Video Installation: Characteristics of an Expanding Medium
2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Copyright and Intellectual Property
ResumoA high stakes civil war rages on your laptop; it pits the ever-expanding proprietary commercial music industry empire against the file sharing, grass-roots freedom fighters who transform old sounds into new ideas. It is a war between intellectual property and fair use, proprietary code and open source, and appropriation and clearance rights. In their recent multimedia project No Business (2005), the audio collage art collective Negativland toys with these central contradictions of transnational capital in the digital age. A multi-platformed, anticorporate, pro-democratic media manifesto, No Business provides an operations manual to rip, burn, mash, recycle, and intervene into mass culture. It is a twenty-first century communist manifesto for public domain, sampling, reuse, and audio collage; the fifty-six page essay, audio compact disc (CD), 5 x 11 inch die-cut outer sleeve art, and Gimme the Mermaid digital video disc (DVD) present a sly, subversive, and brilliant polemic against proprietary corporate culture. Negativland camouflages their radical politics with fun, satire, and myriad popular references ranging from Ethel Merman to the Beatles to Rosie O'Donnell. Their artistic practice is oblique rather than agit-prop, asymtopic rather than topical. Every image and sound on No Business is resolutely illegal--a kind of audio-visual sit-in against the transnational media corporations (TMCs). In the last fifteen years, the TMCs have shifted out of production and into global distribution across platforms, an economics depending less on original productions and more on the control of copyright and intellectual property. The TMCs recycle and remix their own intellectual property, reaping enormous financial gains as they reduce the high risks of production. As the outer sleeve proclaims, elements original to Negativland were used to make these recordings. In other words, everything on the CD is illegal--not one of the tracks is copyright cleared. This illegality and marginality contributes to Negativland's outlaw status in the world of cultural production, a position that has often dumped their highly conceptual and often political artwork into the realm of the novelty category in record stores and pranksterism in the art world. No Business is not exactly an easy-listening CD to enjoy while chopping carrots for the evening's pilaf. Instead, it functions more like a conceptual art piece for headphones--it is a form of portable audio art more often found in museum installations with large high-end speakers than on CDs. It mines the interstitial zones between popular culture, activism, music, and complex art. No Business is no cute mash-up combining incongruous tracks for ironic effect. Under the cover of a zany, seemingly tangential cacophony lurks a compelling, logical, and surprisingly deductive argument to liberate the public domain from corporate colonization. It advocates multiple weaponry: file sharing, Internet, computers, stealing music, law, creativity, and grassroots defiance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A hybrid between an artists' collective, a punk rock band, and a satirical performance art team, Negativland's subversive antics have helped to define interventionist art in the last two decades. They coined the term culture jammer in 1984; they provoked an infamous copyright lawsuit in 1991 when Island Records sued them for sampling U2 and remixing it with outtakes from a swearing Casey Kasem. Filmmaker Craig Baldwin's 1995 rollicking collage documentary film, Sonic Outlaws, recently released on DVD, unpacks the case and provides one of the best entrees into the radical insurgency of Negativland for the uninitiated. They have wrangled in legal scares and skirmishes with the Recording Industry Association of America, Pepsi, Geffen Records, and Phillip Glass. Their densely collaged, weekly, live improvisational KPFA radio show, Over the Edge, has aired since 1981. …
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