Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art

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Description

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials.

Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude ( la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

Reviews

As current as 'the day Wiki shut down in protest,' Guertin's deeply informed, wide-ranging, and provocative book resituates the questions of net freedom, intellectual property, digital distribution, and censorship in what- borrowing from and building upon Homi Bhabha's Location of Culture- she calls the 'third space of authorship.' In a heady and vibrant series of interlaced arguments and speculative forays, Guertin delivers on her promise to 'explore ... the potentialities in the social nature of electronic worksliterary, artistic, and viralto create new kinds of creative practices, and new spaces for the rise of alternative artistic, authorial or publishing models'. --Michael Joyce, Professor of English and Media Studies, Vassar College
Guertin's book is extremely timely in addressing the crisis in copyright but also in terms of the explosion of compositional/authorial modes and practices circulating through popular cultures. This interconnection brings together two issues that have, for the most part, been addressed separately. Connecting them through a framework of prohibition provides an excellent historical grounding and an innovative foothold for these discussions in progressive media studies. --Jamie "Skye" Bianco, Assistant Professor, English Department, Director, DM@P, Digital Media at Pitt, University of Pittsburgh
Carolyn Guertin has long been embedded in the digital, both as a practitioner and as a critic. Her insightful and provocative ideas should be part of every new media syllabus. -- Professor Sue Thomas, De Montfort University, UK
This is an inclusive text that connects media philosophers with radical changes to internet periodicals and plenty of related digital artworks. Nicolas Bourriaud's definition of "art as a social interstice" suitably describes most of the art present here, with its distinctively disruptive, powerful and subtle qualities. * Neural.it *

Author Bio

Carolyn Guertin holds a dual appointment in digital media-as Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and as a member of the graduate faculty at Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany. She was Senior McLuhan Fellow and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto from 2004 to 2006. She is widely published on issues related to cyberfeminism, born-digital arts, and participatory cultures.