#14
Depropriation
By Marcus Boon
For many philosophers appropriation is constitutive of human being. In order to survive we eat, we build territories, we take and we give. Marx, in his early manuscripts, spoke of man’s entire relation to world as one of sensory appropriation. More broadly, all political-economic systems that are based on exchange and equivalence may be said to involve appropriation…
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#13
Post-Internet Curating
By Boris Groys
The word present can be understood in at least two different ways. Thus, we can speak about the presence of the present—about the ways in which the world presents itself to us. It is a traditional topic of philosophy. From Plato through Heidegger and until our own time one mostly thematized the experience of here and now, the immediate openness of the world to our senses…
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#12
“Taswira” in the Archive
On the Afterlife of Television Images in the Postcolony
By Andrei Siclodi
The structure and dynamics of the world we live in are informed by a economically driven mindset to an unprecedented degree. After its steady rise since nineteenth-century industrialization and the demise of the communist project at the end of the 1980s, capitalist expansion has practically conquered the entire world with its ideological stamp…
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#11
The Surplus of Copying
How Shadow Libraries and Pirate Archives Contribute to the
Creation of Cultural Memory and the Commons
By Cornelia Sollfrank
Digital artworks tend to have a problematic relationship with the white cube—in particular, when they are intended and optimized for online distribution. While curators and exhibition-makers usually try to avoid showing such works altogether, or at least aim at enhancing their sculptural qualities to make them more presentable…
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#10
Be with the Trouble
Cultural Appropriation in America
By Bettina Funcke
“Now art is all about being constructed out of relationships between parts.” (Laura Owens) If we take what Laura Owens intended to be a comment on the formal, material process of art-making today and read it as a social, cultural, and political description, we find a key to the American debate over cultural appropriation…
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#09
“Retrograde Remediation”
Cross-Media Translations in Contemporary Film-Related Art
By Gabriele Jutz
In his prose poem “Ixion” Belgrade Surrealist Monny de Boully draws a detailed diagram of a fantastic machine, namely an air-carriage, powered by “sexually starved eagles”. The heroine of the book describes in detail how this contraption functions: It is flown by eagles, who are at first kept inside their cages. In the big front cage, are a male and a female…
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#08
One to One-and-a-Half
On the Spectrum of Contemporary Artistic Copying Practices
By Christian Höller
The fake snuff movie effect alone is remarkable. In Kanye West’s notorious music clip “Famous”, as the camera eye slowly fades down through the clouds, the pixelly image resolution already suggests something nasty. When the first hints of faces appear, as if they were filmed with a cheap pre-digital video camera, you are already…
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#07
Giving and Taking
Renegotiating Literary Citation Culture
By Annette Gilbert
There is a growing number of cases in which authors are actually being cited to appear in court for their citations, for quoting from a foreign source, and being admonished in public—and not just in the strictly regulated scientific or journalistic fields but also in the literary realm, where freer rules apply to the practice of citation…
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#06
Copying as Performative Research
Toward an Artistic Working Model
By Franz Thalmair
Why original and copy yet again? Why still? Copying has attained a new diversity. In the context of digital technologies, which facilitate identical reproductions of any data, the practice of copying is omnipresent yet often invisible. It has evolved into a multifarious but…
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#05
How Electrons Remember
By Laura U. Marks
In this essay I will argue that electronic images are the index, if not of an original object, then at least of a physical process. Without sounding too anthropomorphic, I want to suggest that electrons remember. There are two problems to be addressed. First, what is the material basis of electronic imaging? Second, is this material basis…
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#04
Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative
By McKenzie Wark
Unlike Hito Steyerl, I don’t think art is a currency. I think it’s a derivative, which is not quite the same thing as a currency. A currency can store value or act as a means of exchange. A derivative does something different. It manages and hedges risk. What we need, then, is a theory of art as a derivative…
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#03
Copy
By Jussi Parikka
The process of copying is a key cultural technique of modernity. The mechanization of imitatio awed even the hailed Renaissance artist Leon Battista Alberti at the dawn of the Gutenberg era: “Dato and I were strolling in the Supreme Pontiff’s gardens at the Vatican and we got talking about literature as we so often do…
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#02
Easy is the New Difficult
By Kenneth Goldsmith
Easy is the new difficult. It is difficult to be difficult, but it is even more difficult to be easy. Easy is not easy. Easy takes effort, just as difficulty takes effort. I want an easy art, an art of pure pleasure, an art that is completely understandable by anyone viewing it, an art that doesn’t leave you puzzled, an art that ties up every loose end, dots every…
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#01
Living with Ghosts
From Appropriation to Invocation in Contemporary Art
By Jan Verwort
Appropriation is a common technique in contemporary culture. People appropriate when they make things their own and integrate them into their way of life, by buying or stealing commodities, acquiring knowledge, squatting and so on. Artists appropriate when they adopt imagery, concepts and ways of making art other artists have used at other times to…
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