“One thing you should consider before posting:
When you make something publicly available on the
Internet, it becomes practically impossible to
take down all copies of it.”1
In the context of digital technologies, which facilitate identical and loss-free reproductions of any data, the process of copying has become omnipresent yet invisible. Particularly with the popularization of the Internet over the past two decades, copying has developed into a multifaceted but controversial cultural practice, which nowadays predominantly manifests in public discourses about copyright, plagiarism, and unauthorized fakes. At the root of this debate is a negative understanding of the copy always in opposition to the positively connoted original. In the arts-based research project originalcopy, however, we develop a working model that contrasts these discussions, which are normally conducted from a commercial standpoint and have their origin in the establishment of ownership privileges2 in the nineteenth century bourgeois understanding of hierarchies.
In point of fact, originalcopy places the potentials of the copy, its generative force, and its mimetic productivity at the center of the research. By no longer regarding the original as the basis for the evaluation of the copy we question traditional value systems. The ubiquity of copies nowadays confirms that the processes underlying the act of copying have become established as artistic and cultural practices. But precisely because the mechanisms of copying frequently remain hidden and that this invisibility and loss of control arouse anxieties, which in turn manifest in the strengthening of the dichotomy between original and copy, our aim is to investigate how the act of copying functions in our post-digital3 condition. Rather than merely focusing on the copy’s invisibility, we go one step further and ground originalcopy on the actual indifference toward the act of copying—on its banality, self-evidence, and implicitness.
By adopting prevalent copying strategies and re-using them in the context of originalcopy—or in simple terms, by copying copying methods—we follow a recursive research path and strive for a meta-methodology of copying methods. Our inclination is that the distinction between the original and the copy is no longer explicit within current methods of art production and that former bipolarities have lost their basis. As the project title originalcopy suggests, we no longer conceive the previous opposites as temporally or hierarchically sequential, but as parallel, simultaneous, and equal—original and copy have merged into a new entity which has become a decisive engine for art production, be it in the digital or in the analog realm.
The term “original copy”—written separately in standard English language—is central to the research project. Here “original” denotes the unique source of a thought or an object while “copy” inscribes its own carbon likeness on this source, thereby immediately dissolving the idea of uniqueness once again. In this sense “original copy” is not the inceptive and primordial; it is but one of many in a series of versions: a chronologically previous basis, a present model, and a pioneering future prototype at the same time. In the tantamount research originalcopy the words “original” and “copy” are no longer read separately but merge into a single form and concept. The amalgamation of the terms—transformed by erasing the space between them—stands programmatically for both the idea and the arts-based methodology of performative research upon which originalcopy is based.
In originalcopy we understand the copy not only as a true-to-scale image with the greatest possible resemblance to the original but as a practice that transcends this definition. We negotiate the act of copying as an act of appropriating contemporary practices, methods, and techniques, and as an act of translation intervening in and thus interpreting existing concepts, forms, or materials anew in order to critically reflect or analyze them. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s conception of translation as a “tangent [which] touches a circle lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course,”4 allows us to embrace the processes of copying in two respects: On the one hand, we explore how the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of the copy affects the general conditions of art creation, and on the other hand, we employ the act of copying in a self-reflective manner—as an artistic means underlining its own pivotal iteration-based character.
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1 “Terms of Service,” Tumblr, last modified: January 27, 2014, accessed August 12, 2016 http://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/terms_of_service.
2 Cf. Sabine Nuss, Copyright & Copyriot. Aneignungskonflikte um geistiges Eigentum im informationellen Kapitalismus (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2006).
3 Cf. Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure. Post-Digital Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal, 24, no. 4 (2000): 12–18.
4 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux Parisien’,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2004[1923]), 80.