RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2012

www.PosterPresentations.com

In the first book to discuss the global politics of creativity in a digital age, Carolyn Guertin takes a uniquely Canadian perspective to explore emergent models of authorship. Her wide-ranging study roams from high-brow conceptual art to vernacular video in a quest to understand the process of the creation of new media forms by international artists who use technology to challenge established modes. These new practices mark the death of creativity and the rebirth of a new self-reflexive creative practice. Redefining authorship within remix culture, the book identifies the potential in the social nature of electronic works to foster a genealogy of new creative practices – from sampling to mashups to digital anthropophagy – on a global scale. After first exploring creative practices by Western artists, the final third of the book explores creative practices in the East that have been unfettered by copyright restrictions. Wildly influenced by boatloads of Western cultural artifacts, the new forms might be born of Western garbage, but are transformed into something entirely new via productive mistranslation and digital anthropophagy.

ABSTRACT

CONTENTS

The dominant mode of creative practice in the 21st century is the remix, the act of resituating one or more existing works in a new context. Remixing is a conversation, a critique and a protest all wrapped up in a single package. The remix seeks to explore the social nature of creation through the (sometimes hostile) act of appropriation and re-integration. This book explores a variety of different kinds of remix techniques, including:

SamplingMashups

Remakes, adaptations and intertexts Capture, streamed or visualized data

Surveillance ArtHacks

Data miningTemporal manipulationCreative cannibalism

Digital anthropophagyProductive Mistranslation

It then establishes a tri-part criteria for understanding how and why those aesthetics or remix techniques work.

Following the death of creativity, Digital Prohibition maps the rise of three new aesthetic practices in new media in an age of perfect copies. The first is interruption (which includes a process of stoppage and repetition), and marks a shift from the old creative model’s focus on content to a process-oriented work of art. It is a work that opens an image or text to create a space for critical engagement. The second, disturbance, which brings together an action with an event, is a new kind of aesthetic activism – artivism or tactical media – for the socially networked age. Looking at the psychic and social consequences of technology and aesthetics, this section explores the importance of performance in an age of consumer culture for the creation of tactical media as an agent of new political practices and events. The third practice is that of capture/leakage, which is a meeting of performance with documentation. In an age of information overload, everything is potentially subject to capture and to surveillance. At the same time, once the data exist they are always already potentially leaky; the more tightly information is controlled, paradoxically, the more likely it is to be released out into the data environment. In the spirit of protocol and data, documentation is coming to the fore as a new art form in its own right.

THE  TERRAIN    OF  THE  REMIX

A selection of the artists and works discussed in the book include: Addictive TV, Beam Up the Bass Christen Bach, Bear Untitled: D.O. EditMichael Banowitz & Noah Sadona, This Aborted Earth: The Quest BeginsPerry Bard, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global RemakeAlan Bigelow, BrainstripsJosh Bricker, Post-NewtonianismJim Campbell, The LibraryCao Fei (China Tracy), iMirrorKatarina Cisek, Highrise, The Thousandth Tower, & Out My WindowJordan Crandell, HeatseekingDanger Mouse, Grey AlbumBrendan Dawes, Don’t Look NowRod Dickinson & Steve Rushton, Who, What Where, When, Why and HowAtom Egoyan, 8 ½ ScreensHasan Elahi, Tracking Transience: The Orwell ProjectOmar Fast, CNN ConcatenatedFeng Mengbo, Long March: Restart & Q4UStephen Fry, MyFrySteve Gibson, Grand Theft BicycleKhaled Hafez, The Video DiariesJODI.orgCarmin Karasic, FloodNetAdeena Karasick, All the Lingual LadiesScott Kildall, Paradise AheadRaphael Lozano-Hammer, Surface TensionManu Luksch, FacelessKevin MacDonald, Life in a DayDayna McLeod, That’s right, Diana Barry. You needed me. Lev Manovich, Soft CinemaChristian Marclay, The ClockEva and Franco Mattes, Catt, & Synthetic PerformancesMauj CollectiveMezMiao Xiaochun, Last Judgment in CyberspaceMovie Bar Code Huma Mulji and Shilpa Gupta, The Aar-Paar ProjectsNi Haifeng, Of the Departure and the ArrivalPhilippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe, No Ghost Just a ShellPirates of the AmazonPratchaya Phinthong, Alone TogetherVanessa Ramos-Velasquez, Digital Anthropophagy: A ManifestoRashid Rana, In The Middle of NowhereRaqs Media CollectiveEvan Roth, FAT (Free Art and Technology) Lab Lindsay Scroggins, Wonderland MafiaSoda_Jerk with Sam Smith, Pixel Pirate 2Cornelia Sollfrank, Female ExtensionBill Spinhoven, It’s About Time/The Time StretcherFlorian Thalhofer, Planet Galata Thomson and Craighead, Time Machine in Alphabetical OrderUbermorgan.com, Amazon NoirCamille Utterback, Liquid TimeWang Jianwei, Connection Dan Warren, Son of Strelka, Son of GodNoah Wardrip-Fruin et al, The Impermanence Agent

EMERGENT  ART  AND  ARTISTS  CONCLUSIONS:  

PRODUCTIVE  MISTRANSLATIONMore and more, by stepping outside of the venues of commercial culture and mass media, artists and activists around the globe are seizing the materials at hand and repurposing their tools to their own ends. The art that they make or the movements that they start are designed to foster dialog. Mass media culture belongs to no one and is all too easily coopted by powerful forces to be deemed trustworthy any more. The future of culture depends on people translating the materials in their midst into materials that enable them to tell their own stories and to share embodied perspectives. Science fiction author Neil Gaiman says, “We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories” (quoted in Jenkins, 2009, 109). Digital media, social media, and the powerful digital tools we have at our fingertips enable us to do just that. Digital prohibition is upon us and, just like those crazy speakeasy times in the early days of the twentieth century, people’s creative expression will not be denied and, for a time at least, we have some of the most powerful distribution tools ever invented at hand and free to use. Activism does not happen in digital spaces, but digital technol- ogies and social media enable people to gather and express themselves, and to share their art. Dutch artist and critic Florian Cramer says in his article “The Fiction of the Creative Industries” (2011), For young people, TV has been killed by YouTube, the music industry by mp3, DVD profits by bittorrent, newspapers by the web. But even more significant than these shifts of consumer technology was the digital revolution of production. Most musicians no longer need a record label, but can master their music on a laptop. Thanks to the last generation of inexpensive digital cameras, cinematic films can now be shot and edited at home by freelancers. Writers no longer need publishers, but often are better off self-publishing via print-on-demand and e-books. In all these areas, “creatives” become allrounders. Division of labor is decreasing, not increasing, with many industries, big agencies and highly staffed bureaus becoming dinosaurs of the past. In those dusty bureaus a whole new mode of creative expression has quickened into life and will not be silenced. Creativity does not care what medium it is expressed in, but the availability of digital tools is fostering a creative renaissance – despite draconian copyright laws – that will not stop.

FURTHER  INFORMATIONContinuum International Publishers, London and New YorkHardcover, Paperback and Kindle Editions978-1-4411-3190-4 pbApril 2012

CONTACT: Carolyn Guertin, PhD Email: carolyn.guertin@gmail.comWebsite: https://mavspace.uta.edu/guertin/portfolio/

Introduction: Ambivalence and AuthorshipThe Third Space of AuthorshipThe New Prohibition

Part One: The Aesthetics of AppropriationInterruption (stoppage + repetition)Disturbance (action + event)Capture/Leakage (performance + documentation)Dynamic Data and Augmented Bodies

Part Two: AuthorshipFrom Karaoke Culture to Vernacular Video‘Aberrant Decoding’ and Atactical AestheticsGoogle Empire: Smart Art, Intelligent AgentsReal Time

Part Three: Creative Cannibalism and Digital AnthropophagyDigital AnthropophagyTranslation: Performing the In Between‘Productive Mistranslations’ (China and Pakistan)

Conclusion

University  of  Texas  at  Arlington  &  Transart  InsFtute,  BerlinCarolyn  GuerFn

Digital  ProhibiFon:  Piracy  and  Authorship  in  New  Media  Art

Eva  and  Franco  MaOes,  Ca#

Soda_Jerk with Sam Smith