DMA HW week 5

Artists today are reshaping our culture, whether it be through reimagining art and our cultural past or challenging the conventions of today. Take the artist Issa, formally Jane Siberry, who was the first artist to allow people to choose what they paid for her music, even if it be a cool $0.00. When the average price for a download ended up being more than the average price of an itunes download, she demonstrated the virtue in an open artistic environment in which the people who actually care about the art can assign their own value to it, rather than government and record labels determining its value and distributing it as they please. However, Issa is part of a small, yet growing, minority, and copyright law still hinders the way that people can access and use what the experience in culture for artistic purposes. The graphic novella Bound By Law illustrates how even with the legal protection of Fair Use, corporations can make it so expensive legally to test the copyright waters that there really isn't anything that has been created by someone else that is truly free for a next creative mind to use. The Remix entry on Wikipedia explains how copyright laws often pertain to how closely the remix resembles the original, and how much the original artist (or legal or commercial entity that owns the work, or "product" from their standpoint) cares that someone else creates their own vision of it. Tim Wu sums it up in his article on tolerated use: "(Today we have) a copyright law that covers almost everything we do in the digital world... so expansive and extreme that the very firms that first sought it cannot even make use of it". So we end up with different degrees of "tolerated lawbreaking", and different artists risk themselves to different degrees in order to remix culture. Justin McIntosh and Pogo are two remix artists who have used traditional Disney animation for different purposes. McIntosh mixed classic Donald Duck footage with audio clips of Glenn Beck in order to use Donald as a metaphor for the American who is senselessly put into a state of paranoia by blinding following political propaganda. Pogo, on the other hand, was originally sanctioned by Disney to remix their classics, but they didn't approve of his impressive Snow White remix and he was only allowed to individually distribute it after his contract had been terminated. Nonetheless, both remain on Youtube and the public's overwhelmingly positive response speaks for itself. This trend is evident as well with The Story of Cosmetics, a short film on Youtube that was posted independently. The piece is a perfect example of how a short Youtube video, free for anyone to view, can serve a great and powerful cause, such as bringing to light the way that corporate interests and corruption of government causes us to be constantly polluted from the things we buy and consume, under the "toxins in, toxins out" model. Independent digital art such as this is proving to be the new movement of creative control in our society, where creative control doesn't imply control over the monetary profit of one's creativity, but control over what impact one's creativity has on culture. This self-reliance can be seen with the band Atomic Tom, who released a video of themselves performing a song on a subway exclusively on iPhone app instruments, since their real instruments had been stolen. Although the band has stated that the backstory of the stolen instruments was fictional, the fact that they were able to adequately perform the song using nothing but smart-phones proves that a new era of artistic ingenuity is rising in the age of digital media.