Florian Cramer on Sun, 7 Dec 2008 14:41:07 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Call for support: why? |
On Saturday, December 06 2008, 21:42 (+0100), Felix Stalder wrote: > I agree. The concept of artistic freedom seems tied to the notion > of art as an autonomous, i.e. distinct, sphere. ...which literally means its confinement to exhibition spaces and a predefined art context, a point also made by Arthur C. Danto in his book "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace". While art movements from Futurism to Fluxus have attempted to break out of those spaces, these attempts mostly remained symbolic gestures, ultimately contained by remnant objects and documents [such as Johannes Baader's Dada pamphlets or Fluxus event scores and photographs] that preserved the intervention and safely brought it back to art exhibition spaces. The quality of interventions by ubermorgen, the YesMen and now the Pirates of the Amazon (although the students themselves never intended to act in such a position and legacy, being quite intimidated by the news media attention their project received) lies exactly in the fact that they are not confided to these safe spaces. To use Calin's terminology, the "relational" aesthetics is not just aesthetic, often even hardly recognizable as aesthetic, but intervenes straight into the actual economic and political systems, thanks to the fact that social and economic structures have been coded into software and thus are also prone to be disrupted by software that finds a clever crack in the symbolic system. (The YesMen's ReamWeaver and ubermorgen's voteauction.com are more such examples.) > Again, I cannot but agree, which makes me wonder why it was closed > down so quickly (though, it's always easy to criticize others for not > taking the heat). It was the learning experience for the students themselves that it takes so little to go from a more safeguarded space of artistic and school experimentation to headline news. I think it needs to be respected if they do not want to take the heat, and it's my responsibility as their teacher and mentor to support them in this respect. > Rather, it seems to reveal how much the "free > culture movement" (if there ever was such a thing) has been reshaped > as "web2.0" and how much it is now happy with this niche of "user > generated content" or "amateur creativity". [...] > Projects like the "Pirates of the Amazon" blur this distinction > and threaten to undo the last couple of years of work of building > respectability for the CC and YouTube set. This, I think is why the > reactions on digg.com and other web2.0 sites are so hostile. Yes, I couldn't agree more, Felix! But it even goes further than that. The hostile reactions were not only to be found on the web2.0 sites, but also on sites like torrentfreak. What the "Pirates of the Amazon" revealed is that even the p2p file sharing community is happy with its niche, and eager to keep it like that. Amazon and The Pirate Bay are two parallel systems that don't bother each other very much [although their media content is quite similar]. In interfacing the two sites, the plug-in violated a taboo for Amazon.com as much for the P2P "pirate" community which was afraid that, through the plug-in, their niche could be discovered by the mainstream and consequently shut down. This why I think the students are absolutely right in characterizing their plug-in as parodist. Kristoffer's hint to Bataille and Klossowski is helpful here indeed - I am also reminded of Kurt Kren's 1967 experimental short film "20. September", a montage that directly connects eating mouths to urinating penises and defecating anuses. The seemingly "perverse" link between Amazon and the Pirate Bay states a similarly simple truth that the cultural mainstream (whether Amazon customers, Web 2.0 amateurs or P2P downloaders) does not enjoy to be reminded of. -F -- http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70 gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org