Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age
JA
May 26
Following on from my post on originality the other week, I thought many of you might be interested in this three-part documentary, Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age, done by several students studying Intellectual Property at Yale.
The 24-minute doco features commentary and interviews by various musos, artists, lawyers and DJs, including DJ Earworm, DJ Ripley, Eclectic Method and Joy Garnett, as well as authors Michael Cunningham and Jonathan Lethem.
One of the observations that struck me as particularly illuminating was the impact of perception and time on how we view the right to use. Namely, the argument that all work is, in some way, made up of thousands of tiny cultural references – the less recognisable these references are, the more original or innovative a work may seem.
The crux here is that, pre-Internet, creativity progressed somewhat more slowly. Ideas had more time to dispel into the general artistic ether where they were thought as being fair game (or not ‘belonging’ to anyone), either because of the passage of time or because their copyright holders had died. Now, given the immediacy and accessibility of the web, it’s less easy to hide behind this lapse. The use of various cultural pinpoints are therefore becoming more and more apparent. (via boingboing)
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Comments
26 May 10 at 14:43
This is a subject that I’m very interested in, so thank you very much for linking this one Jess.
Something which was brought up on the fringes in the videos that I think is very pertinent to the whole argument of copyright is the way that those growing up with our current social technology are going to produce artwork. Influences and connections in any new piece of art are becoming more apparent, or at the very least, a lot easier to ‘index’ with the advent of Internet culture, crowdsourcing, and the interconnectedness of social networking services.
Say that in ten years, an author who has grown up in the current Internet environment releases a new (shudder) vampire book, and person A reads it. They might post their review on their blog, and link it through to Twitter. That review gets picked up by their followers, and they read it, too. Now, some of the readers think that parts of the book are heavily influenced by this girl that wrote a four-part series a while ago, Stephanie M-something. They might be able to go to the author’s blog, their Twitter account, Shelfari page, or Facebook, and discover that yes, that author read the series when they were coming up with the idea for this novel. Does that make this new work less valid? Does the ease with which we can investigate the links of influence contained within any piece of art make it less of a piece of art than when those links were hidden and/or diffuse? Should young people that are thinking of producing artwork keep those links hidden (i.e. by not posting updates on what books they’ve read, movies they’ve seen, places they’ve been), or embrace them? It’s tricky, and I think that attitudes will have to change about whether we truly value originality over creative interpretation and /or reconstruction.
...26 May 10 at 15:50
Yes that’s a great point. This is a hugely complex issue and I don’t think there are any easier answers, but I do think that the more open we are about influence and ideas, the better. Social networking/the internet is the perfect way to try and do this, especially, as you say, due to all the digital trails we leave during the creative process
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