< i've been reading Whitehead's "process & reality," which 
radically problematizes the myth of perpetual objects existing 
throughout time, and replaces that myth with the quantum myth of "real 
entities/events," a series of which may form a nexus of connections 
which we used to call "an object." the egyptian pyramids as one long 
series of consecutive events.>

At the risk of straying somewhat from the copyright topic, that sounds extraordinarily interesting. I'm going to get a copy.

I've found it helpful to think of any artwork, be it literary, visual 
art or music ( or cookery - it works for cookery too) as a kind of fuzzy four dimensional manifold ( and I mean 
that precisely - it's neither metaphor nor terminological abuse).
So the "complete" artwork is the sum of all its instances in time, and 
all epiphenomena - for the piece of music, all scores, published or 
otherwise, all performances, accurate or otherwise, all parodies and, as
 a kind of pre-echo, all the previous pieces it borrows or learns from  -
 variations on a theme of &c, as well as everything it itself 
influences, echoing on, like ripples in a pond, until these vanish...
For the visual art work it is every moment, from birth to decay, through
 repair to decay once again, to death and dissolution ( for it *will* 
happen!). It is also every critical text, every photo, every parody, 
every joke cracked about it, every apoplectic letter to the Times, or 
whatever...
The entire artwork, seen this way, is a real and precisely enumerable 
sum, a concrete, not imaginary, set, which could be knowable in its 
entirety by something long lived and far seeing enough (though finite, 
for all the artworks it could know, taken all together, are still 
finite).
This has the huge advantage in finding common ground for artworks in all 
different genres and disciplines, getting rid of the rather silly and 
fussy type/token arguments in the ontology of music, theatre &c as well as 
grounding borrowing, dialogue, connection and influence in art's very 
core...
cheers
michael


________________________________
From: curt cloninger <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 4:51 PM
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] October Theme: Copyright

hi michael (and all),

Sans Soleil is gradually becoming my favorite film. i've thought a lot lately about Marker's "a grin without a cat" and its relation to Debord's "society of the spectacle" film, and their relations to all the Adam Curtis BBC documentaries, and all of their relations to early Greenaway faux-documentaries (the falls, a walk through h, vertical features remake), and maybe even all their relations to Herzog's "Fata Morgana." and i've been reading Whitehead's "process & reality," which radically problematizes the myth of perpetual objects existing throughout time, and replaces that myth with the quantum myth of "real entities/events," a series of which may form a nexus of connections which we used to call "an object." the egyptian pyramids as one long series of consecutive events.

anyway, to Whitehead, history "belongs" to each person from her unique perspective just as her own body belongs to her -- both come together to make her who she is perpetually becoming. so Fata Morgana or The Falls are obviously like personal, idiosyncratic, faux-histories -- ficto-documentary as a creative genre. but debord and marker are also making history their own, not by adding an original voice-over narrative to "original" footage, but by adding an original voice-over narrative to "found" footage. (adam curtis is doing the same, although in the guise of "real" documentary.)

so my own personal memories can't be coyrighted, and according to Bergson, I'm constantly making of them what i need. but some of those memories happen to be memories of media, and according to de certeau, i'm constantly making (do) of them what i need. but all of this personal historical concrescence (remixing) is happening within me. it's only when i exteriorize "my" history for others to see (in the form of a film, for example), that copyright issues come into play.

personal recontextualizing, modulating, and remixing of copyrighted media is happening all the time (just like personal recontextualizing of the events of the "non-mediated" historical world are happening al the time). we can't avoid making all of these things our own -- indeed, they are constantly concretizing into who we are becoming. it's only once we externalize this process by making a found footage film which enacts the process that it seems hideous and monstrous to those whose source materials we are remixing ("she made *that* of *my* media?")

from this perspective, one could argue that copyright is a capitalistic reification of the overwhelming, underlying desire for (the myth of) im-mediate, un-mediated communication -- a desire for lossless transference a la Vulcan mind-meld. if i can't by any means control the ways in which you subjectively receive my source media, and least i can keep you from externalizing your bastardized reception of it, to prevent your "wrong" bastardization of my "pure" source intention from further contaminating the minds of others!

fortunately, the media of language is not so heavily policed as the media of film/video. otherwise there would be no slippage/difference/evolution of thought (at least thought via language). spinoza would sue deleuze, bergson would sue whitehead, plato would sue everyone, and derrida would be out of a job completely.

curt cloninger [sent from my phone]

____________________________________________
From: Michael Szpakowski
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2011 6:10:52 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] October Theme: Copyright


Again, anecdotally ( and deliberately so; I want to look at this, not from a legal perspective but in terms of, if you like, natural justice, of access to expressive means...)
I'm watching and re-watching Victor Erice's fantastic short movie, La Morte Rouge, about -amongst other things - his first experience of seeing a film at the Kursaal (!) in San Sebastian in, I think, 1946.

Its visual methodology conjures inescapably Benjamin's notion of a work made entirely of quotations - virtually all the images are stills from newspapers, archive photos, film &c. as well as clips from The Scarlet Claw, the movie set in the eponymous village of La Morte Rouge.

There are sections, views of watching cinema audiences, which appear to have been especially shot.
It's glued together by these & by a narration somewhat reminsicent of Marker ( and - I have to ask -does this similiarity devalue it) and this glue and the semi documentary quality lull us and innoculate us against the sheer strangeness of Erice's endeavour.

I've no doubt that Erice was able to clear everything he uses. That is, for me, neither here not there. It's the need that grips me, the need to make something almost entirely out of fragments... And the extraordinary affective charge that results...


Then I thought about another Erice film -El Sol del Membrillo - another "documentary" ( documentary it is, but so much more too) about Antonio Lopez Garcia , the Spanish realist painter.

If the pasting together of fragments in the manner of La Morte Rouge could ever be in any sense "wrong" then what does it mean to make a piece like El Sol del Membrillo where everything is "parasitic" upon the life and the art works of another...

And then  - isn't this true of every work of art? I said this elsewhere but it bears repetition  -if I take a photograph in Barcelona and it includes a image of part of La Pedrera, either by accident of design, do I need to attribute some of the "ownership" of the photo to Gaudi? And if yes, how much of La Pedrera must I have included to tip myself over this threshold?


Or, if I take a photo of a particularly fine cheese grater, a designer cheese grater no less - is my authorship or morality contaminated by a failure to acknowledge that designer?

Or are these stupid questions when we acknowledge the essential interconnectedness of all art?

michael