Addressing the assigned concerns of the week:

Concern 1: What are the advantages of an “open source” and/or “open content” approach to remix culture in general, and consumer culture at large? Do we really need a “free culture” or is it in our best interests to restrict rights?

Response 1: The advantages of “free culture” (termed “open source” and/or “open content”) relate to the advancement of ideas based on the improvement of existing ideas. Open source not only permits individuals the right to use and change ideas that might otherwise be restricted and protected by individual or group concerns, it promotes one-upspersonship which in turn promotes healthy advancement and improvement of original ideas. The basic idea behind open source is to reduce or eliminate the restrictions enforced by copyright law and to help facilitate the notion that someone else might be able to do better than you have been able to do with an item of your “invention/creation”. A simple example of this is open source software like “Gimp” (a free version of a program similar to Photoshop). While this program may not necessarily be an absolute substitute for Photoshop, it is a workable program that can be rewritten and improved upon by individuals. The incentive to change the program is to make it more functional and to share this improved function with others.

How does this advantage remix culture? Open source advantages remix culture by providing information, code and software to individuals able to manipulate the sources for advancement and improved functionality. How does this advantage consumer culture at large? This is a bit more tricky, since consumer culture implies capitalism (in effect, the exchange of goods or services for money). Since open source often means “free”, it would seem a different model is in play than straight consumerism. For the consumer, more programs or ideas are available, often without cost. Healthy competition for creating the best programs or ideas is a possible consequence of open source or free culture, which has the potential to benefit the consumer who will use the programs or ideas.

Do we really need a “free culture”? Probably not, but restrictive ownership is a limitation on the advancement of ideas. Restricting rights advantages the individual, not the culture at large. The question to be asked is, “Which is more important, the individual or the greater public?”

Concern 2: Does the idea of copyright and intellectual property become more obsolete in digital/networking culture? Must the effort to protect intellectual property be valiantly fought in cyberspace as in other (more material) spaces? Why or why not?

Response 2: It seems a popular sentiment now to forego copyright and intellectual property on the net, at least with regard for individuals disseminating their ideas. The opposite is happening with mainstream record labels (for example) in their attempts to regulate file sharing. Most individuals in the networking culture seem to prioritize idea exchange over monetary exchange, and while corporations want to take advantage of the networking possibilities within the digital culture, they still prioritize financial gain and adamantly protect their right to make money. The question then is not whether intellectual property is more obsolete, but rather, “For whom is intellectual property obsolete?” The concern for intellectual property boils down to making money, at least outwardly. All corporations and most individuals are interested in making money, but the networking culture, if they are in fact interested in making money, want to do that in indirect ways that do not infringe on the rights of others to share information. Corporations want to take advantage of the vast quantities of people using the net, but monetary gain is not easily regulated in such a culture, and their self-preservation hinges on their right to own and sell intellectual property.

Concern 3: What about an artist’s labor? Where is the balance in protecting ones “original” creative output versus opening up the collective’s creative output imagined by some as freely accessible source material for active reconfiguration?

Response 3: Artists who freely participate in free culture are not prioritizing the protection of their “original” creative output, at least not in the traditional format of copyright. The copyleft movement allows these artists to receive credit for their ideas while allowing mutations and improvements to occur (as long as they get credit for their source contribution). Users of copylefted material then have the “left” to do what they want with this information by actively reconfiguring it.

Concern 4: Give an example of a work of visual or media art that you personally value where the artist(s) were clearly remixing / postproducing / reconfiguring source material from other visible sources. Was the final result for the betterment of culture in general? At what risk/cost?

Response 4: I’ll have to go into the wayback machine for this one and bring up Eduardo Paolozzi’s collages, particularly “I was a Rich Man’s Plaything”, 1947. This work predates the pop movement but arguably induces the movement’s first textual mention in a work of art. This collage uses images from popular culture exclusively, all of them from different sources including advertisements, comic books and pulp fiction texts. By taking images from existing sources and reconfiguring them, Paolozzi “remixed” popular culture to arrive at an “original” image. In my opinion this collage advantages the work to be done after 1947 by introducing such possibilities to the populace (not that this one was the first or the only artwork to do this). The risk or cost of this kind of art is that from this point on, works sourced from “low culture” are elevated to the level of traditional forms of working, those forms said to be “high art”. The possibility exists as well that the originators of Coca-Cola and Real Gold advertising images and pulp fiction cover artists are not credited for their contributions and are forever implicated in the works of art that use their imagery without their permission. In these forms of art however, we have not heard these arguments (to my knowledge) but we certainly have heard them in the digital realm.

Concern 5: Give an example of how you recently sampled and remixed source material from the general culture into something that you felt was an original form of expression (not including what you have created for this class).

Response 5: Initially I respond this way: that I don’t really do this in my work, not consciously anyway. What I most likely do is create things I think are new and then find out that I’m working 50 years ago. To attempt to answer the question however, a version of remixing source material (which, like my reference to Paolozzi is completely non-technical) would be a drawing titled “Project for: Projecting an Image on the Surface of the New Moon, A Rough Draft”. All that I’ve really done here is source images from a visual dictionary in order to make drawings of them in new configurations for somewhat backwards inventions.

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