I wrote a text called Copy and Paste Culture, for MyCreativity, an Institute of Network Cultures conference taking place on November 16-19 in Amsterdam:
"On November 16-18, 2006 the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster will organise MyCreativity, a Convention on International Creative Industries research. MyCreativity is a two-day conference that intends to bring the trends and tendencies around the Creative Industries into critical question. It seeks to address the local, intra-regional and trans-national variations that constitute international creative industries as an uneven field of actors, interests and conditions. The conference explores a range of key topics that, in the majority of cases, remain invisible to both academic research and policy-making in the creative industries.
Overall, the conference adopts a comparative focus in order to illuminate the variability of international creative industries. Such an approach enables new questions to be asked about the mutually constitutive tensions between the forces, practices, histories and policies that define creative production, distribution and organisation within an era of information economies and network cultures".
More info here
COPY AND PASTE CULTURE
by Hanne Mugaas
A new generation of cultural producers is challenging notions of media, art, distribution, and copyright. The development is taking place online where the popular archive is being modified and reused. The Internet contains media previously unavailable outside of controlled broadcasts or locked into consumer products such as records and videos. Through the web, this media becomes accessible, and its usage and mutability becomes its main attraction to cultural producers. The working methods once the domain of hackers and the 'open source' movement, in which everyone was encouraged to participate, have developed into everyday practice. With the Internet, there is an explosion of creativity where young people who grew up with technology are at terms with their contemporary situation in regards to media.
As with any visual style, web aesthetics and practice often rely on the appropriation of non-original media. People often copy or hack html codes from other websites in order to sample images, video or graphics. In this context, amateurs become empowered to create and distribute sophisticated and layered work. A practice like this tends to challenge copyright, or lets say, money matters, but with the new evolvement and re-circulation of creativity, is there any longer such a thing as a copy? With every copy and paste, the context of the duplicate changes, creating a new original. On the web, the usage and modification of other people’s media has become the rule rather than the exception. In most cases, creativity on the Internet has upset the standard legal notion of copyright.
Chris Moukarbel, an MA art student at Yale, got hold of the script for the then upcoming blockbuster "World Trade Center" directed by Oliver Stone. He shot a scene from the director's epic using the bootlegged script and a cast of students. Moukarbel further leaked the scene on the Internet, where thousands of people linked to it. The student is now being sued by Paramount Pictures, which claims the movie clip is almost identical to the scene in Stone's production. Jean Baptiste Bayle, an Internet activist based in Paris, has recently copied the structure of MySpace to create MyOwnSpace. The site is operated as its original, enabling social networking, although the advertisements are links to Bayle’s projects on the web. Bayle also created "Popautomate", a project made in collaboration with the Internet personality Talk-Over, that lets participants write their own pop hits. If the participant writes a text, the software performs this text as music by stitching together small samples consisting of these words from different pop hits. Bayle also created a website where one can download pop hits played in reverse, to combat copyright laws. The New York based artist Michael Bell-Smith launches his work both in galleries and on the Internet. Drawing on the Internet phenomenon of “mash-ups”, where different parts of popular culture are mixed together to create new meaning, he synced and layered the chapters of the R&B performer R.Kelly’s DVD “Trapped in the Closet”, creating a new work which is the “sum” of R.Kelly’s originals. The artist Cory Arcangel, also living in New York, recently outsourced the American cult movie “Dazed and Confused” to India where It was dubbed from English to English with an Indian accent, such commenting on the big business of outsourcing in America, and also highlighting the blurry lines between the export of American ideology and the export of American entertainment.
These artistic means of production are creating new fields for artistic work. Refusing to stay in their field, the artists move out of the art system to inhabit and modify popular culture. The Internet has created an unlimited space for finding and developing ideas and material. Further, Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has become a truism on the web. No matter how good one’s idea is, there is a very good chance that a college student somewhere has already carried out that idea and become famous for it on the web. Art after the Internet is evolving, and some claim that the Internet is becoming art's final frontier. In a society of comprehensive image production, the distinction between art and non-art is already blurred. At this moment, art is legitimized through being framed by an institution or written about in an art magazine. Within mass communication, at least with the introduction of the Internet as memory, knowledge and culture are inherited in new ways. For example, a work no longer needs to be seen. One consumes the documentation by googling. Information is gathered through appropriations. The popular archive of the Internet is changing what is considered worth noticing and thus what is to become history.
