Under similar circumstances, the 2008 audiovisual remix performance Rebirth of a Nation by DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) seems more successful at condemning the racial slurs in D.W. Griffith\u2019s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which exalts the exploits of the Ku Klux Klan during the American war of secession. Here, the artist speaks from a political position generated by his own ethnicity, which is analogous to the group attacked in Griffith\u2019s film. DJ Spooky doesn\u2019t interpret Birth of a Nation. Instead, he creates a transformative piece that recontextualizes the filmmaker\u2019s moving images, producing a d\u00e9tournement that outlines the subjugation of black people and making it impossible to read Griffith\u2019s intentions in a forgiving manner. Schutz and DJ Spooky provide clearly contrasting instances of the impact that praxis has on authors, works, and audiences. And they both demonstrate the difficulties entailed in stomaching stories of oppression when told by members of the oppressive group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"DJ-Spooky_RebirthofaNation\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/97_DO02_Sorenson_DJ-Spooky_DSC_0043_CMYK-C-FLAT-scaled.jpg\")
Rebirth of a Nation<\/em>, performance, MCA, Chicago, 2004.
Photo : Michal Raz-Russo, \u00a9 MCA Chicago<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Some critics have characterized this dialectical tension between factions in uneven positions of power as a form of \u201ccultural cannibalism\u201d which often overwhelms the powerless and occasionally engulfs the powerful. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in Cannibal Metaphysics, calls for a greater reciprocity between \u201cprimitive\u201d and \u201ccivilized\u201d discourses, so that remote tribes and ancient cultures may absorb Western knowledge without fear of losing authentic ties to their traditions. He suggests the methods and behaviours of these tribes and cultures should more readily permeate scientific thinking, which would provide valuable insight into the frameworks of Western societies.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).<\/span> Deborah Root, in Cannibal Culture, suggests a darker outcome to this exchange by deconstructing the Western tendency to aestheticize and commodify markers of difference in Other cultures for the narrow purpose of selling new products. She points to how citizenship, ethnicity, dress codes, and other place-based markers actively participate in a subject\u2019s identity formation and become thoroughly sullied when rebranded on a global scale as commodities.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Some critics have characterized this dialectical tension between factions in uneven positions of power as a form of \u201ccultural cannibalism\u201d which often overwhelms the powerless and occasionally engulfs the powerful.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Indeed, economic vectors habitually overshadow political actions. The objectification of bodies, which extended to chattel slavery under colonialism, was driven largely by commercial incentives, which John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and John Bellamy Foster have discussed in great detail.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - John Stewart Mill and Thomas Carlyle, The Negro Question (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Digital, 2012); Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. Harry Quelch (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2008); John B. Foster and Brett Clark, \u201cThe Expropriation of Nature,\u201d Monthly Review 69, no. 10 (2018): 1\u201328.<\/span> Likewise, in the transition out of colonialism, a zero-sum game was enacted throughout the industrial revolution so emancipated subalterns could conveniently morph into subservient working classes, along with landless farmers and serfs moving from situations of famine and despair to work in factories and their associated structures of wage slavery. In other words, condemning the appropriation of an Other\u2019s body made way for the more lucrative expropriation of an Other\u2019s labour time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The innovations of industrial capitalism, dependent upon the extraction of value from human resources, introduced the circular economy of mass production\/consumption. Wages exchanged for productive labour were promptly handed back to industrialists during leisure time, as labourers were temporarily converted into consumers that purchased the merchandise they made in the factories. Instead of discrediting this redundant logic, the crash of 1929 provided an impetus to speed up the production\/consumption cycle by shortening the lifespan of commodities, a policy coined by Bernard London as \u201cplanned obsolescence.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Bernard London, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence (New York, 1932).<\/span> The demand for purchasing new things at ever-faster rates is first reflected in artistic terms in Rimbaud\u2019s call to be absolutely modern.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations, trans. John Ashbery (Manchester: Carcanet Classics, 2018<\/span> Explicit yet open-ended, the word \u201cmodern\u201d applies to all things that qualify as new, contemporary, different, original, and trendy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the twentieth century, this call to be modern endorsed the continuous renewal of one\u2019s wardrobe, reading list, art collection, and so on, to further enhance the flow of consumption. As stated above, the \u201ccult of the new\u201d fetishized a cannibalism of traditional societies; energized Rimbaud\u2019s influence on avant-garde art; overtly celebrated mass culture within Pop Art; and has been constantly repackaged in recent times (from Neo-Expressionism through to Neo-Geo and Post-Internet art). In current multinational corporate climates, marketing structures have instituted a perpetual quest for innovation, especially under the mantle of New Media and digital economies governed by Moore\u2019s Law.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Moore\u2019s Law refers to an idea proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, CEO of Intel Corporation. Moore believed that new electronic equipment would become twice as powerful and half as expensive every eighteen months, boosting the incentive to continually upgrade to new products.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Innovation has become the dominant model for profit-mongering, in conjunction with what McKenzie Wark calls \u201cdisruption\u201d: the upward transfer of wealth in times of austerity and lapses in the growth of consumer markets.8 In response to stagnation, new ventures have encroached on public services and common lands\u200a\u2014\u200aaccess to national parks, roads, education, healthcare, culture, and more\u200a\u2014\u200ato privatize and monetize previously free amenities. Via cyberspace and the uberization of the gig economy, hospitality services have endured particularly severe disruptions as hotel and taxi bookings have been swiftly streamlined into the app-based models of immaterial markets. Alongside the controlling measures of surveillance capitalism best encapsulated by the 2013 NSA scandal, blue-chip high-tech corporations now extract value from the primitive accumulation of information.For instance, users of Google and Facebook are treated not as customers but as raw material. The wealth of knowledge accumulated by appropriating data from the browsing and purchasing histories of users, geographic locations, biometric features, and more is captured within databases and sold as statistics to the highest bidders. Consequently, engaging with one\u2019s social network online has become unpaid labour. The captive attention of web users has been subjugated to immaterial bondage, put to work to generate real and concrete prosperity for corporate shareholders. Carrying the modern project to its logical conclusion, this century\u2019s global economy no longer cannibalizes isolated tribes but entire online populations, like the mythological snake Ouroboros eating its own tail and consuming itself into oblivion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This one-sided appropriation of knowledge, sustained by fencing off and selling information in limited parcels, recalls Georges Bataille\u2019s definition of waste: to maintain the economic regime of scarcity within conditions of abundance.9 Admittedly, the relative growth in revenues has waned in most markets. Yet, in absolute terms, the overall quantity of information now streaming online carries unprecedented economies of scale: Facebook users upload an average of 350 million new photographs every day; three hundred hours of video are uploaded on YouTube every minute; and Amazon processes over three hundred transactions every second. UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith associates this overabundance of signs with a \u201cnew illegibility\u201d contingent upon the viewer\u2019s acquired inability to metabolize cultural signifiers, which ultimately foments a decline in representational efficiency.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n As our biographical details are made virtual and squandered on databases worldwide, new anxieties escalate due to a lack of clarity about the moral right to preserve the integrity of this data. Under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights<\/em> (TRIPS), a complete database file is regarded as an authored collection of records and can therefore be copyrighted, whereas single items of data remain unprotected when listed as \u201cpublic facts,\u201d thus becoming subject to unrestricted extraction by data-mining activities. In the meantime, entertainment firms such as Disney re-master and re-launch their existing films every few decades, to renew the trademark protections on creative works. This constant restoration process allows Disney to block its content from ever entering the public domain. Such concerns beg the question: Where exactly is culture? Is it privatized in corporate networks, stockpiled in public institutions, or roaming within the collective memory of living communities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to animator and fair use advocate Nina Paley, culture essentially lies within us\u200a\u2014\u200ainside our brains and physical constitutions. Images and sound bites may have been mediated through private channels, but once they reach our consciousness, they reside inside us. Paley argues that copyright rules have no jurisdiction over embodied cultures and cannot hinder a person\u2019s ability to share, modify, or remove the contents of their intellectual character. How much choice do I really have about what information goes in and comes out of me?11 Such proclamations revitalize attempts by women to maintain control over their own bodies with regard to reproductive rights. Intersectionally, the claims of copyrights militants resonate with the demands of pro-choice activists for the sovereignty of a cohesive body that cannot be divided into subunits to be governed by third parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the shrinking public sphere previously summoned the Ouroboros, the expanding field of private intellectual property is perhaps conjuring another mythical snake, tempting us to bite the forbidden fruits of tinkering and repair. Conspicuously sitting at the helm of all Apple products, the technology firm\u2019s logo epitomizes this interdiction. The trademarked icon evokes the prohibition to take from Apple\u2019s tree of knowledge and otherwise banishes culprits from its garden of consumption. Put simply, Apple bans its customers from repairing and upgrading the hardware that they own, just like Monsanto bans farmers from replanting the patented seeds that they grow, to police the demands on their respective commodities. Interestingly, when Napster was hijacking the burgeoning digital music market in the 1990s, they were instrumental in convincing Apple to launch iTunes in 2001 as a way to bring downloadable music to mainstream attention. Although Napster\u2019s peer-to-peer service eventually went bankrupt because of iTunes\u2019s rebuttal, there is something tragically romantic about a tiny start-up challenging the supremacy of mega-corporations such as Apple\u200a\u2014\u200aa feat analogous to citizens defying the bureaucracy of authoritative governments or subjects resisting the dominion of nineteenth-century empires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Danish collective Superflex also quixotically confronts intellectual property conventions with its Supercopy Factory<\/em> events, as presented in 2017 at the Trapholt Museum (Denmark). With this project Superflex invites visitors to bring in replicas of brand-named goods, onto which they silkscreen the word \u201cSupercopy.\u201d This ritualized transformation of a replica into a copy of a copy flips the object\u2019s status from that of cheap imitation to customized original. This anecdote teaches us that gestures of appropriation that disobey the hegemonic rules of copyrights, are best wielded from the precarious position of pirates and underdogs. Such DIY tinkering expresses dissent toward the inflated value of corporate brands, shames the hoarding of information by social networks, and, on a grander scale, questions the legitimacy of conqueror-centric historical records.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/97_DO02_Sorenson_Nina-Paley_Movie-Clipping_1-1_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/97_DO02_Sorenson_Nina-Palay_MovieClipping_3-1_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
Seder-Masochism<\/em>, video stills, 2018.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/97_DO02_Sorenson_Nina-Paley_MovieClipping_2-1_CMYK-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/97_DO02_Sorenson_supercopy_lacoste01_CMYK.jpg\")
Supercopy Lacoste<\/em>, 2002.
Photo : courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n