CULTURE MACHINE <http://www.culturemachine.net> is pleased to announce 
the publication of the following new reviews:

* RiP: A Remix Manifesto (2009) documentary directed by Brett Gaylor. 
Reviewed by Laura J. Murray.

Brett Gaylor’s documentary on the friction between copyright law and 
remix music is highly engaging to look at and listen to. The ‘talking 
heads’ that appear in the film will be familiar to copyright watchers 
(Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow), and many examples have been exposed 
quite a bit too (Disney’s Steamboat Willy, Negativland, Gilberto Gil). 
But Gaylor also presents some less-known material: for example, he has 
great interviews with Dan O’Neill of the Mouse Liberation Front, a 
beguiling copyright resistance movement from 1971, and clearly a model 
for Gaylor of how to speak truth to power with style and pleasure. 
(Spoiler: you get to see Minnie and Mickey doing something in bed Disney 
never let us in on.) With snippets of visuals from popular culture 
collaged with interview footage, and a central focus on the Pittsburgh 
DJ Girltalk, Gaylor’s film embodies the punchy, sampling aesthetic it 
champions.


* The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in Plato and Nietzsche 
(2008) by Séan Burke. Reviewed by Maebh Long.

The prologue to Seán Burke’s The Death and Return of the Author 
concludes with the remark that ‘the concept of the author is never more 
alive than when pronounced dead’. Continuing his focus on the author, it 
is the origins of this thoroughly resuscitated revenant that Burke turns 
his attentions to in The Ethics of Writing: Authorship and Legacy in 
Plato and Nietzsche. As in his earlier publication, this text combines 
the same uneasy relationship to post-structuralism and deconstruction 
with rigorous research and a careful, scholarly approach. It therefore 
raises the following question: does writing against deconstruction from 
within a deconstructive vocabulary and style constitute a performative 
paradox or an absolute enactment of, and agreement with, deconstruction?

TO READ THE FULL REVIEWS:
1. Go to <http://www.culturemachine.net>
2. Click on the ‘Reviews’ heading right under the journal’s banner.
3. Click on the ‘PDF’ sign next to the review you are interested in.


* Bonus project: Culture Machine in Search of Pirates

The current ‘Pirate Philosophy’ issue of Culture Machine engages with 
the philosophy of internet piracy, as well as the emergence of social 
movements and even political parties focused around piracy, such as the 
Piratpartiet in Sweden, which recently won two seats in the European 
Parliament. But this issue of Culture Machine also contains a number of 
contributions which engage with the philosophy of piracy by 
experimenting with the creation of what might be interpreted as actual 
‘pirate’ texts.

To encourage further experimentation of this kind, Gary Hall’s 12,000 
word article, ‘Pirate Philosophy Version 1.0: Open Access, Open Editing, 
Free Content, Free/Libre/Open Media’, which initially formed the opening 
essay to this issue, has now been placed on a torrent search engine and 
directory, while the original has been deleted from the Culture Machine 
site. Already at the launch of this issue Hall announced his intention 
to destroy his original file as soon as someone downloaded this 
torrented file and opened it. ‘Pirate Philosophy Version 2.0 was indeed 
downloaded via a torrent on 25.05.2009, so the original was destroyed 
the same day. What this means is that there is now no longer an 
‘original’ or ‘master’ copy of this text in the conventional sense. 
Instead, it exists only to the extent it is part of a ‘pirate’ 
peer-to-peer network’ and that it is ‘pirated’. All copies of the 
‘Pirate Philosophy’ article are now ‘pirate’ copies. The aim behind this 
project is to explore the effect of internet piracy on our ideas of 
authorship, the proper name, the signature, attribution, publication, 
citation, fair use, copyright, intellectual property and content 
creation, both philosophically and practically.

To download ‘Pirate Philosophy Version 2.0’, search the Mininova torrent 
directory for ‘Pirate Philosophy p2p ver2.0’, or just go directly to 
<http://www.mininova.org/tor/2620411>.

-- 
Dr Joanna Zylinska
Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London

My website: http://www.joannazylinska.net
Reviews Editor for Culture Machine: http://www.culturemachine.net

* New book: Bioethics in the Age of New Media *
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11759