Shannon O'Neill » appropriation

Experimental Music – audio explorations in Australia

Shannon — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:28:26 +0000

I have a chapter in this new book:

Very shortly the book Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia will be hitting the streets.

Written by artists, producers and participants in alternative music-making, and including a companion CD, Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia explores the development of forms, ideas and scenes from the 1970s to the present.

It brings together a wide range of musical experimentation, from post-punk, noise, appropriation, electronic dance and listening music, to free improv, computer process music, experimental radio, instrument building and audiovisual fusions. More soon…

To accompany the book, a website www.experimentalmusicaustralia.net has been created to bring together information about experimental music and sound in Australia. There are 3 features that invite your input:

National Calendar: a web-based calendar (it’s a little bit ugly, but it’s free), to bring together listings from across the country. So if you have a gig, festival, exhibition, conference etc that you’d like listed you can send through information. If you produce multiple events or series you can have editing access.

Artist Directory: Hopefully a comprehensive map of people working in experimental music and sound across Australia. If you would like to be included, download the form, fill it in, and email back, or contact for further information.

Resource List: This is a mega links list starting with information drawn from the book on all things experimental music from gigs, organisations, online journals and a bibliography. Already an unwieldy monster, feel free to send through additions/suggestions.

For all of the above email: info experimentalmusicaustralia.net

I’ll email more when the book is ready for our hot little hands, but in the meantime help make the website a valuable resource!

thanks

Gail Priest

NB: The website www.experimentalmusicaustralia.net is an unfunded, independent activity undertaken to accompany the book Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia.

Out November 2008

Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia published by UNSW Press

RRP $29.95
ordering information
For a limited time there is a
20% pre-order discount

Written by:
Julian Knowles
Ian Andrews with John Blades
Cat Hope
Shannon O’Neill
Bo Daley
Alistair Riddell
Jim Denley
Virginia Madsen
Sean Bridgeman
Gail Priest

edited by Gail Priest

The printed publication Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia was funded by the Australia Council Music Board as part of a series of publications.

[via Nick Mariette]

granular grind

Shannon — Tue, 15 May 2007 01:28:09 +0000

Thanks to Christian for introducing me to YouTube Poop. It reminds me of the kinds of collages I’ve made when starting to play with a technology: cassette pause button edits in the 80s, samplers in the early 90s, hard disk editing and granular synthesis in the late 90s. Basically having fun, trying things out, and exploring rhythm, texture and mood in a more or less musical way, but with little regard for convention. Taking whatever happened to be on TV or radio and sculpting it into something resonant.

Here’s a little video I made in 2003, shortly after getting my hands on Sonic Foundry Vegas (now Sony Vegas). It uses a bunch of videos I’d collected from the web (mostly from Stileproject) but isn’t all that different from the video collages I made back in 1993 when I first got access to a SVHS edit suite.

It’s called Four Words by Time Being and appears on the Section Media compilation VIVA [section] which is being rereleased by Alias Frequencies [preview].

I’m currently writing a book chapter on how the now-ubiquitous ‘mash-up’ (in web, video, music, etc) came from the same musical underground that gave us ‘culture jamming’ ie the Evolution Control Committee, Negativland, John Oswald. I’m also looking at relationships between collage, granular synthesis and cultural granularity.

It will probably become part of my dissertation, and may be the kick start that I need, as I’m at that awkward stage of having to redefine the paramaters of my research. For example, I’m probably not going to go ahead with the wiki site that I’d planned, as the Web2.0 landscape is developing too rapidly and I don’t want to make something that will be redundant. It may be more useful to concentrate on analyzing and ‘mashing up’ existing (and emerging) sites, as well as being involved in the development of such sites, as I am with the ABC’s ‘Pool’ project. We’ll see…

Cillit Bang

Shannon — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 08:53:22 +0000

Buttress O’Kneel

Shannon — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:26:45 +0000

is a brilliant Australian sound collagist and radio producer, working in a similar style to Negativland, but with a more overtly political edge.

I first heard her work a few months ago on FBi Radio’s Sunday Night at the Movies, and found out today that she’s also participating in ABC Radio’s Figure in a Soundscape project that I’m involved in, so I finally got hold of her URLs.

Apart from her MySpace page, some of her work is available on CD and for download from the InterWebMegaLink. Highly recommended! Especially if you like the League of Infinite Justice.

Juggernaut Bitch

Shannon — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 07:21:16 +0000

In case you were wondering wtf was going on in this scene from X-Men 3:

It’s a reference to this fan video:

Weird. (The second video actually goes for nine minutes, but that two minute excerpt is plenty. Go to YouTube if you want to see the full version.)

Apparently it was quite an in-joke with the filmmakers.

Btw I’m in love with Kitty Pryde (sorry Stephen Fry!). It’s a shame that she, Rogue and Nightcrawler didn’t play a larger part in the films, as they were probably my fave characters in the 80s comix. The way Rogue in particular was portrayed was one of the most disappointing aspects of the films, as I think most fans of the comics would agree.

Appropriation and Control

Shannon — Tue, 30 May 2006 03:21:29 +0000

Thanks to Seb (who has been writing lots of interesting stuff about social networking, Web 2.0, etc. over at fresh + new) for telling me a few weeks ago about this paper, “You must be logged in to do that!” : Myspace and Control by Fred Scharmen, which discusses how young ppl use sites such as Myspace to escape (parental) control, only to be controlled in other ways.

I’ve been meaning to write about it here, but haven’t been in the mood for blogging – too many distractions. But today I came across a response to it by Anne Galloway, via an interesting post by Glen.

These issues are nothing new, as anyone who has been involved in tactical media, etc. knows. And we all know how punk and the counterculture before it were packaged and sold to the mainstream. I think the low point for me was when William Burroughs did those Nike TV commercials in the 90s.

There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about how tactical media should give way to strategic media (in fact the term ‘tactical media’ is rarely used these days). I don’t know… I think both approaches are important. Maybe resistance is futile, but it is still meaningful for those doing it. The problem is with a dynamic which positions the subject as victim &/or consumer. That’s why I’ve always loved those artists who seem to create their own world (e.g. the early work of Negativland). Another world is possible *right now*. “Just live it”. Of course there is a slippery slope from that to a disengagement with important political issues in the ‘real’ world. Or the vision gets worn down by experience. It seems that the challenge is to successfully combine idealism with pragmatism, imagination with engagement, spontaneity with strategy. Or will that still inevitably feed the system?

Can the appropriation feedback loop be broken?

upcoming talks

Shannon — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:52:47 +0000

Some interesting free talks coming up in Sydney:

1) Key Concepts lecture series at Sydney Uni. A follow-up to last year’s Key Thinkers series which I couldn’t make due to work commitments. I’m looking forward to attending some of these.

Wednesday 3 May ‘Terra Nullius’ Andrew Fitzmaurice
Wednesday 10 May ‘Nationalism’ Glenda Sluga
Wednesday 17 May ‘Freedom’ Duncan Ivison
Wednesday 24 May ‘Truth’ Huw Price
Wednesday 31 May ‘Racism’ Ghassan Hage
Wednesday 7 June ‘Death’ Jennann Ismael
Wednesday 14 June ‘Globalisation’ Raewyn Connell

Venue: NEW VENUE FOR 2006 Footbridge Theatre The University of Sydney

2) Cory Doctorow (of Boing Boing, Creative Commons, etc.) at Popcorn Taxi:

Outspoken novelist, commentator and new-tech guru CORY DOCTOROW debates the future for filmmakers and media artists in this special event presented by Popcorn Taxi and the Australian Film Commission. Doctorow asks where does Hollywood get off, “with its antiquated business model, in treating the media user as a criminal with their draconian copyright laws?…Such laws limit the creative possibilities for artists and users.”An innovativeand brilliant thinker Doctorow proposes a revolutionary new model for media artists that defies the Digital Rights Management: “Technologies that seek to restrict the copying and use of digital works are wrong and wrong-headed”, Cory says. “Wrong because they don’t work, because they suppress creativity, and because they treat honest users like crooks. Wrong-headed because they seek to make digital works act as much as possibly like analog works. No DVD owner wants a way to do less with her movies, and companies that try to sell her technologies to do this deserve to go broke.”This debate is essential for any filmmaker and media artist who wants to give serious consideration to the future of their Work. The evening will include an interview and audience Q&A conducted by MARCUS GILLEZEAU, filmmaker (Firelight) and a specialist in digital production technologies.

popcorn taxi
Rated: R18+ EXEMPT from CLASSIFICATION
Time: 7.00pmDate: Wednesday, April, 19th, 2006
Where: Greater Union Bondi Junction
Address: Level 6, 500 Oxford Street, Westfield Bondi Junction Entry: Free

tabs

Shannon — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 06:22:02 +0000

Bettered by the borrower – copyrights and music composition

Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

Famous Cannabis Users

Google Idol

THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY FOR CHILDS

The Mercury Theatre on the Air

Nyet

sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! (awesome software!)

SONY admits that CD/44.1PCM is inferior

Stagg Chili Recipes

Video Downloader

xTal – free mp3 DJ VSTi plugin

Zaatar Mix

Eagleton on Bloom

Shannon — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 06:26:27 +0000

Two very different American critics endebted to Freud are Kenneth Burke, who eclectically blends Freud, Marx and linguistics to produce his own suggestive view of the literary work as a form of symbolic action, and Harold Bloom, who has used the work of Freud to launch one of the most daringly original literary theories of the past decade. What Bloom does, in effect, is to rewrite literary history in terms of the Oedipus complex. Poets live anxiously in the shadow of a ’strong’ poet who came before them, as sons are oppressed by their fathers; and any particular poem can be read as an attempt to escape this ‘anxiety of influence’ by its systematic remoulding of a previous poem. The poet, locked in Oedipal rivalry with his castrating ‘precursor’, will seek to disarm that strength by entering it from within, writing in a way which revises, displaces and recasts the precursor poem; in this sense all poems can be read as rewritings of other poems, and as ‘misreadings’ or ‘misprisions’ of them, attempts to fend off their overwhelming force so that the poet can clear a space for his own imaginative originality. Every poet is ‘belated’, the last in a tradition; the strong poet is the one with the courage to acknowledge this belatedness and set about undermining the precursor’s power. Any poem, indeed, is nothing but such an undermining – a series of devices, which can be seen both as rhetorical strategies and psychoanalytic defence mechanisms, for undoing and outdoing another poem. The meaning of a poem is another poem.

Bloom’s literary theory represents an impassioned, defiant return to the Protestant Romantic ‘tradition’ from Spenser and Milton to Blake, Shelley and Yeats, a tradition ousted by the conservative Anglo-Catholic lineage (Donne, Herbert, Pope, Johnson, Hopkins) mapped out by Eliot, Leavis and their followers. Bloom is the prophetic spokesman for the creative imagination in the modern age, reading literary history as an heroic battle of giants or mighty psychic drama, trusting to the ‘will to expression’ of the strong poet in his struggle for self-origination. Such doughty Romantic individualism is fiercely at odds with the sceptical, anti-humanist ethos of a deconstructive age, and indeed Bloom has defended the value of individual poetic ‘voice’ and genius against his Derridean colleagues (Hartman, de Man, Hillis Miller) at Yale. His hope is that he may snatch from the jaws of a deconstructive criticism he in some ways respects a Romantic humanism which will reinstate author, intention and the power of the imagination, Such a humanism will wage war with the ’serene linguistic nihilism’ which Bloom rightly discerns in much American deconstruction, turning from the mere endless undoing of determinate meaning to a vision of poetry as human will and affirmation. The strenuous, embattled, apocalyptic tone of much of his writing, with its outlandish spawning of esoteric terms, is witness to the strain and desperateness of this enterprise. Bloom’s criticism starkly exposes the dilemma of the modern liberal or Romantic humanist – the fact that on the one hand no reversion to a serene, optimistic human faith is possible after Marx, Freud and post-structuralism, but that on the other hand any humanism which like Bloom’s has taken the agonizing pressures of such doctrines is bound to be fatally compromised and contaminated by them. Bloom’s epical battles of poetic giants retain the psychic splendour of a pre-Freudian age, but have lost its innocence: they are domestic rows, scenes of guilt, envy, anxiety and aggression. No humanistic literary theory which overlooked such realities could offer itself as reputably ‘modern’ at all; but any such theory which takes them on board is bound to be sobered and soured by them to point where its own capacity to affirm becomes almost maniacally wilful. Bloom advances far enough down the primrose path of American deconstruction to be able to scramble back to the heroically human only by a Nietzschian appeal to the ‘will to power’ and ‘will to persuasion’ of the individual imagination which is bound to remain arbitrary and gestural. In this exclusively patriarchal world of fathers and sons, everything comes to centre with increasing rhetorical stridency on power, struggle, strength of will; criticism itself for Bloom is just as much a form of poetry as poems are implicit literary criticism of other poems, and whether a critical reading ’succeeds’ is in the end not at all a question of its truth-value but of the rhetorical force of the critic himself. It is humanism on the extreme edge, grounded in nothing but its own assertive faith, stranded between a discredited rationalism on the one hand and an intolerable scepticism on the other.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory – An Introduction, pp. 183-185

The first par in particular suggests a psychoanalytic approach to thinking about appropriation, originality, influence, etc. I’m skeptical of psychoanalysis, but it’s still something to which I should give some consideration.

Eagleton on Barthes

Shannon — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 09:42:53 +0000

The ‘work of the break’ is Barthes’s astonishing study of Balzac’s story Sarrasine, S/Z (1970). The literary work is now no longer treated as a stable object or delimited structure, and the language of the critic has disowned all pretentions to scientific objectivity. The most intriguing texts for criticism are not those which can be read but those which are ‘writable’ (scriptable) – texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer. It is not exactly as though ‘anything goes’ in interpretation, for Barthes is careful to remark that the work cannot be got to mean anything at all; but literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport. The ‘writable’ text, usually a modernist one, has no determinate meaning, no settled signifieds, but is plural and diffuse, an inexhaustible tissue or galaxy of signifiers, a seamless weave of codes and fragments of codes, through, through which the critic may cut his own errant path. There are no beginnings and no ends, no sequences which cannot be reversed, no hierarchy of textual ‘levels’ to tell you what is more or less significant. All literary texts are woven out of other literary texts, not in the conventional sense that they bear the traces of ‘influence’ but in the more radical sense that every word, phrase or segment is a reworking of other writings which which precede or surround the individual work. There is no such thing as literary ‘originality’, no such thing as the ‘first’ literary work: all literature is ‘intertextual’. A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to vanishing point. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author, for the ‘death of the author’ is a slogan that modern criticism is now confidently able to proclaim. 1 The biography of the author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special privilege: this text too can be deconstructed. It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming ‘polysemic’ plurality, not the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicity of the text is momentarily focused, it is not the author but the reader.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory – An Introduction, pp 137-138.

tabs

Shannon — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:09:16 +0000

‘normal’ blogging will hopefully resume soon. in the mean time, yet more links…

Elevayta

Feed on Feeds

GTG Synths

Highway Bridges and Feasts: Heidegger and Borgmann on How to Affirm Technology

Pop, art, and and Zizek

Progress Audio

Tiny Tiny RSS

victime de mode

vul3jp6

links

Shannon — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 09:44:19 +0000

AudioMasters Forum

bcontrol forum

BCR video

The catalogue of UK Entrances to Hell

digitalfishphones

electro-music

Electronic Music 411

energyXT

Freeware 2005 VSTi/VST Roundup

The Grey Commons – strategic considerations in the copyfight

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

InstaJungle 0.3

i, robot by Cory Doctorow

KVR Audio

MIDI NRPN and RPN

mulch-discuss

SIR – Impulse Response Processor

Inspector and InspectorXL

smartelectronix

Synthedit and SynthMaker

Tech Talk with Exile

theoria: Zizek!

Tobybear Productions

Word

Eagleton on Bakhtin

Shannon — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:08:26 +0000

Mikhail Bakhtin is an important theorist for my PhD, particularly his concepts of hybridity and the dialogic, which are very useful for thinking about appropriation.

I recently purchased Terry Eagleton’s After Theory, the sequel to his classic Literary Theory: An Introduction (probably the most useful book I read as a first year undergrad all those years ago). I decided to reread Literary Theory first and came accross this section on Bakhtin (pp. 116-118):

One of the most important critics of Saussurean linguistics was the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who under the name of his colleague V.N. Voloshinov published in 1929 a pioneering study entitled Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Bakhtin had also been largely responsible for what remains the most cogent critique of Russian Formalism. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, published under the names of Bakhtin and P.N. Medvedev in 1928. Reacting sharply against Saussure’s ‘objectivist’ linguistics, but critical also of ’subjectivist’ alternatives, Bakhtin shifted attention from the abstract system of langue to the concrete utterances of individuals in particular social contexts. Language was to be seen as inherently ‘dialogic’: it could be grasped only in terms of its inevitable orientation towards another. The sign was to be seen less as a fixed unit (like a signal) than as an active component of speech, modified and transformed in meaning by the variable social tones, valuations and connotations it condensed within itself in specific social conditions. Since such valuations and connotations were constantly shifting, since the ‘linguistic community’ was in fact a heterogeneous society composed of many conflicting interests, the sign for Bakhtin was less a neutral element in a given structure than a focus of struggle and contradiction. It was not simply a matter of asking ‘what the sign meant’, but of investigating its varied history, as conflicting social groups, classes, individuals and discourses sought to appropriate it and imbue it with their own meanings. Language, in short, was a field of ideological contention, not a monolithic system; indeed signs were the very material medium of ideology, since without them no values or ideas could exist. Bakhtin respected what might be called the ‘relative autonomy’ of language, the fact that it could not be reduced to a mere reflex of social interests; but he insisted that there was no language that was not caught up in definite social relationships, and that these social relationships were in turn part of broader political, ideological and economic systems. Words were ‘multi-accentual’ rather than frozen in meaning: they were always the words of one particular human subject for another, and this practical context would shape and shift their meaning. Moreover, since all signs were material – quite as material as bodies or automobiles – and since there could be no human consciousness without them, Bakhtin’s theory of language laid the foundations for a materialist theory of consciousness itself. Human consciousness was the subject’s active, material, semiotic intercourse with others, not some sealed interior realm divorced from these relations; consciousness, like language, was both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the subject simultaneously. Language was not to be seen either as ‘expression’, ‘reflection’ or abstract system, but rather as a material means of production, whereby the material body of the sign was transformed through a process of social conflict and dialogue into meaning.

Steve Reich on sampling

Shannon — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 12:00:58 +0000

From ‘Invisible Jukebox’, The Wire #261, November 2005, pp. 21-22

SUSMU YOKOTA
“GEKKOH”
FROM SAKURA (LEAF) 2000

I’m interested in your reaction to this.
[Immediately] Well, I know that. [Percussion comes in] Whoops, I don’t know that after all. Uh-oh, time to call the lawyers! [Laughs]. Gosh, I thought I was aware of all the various samplings but this is a new one. OK, folks, it’s the beginning of Music for 18 Musicians, “Pulse”, pretty much staying on the one chord and added percussion, and let’s see what happens. Is this recent?
Yes, 2000. It’s by Japanese musician and DJ Susumu Yokota.
[Reads press quotes on sleeve] ‘Electronica album of the year.’ Hey, I want a piece of the action. And you said it – The Wire. Hey, guilty as charged, man. Get two lawyers! Ah, he’s reharmonising my harmony, different bass. It’s nice. I like his choice of reharmonisation. Well, you know, this is pretty. As a track it’s nicely done and I guess my attitude to all this stuff in general is that I write a piece of music and if people listen to it and love it, I feel good, right? Now, if other musicians hear it – aside from all the legal issues – and they get something out of it, that’s even more so. In and of itself, they say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
But wouldn’t you make the distinction between imitation and someone actually helping themselves to a piece of your music?
I think here he’s obviously taken off in his own direction. He liked the idea of a pulse and chose one of the chords, and from there went on his own way. Even when I heard “Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb [which samples Reich's Electric Counterpoint], we never sued them. Years passed and then there was the Reich Remixed album. And all these people volunteered the rights to me. Basically, it wasn’t my music, it was their music, but I was the beneficiary of it, so it all works itself out in the end. I wouldn’t get all hot and bothered about this in a negative way at all. In fact, I get a kick out of it, and I enjoyed the track. You picked a provocative one that was a very good choice. I hadn’t heard it. I’m glad I have heard it.
Your own use of sampling is different in that you only use sounds that you’ve recorded yourself.
I’m not interested in sampling music. I’m interested in sampling things that are non-musical and bringing them into the music, so I never have that problem. I’m interested in bringing in the world, as in City Life and as in The Cave, into the concert hall and the opera house. My attitude to sampling? I see it as sort of folk music of our time. So this Japanese DJ is sampling music around him and then arranging it. People were taking other people’s music and rearranging it in the Middle Ages. “L’Homme Armé” was an enormously popular folk tune and composers from Dufay all the way up to Palestrina – that’s 200 years – all wrote masses for the church, hidden away inside of was “L’Homme Armé”. [Reich sings the melody] A really good solid tune. As a matter of fact, in You Are (Variations), squirreled away inside of the third variation is “L’Homme Armé”. Yeah, I put it in the programme notes: mea culpa. If that guy still had a copyright man, he’d be making as much money as James Brown [laughs]. Anyway, Susumu Yokota, I enjoyed your music.

Abandoning Copyright: A Blessing for Artists, Art, and Society

Shannon — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:47:57 +0000

Abandoning Copyright: A Blessing for Artists, Art, and Society
By Joost Smiers
de Volkskrant, 26 November 2005

http://www.culturelink.org/news/members/2005/members2005-011.html
(English translation of original article published in Dutch)

Several weeks ago, Carlos Guiterrez, the US Secretary of Commerce, announced a series of initiatives to stamp out the rampant piracy of, among other things, music. Damages resulting from counterfeiting and piracy is estimated to amount to 250 billion dollars annually, in the United States alone. In a press release, he stated, “The protection of intellectual property is vital to our economic growth and global competitiveness and it has major consequences in our ongoing effort to promote security and stability around the world,”

Now I must admit that it never occurred to me that copyright could contribute to global security and stability. This is quite an intriguing message ? and from a US Secretary, at that! Another aspect addressed by Carlos Guiterrez is, however, more obvious. Copyright has increasingly become an instrument for securing huge investments. In the past decade, it has become one of the major driving forces of western economy, and US economy in particular. This development, however, has a major downside: companies owning massive amounts of copyrighted works can, at their whim, ban weaker cultural activities ? not only from the marketplace, but also from the general audience’s attention. This is happening under our very eyes. It is nigh impossible to ignore the blockbuster movies, bestselling books and top-chart records presented to us by these cultural molochs, who, incidentally, own almost every imaginable right to these works. As a result, the most people are completely unaware of all those other, less commercialized activities taking place in music, literature, cinema, theater and other arts. This is a tremendous loss to society, because our democratic world can only truly thrive on a large diversity of freely expressed and discussed cultural expressions.

The common perception is that copyright first and foremost protects the well-being and interests of artists. However, history shows that the first political act somewhat resembling our modern copyright laws already had quite a different objective than safeguarding the artist’s income. The first initiative for protecting the intellectual property of artistic expression was made by Queen Anne in England, who, in 1557, granted the Stationer’s guild a monopoly on printing and publishing books; a monopoly which conveniently banned all competition from printers in other parts, such as other counties, or rival Scotland. In fact, the term “copyright” says it all: it is the exclusive right to copy any particular work; nowhere in early copyright was any mention made of the author or artist who produced the work. Queen Anne had her reasons for installing this copyright. She was not overly fond of the concept of “the free word”, and granting the Stationer’s guild the exclusive right to publishing books gave her full control over which books could be published and which were banned from the market. After all, those who can grant rights, can deny them as well.

This act by Queen Anne is the specter by which copyright is haunted up to this day, and perhaps even more than ever before. Ever smaller numbers of increasingly large and powerful entities own the exclusive rights to ever more works in the fields of literature, cinema, music and graphic arts. For example Bill Gates, widely known as the founder of Microsoft, also owns a rather less known company by the name of Corbis, which collects vast amounts of images from all over the world; together with Getty, Corbis is developing into an oligopolist in the field of photographs and reproductions of paintings ? in other words: an entity which has a large amount of control over the market, just as the Stationer’s guild had in the sixteenth century. The oligopolist has control over which artistic works we may use for which purposes, and under which conditions, in much the same way Queen Anne had control over printed works.

In most cultures around the world, this state of affairs was, and is, highly undesirable, even unthinkable. Artists have always used and built upon other artists’ work to create new works of art. It is hard to imagine indeed that the works of Shakespeare, Bach, and countless others cultural heavyweights could have come into existence without this principle of freely building on the work of predecessors. Yet what do we see happening now? Take, for example, documentary makers, who nowadays face almost insurmountable obstacles, as their work almost inevitably contains fragments of copyrighted pictorial or musical content, the use of which requires both consent from the copyright owner and a fee to be paid. The latter is almost always beyond the documentary maker’s means, and the former gives Bill Gates, or any other copyright owner, full rights to allow the use of “his” artistic content only in a way he deems appropriate. Now where in this scheme of things are our human rights? Human rights should guarantee freedom of communication, and a free exchange of ideas and cultural expressions is what greatly helped build our modern society. This human cultural development will, however, grind to a halt when a mere handful of persons or companies can call themselves “owners” of the majority of pictures and melodies our society has brought forth. This puts them in a position where they alone can dictate whether we can make use of a substantial part of our collective human cultural achievement, and on which terms and conditions. The consequences are detrimental: we are being made speechless; our cultural memory is taken from us and locked away; the development and spread of our cultural identity is stunted, and our imagination is laid in chains by law.

Contrary to what one might expect, the seemingly endless possibilities of copying and sampling using modern digital technologies have so far only aggravated the situation. Publicly offering even a mere second’s worth of copyrighted work will almost certainly attract attention from lawyers on behalf of the “owners” of said material. Sound artists, who used to freely sample work from others to build new musical creations, are now treated as pirates and criminals. Whole copyright enforcement industries have emerged, scouting the digital universe day and night for even the smallest snippet of copyrighted work used by others ? and those found out, often stand to lose literally everything they have.

Copyright has yet another intrinsic fault which makes it difficult to maintain in a democratic society. Copyright nowadays revolves almost exclusively around so-called intellectual property. This is a problem, since the traditional notion of property is largely irreconcilable with intangible concepts such as knowledge and creativity; a tune, an idea or an invention will not lose any of its value or usefulness when it is shared among any number of people. In contrast, a single physical object, such as a chair, quickly becomes less useful when more people want access to it; in this latter case, the term “property” has a clear meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, in the past decades the legal definition of property has been extended way beyond any physical constraints. These days, almost anything can be someone’s property, such as fragrances and colors; even the makeup of the proteins in our blood and the genes in our body cells are being claimed as the exclusive property of one company or another, which can subsequently bar anyone else from using it. It is therefore high time to reconsider the current concept of property.

With regard to artistic works, it is quite conceivable that no single person should have the right to claim exclusive ownership over, say, a particular tune. We all know that almost every work of art, and every invention, is based upon the work of predecessors. Now this doesn’t mean we should have less respect for artists creating new works of art based on the work of others, and we’re obliged to contribute to artists’ well-being and income in our society. Yet rewarding their every single achievement, or reproduction or even interpretation thereof, with a monopoly lasting many decades, is too much, because it leaves nothing for other artists to build on. In fact, even criticizing the artist’s work can become rather hazardous, as it “damages” his “property”. Unpleasant as this sounds, things get even worse when we consider that the vast majority of copyrighted works is owned by a relatively small group of large conglomerates. These mega-industries create, invent or produce nothing at all, yet demand that artists sign over all rights to their works to them, just for the privilege of having their works distributed.

From this point of view, there is ample reason to send our current system of copyright to the scrapheap. Artists will of course feel threatened by such a bold move. After all, without copyright, they will lose all means of existence, now won’t they? Well, not necessarily.

Let’s first look at some numbers. Research by economists shows that only 10 percent of artists collect 90 percent of copyright proceeds, and that the remaining 90 percent of artists must share the remaining 10 percent of proceeds. In other words: for the vast majority of artists, copyright has only marginal financial advantages. Then there’s another peculiar fact: most artists have entered into some sort of covenant with the cultural industry ? as if these two groups have even remotely similar interests! For example GEMA, the German copyright organization, sends approximately 70 percent of copyright proceeds abroad, mostly to the US, where several of the world’s biggest cultural conglomerates reside. In this process, the average artist is nowhere to be seen.

What is called for, is a way to ensure that artists can make a fair income from their work, without the risk of being pushed out of the market and the larger audience’s attention by the cultural industry’s marketing power. This may sound rather idealistic, and perhaps somewhat unrealistic, but society’s need for cultural diversity should not be underestimated.

The interesting thing is that it is quite feasible for artists to thrive without copyright. After all, copyright is simply a protective layer of armor around a work of art ? and the question is whether the benefits of this protection outweigh its drawbacks. Artists, and their agents and producers are entrepreneurs. What then justifies the fact that their work receives vastly more protection ? i.e. long-term monopolistic control over their work ? than the work of other entrepreneurs? Why can’t they simply offer their work on the free market, and try to attract buyers?

Let’s try to predict what would happen if copyright were abolished. One of the first effects would be intriguing: All of a sudden, it would be no longer interesting for large cultural industries to focus so heavily on bestselling books, blockbuster movies and superstars. If, in the absence of copyright and intellectual property, these works can be freely enjoyed and exchanged by anyone, the cultural industry giants lose their exclusive rights to works of art. As a result, they will also lose their dominating market position which keeps so many other artists out of sight. The market would become normalized, which would enable more artists to show their work, make themselves known, and make a fair income from what they produce. This income initially results from being the first in the market with a specific work. But there’s another factor contributing to the artists’ success. A more normalized cultural marketplace will offer more artists an opportunity to build a reputation, like a brand name, which can subsequently be exploited to sell more works at a higher price. Rapid and widespread copying of an artist’s work, only possible in this digital age, may indeed decrease its market value, but will only serve to increase the artist’s reputation. This gives more artists an opportunity to keep selling their works to a larger audience than the current, industry-controlled distribution model.

Obviously, abandoning copyright raises several important questions which need resolving, and three major adjustments in particular are called for. The first issue is that the production of an artistic work sometimes involves a significant investment in time and/or money. This would require legal protection for a short period of time, such as a year in the case of literature or cinema, during which the artist can exclusively reap the benefits from his work. This usufruct, however is different from current practice, as the work will automatically enter into the public domain after completion ? as was customary in nearly all cultures before our current intellectual property laws.

The question of course is, why specifically a year, and no longer? Experience shows that the economically viable life span of the majority of works is a year or less. After this period, producing and distributing the same work is no longer interesting for other parties anyhow, because lots of others could do the same, which makes the investment unprofitable. An obvious consequence of all this is that there can be no more illegal use of works of art ? at least outside the protection time span ? since the material in question is no longer owned by any one party. Piracy will mostly be a thing of the past, as will criminalizing and pursuing people who share and distribute works of art, e.g. those who share music via the Internet.

The second obvious problem is that many works of art may not yield any profit in a free market for some time, or at least not within the proposed protection time span of one year. This may happen when a particular work remains “undiscovered” by the major audience. Still, it is important for society that a large diversity of works of art is available for public enjoyment and discussion. Also, artists must have the opportunity to develop their work, even when these are not directly interesting to the market at large. The development of an artist’s skills and personal style often takes a lot of time, yet it is in the interest of society as a whole to invest in this development. For these and other reasons society has an obligation to support the creation of these works of art by means of subsidies or other support models.

The third issue concerns the whole of the cultural market place. Abandoning copyright would remove one major support from under the dominance of our current cultural industries, but this does not necessarily mean that their dominance would end. Established industries would still hold the means to large-scale production, distribution and marketing of cultural goods and services in a firm grip; this is one of the reasons for their current success: keeping total control over artistic works from the source to the end consumer, and this distribution model is what largely determines which films, books, theater productions and image materials we can enjoy.

This concentration of power is undesirable in every branch of industry, but it is particularly detrimental in the cultural field. We could therefore imagine that the cultural market be subjected to a kind of competitive law with a strong cultural bias. This relates among other things to ownership of means of production and distribution of cultural goods. Also, legislation may be called for to force large cultural enterprises to (re)present all of the actual cultural diversity being created by both local and foreign artists. This model would make a world without copyright not just perfectly imaginable, but also profitable for very many artists, and be a veritable blessing to cultural democracy.

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Joost Smiers is the author of Arts Under Pressure, Promoting Cultural Diversity in the Age of Globalization, and a professor of political science of the arts in the Art and Economics Research Group of the Utrecht School of Arts, in the Netherlands

via nettime

resync

Shannon — Sun, 18 Dec 2005 06:58:36 +0000

ok, being noisy was fun for a while (i got as far as find candace – you’d have known that things were serious if i’d pulled out making orange things) but now it’s time to chill out with the cricket until my frenz arrive (soon please!). (there are also some cockatoos and baby magpies around atm which are making more annoying noises than even i’m capable of.)

i love cricket. i make no apologies for that, even though it’s just about the only sport that i follow these days. i know it’s a relic of the british empire, but as a game, i think it’s beautiful (i could go on for hours about the aesthetics of wrist spin alone…). especially test cricket: it has such a meditative rhythm, with room for as much or as little engagement or analysis as one wants. i like nothing more than having the cricket on as i go about my business.

like most real cricket fans i prefer to listen to the abc radio commentary while watching the television coverage.

one thing that foxtel doesn’t advertise is that if you get digital cable, the tv signal is delayed by a few seconds compared to the analogue broadcast, and if you get one of their iq pvrs (as i have) the delay becomes even longer, which ruins the radio simulcast.

fortunately i can patch the radio through my virtualizer pro (which i also use for this – at a street price of approx $180 it’s a great audio swiss army knife – highly recommended) with its 5.5 second delay, which makes the sync close enough to not be a problem. but it must be a pain for any cricket fan without this option. after all, sports fans are one of the target audiences for cable tv. it’d be great if radios had a buffer (like the iq, and other pvrs) which one could adjust in order to delay (and rewind) live audio – are such radios already available?

btw, the problems i was having with my iq box (randomly rebooting, recordings failing, etc.) have finally (touch wood) been solved. the signal strength was insufficient. a foxtel tech rectified the problem last sunday (at 7am). so hopefully my plans to use the iq as an a/v uber sampling device will now be practicable.

coldwerk

Shannon — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 00:32:33 +0000

stumbled upon coldplay’s song talk on rage this morning and thought it sounded familiar. they’ve completely ripped off kraftwerk’s computer love. apparently with kraftwerk’s permission? i guess there’s lots of money to be made for all involved…

so computer love, one of the greatest songs ever, becomes yet another dreary coldplay dirge. is it coldplay’s mission to ruin music?

i was in a meeting all day today

Shannon — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 10:52:29 +0000

and drank too much coffee

Miss McDonald

Shannon — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 05:18:51 +0000

The Miss McDonald project. (via linearscaffold)

The Juxtaposition Engine

Shannon — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 12:35:29 +0000

Software with an Ontological Mission