Digital Prohibition

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 (à 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.

Introduction: Ambivalence and Authorship    The Third Space of Authorship: Participatory Practices and New Narrative Models    The New Prohibition: Digital Piracy and the Politics of Creation     Part I ~ The Aesthetics of Appropriation    Creativity is Dead    Long Live The Reflexive Remix    Interruption (Stoppage + Repetition)    Disturbance (Action + Event)    Tactical Media: Public Disturbance After the Decline and Fall of Activism    Capture/Leakage (Performance + Documentation)    Dynamic Data and Augmented Bodies     Part II: Authorship    From Karaoke Culture to Vernacular Video    ‘Aberrant Decoding' and Atactical Aesthetics    Sampling    Mashups    Remakes/Adaptations/Intertexts    Streamed data/content or visualization    Archiving As An Aesthetic Form    Hacks    Google Empire: Smart Art and Intelligent Agents  From Intelligent Tools to Smart Art    Real Time/ UnReal Time     Part III: Creative Cannibalism and Digital Anthropophagy    Digital Anthropophagy    Translation: Performing The In Between    ‘Productive Mistranslation' (China and Pakistan)     Conclusion    Works CitedIndex