Data Materialization Studio

In a recent essay, the urban geographer Amy Siciliano recounted a curious anecdote: from the video surveillance control room of a public housing project in Toronto, she observed how two teenagers dismantled and destroyed a surveillance camera -while being recorded by the very device they were in the process of demolishing (Siciliano 2007). Siciliano was not a live witness to this event; what she watched from the safe confines of the housing project's remote control room was, rather, an archival copy that provided an equally safe temporal remove. Yet, despite this spatial and temporal distance, the tape had an oddly visceral effect on the researcher: watching it, Siciliano suddenly felt implicated in the 'narrative' that played out on the screen, and became very conscious of how surveillance technology can distort and invert the social relations and, indeed, the logic of the 'reality' it seeks to con trol. 'The movements of the youth were methodical and unhurried. They made no effort to conceal their identities ... I became acutely aware that as the viewer, I, in fact, was what was "represented" and they-the youth-the "reality'" (Siciliano 2007: 53-4). The surveillance camera, then, had not simply recorded reality, but instead had somehow constituted it -'[b ]y destroying the instrument that marked my presence as a viewer, the youth effectively made me present, exposing the mediating agent as a determining factor of the event itself (54). How, then, has this camera served the assumed purposes of surveillance technology, considering that all the device was able to document was its own destruction? Can such a recording be accepted as an authoritative, unbiased document, or must it be acknowledged, rather, that the recording is an effect of the presence of the surveillance apparatus -which in tum prompted the action that was being recorded? Who, by extension, is the 'author' of the recorded act -the youths who performed the destructive event, or the surveillance apparatus that staged it?

Through a multitude of restrictions imposed on how creative expressions bound in digital media can be produced, accessed and disseminated, contemporary intellectual property regimes strongly impact how musicians are able (or unable) to practice their craft. This essay considers how chipmusic, a fairly recent form of electronic music to emerge from the underground into popular awareness, deals with this impact. I survey the chiptune scene’s creative approach of reusing outdated technology and content from the era of 8-bit video games as well as the community’s dissemination strategies, and highlight points of contention between the critical perspectives embodied in this art form and contemporary intellectual property policy. In exploring chipmusic’s close ties to appropriation-based production techniques that are frequently seen as interfering with narrow concepts of intellectual property rights, I describe this music scene as an active site for implicit critiques of restrictive copyright regimes. In doing so, I draw, in part, on the art form’s important, if idle, links to the ‘demoscene’ amateur hacking culture of the 1980s. This will be contrasted with the chiptune community’s current reliance on Creative Commons licenses in regulating use of and access to its creations. I question whether discussing this alternative dissemination and licensing scheme can adequately describe the shared cultural norms and values that motivate chiptune practices. Responding to this question, I conclude this essay by offering the concept of a moral economy of appropriation-based creative techniques as a new framework for understanding digital creative practices which – like chiptune music – resist conventional intellectual property policy both in form and in content.

If driving has today really become a Western "metaphor for being" (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming "Right lane must exit" or "Through traffic merge left", inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel indivi-dualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, "nomad science" and "state science" (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic "amnesia of driving" (Baudrillard). Are a city's multitudes of cars resistant "projectiles" (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic "sites of containment" (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between "untamable" democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the "masking screen of the windshield" (Virilio). As they "quit stal-ling", both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad - one a driver who remains on the road but goes "under the radar", the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films' metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the innercity road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control.

This essay approaches the audio-visual works and installations included in the exhibition A Total Spectacle (Atomic Arts Centre, Winnipeg, 2013) through the critical writing of Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In discussing a variety of media events, I consider how the spectacle oscillates between a powerful tool of propaganda and persuasion, on the one hand, and a radical tool of political resistance, on the other. Drawing on Baudrillard’s discussion of the mass- mediated simulation of reality, I begin by surveying how the mainstream spectacle, deployed through news media and the entertainment industry, continues to serve capitalist agendas. This is contrasted with Debord’s concept of detournement, which aims to re-appropriate the spectacle for counter-cultural political purposes. These critical perspectives are then linked to the art works in the exhibition through the discussion of a several spectacular media events that bridge the divide between Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ (exemplified by the famous footage of the O.J. Simpson car chase and a more recent viral YouTube video) and Debord’s detourned, politically ‘activated’ everyday event (exemplified by Christoph Schlingensief’s theater performance Please Love Austria! [2000] and Nam Jun Paik’s installation piece TV Buddha [1974]).

This chapter concerns the emergence and growing popularity of the international pirate party movement. We survey critical approaches to the phenomenon of piracy, consider the usefulness of this concept in discussions of digital practices commonly labeled ‘media piracy,’ and discuss the role of the pirate parties in opposing conflicts around these practices. Contrasting the international pirate party movement with the historical figure of the maritime pirate, we approach the modern-day pirates through Christopher Kelty’s concept of the ‘geek,’ which describes individuals motivated by the desire to preserve their ability to use digital tools for the sharing of information, communication, and creative purposes. Our discussion highlights some of the gross imbalances imposed by current copyright laws on digital culture and on the private use of digital technologies, and proposes that the activities of today’s so-called pirates can be understood as a critical commentary on the vilification and criminalization to which everyday users of digital technologies are often subjected. In considering how these imbalances are reflected in the rhetoric of the pirate party movement, ultimately we suggest that the movement represents an experimental arena of political dissent and policy reform efforts.

[CONTACT ME FOR A DIGITAL COPY] This essay concerns the emerging practice of live coding (i.e., the real time programming) of electronic music in text-based programming environments), and explores how this practice can be deployed as a tactic of resistance against the overreach of restrictive intellectual property regimes. I begin by surveying copyright and patent law discourse to situate live coding in the field of existing perspectives on cultural ownership. Drawing on legal theory and critical discourse on improvised music in other genres, I then argue that the dynamic, palimpsestic, and improvisational qualities of live coding contradict many of copyright law’s core assumptions regarding the nature of ‘fixed’ works of art. These contradictions can be usefully mobilized for the purpose of resisting the large-scale legal and economic enclosures of the digital cultural commons. As I conclude, live coding can, from its current, inherently ambivalent position on copyright matters, develop a strong, performance-based critical stance against the imbalances and shortcomings of intellectual property regimes and outdated notions of exclusive cultural ownership. Integrating artistic practices with evolving IP critiques, such resistance can go a long way towards highlighting readily available opportunities to oppose and confound the law creatively.

This paper explores recent efforts by cultural institution and private start­-up companies to engineer digital art markets
using cryptocurrency technologies in order to propertize digital artworks that were previously presumed to be
‘uncollectible’ and ‘unsellable.’ I argue that such developments are heavily suffused with neoliberal perspectives and
counteract media artists’ efforts to situate their work outside the cultural and economic logic of property­-based
exchange.
The ‘virtual,’ the ‘digital,’ and the ‘immaterial’ hold special significance with regard to media artists’ ability to shield
their creative practices from the circuits of property­-based art production and dissemination. Media art frequently
invents new digital contexts of creative expression that disrupt capitalist technologies of commodification and
monetization. But because digital culture also holds the potential of representing hugely profitable markets, digital art
practices are under constant threat of being assimilated or co­opted by digital capital.
Tying digital art works to cryptocurrency blockchain entries could render them as truly ‘unique’ digital artifacts – as
commoditized artworks with a clear, indisputable pedigree and 'provenance. Such efforts are purportedly guided by a desire to protect artists’ ownership rights. But in stemming the dynamism of inherently copyable, malleable, and recombinable digital artefacts, these efforts also share the economic agendas of our current, expansive intellectual property regimes. Discussing relevant commercial and critical projects driven by Ascribe.io, Rhizome.org, and Furtherfield.org, I argue that the regulation of digital art markets through cryptocurrency technologies fundamentally contradicts the dynamic nature of the digital and the ideals of openness that guide many media artists. The fencing-in of digital art in tightly controlled virtual marketplaces can serve only to undermine – not to embody – the ‘value' of the
works to which such technologies seek to attach themselves.

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In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial artmarket have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.

This essay explores how mētis – understood as the appropriation of dominant power and its inscription in the resistant force of alternative practices – can serve as a framing device for theorising tactical practices of digital culture. Revisiting critical discourses on mētis here serves as a framework for arguing that digital practices can simultaneously exist within and without (i.e., against) capital, and as such can become a viable oppositional stance that derives its power from precisely the contradictions that also delin-eate its limits of criticality. My discussion is linked to theories of appropriation, biopower, the multitude, and cognitive capitalism; my arguments are supported by reference to a series of examples in the form of experimental media art works which, as I argue, inhabit the critical potential of digital mētic action.

This short essay introduces my ongoing project Pattern Recognition, which explores how evolving machine agency in artist–computer collaboration impacts our understanding of concepts such as ‘authorship’ and ‘cultural ownership’. Based on the appropriation and reworking of early works
of computer art, Pattern Recognition develops
a combined critical and artistic approach, in which detailed analysis of the original works is an inevitable prerequisite for reworking them artistically. In this way, ‘authorship’, ‘creative agency’ and ‘originality’ are engaged both critically and creatively, and the project contributes to ongoing aesthetic discourse on digital art practice, while simultaneously intersecting with emergent socio-legal issues connected to contemporary art. Interloping on both theory and practice, the project lastly also provides a context
for exploring the critical role artistic practice can play in – or as – research.

The subject of survival in virtual environments has emerged as a potent site of critical and artistic intervention in video games. Influenced by traditions in performance art practices, in particular the critiquing of socio- political power systems through the radical, performative use of bodies, many current artists effectively use existing game platforms to address conflicts at the intersection between the individual and system. This essay explores the performative affordances of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game worlds as a research tool, subject of critique, or theatrical stage. Though survival is difficult to address successfully in virtual interventions, the trope of survival as coded in game environments can be mobilized by virtual performance artists to address problematic limits and constraints dictated by the algorithmic systems framing gameplay.