Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art

Description

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials. Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality. Content Acknowledgments Introduction: Ambivalence and authorship The third space of authorship The new Prohibition 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 mistranslation’ (China and Pakistan) Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index