the central questions of
power in the twenty-first century. It is not just
a matter of vast sums of money; elementary civil
liberties are also at stake - such as the right
to inform oneself without hindrance in the
framework of the knowledge available, and the
right to communicate this information to
others.'13 An outlook on the unparalleled
privatisation of intellectual property is given
in the exhibition Anna Kournikova Deleted By
Memeright Trusted System by Kembrew McLeod's
project Freedom of Expression(tm), for which the
American university professor trademarked14 the
term 'freedom of expression', and threatened with
legal action anybody who used his trademark
without the express authority of the owner.
Already in 1997, the Spanish artist Daniel García
Andújar collected for his project Language
(Property)15 vast numbers of sentences that are
now registered trademarks and therefore the
property of their (corporate) owner. Examples
include 'Where do you want to go today? (tm)'
(Microsoft) or 'What you never thought
possible(tm)' (Motorola). The overriding motto of
Andújar's work was consistent: 'Remember,
language is not free(tm)'.
Asymmetrical Expansion of Copyright to the Advantage of Exploiters
'The past ten years have witnessed a progressive
expansion of copyright - but by no means in the
interest of creative activity, and even less so
with reference to the common good.'16 The lawyer
Reto Hilty, director of the Max-Planck-Institut
fuer Geistiges Eigentum, Wettbewerbs- und
Steuerrecht, talks of a 'dangerous fiction to
which we succumb almost passionately - but
without reflecting - namely the notion that
copyright protects the author.'17 It is necessary
to distinguish between three agents whose
interests copyright law must take into
consideration: authors (creators), consumers, and
the 'copyright industries' (Hilty), in other
words: the exploiters. Hilty points out that the
last-named group is 'incredibly skilled at being
perceived under the title of "author"' by using
the generic term 'owner of the rights' that
conceals however the fact that author and
exploiter 'by no means pursue the same
interests'.18 That the exploiters desire to
extend the copyright protection is
understandable. 'The usual formula "more
protection = more creativity" is highly
acceptable, being terribly easy to understand.'19
However, it is for the most part the case that
nobody notices that the hands of precisely the
authors - the actual creative forces - are being
bound at the same time. Not just since the
beginning of the twenty-first century has
creativity often been - as described above -
're-creativity' from authors reliant upon open
access to knowledge and cultural artefacts. This
aspect is confirmed by Hilty: 'As we know, nobody
is in a position to create something new without
taking recourse to the pre-existing. And in
consequence we should not be allowed to advance
copyright to the point that the production of new
works is hindered by, of all things, copyright
law. But we are well on the way ... to doing
precisely that.'20
'Digital Dilemma': Tension Between Participation and Exploitation
The above situation is exacerbated by the
so-called digital dilemma. At the very moment
when digitalisation and the possibility of
worldwide access to knowledge could exercise a
positive influence on the availability of
content, considerable constraints are being
placed - paradoxically - upon access, with the
result that digitalisation is leading to a
regular scarcity. The reason for this development
is to be found in the sharp reaction of the
rights industry to the ability of digital works
to be copied and distributed with no impairment
of quality. Since 1990, the exploiters have been
pressing for the introduction of technical
protection measures (Digital Rights Management,
DRM). However, not only do these technical
barriers prevent the mass copying of digital data
in, for instance, Internet exchange forums, they
also make it impossible to carry out actions that
are guaranteed by existing copyright law, for
instance, the right to make a copy for private
use.21 In 1996 the World Intellectual Property
Organisation (WIPO) passed two agreements
relating to the internet that place under penalty
any 'cracking' of this protection.22 Furthermore,
the right to re-sell digital works was
abolished.23 Now that DRM has proved not to
function, however, the rights industry (in
particular, the International Federation of the
Performing Industry IFPI) is currently targeting
the infrastructure level of the Internet Service
Providers (ISPs) with demands for internet
filtering and barring those who repeatedly
infringe copyright from using the internet. By
means of the multilateral Anti Counterfeiting
Trade Agreement (ACTA), the US-American,
European, and Japanese rights industries are at
present trying to enforce these and other
measures worldwide in the course of clandestine
negotiations that bypass the national parliaments
and the appropriate UNO agencies, the WIPO and
the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Any
discussion in the framework of these bodies would
entail publicity - something that would not be
beneficial to the cause of the exploiters.
Let us return, however, to the paradoxical
situation presented by the ' digital dilemma'
that Hilty, too, describes as highly problematic:
'The greater the number of works available
online, the wider the theoretical range of
possibilities of usage; yet in practical terms
this usage is proving to be increasingly
difficult the less traditional - that is,
physical - copies of works are being produced.'24
For if works can only be used online, users are
at the mercy of the conditions drawn up by the
owners of the rights, and as mentioned above the
rights are generally owned not by the authors but
by the exploiting parties who favour the
expansion of copyrights, digital rights
management (DRM) and controlled access to the
internet - a de facto ban on copying (and more
besides). The copyright law currently in force,
which has yet to be adequately adjusted to the
digital age, therefore affects 'access to
knowledge on the net in a much more far-reaching
and fundamental manner,' according to Jeanette
Hofmann, 'than is the case in the analogue
world.'25 Hofmann describes the digital dilemma
as follows: 'In the much-quoted information
society the possession of and the access rights
to knowledge of all kinds are developing equally
into a pre-defined breaking point for democracy
as well as into a growth-intensive value-added
chain. In the relation of tension between claims
to democratic participation and economic
exploitation interests lies (...) the core of the
digital dilemma. The manner in which exclusive
exploitation rights and public entitlement to
usage of knowledge, or knowledge wares, are
brought into balance in the future is a political
matter likely to become of the central
distributive questions in the new economy.'26
On the Future of Art in the Age of 'Intellectual Property'
'Copyright law pursues the goal of safeguarding
the generation of knowledge by furnishing the
producers with control over the usage and
distribution of their works. At the same time,
however, it follows the intention of safeguarding
public access to this knowledge - not just
because the generation of knowledge is recognised
to be a process involving a division of labour,
but obviously also because all those who generate
or distribute knowledge by necessity themselves
take recourse to existing stocks of knowledge.'27
The expansion of copyright that at present
amounts to a de facto expansion of exploiters'
rights is bringing about an 'increase in the
opportunities to deliberately or negligently
violate third-party copyrights as well as an
increase in the risk of being falsely accused of
violating third-party copyrights (...)
particularly in those cases in which collage or
sampling techniques are deployed, or in
conceptual art.'28 That is why the ranks of
critics of the expansion of intellectual property
rights are swelling - particularly in areas where
'intellectual property' in its present form
'turns against freedom in art (and science) and
threatens to obstruct the production of new
works.'29
In view of these developments, the exhibition
Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted
System - Art in the Age of Intellectual Property
mounted on the 2,200 square metres of floor space
in the PHOENIX Halle on the former site of
Phoenix-West steelworks in Dortmund inquires into
the implications for art and music that
appropriates, samples and cites existing material
in an era of copyright (or intellectual property)
law increasingly favouring exclusive exploitation
rights as opposed to public entitlement to usage.
In contrast to the assertion of the copyrights
industry that the expansion of copyright (for
whom?) signifies more creativity, the exhibition
posits the thesis that creativity is, and
continues to be, possible only if artists are in
a position to create new work with recourse to
existing material. Appropriating art that speaks
about culture by referring to cultural artefacts
and deploying found aesthetic material will only
be able to continue to come into being if in the
future too it is assured that sufficient
allowance is made for the democratic rights of
participation (of consumers, but of originators,
too!) alongside the justified economic interests
of the originators and exploiters.
If the development of copyright and other
intellectual property rights continues along the
present lines, it will become questionable
whether sufficient consideration is given to
general participation. Tightened up in the
interest of the exploiting parties, copyright law
would turn against the freedom of art and
degenerate into an effective instrument for
suppressing innovation. It would become
increasingly difficult to talk about culture by
using images, logos or sound fragments of
precisely that culture. A foretaste of such a
development is already given by the vast
reduction in the usage of sampling in hip hop
since the legal departments of major labels have
started to aggressively pursue the unlicensed
usage of samples by musicians signed to other
labels. In this sense, it would be possible to
ask in regard to the works featured in this
exhibition: What would happen to, for instance,
Fred Fröhlich's digital animation Volume 1 that,
made up of over ten thousand 'stock photographs',
represents a heightened form of 'plunderphonics'
or found footage? This work speaks, just as does
Der Plan's karaoke music video Hohe Kante (2004),
explicitly and critically about our times - using
images of our times' everyday culture.
Happy Birthday To You
The fictitious newspaper announcement of the
death in 2067 of the ex-professional tennis
player and model Anna Kournikova referred to in
the exhibition title Anna Kournikova Deleted By
Memeright Trusted System describes not only a
distant future but to some degree the reality of
the present day. The unpleasantly formulated
notice briefly reports that Kournikova, who
copyrighted her appearance, or her 'trademark',
against illegal lookalikes, was identified as an
illicit copy of her own self while on a
non-registered trip in the Asian-Pacific region,
and was deleted by the high-power laser beam of a
satellite operated by the Memeright Trusted
System.
However, a similar scenario might play at your
next birthday party if such a system were to be
installed. Did you know that the song Happy
Birthday To You30 is owned by Time Warner, the
world's largest company in the field of
entertainment? Every time you sing the song
without the owner's permission you are guilty of
copyright infringement. To this extent, the
equation of 'use' and 'sue' is more than just a
play on words. Bear that in mind next time you
throw a party, and obediently pay your licence
fees. The alternative? Don't sing the song.
(Translated by Tom Morrison)
1 Music video for the song of the same title,
published on the Negativland CD Fair Use: The
Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2, 2000.
2 Jon Oswald, 'Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as
a Compositional Prerogative' in Wired Society
Electro-Acoustic Conference (Toronto, 1985),
http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html.
3 The court proceedings against Negativland were
accompanied in 1993 by the appearance of the CVS
Bulletin ('Copyright Violation Squad Bulletin'),
a kind of manifesto of Plunderphonics. See
http://cvs.detritus.net/.
4 As purely poetical methods of generating
unusual images, 'cut-up' and 'fold-in' had
numerous forerunners among the Dadaists and
Surrealists, among the Lettrists and Concrete
poets of the 1950s, in the 'cross-column
readings' that became fashionable as a parlour
game in England around 1770, as well as in the
'ars combinatoria' of the European Mannerists,
who used combination tables to generate generated
so-called opposition metaphors in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries.
5 Carl Weissner, 'Das Burroughs-Experiment' in
Burroughs, eine Bild-Biographie (Berlin, Dirk
Niehsen Verlag, 1994), p. 62.
6 'Le plagiat est nécessaire. Le progrès
l'implique. Il serre de près la phrase d'un
auteur, se sert de ses expressions, efface une
idée fausse, la remplace par l'idée juste.'
(Isidore Ducasse, Poésies, 1870, available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16989).
7 On this, see the panel held on 'Art as
Anticopyright Activism', Wizards of OS 3, Berlin,
2004,
http://www.wizards-of-os.org/archiv/wos_3/programm/panels/freier_content/art_as_anticopright_activism.html.
8 'Plagiarism', Festival of Plagiarism, London, January-February 1988.
9 Florian Cramer, Anti-Copyright in
künstlerischen Subkulturen, lecture held on 22
September 2000,
http://plaintext.cc:70/all/anticopyright_in_kuenstlerischen_subkulturen/anticopyright_in_kuenstlerischen_subkulturen.html.
10 Julia Kristeva, 'Word, dialogue and novel' in
The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford
University Press,
1986), p. 37.
11 Reto M. Hilty, 'Suendenbock Urheberrecht?' in
Geistiges Eigentum und Gemeinfreiheit, eds.
Ansgar Ohly und Diethelm Klippel (Tuebingen, Mohr
Siebeck, 2007), pp. 107-44; here p. 111.
12 Eberhard Ortland, 'Die Schluesselrolle der
Kunst fuer das Urheberrecht' in Urheberrecht im
Alltag. Kopieren, bearbeiten, selber machen /
iRights.info, eds. V. Djordjevic et al. (Bonn,
Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2008), pp.
311-15; here p. 311.
13 Ibid., p. 312.
14 Words can be trademarked but not copyrighted.
15 Shown by HMKV as part of the 2006 exhibition
The Wonderful World of irational.org.
16 Hilty 2007, p. 144.
17 Ibid., p. 113.
18 Ibid., p.114.
19 Ibid., p. 137. The same assertion was made in
the open letter addressed to Federal Chancellor
Merkel by the Federal Association of the German
Music Industry on 'Intellectual Property Day'
(printed in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25
April 2008).
20 Hilty 2007, pp.118-19.
21 www.privatkopie.net
22 The agreements were implemented in the Digital
Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the USA in
1998, and in the EU Directive on Copyright in the
Information Society in 2001.
23 Unlike digital data, material sound carriers
like records, CDs or DVDs may be re-sold, for
instance in second-hand shops.
24 Hilty 2007, p.110.
25 Jeanette Hofmann, 'Das "Digitale Dilemma" und
der Schutz des Geistigen Eigentums', contribution
to conference Wem gehört das Wissen?,
Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin, October 2000,
http://www.wissensgesellschaft.org/themen/publicdomain/dilemma.html.
26 Hofmann 2000.
27 Hofmann 2000.
28 Ortland 2008, p. 312.
29 Ortland 2008, p. 314.
30 The melody was published under the title Good
Morning to All in 1893 by the schoolteachers
Mildred and Patty Hill in their book Song Stories
for the Kindergarten. Children then started to
sing the song with their own lyrics at birthday
parties. In the exhibition, see Illegal Art, CD;
see also Kembrew McLeod, 'Copyright and the Folk
Music Tradition' in id.,Owning Culture.
Authorship, Ownership & Intellectual Property Law
(New York, Peter Lang, 2001), pp. 39-69.
--
Dr. Inke Arns
Künstlerische Leiterin / Artistic Director
Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Güntherstrasse 65
D-44143 Dortmund
T +49 - 231 - 823 106
F +49 - 231 - 882 02 40
M +49 - 176 - 430 62 793
www.inkearns.de
www.hmkv.de
Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System -
Kunst im Zeitalter des Geistigen Eigentums
Art in the Age of Intellectual Property
HMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund
19 July - 19 October 2008
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