[Image: Future Memories by Scott Kildall] Scott Kildall wrote: I am an independent artist, currently living in San Francisco. Lately I have been working with forms of remediation including several projects in Second Life, a recreation of the lost Apollo 11 moon landing tapes and event-specific video portraits. I have an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies department. Recent projects include a residency focusing on contemporary conceptual art at the Banff Centre for the Arts and a 6-month fellowship at the Kala Art Institute. My work is at www.kildall.com.

I would like to open up a discussion on the effects of the recent blurring between media production and consumption. Specifically I would like to invite everyone to consider how this impacts contemporary art production.

We can point to the quick rise of YouTube as the first indicator of a total shift; Established in February 2005, it quickly became apparent that the means to index and track video content had become inadequate. The producers of media now have access to means for widespread dissemination; Media has surpassed the means to categorize it.

What I am pointing to is not the just impact of Web 2.0 technology with its buzz and sharing through feeds and the reblog; it is rather, a new type of use of cultural signs derived from collapsed catalogues. Hierarchical taxonomies have failed. Tagging mechanisms exemplified by del.icio.us act as a sieve-search. We often lose our original intent and stumble upon something else. Video and audio on the web resemble memories to the human brain — flowing associatively and too numerous to list.

Content production now dips heavily into appropriated forms. Mashup culture has become widespread and the remix — in music and video is commonplace. DVD protection schemes are breakable; web-based videos and music can be unlocked. We can no longer identify the original and many no longer care.

Certain video works manifest this change in our way of watching, listening and producing. Christian Marclay’s “Video Quartet” (2002) treats the moving image like a 4-channel audio mixer. Film clips trigger flashes of recognition as our memory scrambles. The cohesive audio track grounds the visual in a reversal of traditional cinema.

Several years earlier, Pierre Huyghe created “Remake” (1995) in which the every scene of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” is re-acted by unknown French actors. This suggestion is that this classic film has moved from the realm of the movie studio to the public in the form of a script that can be forever replayed. The amateur has become celebrity.

More recently, Phil Collins delivered “The World Won’t Listen” (2005) which invites residents of Istanbul to sing karaoke to Smiths songs. Crossing cultures and ages both in subject and viewer, I joined a crowded room and watched the entire reel in two successive visits. Many artists seem to be recreating from what we already have in response to the overwhelming amount of available material.

For those that missed the museum exhibitions, clips are available on YouTube through clandestine recordings:

I find myself re-reading Bourriaud’s Post Production (2002) as a helpful reference. He writes “that artists’ intuitive relationship with art history is now going beyond what we call ‘the art of appropriation,’ which naturally infers an ideology of ownership, and moving toward a culture of the use of forms, a culture of constant activity of signs based on a collective ideal: sharing.”

Although Bourrriaud wrote these words just before the advent of social media sites, he has pinpointed a significant change in the apprehension of cultural forms. Of course, appropriation in artwork is nothing new; what has changed is the relationship between consumption and production. The media-information culture that has unfolded in just the last couple of years has forever altered public discourse.

My thoughts are that this is a seismic cultural event. If art production reflects cultural production, then I would expect to see an increasing number of works, which eschew notions of the original altogether. I would imagine viewing work where I was confused as to who the creators were and like with popular culture, I would consider this unimportant.

Please do respond with your own thoughts and observations and examples of works which supports, challenges or expands upon this.

Brad Borevitz replied:

>>…the effects of the recent blurring between media production and consumption.

the idea of a transition from an ideology of ownership to a culture of the use of forms is provocative. i wonder if de Certeau’s notion of use as production in his “The practice of everyday Life” is relevant. he makes a distinction though between the realm of production he calls strategic, which depends on power, and the triumph of place (the proper) over time, and the tactical production through use which is the revenge of the weak, who have no proper place, no power, and only the cunning of time in which to manipulate the givens of the powerful to their own ends.

these categories, i think, help make sense of the landscape of struggle that is social media. it is important to shake off the tendency towards utopian dreaming and realize that the explosion of cultural production that we focus on so fixedly is contextualized within a nexus of legal and technical infrastructure that is designed and deployed by and in the interest of global capital.

whether it is the network itself, its protocols, the vast server farms of google, or youtube, or myspace, their software, their terms of service, the great edifice of international intellectual property law and multitudes of lawyers that police the proprietary holdings of megamediacorporations … all of these are the constraining location of our use - of our game of sharing. they determine the horizons of possibility while we invert and subvert their meanings in spaces hacked out of, and borrowed from their territories. we rent. they own.

so i don’t see a change of structure in our time; it is possible that there is an intensification of struggle. but every tactical victory is countered by strategic maneuvers: youtube has mechanisms for the removal of proprietary content; napster was killed, news reports show that comcast is blocking filesharing at the network level, people are being taken to court for sharing music; we are unprotected from electronic surveillance by the government …

the insight that an art of appropriation depends on a tacit acceptance of the proprietary is useful. but i can hardly conceive of a way to get beyond that and to remain “art”. and i don’t believe that popular culture exists outside of some idea of authorship - rather i think it is dependent on it for its existence.

can we even cite a work of art without simultaneously citing its author? even more so than in literature, the work of art is tied to the authorizing hagiographics of creative identities. all experiments in renunciation and disavowal of intent and authority have failed, either outright or in the recuperative movements of the market and historiographic circuits. The most popular of popular productions are identified with the simultaneous production of identity, either in the figure of the star, or in that bastard of identity, the corporate brand (o holy fandom, o brand loyal minions).

but there may be a cultural realm (more) immune to claims of identity — this is not some new technoshpere, it is simply folkculture - which must have its memic technological counterpart (although anonymity is not the default in cyberspace, rather it seems something that must be laboriously produced and achieved). is there folk culture in cyberspace? the authorless song? the “traditional”. the (urban) legend. the tale.

maybe in those viral meanderings of misinformation, chain letters, sad stories, fear mongering, and get rich quick schemes … maybe in those endlessly circulating and authorless texts, there is some clue to what could come if we managed to become authorless.

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