Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art

Carolyn Guertin

Eph 2012 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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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.

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Carolyn Guertin holds a dual appointment in digital media-as Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and as a member of the graduate faculty at Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany. She was Senior McLuhan Fellow and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto from 2004 to 2006. She is widely published on issues related to cyberfeminism, born-digital arts, and participatory cultures.