DMA week 4 HW

Write a blog entry about creativity, influence, ownership, and art in the digital age.

I've watched the film "RiP: A Remix Manifesto" before I took this class, but viewing it now specifically as an artist who lives in a world that is undeniably dominated by technology and inextricably digitized, it achieves its goal with me personally; it is extremely unsettling. The Remixer's Manifesto, as it is called in the film, partially states that culture always builds on the past, and that the past always tries to control the future. This is virtually inarguable; Jonathan Lethem explains in The ecstacy of influence how literature, one of our older art forms, has and always will adhere to this principle as he provides the example of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1956) is strikingly similar to Heinz von Lichberg's tale of the same name from forty years earlier, though it is impossible for anyone to truly judge whether Nabokov intentionally sampled story elements from Lichberg or if the earlier story had subconsciously influenced him so much that he couldn't help but write the story. Culture, and art, more specifically, has proven to be governed by this principle and process. Steve Dixon's "Digital Performance" shows us how the basic idea of such new age forums of digital art as an IMAX theater are just a part of a natural artistic evolution from such things as the friezes of ancient Pompeii. As my professor Bob King has stated in one of his podcasts, digital media can be defined technically and ontologically, but its historical definition explains that it's merely the industrialization of mental labor, and that it's just the most recent step in a long history of technology that is itself a small step in a large anthropological history. It makes sense then that the development of modern media with the daguerrotype (the first photographic machine) and the development of computing machinery with the analytical engine occurred at roughly the same time in the nineteenth century, as Lev Manovich relates in "New Media". The essence of all of this information is that both art and technology are constantly evolving human "phenomenons", if you will, that by their very nature sample from and utilize their past in order to create their future, and that these governing principles have made the dawn of digital media inevitable. The problem is that the potential for digital media to connect the world electronically to share ideas about art and media has become, for some, an even greater potential for profit. Copyright laws that were originally intended purely to protect artists are now ways for incomprehensibly large corporations to harness the communication that occurs digitally over the internet and reinterpret it as a commercial market. As Lawrence Lessig says, we are now criminalizing an entire generation (technically I'm of the generation, not a "raiser"), but the motivation is one of profit, not of protecting artistic creativity. Artists like Girl Talk who blatantly use other artists' music to create his own are only doing what artists of any medium have done throughout history; the digital age has just made it far more apparent and far more accessible to the masses, which allows for far more legal and commercial attention to be paid to the "issue".