Año 2067, los diarios anuncian la muerte de la ex tenista y modelo Anna Kournikova eliminada con un potente rayo láser enviado desde un satélite, por haber sido erróneamente confundida con una imitación de sí misma.

El terrible incidente ha sido posible porque, según elucubra el artista estadounidense David Rice, en el futuro las estrellas como Kournikova, patentarán su aspecto físico y se protegerán de las copias a través de un sistema vía satélite capaz de identificar y eliminar los parecidos no autorizados.

El relato para Internet Anna Kournikova Deleted by Memeright Trusted System es una de las obras más emblemáticas de la exposición del mismo título, abierta en el HMKV de Dortmund (Alemania). Tal como indica el subtítulo “el arte en la edad de la propiedad intelectual”, la exposición reflexiona sobre las implicaciones artísticas del copyright.

“La historia de Kournikova denuncia los peligros de estas leyes. ¿Qué pasaría si la Time Warner decidiera recaudar los derechos para la canción Happy Birthday To You, que es de su propiedad? ¿Cada vez que celebramos un cumpleaños tendremos que pagarle?” se pregunta Inke Arns, directora del centro y comisaria de la exposición.

Mientras que las industrias culturales sostienen que la expansión del copyright significa un aumento de la creatividad, la exposición defiende la necesidad de reutilizar materiales existentes de otros autores, como condición creativa inexcusable, a través de obras de net, software y videoarte, que critican de forma divertida la colisión entre la economía y la cultura, y el desarrollo tecnológico y la administración de los derechos digitales.

Entre los 28 artistas seleccionados por su uso conceptual de técnicas como el sampleado, la copia, la apropiación y el plagio, se encuentra el español Daniel García Andújar, autor de Archiv, una instalación presidida por la Torre del Conocimiento Público, una estructura simbólicamente inaccesible, rodeada por dos mesas en forma de C (la Comunidad y el Copyright), que acogen el material reunido por el artista en el PostCapital Archive.

“La agresividad de las compañías está provocando una degeneración de las leyes, que se podrían convertir en un eficaz instrumento de supresión de la innovación. Lo demuestra el parón experimentado por el hip hop desde que los departamentos legales de los principales sellos han empezado a demandar el uso no autorizado”, explica Arns, preguntándose qué pasaría con algunas de las obras de la muestra como el vídeo musical de Hohe Kante o la animación digital de Fred Fröhlich, realizada con más de 10.000 fotos de archivo.

Se trata de una pieza plunderphonic, algo así como robofónico, término acuñado en 1985 por el músico canadiense Jon Oswald para definir la música compuesta exclusivamente de fragmentos preexistentes.

Otra obra de este tipo es Gimme the Mermaid de Negativland & Tim Maloney, un vídeo musical donde la Sirenita de Disney grita con la voz de un furioso abogado “no puedes usarlo sin mi permiso, demandaré incluso tu culo”, al ritmo de Gimme Gimme Gimme, de Black Flag. Negativland se arruinó en 1991, cuando realizó una versión no comercial sampleada de una célebre canción de U2. A pesar del activismo mediático de Bono, Island Records llevó a juicio al grupo, que fue obligado a destruir la obra y a pagar los costes procesales.

Otra película de Disney, El libro de la Jungla, sirve al francés Pierre Bismuth para crear una versión babilónica, compuesta por fragmentos doblados a varios idiomas, de modo que Mowgli habla español, la pantera Bagheera árabe, el tigre Shere Khan inglés y el oso Baloo hebreo. “A pesar de los idiomas, los personajes se entienden, lo cual apunta a las potencialidades utópicas de la comunicación global, en contraste con las pinceladas de humor negro con las que Bismuth define los caracteres nacionales”, concluye Arns.

HMKV: www.hmkv.de/dyn/e

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‘You can’t use it without my permission … I’m gonna sue your ass!’ shouts Disney’s Little Mermaid with the angry voice of a copyright lawyer in the video Gimme the Mermaid (4:49 min., 2000).

The video by Negativland and Tim Maloney, situated at the exhibition entrance, is only one of more than twenty works included in ‘Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System: Art in the Age of Intellectual Property’, an exhibition presented by Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) It is part of Arbeit 2.0 – copyright and creative work in the digital age, one of thirteen projects in Germany funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation focusing on ‘The Future of Labour.’ In the framework of Arbeit 2.0, HMKV – together with the Berlin-based collaborative partner iRights.info/mikro e.V. – explores the relationships between creative work, intellectual property law, and technology (www.iRights.info).

So how does the changing notion of (creative) work relate to intellectual property? Today we live in a post-industrial society where the goods being produced are no longer material (like steel, coal, etc.), but immaterial. The Ruhr Area, with its vast deindustrialised landscape, paradigmatically stands for this transition from the Industrial Age to the information or knowledge society. However, there is a significant difference: Immaterial goods such as knowledge and information can be reproduced without loss. Therefore, in order to function in a value-added chain, the distribution of these immaterial goods has to be restricted. This is effectuated with the aid of intellectual property (IP) law, namely copyrighting, patenting, and trademarking.

David Rice’s perfidious short story ‘Anna Kournikova Deleted By Memeright Trusted System’ – from which curators Inke Arns and Francis Hunger have borrowed the exhibition title – deals with the concept of intellectual property: In 2065 stars – such as ex-tennis player Anna Kournikova – have their ‘brand’ protected by a satellite-based system that identifies unlicensed look-alikes and eliminates them via a strong laser beam. During a trip to the Pacific Rim, not officially cleared, the ‘real’ Anna Kournikova is identified as an imitation of herself and is consequently eliminated by the system.

The exhibition in the PHOENIX Halle, measuring 2,200 square metres and located on the grounds of the former steelworks Phoenix-West, puts forward the thesis that the increasingly strict application of intellectual property law hampers the development of culture as a whole. It proves increasingly difficult to impart this culture by employing images, logos, or soundbites of this very culture (for instance, sampling in hip hop, which has already been made impossible by aggressive copyright lawyers threatening any use of sampling with legal action).

The artists represented in this exhibition explore the question of art in the age of mechanical reproducibility positioning itself differently in a post-Fordist era permeated with digital networks than in Fordist, analogue times to which Walter Benjamin has referred. Artistic techniques like cut-up, sampling, détournement, appropriation, copying, remixing, plagiarism, and repetition are employed.

Participating artists: Agentur/Kobe Matthys (B), Daniel Garcia Andújar (E), Walter Benjamin (US), Christian von Borries (D), Christophe Bruno (F), Claire Chanel & Scary Sherman (US), Lloyd Dunn (US/CZ), Laurent Fauchere and Antoine Tinguely aka Ramon & Pedro (CH), Fred Fröhlich (D), Nate Harrison (US), John Heartfield (D), Laibach/Novi kolektivizem (SLO), Kembrew McLeod (US), Sebastian Lütgert (D), Monochrom (AT), Negativland and Tim Maloney (US), Der Plan (D), David Rice (US), Ines Schaber (D), Cornelia Sollfrank (D), UBERMORGEN.COM & Alessandro Ludovico & Paolo Cirio (CH/AT/IT), a.o.

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• 1998/2006
• Website with linked images
• www.irational.org/tttp/Crypto/armed1.html
• Presented in the exhibition with large-format DVD slide projection and Folder

Presented in the exhibition as an upgrade of almost 100 images, the internet project Armed Citizen shows a series of 17 small arms. No information is given on their origins. Who owns them? Are they being used as criminal evidence? Are they perhaps murder weapons? Who does the ›armed citizen‹ of the title refer to — the police? Or a citizens’ defence group that has taken up arms? Is there some allusion to the liberal firearms laws in the United States, to bloody incidents like the amok shootings that took place in Columbine High School, Colorado, in 1999, or in the Gutenberg Gymnasium in Erfurt in 2002? Armed Citizen is difficult to pin down. But it is safe to assert that it deals with an indeterminate feeling of fear and menace, and, by association, with the growing longing for security in a world felt to be increasingly less safe. The exhibition deliberately groups Armed Citizen in a kind of »security zone« together with Heath Bunting’s CCTV and Rachel Baker and Heath Bunting’s CCTV Sabotag — further irational works pointing to the essential futility of technology — or weapons based protective measures. (Inke Arns)

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• 1997
• Website with trademarked sentences linked with URLs
• www.irational.org/tttp/TM/trademark.html
• Presented in the exhibition as wall installation

Daniel García Andújar – the Spanish media artist better known by his company name Technologies To The People — almost ten years ago created with Language (property) a work addressing the increasing privatization and commodification of language. A plain HTML page presents a list of sentences that have become registered trademarks and thus the property of their corporate owners. Examples include »Where do you want to go today?™« (Microsoft), »A better return on information ™« (SAP), »Moving at the speed of business™« (UPS), »What you never thought possible™« (Motorola). By giving his project the title Remember, language is not free™, Andújar anticipated the disputes surrounding ›intellectual property‹ in the following years (and increasingly evident in the second half of the 1990s with the ruthless scramble for domain names in the World Wide Web). While on the website the individual sentences are linked to the copyright notices of the relevant companies, a large-format, almost ›immersive‹, wall Presented has been chosen for the exhibition.(Inke Arns)

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with
Antoni Muntadas
Daniel García Andújar
Bettina Lockemann

The Project

“Heimatwechsel” is an interdisciplinary 4-week workshop for students specialising in the areas of design, visual communication, art, media and culture sciences. The tutors of the workshop are three internationally renowned artists from the USA, Spain and Germany: Antoni Muntadas, Daniel García Andújar and Bettina Lockemann.

The aim of the workshop is to facilitate reflection upon the structures of the “public” process, the methods of communication and the possibilities these present and to intervene artistically using modern communication technology methods and to test new “public” participation models.

Within the four weeks of workshop, forms of creative, critical and subversive handling of media and new technologies in both theory and in practice shall be developed. Focus of the workshop is thereby additionally the specific urbane and social situation in Dortmund Hörde regarding the developments planned at present at the locations Hörde, Phoenix West and Phoenix Ost. The project offers beyond that the opportunity to examine strategies of “art in public space” – a public space which has long been influenced by the mass media as well as by new information and communications technology (Internet, mobile telephone, wireless LAN).

Background

The central location of the workshops will be the former spare parts stores at the disused Phoenix West steel works, which was shut down in 1998. The, in the meantime, renamed “Phoenix Halle” exhibition and events hall is situated in one of the “future locations” of Dortmund, which will become the location of ICT business in the next few years – or like the eastern part of the steel works “Phoenix east” – will be converted into high-quality residential quarters.

In the middle of the two areas lies the centre of the suburb Hörde, which played neither a roll in the planning to date, nor can it participate in any way in the radical restructuring of the former industrial location.

The location – the Phoenix Halle – offers the workshop a concrete example to reflect on the extremely varied communication technologies and their functions within the context of this radical, local “Heimatwechsel”.

Part 1
Methods and Strategies of Public Interventions:
by Antoni Muntadas, 10. – 19. July 2004

Antoni Muntadas (New York) is one of the main artists, who has been experimenting with critical media practice within constantly changing contexts (public space, television, internet etc.) since the late 1960’s. He was represented at the documenta 5 and X and at various biennial art festivals.
In the workshop he will reflect on basic, methodical and theoretical ways of tackling an interventionist practice of art with the students of the workshops and will discuss optional interaction between theory, practice and actual implementation.

Part 2
Subversive and participative networks in the virtual “public” space: open source, free software and “Hactivism“
by Daniel García Andújar, 20 July – 29 July 2004

Daniel García Andújar (Valencia) is an artist, who has used the Internet in an interventional and de/constructive way as a tool for critically viewing media since the middle of the 1990’s. He is a fellow initiator of irational.org, took part among other things, in the exhibition net.conditions (ZKM, centre for art and media technology). In 2002 with the project “e-valencia“ he put into action the idea of a networked local communication structure, which successfully brought together divergent interest groups concerned with a critical discussion of cultural political developments.
In the context of the workshops, he will develop further the ideas, which were generated by the students in the first part of the workshop. Thereby the main emphasis will be concerned with the implementation of free communication “tools”: how to reach which target groups, either through participation or reception, which infra-structure and what technology is necessary for this.

Part 3
Addressing, Participation, Knowledge Production, Documentation
Tutor Bettina Lockemann, 30. July – 10. August 2004

Bettina Lockemann (Köln) is a media artist (photography, video, Internet), designer and media theorist. Among other things she took part in the research project of the Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste (State Academy for Creative Arts), Stuttgart for “Visuellen Kompetenz im Medienzeitalter“ (visual competence in the media era). In her extensive exhibitions she combines the theoretical side of creative strategies with the actual, artistic conversion into practice.
Bettina Lockemann will actively accompany the first two parts of the workshop. The emphasis in the third part will be on the implementation of individual plans and their adequate documentation, visualisation and communication.

Part 4 Presentation: September 2004 (at different venues)
No exhibition is planned as such. The emphasis will be on the documentation of planning concepts or the consolidation of infrastructural proposals for those taking part in the workshop and/or from population groups involved in the projects. The aim of the presentation is more to let “news” of the workshop results “seep” through to the public than to present it publicly. Here the actual public space, the internet or the still very effective print media can play a roll.

Participants

The 4-week interdisciplinary workshop is aimed at those students whose main area of study encompasses visual communication, media art, film/video, media and cultural science, and design.

The Workshop will be held in English.
The number of participants is limited to 15 students.

Please, send your applications including CV and a short description why you would like to participate to:

hartware medien kunst verein
Silke Albrecht
Güntherstr. 65
44143 Dortmund

Application deadline: 10.06.2004 (Post mark)

The participants will be informed directly in the middle of June.
Students from abroad will get reimbursed their travel expenses as far as they do not receive subsidies. If necessary, students from abroad will be supported by accommodating.

A project by
hartware medien kunst verein + medien_kunst_netz dortmund
In cooperation with
Fachhochschule Dortmund, FB Design (Polytechnic, Department Design)
Supported by
Ministerium für Städtebau und Wohnen, Kultur und Sport des Landes NRW
Kulturbüro Stadt Dortmund
and others

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A long list of awards conceivably and inconceivably bestowed on the Technologies To The People website which, as its makers would have us believe, is »one of the most popular art sites on the internet «. Framed in silver like a collection of especially valuable postage stamps, the some 30 distinctions presented in the original thumbnail format include »Browser Watch — Net Fame!«, »An Internet cool site of the day«, »Magellan Star Site«, »Prescribed by Dr. Webster’s Web Site of the Day«, »Art Dirt« — »Your Webscout Way Cool Site«, and »Orchid Award for Page Excellence«. (Inke Arns)

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