The book is available for purchase on Amazon.com, but you can read my chapter below, or download it as a pdf.

The post Crises of Meaning in Communities of Creative Appropriation – A Case Study of the 2010 RE/Mixed Media Festival first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In 1961, Ellen Stewart revolutionized the New York performance scene when she opened Café La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street tenement. The African-American fashion designer-cum-impresario imagined the new space as an alternative to popular Off-Off Broadway venues like Caffe Cino and the Gaslight — small spaces that were relics of, and still very much associated with the Beat coffeehouse scene.

Those early venues had been created with a particular ambiance and with a specific audience in mind. Stewart’s innovation was to create a truly neutral performance venue to serve as a tabula rasa for emerging playwrights, allowing them to create new work on their own terms. La MaMa was truly a “black box” — a theatrical architecture that inspired future generations of underground performance and spawned what might be called a micro-theatre movement in the East Village and the Lower East Side that continues to this day. But the black box wasn’t the only experimental innovation happening in the 1960s New York art world.

Early in that decade, ideas driving the convergence of art with cybernetic and computer technology, being conducted in Europe by Roy Ascott and others, reached the United States. In 1966, American composer and sound-art pioneer Max Neuhaus teamed up with NYC radio station WBAI to create “Public Supply” — an experiment in two-way aural public space in which listeners could contribute to a composition in real time by phoning into the station and having their voices electronically transformed into components of a musical composition. The project is considered one of the first successful artistic collaborations over an electronic network in real-time. The same year, renowned abstract expressionist Robert Rauschenberg met an engineer from Bell Telephone Lab named Billy Klüver. Together, they launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), with the aim of connecting artists and technologists to launch experimental explorations into the intersection of art and technology.

Meanwhile, Ellen Stewart connected La MaMa with theatrical communities worldwide and built a global circuit of independent theatrical practitioners. Networking, collaboration, and technology were all emerging into the cultural zeitgeist — blending, morphing, and generating new art forms and schools of thought.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in 2009, La MaMa launched CultureHub — its own art and technology incubator, in partnership with Korea’s Seoul Institute of the Arts. The collaboration is dedicated not only to blending technology with performance but also to using tech as a tool to continue the theatre’s long tradition of connecting cultures around the world. The new laboratory’s stated mission is to provide “a shared space for artists to collaborate, share ideas, and create interdisciplinary works of art that explore emerging mediums and technologies.” For the past four years, they have been doing just that. In addition to presenting art/tech hybrids in their wired black box studio on Great Jones Street, CultureHub is equally invested in youth media and educational initiatives, conducting workshops for students, teens, and young artists. Virtualab, one of its flagship programs, connects students and professional artists via distance learning.

One of the core technologies utilized by CultureHub specifically for this purpose is something called telepresence, which might be thought of as a hyper-customized version of teleconferencing. As opposed to participants sitting around a table and projecting to a single screen, telepresence uses live video to build virtual environments, utilizing multi-camera viewpoints and projecting video to an entire wall, creating an atmosphere of virtual “liveness.”

CultureHub Artistic Director Billy Clark says that by incorporating this technology on a larger scale and using multiple cameras, you can “get to a certain level of abstractly feeling like you’re there.” CultureHub has already implemented this technology for several projects, including workshops conducted with students at their partner organization in Korea and a virtual spoken word workshop connecting youth from New Orleans and New York City in collaboration with the Hip Hop Re:Education Project (reeducate.org). The latter experiment was so successful that, after the workshop, the students in Louisiana raised their own money to travel to New York to meet their “classmates” in person.

“It’s never going to be entirely like being physically present,” said CultureHub Managing Director Anna Hayman, “but you do make eye contact, you do hear people breathe.” She also pointed out that the technology seems to increase the engagement of its participants, particularly kids. “They feel like they’re being treated to something special. It’s actually more engaging than a conventional classroom where they’re just sitting there. Kids forge real relationships in that environment.”

Though the young organization represents an exciting new direction for La MaMa, CultureHub recognizes its place in a continuum of artists working with technology — and acknowledges that, while the work they create and support is innovative, it also builds on decades of experimentation by prior artists. Clark concurs, noting, “The ideas aren’t that new. Nam Jun Paik was doing this in the late 70s and early 80s. But now the technology is more ubiquitous, it’s cheaper. High-speed Internet is on all the time.”

That ubiquity has necessitated a cultural space for artists — some of whom have never used technology in their work — to experiment with tech in a low-risk environment. “We’re trying to support artists in their very early stages of development,” Clark said. “We want to give them a space where they have access to technology and can just try something, like a sketch. Some might get developed, and others end up as more of a one-off. It’s a learning experience.”

Having worked on a project-to-project basis since its inception, CultureHub is borrowing a page from the theatrical establishment by launching its first-ever “season” of technologically based works (running until the end of the year). The centerpiece of that season is RE/FEST — a three-day festival of mediated performance, interactive installations, and talks taking place from November 29-December 1 at CultureHub’s Great Jones Street studio.

RE/FEST kicks off on Friday night with an evening of performance curated in collaboration with the annual RE/Mixed Media Festival (which returns in April 2014 at The New School). In addition to performances by Adriano Clemente and David Commander, Friday’s kickoff event will feature a piece called the “Long Table” — a discursive art form pioneered by performance artist Lois Weaver that begins with eight artists seated at a table discussing a topic provided by the curators. As the conversation progresses, audience members are invited to come to the table and add their voices to the discussion. They may even ask for one of the participants’ seats if the table happens to be full.

Saturday and Sunday will continue with work by, Culture Hub says in a press release, revealing “how new technologies are changing performance practices, how networked screens and communications technologies are changing the way artists collaborate and create, what the exhibition/performance venue of tomorrow might look like, and how the nature of storytelling is becoming cross-media, multi-modal, and multi-locational.” Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, will also be on hand to present work he’s been developing with the Seoul Institute which, according to Hayman, will involve “new hardware and software and have a performative element.”

The partnership with RE/Mixed Media Festival in curating the first night of RE/FEST demonstrates the collaborative ethos that CultureHub has inherited from La MaMa. “So often in the not-for-profit world, you’re forced to have your head down,” Clark said, “you don’t have enough resources, you’re always too busy, you’re trying to scramble. But many of us are scrambling in the same direction without taking the time to look up and say, ‘Hey, they’re doing something similar. What if we worked together?’ We certainly can’t solve that whole problem, but the spirit is one of collaboration.”

In recent years, New York’s micro-theatre movement, which was activated by Ellen Stewart’s “black box,” has foundered in the wake of higher rents and aggressive real estate development. Several storefront theaters that flourished in the Lower East Side in the 90s — Surf Reality, Todo Con Nada, and Collective Unconscious, to name just a few — have disappeared. But the loss of physical space doesn’t necessarily mean that those artists have stopped working. Surf Reality has resurfaced as a producing entity that dabbles in the technological, and Collective Unconscious recently collaborated with Three Legged Dog to produce a 3D cinematic adaptation of their 1999 theatrical experiment, “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a film that was lauded at Sundance and other festivals throughout the country. Other organizations exploring the intersection of art and technology, such as Eyebeam and IMC Lab + Gallery, have developed performative works with independent artists.

Perhaps for the performance community, the current circumstance isn’t one of loss but one of transition — one that may require we revisit the ideals of community and collaboration embraced by Ellen Stewart. CultureHub claims they are “transforming the black box for the new century.” Their MaMa would be proud.

The post The new black box has global reach first appeared on Tom Tenney.

Parody, by definition, speaks with two voices – that of the parodist, and that of its target – the former always subverting the latter by an act of redirecting the text from its original context to one more compromising. It implores us to consider its subject through a different lens, one that reframes it in a way that appeals to our common sense and critical judgment. The Ultimate Stimulus, Felipe Ossa’s offering in this year’s NY International Fringe Festival does just that, skewering our contemporary obsession with new “genius” ideas, as presented in the quintessential new-age-genius forum, the TED talk. Ossa pokes fun not just at the ideas themselves, but at all the tropes that we have come to associate with their presentation – the animated bubble charts, the tech-savvy terminology, the reliance on “network models” and, of course, the gratuitous acronyms and buzzwords.

The “Ultimate Stimulus” presentation is given by “renegade economist” Amanda McCloud (Tanya O’Debra) a 21st century thought-leader who has a plan to correct America’s most pressing problem, income inequality. Equipped with an arsenal of convoluted charts and statistics, McCloud kicks off the talk with an assessment of America’s income divide, which is so out of control that it “beats the height of excess during the roaring twenties.” In fact, she asserts, “This is pre-revolutionary France.” This leads McCloud to her revolutionary solution, “a system of culturally-sanctioned master and concubine relationships.” Concubinage, as McCloud calls it, is a quasi-feudal system of sexual patronage in which a person in financial need (cliebkin) may enter into a contract with a member of the elite super-rich (vole) as his or her sexual plaything. McCloud then utilizes the remainder of her presentation to show us how this would work from an economic perspective, walking us through a series of hilarious hypothetical situations with “typical” people. In one case, a down-and-out married restaurant cook named Manuel, meets his sexual mentor via a matchmaking website called “Equal Hearts” where he catches the fancy of none other than Christy Walton, the widow of Walmart founder John Walton, one of the ten richest women in the world. After some digital foreplay on the site, Christy and Manuel enter into a 5-year TTM (Two-Tiered Marriage) and Manuel moves his wife and 2 kids into a cliebkin village on the Walton estate.

Tanya O’Debra is brilliantly funny as McCloud, not flagging for a moment in her 45-minute monologue, and burns through Ossa’s Swiftian script headlong, oozing yuppie smarminess, and punching every comedic moment while maintaining utter believability. She perfectly embodies the persona of the 30-something, modern professional female, complete with a baby-bump that she subtly caresses whenever she mentions the nourishing cliebkin/vole relationship.

But to say this is a one-woman show is to ignore the fact that what we’re really watching is a duet between Ms. O’Debra and her co-star, the 12-foot projection screen that looms behind her, providing the punch lines to many of the show’s funniest moments. Like Stephen Colbert’s “The Word,” we’re watching postmodern parody in action, the anthropomorphizing of technology to the point that the machine becomes the foil of a vaudevillian comedy routine. The slides are such an integral part of the text, in fact, that they even provide the subtitles as O’Debra performs Manuel’s hypothetical dialog with his hypothetical wife – in Spanish. Taking on the task of maintaining a dynamic, comic dialog with an inanimate object would be a challenge to any actor, but under the competent direction of Sara Wolkowitz, O’Debra strikes the perfect balance between taking stage and giving focus to the slides. If we linger a bit longer than we should on a visual, it’s due only to the sheer difference in size between the enormous projection and the comparatively diminutive actress – and perhaps, just a little, to our collective addiction to gazing upon the electronic oracle. Fortunately, O’Debra has enough charisma and skill as an actor to pull our attention right back to her when needed.

Still, for all its sharp writing, energy and humor, I found myself craving a narrative. I wanted this show to take me on a journey, to arrive somewhere different than where it started, and I’m not sure we ever got there. Perhaps we’re not meant to – perhaps the ultimate vindication of Mr. Ossa’s script is that it mirrors its subject so well that the line between theatre and TED talk, between satire and subject, is indelibly blurred. I would love to see this work performed at an actual TED event, as a public intervention, as comedian Sam Hyde did at Drexel University last year. After all, one could say that TED talks themselves never get anywhere, that they are simply an exercise in narcissism, an ego-stroke for the modern professional, allowing anyone to be an “thought leader.” And at the end of the day, how many of those “revolutionary” ideas do we embrace, how many actually cause paradigmatic shifts, how many change the world? Exactly. Maybe that’s the point.

The Ultimate Stimulus. Saturday August 23 at 3PM. Celebration of Whimsey (21a Clinton Street, NYC). Ends Saturday, August 23rd. http://www.fringenyc.org

The post The Ultimate Stimulus at Fringe NYC first appeared on Tom Tenney.

New York is a city that recycles itself, and those who have lived here long enough have become accustomed to the life cycles of landscapes, buildings, businesses, and cultural institutions.  New York is in a constant state of metamorphosis; it’s just how this city rolls, and we either roll right along with it or we leave. As we get older, though, we’re occasionally haunted by a nostalgia for a time that seemed somehow “better,” a time when the city delivered exactly what we expected of it, and it’s just these moments that give us pause to reflect on exactly what our expectations are, and how they may have changed. Radical Vaudeville, Surf Reality’s monthly burlesque/variety shows at the Kraine Theatre feels reflective like that, like a ghost that evinces an intangible vital energy of another time still lingering in the ether.

From 1993-2003, Surf Reality existed as a 2nd floor performance loft on the Lower East Side, and was considered by many to be one of the epicenters of the downtown alternative performance scene. The space was a ramshackle black box that made one feel more like they were crashing a secret kegger in Jeff Spicoli’s garage than attending a night of theatre. Indeed, what came to be called the Art Star scene was an endless party of creative folks of all ages, smearing their DIY blood and guts all over downtown Manhattan. Whether producing dirty sketch shows, performing as perverted priests or gay pimps, or holding proms and pageants, the decade between 1995-2005 was a movable feast of the kind of lurid anarchy that couldn’t have existed anywhere but the LES. Any “respectable” joint would’ve 86’d these punks and barred them for life. But the party sustained these artists, and the bawdiness wasn’t merely juvenile prurience, but an alternative burlesque that made a lot of sense for the times.

 The New York that many of the LES art stars had migrated to in 80’s and early 90’s was a city that promised a sobering shot of reality. It was a New York of drug dealers in the park, of ubiquitous danger and squats and tranny bars and crack dens. It was Lou Reed’s New York, and those artists didn’t come here to “make it,” they came here to live it. When Giuliani came along in 1994, ushering in an era of “quality of life” campaigns, of raids on porn theaters and strip joints, of the homeless and other undesirables being swept under the rug or out of the city entirely – burlesque became an imperative form of cultural critique. Taking off your clothes was an act of political defiance.

Radical Vaudeville does its best to revive the energy of that time, and comes about as close as one could hope. The 90-minutes of rapid-fire music, burlesque, and sketch comedy delighted the audience, which was a slightly older, more restrained crowd than those that partook of the nightly mayhem at Surf Reality, and the Kraine theatre lacks the transient feel of the old venue. But still, as variety shows go in NYC, you won’t find better than this. The performers, running the gamut from puppeteers and poets to full-frontal performance/burlesque artists, might not seem as “radical,” per se, as they might have been considered 10 years ago, but are now professionals with finely polished sets, and the sexual content feels less defiant and contains a self-consciousness that acknowledges that times have changed. The evening was expertly punctuated with interstitial material by the hostess Gabrielle St. Eve and her sidekick Amanda, a grotesquely made-up and scantily clad “burlesque clown” who managed to turn cleaning up in between acts into sublimely titillating performance art.

 But it was the final act of the evening, an improvised participatory set by Fritz Donnelly, that threw open the gates of hell and let those impetuous ghosts of the past come rushing in. Unfiltered, rude and reckless, Donnelly wrangled the entire house into a chaotic, Living Theatre-esque communion, creating a writhing mass of “energy” with the audience – from the back of the house to those who had been dragged onstage – as they chanted self-assigned spirit names. The experience was reminiscent of performance artist Michael Portnoy (of ‘Soy Bomb’ fame) and as the audience thrashed with ecstasy, and the artist, of course, removed his several layers of clothing, the spirit of Surf filled the room.

 Maybe, I thought, the party still has a few stubborn drunks who refuse to leave.

Radical Vaudeville. Every last Thursday of the month at 10:30 PM at The Kraine Theater (85 East 4th Street, NYC). Ongoing. http://www.radicalvaudeville.com

The post Radical Vaudeville: Surf Reality is Still Making Waves first appeared on Tom Tenney.

The Brick Theater produces a lot of festivals – it’s kind of their thing.  But festivals at the Williamsburg experimental venue aren’t your garden-variety observance of artist or genre; they’ve become the theatre’s way of exploring aesthetic and cultural intersections.  Sure, some of the dozens of festivals produced during the theatre’s first decade have had a chimerical bent (The Antidepressant Festival comes to mind), but just as often they examine critical connections between live theatre and other arts or performative elements.  Their annual Game Play festivals, for example, present works that probe the relationship between performance and video gaming.  Others, like the Comic Book Theatre Festival, bring divergent artistic forms to the theatrical table.  It’s what Artistic Director Michael Gardner calls “hybrid theatre,” and it makes one wonder what took them so long to come around to sound design.  But come around they did, and for two weeks starting June 6^th, the Brick Theater will present sound scape: a festival of 12 productions that celebrates the sound designer as a driving creative force.

“‘I’m a huge fan of sound design,” Gardner said,  “It’s an unsung art form, and needed a spotlight. In this festival, the sound designer is the primary artist, and sound design, typically in the background in most theatrical shows, is foregrounded.”

While sound and theatre aren’t exactly incongruous forms – sound, of course, is an integral element in theatre – the aural is normally relegated to the role of servile valet to the mighty image, and this is precisely what makes it cry out for a festival of its own.

Scanning the roster of performances, it’s hard to miss the fact that over half the productions in sound scape are based on past works – a fact that is thrilling to Gardner, who also curated the festival. “There’s a lot of classic text in there, and it spans a wide swathe of time,” he said. “You’ve got Homer, Dante, Beckett, and Virginia Woolf.  It wasn’t intentional, it’s just how it fell out.”

One of the most intriguing of these is a performance of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording, I Am Sitting in a Room.  A classic among aficionados of avant-garde composition, Lucier’s piece is as much a scientific experiment as it is a work of art.  In the original, Lucier recorded himself speaking into a tape recorder in an isolated room.  The tape was then rewound, played back, and re-recorded onto a second machine.  This process repeated through several generations, each producing resonant frequencies which harmonized with each other until the artist’s voice was obliterated, and all that remained were reverberating tones.  This was groundbreaking stuff in 1969, and sound designer Ryan Holsopple’s revival as a concert-style performance designed using 2013 technology (the multimedia program Max/MSP) may be considered a scientific experiment in its own right. Holsopple will employ the Brick’s new 5.2 surround sound system, but his use of modern tech is aimed towards maintaining the original piece’s simplicity.  “It’s very stripped down and simple at its core,” he explained, adding that a public performance allows the possibility of the audience becoming part of the composition itself, in the tradition of John Cage.  “If people get up to go to the bathroom, cough, move around, or if a siren goes by, every sound becomes a part of it because the room is constantly being recorded.”

Chris Chappell also plans on exploiting the Brick’s new sound system to the fullest. His piece, ELE↓↑TOR, was developed specifically for the kind of theatrical spacialization that a surround system can provide.  The play takes place in an elevator in the Empire State Building slowly ascending through a sonic spectrum on its way to the 80^th floor.  Elevators are awkward and uncomfortable, and Chappell sculpts his sound to evoke this feeling in the audience. “We’re trying to create a feeling of being pushed into the confinement of a closed space,” he explained. Chappell sites 2 disparate sonic inspirations for the piece – elevator music, and the “noise instruments” developed the Futurist Luigi Russolo a century ago.  He views the former as “a really empty kind of music, with a flattening quality that dampens the sharper emotions” – a perfect soundtrack to the social awkwardness of elevators.  Russolo’s influence is a bit more opaque, with pounding, electrical zapping, and the sounds of “unfathomable technology” providing a counterpoint to the corporate, anxiety-mitigating quality of elevator music. Chappell says this theatrical noise “is not about soothing the modern man, it’s very loud and threatening and unpredictable.”

Another interesting sonic play on the past is Commotion Collage, which appropriates elements from the Dadaist simultaneous poem – a form pioneered in 1916 by Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire, in which multiple voices and other sounds combine in a singular sonic composition.  Director Roger Nasser’s appropriation liberates the original form from of its historic cultural context, and yokes it into service as a building block for a more contemporary version of the acoustic collage.  “I’m going to take fragments of the original poems and weave them throughout, as part of the background,” he explained, but he’ll also include contemporary sounds, such as answering machine messages, white noise, and a riff from the Family Ties theme song – artifacts from an electronic culture that didn’t yet exist in 1916.

Given the number of ways the festival’s producers are demonstrating that a focus on sound can spur such theatrical innovation, it’s unlikely that sound scape will be merely a one-off festival, and may even become a staple of the Brick’s annual offerings.  “I like the idea that theatre began as an auditory experience,” Gardner said, “Today, one thinks of going to see a play, but we want to remind the audience that they’re there to listen.  I hope this is an opportunity for audiences to reinterpret what the stage is to them, and to re-imagine what a theatre-going experience can be.”

The post Brick Up Your Ears first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In a 1913 letter to the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo declared, “The variety of noises is infinite…today we have perhaps a thousand different machines, and can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.” This letter, which became a known as “The Art of Noises,” advocated a new sonic vocabulary through the imitation of machines and became one of the most important manifestos in the history of sound.

As technological advances at the turn of the century paved the way for a revolution in mass media, they also created new possibilities for individual expression. By mid-century, the computer had opened new sonic territory by permitting unprecedented extension of sounds and scales, pushing the boundaries of music beyond what the Futurists ever imagined. In 1983, seventy years after Russolo’s letter, a British avant-garde electronic group that called itself The Art of Noise (after the manifesto) released a song that mixed sampled sounds of car engines and industrial machinery with time-warped drum beats and orchestral stabs. This song would become one of the most influential instrumentals in the world of hip-hop, sampled by artists from X-Clan to Marky Mark. The name of that song was “Beat Box.” A year later, an 18-year-old rapper from Harlem by the name of Doug E. Fresh pioneered the art of imitating electronic drum machines using only his voice — the art of “beatboxing” was born, and the verity of Russolo’s vision was, once again, affirmed.

As do all musical genres, beatboxing has evolved in the intervening three decades, spawning a variety of techniques, including the “human turntable,” a style invented by Wise of the group Stetsasonic, and “mouth drumming” developed by Wes Carroll. From May 24-26, the Third Annual American Human Beatbox Festival at LaMaMa Theatre will give New Yorkers the opportunity to sample some of the most eclectic beatboxing styles by artists who make percussive rhythms with the human voice.

Now in its third year, this three day exhibition of performances, workshops and film kicks off on Friday night with a battle, not of beatboxers, but beatrhymers, performers who beatbox and rhyme at the same time. Beatrhyming was developed and popularized by the festival’s curator, Kid Lucky, who coined the term, and who characterizes the new style as one that allows the performer to move beyond simply providing a beat. Beatrhyming adds language – poetry, rap, song, spoken word – to the vocal effects, freeing the piece to take off in new directions. “Beatboxers listen to the beat,” Lucky explains, “Emcees listen to the words. With beatrhyming we listen to the whole concept of the song.” Kid Lucky isn’t the first to beatrhyme, and readily acknowledges those who went before him, like Biz Markie, Darren Robinson of the Fat Boys, and Rahzel of the Roots, who astonished hip-hop audiences by beatboxing and singing the chorus simultaneously on “If Your Mother Only Knew.”

For the most part, however, Lucky has seen beatboxers use beatrhyming mainly as a musical machination, a trick for cheap applause. Lucky, who began beatrhyming in the mid 90’s, saw the potential to elevate the style into an art form in its own right. “People used beatrhyming as a trick, or a gimmick,” he says, “I saw it as something much more than that. I saw the possibilities to take the concept and push it beyond the boundaries of what anybody else is doing. That’s how you move from gimmick to art.” He’s also quick to point out that beatrhyming doesn’t necessarily mean rapping, but can include a number of vocal styles including singing and spoken word.

When LaMama approached Kid Lucky to curate the first beatboxing festival in 2010, he saw an opportunity to challenge traditional notions of beatboxing, and bring his innovations to a wider audience who may still maintain rigid definitions of beatboxing as a human emulation of technology. While he recognizes the cultural roots of beatboxing as “man-imitating-machine,” Lucky sees beatrhyming as an opportunity to reintroduce the human element, or “soul,” back into the art. “Beatboxing, which began by imitating the Roland 808 drum machine, is more concerned with the electronic aspect,” he explains, “but as beatboxing moves further, it emphasizes the soul and the feeling as opposed to the technical aspect of it.”

For Kid Lucky, the next step in the advancement of beatrhyming is handing his skills down to a new generation of performers. He teaches weekly beatrhyming workshops at Midtown New York’s famous Funkadelic Studios, and plans to develop them into a school of what he calls “Mixed Vocal Arts” — an institution that will teach not only his signature style, but also an entire array of vocal techniques including humming, whistling, scatting, vocal sound effects, singing, spoken word, yodeling, rapping, and Tuvan throat singing. The concept of the school was born of Lucky’s frustration with the limited number of styles represented in universities and professional training schools. Scat singing, for example, a uniquely American form of jazz vocalization popularized by Ella Fitzgerald in the 1950’s, isn’t taught at most universities. “With scatting, Ella Fitzgerald became a whole entire instrument right there, and people went crazy,” Lucky said. “Why would you stop doing that? Why would you stop pushing that type of situation forward?”

Those who wish to experience this “pushing forward” in person should check out the beatrhyming battle on May 24th, where the performers will include: D-Cross, Kid Lucky, Kaila, Graffiti, Richard, Esalaah, Kenny Urban, Mandibul, Menyu, and Baba Israel. Saturday morning, bring your baby beatboxers to the Kids Beatbox Workshop, and then come back for the emcee/beatboxer team battles at 10. Sunday’s offerings include Nos States, a documentary about French boxer, Priceps, followed by a tribute to the late Steve Ben Israel. It’ll be a unique celebration of music, beats, words, and the art of human noise.

The post Rhyme Machine first appeared on Tom Tenney.

Before we look at the ways in which the Situationists appropriated and incorporated Huizinga’s theory of play into their practices, it’s important to first examine how, exactly, Huizinga defined play and its role in our culture. This can be particularly difficult to nail down because, as Francis Hearn notes, “play refers not to a set of specific activities, but to a context, a set of principles around which personal and collective experience is meaningfully engaged” (Hearn 1977, 150). Still, in the first chapter of Homo Ludens, Huizinga is quite clear about certain characteristics that a context or principle must have in order to be considered play. First, he asserts that play is fun. He also points out that several languages (including French) have no word that translates exactly to ‘fun’ but that nonetheless, it is precisely “this fun element that characterizes the essence of play.” However, despite this defining characteristic, he also states that, for some, it is also a quite serious pursuit. It is bounded by rules, and something that must be quite consciously approached. Another characteristic that is essential to play is that it is irrational and lies beyond morality. He tells us that “play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity, it has no moral function” (1980, 3-6).

Finally, a primary characteristic of play, and the one that is most appropriate to a discussion of the Situationists, is that play is free, that it is, in fact, synonymous with freedom itself. Play, Huizinga says, stands outside of the ordinary, outside “real life” (1980, 8). He goes on to say that the world of play is an aesthetic parallel world, which, through use of language and other playful activities, allows man to elevate things into a higher spiritual domain. In this way, play is endowed with an aesthetic quality that allows him to create “a second, poetic world alongside the world of nature” (1980, 4) Play, he says later, “creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary [emphasis added], a limited perfection” (1980, 10). Play may anticipate an ideal social order (Smith 2005, 424) but it stands apart from that order, and should not be confused with it.

In my opinion, it is precisely in this distinction between play and “real life” that the SI loses much of the essence of Huizinga’s argument. As we’ll see, their goal is to create play as real life, as a way of transforming the everyday into a continual play that is seamlessly integrated with quotidian activities, not as something that stands apart.

Perhaps the concept of play extracted from Homo Ludens that was most meaningful to the SI’s theories and practices was that of play being equal to freedom. In ‘New Babylon,’ Constant Nieuwenhuys wrote that “the liberation of man’s ludic potential is directly linked to his liberation as a social being” (1957). The ability to play was an ability that Constant, Debord, and other theorists of the SI felt had been lost, and that the fact that “man has forgotten how to play” (Trocchi 1963) was directly attributed to his passivity in the face of the spectacle. The SI saw the social functions associated with play as “decaying relics” (Debord 1958a) and that these play functions are essential to the ontological freedom of the human being. In order to address this, they proposed that Homo Ludens become itself a “way of life” that would respond to this human need for play, as well as “for adventure, for mobility, as well as the conditions that facilitate the free creation of his own life” (Nieuwenhuys 1957).  In The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raol Vaneigem discusses this playful instinct at length, asserting that it must be liberated from its “imprisonment in the categories of permitted games [which] leaves no place for the authentic game of playing with each moment of daily life” (Vaneigem 1965). It is precisely this reading of Homo Ludens as play providing a liberation of each moment of “real life” that I believe constitutes a fundamental misreading of the text. Early in the book, Huizinga is quite clear about his theory that play stands outside of daily life in both space and time, has the limitations of both, and in this way is able to construct its own meaning (Huizinga 1980, 9). In her excellent homage to Constant, Jan Bryant also concedes that this was a problem for the Situationists. She says,

“There was a problem for [the Situationists] in the way the play-mood was thought to be fragile and the way it sat in a separate sphere to the everyday. Huizinga’s thesis perpetuated the division of life in contemporary society, which the Situationists were focused on eradicating. Instead, for the Situationists, play was to flow spontaneously from the desires of each individual so that finally there would be no sense of boredom and no rupture between moments of play and non-play. Rather play and the everyday would move from one to the other in such a way that their separateness would finally disappear in a rich and poetic stream.” (Bryant 2006)

Another way in which I perceive the SI to have misinterpreted Homo Ludens is in the way they deny competition as an important aspect of play. For example, in ‘A Contribution to a Situationist Definition of Play,’ Debord condemns the element of competition as a “manifestation of the tension between individuals for the appropriation of goods” (Debord 1958a). This may not be so much a misreading as it is a case of the SI cherry-picking those parts of Huizinga’s theory that suited their agenda. Huizinga’s theory states, fairly explicitly, that competition is part and parcel of play, in particular those romantic aspects that were so attractive to the SI. He says “virtue, honor, nobility and glory fall at the outset within the field of competition, which is that of play” (Huizinga 1980, 64)

Ultimately, Debord and the SI saw the concept of play as having been co-opted by consumer culture, and absorbed by the spectacle. This bastardization of play, they thought, had obviated the dichotomy of work/leisure (Andreotti 2000, 41), turning it into nothing more than amusement that carried the same forms that dominate the working life, and used only to alleviate the tensions created by a mechanized culture (Trocchi 1963; Hearn 1977, 155-156). “Only creativity is spontaneously rich,” Vaneigem wrote in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “it is not from productivity that a full life is to be expected” (1965). Similarly, Debord wrote that play was in danger of being eliminated altogether by functionalism, which he described as “an inevitable expression of technological advance,” (Debord 1958c) even though Constant would later advocate technology as a key component of his new society, as we’ll see.

Whether these problems are a result of a misreading of the text or simply an adaptation to suit the SI’s agenda, there are nonetheless several ways in which Huizinga’s theory of play was effectively utilized by the SI as a revolutionary praxis. Whether or not play is used to transform the “real world” as the SI wanted – or create an alternate, poetic one as Huizinga suggests, it seems as though the egalitarianism and freedom experienced in play have the power to challenge established forms and form a critique that may be interpreted as active resistance (Hearn 1977, 152). In the next sections, I will look at several of the practices utilized by the SI, and the ways in which they utilize the concept of play to advance their utopian vision of a world in which each individual is able to use the power of play to “create a truly passionate life” (Vaneigem 1965).

Dérive

Dérive is the situationist practice that fits most neatly into both Huizinga’s concept of play, and the situationist romantic ideal of play as a practice of adventure and discovery – the “playing at being heroes and warriors” (Andreotti 2000, 39-45). In the first International Situationniste, Debord defined the dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances,” (1958b) an action that involved “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects” (1958d). It was an undertaking performed in the spirit of play, and aligned with Huizinga’s concept of play in several ways, not the least of which was the temporalization of a defined space. Huizinga wrote, “all play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand”, creating a separate temporary world within the “ordinary” one (1980, 10). Although the dérive allowed the player to create this playspace as she went along, it nonetheless adheres to Huizinga’s concept. Homo Ludens also describes 2 basic aspects of play “in the higher forms” – play as contest and play as representation. It is the second that is most appropriate to a discussion of the dérive. To Huizinga, display connotes a type of performance, a “stepping out of common reality into a higher order […] making an image of something different, something more beautiful, or more sublime, or more dangerous than what he usually is” (1980, 13-14). The dérive did just that, it was an exercise in playfully creating alternative modes of representation. Instead of passively accepting the traditional map, i.e. the social/political/economic boundaries and divisions created by the state – which to the SI implied an acceptance of its cultural domination – the dérive allowed one to chart the city based on affective criteria: ambience and mood, aesthetic, and a personal sense of play. In this way the dérive became a revolutionary praxis that began with liberating the playful spirit and engendering a sense of adventure. In fact, Vaneigem describes the dérive almost entirely in the language of play, saying that it “appropriates mankind’s ancient love of mazes, the love of getting lost solely in order to find one’s way again: the pleasure of the dérive” (1965, 134).

Détournement

“[Détournement is] The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu. In this sense there can be no situationist painting or music, but only a situationist use of those means. In a more elementary sense, détournement within the old cultural spheres is a method of propaganda, a method which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of those spheres.” (Debord 1958b)

While Debord’s 1958 definition may seem rather dry, the situationist concept of détournement – a recontextualizing of words and images in a way which subverts their dominant meaning – can be seen to be profoundly playful in a number of ways. In ‘A Users Guide to Détournement,’ written 2 years earlier, Debord and Gil Wolman liken the impulse to détournement to “the need for a secret language, for passwords, [which is] inseparable form a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite” (Debord and Wolman 1956). In essence, what the practice of détournement does, is create what Huizinga would call a “new poetic language” (1980, 134) which is parallel to our “ordinary” language, in same way that, as we’ve seen, play creates a separate world that engenders order using an alternative, irrational logic. In his chapter on “Play and Poetry,” Huizinga characterizes the language poetry as analogous to this kind of “secret language” mentioned by Debord and Wolman:

“It is based on a meticulous code of rules absolutely binding, but allowing of almost infinite variation […] When the poet says ‘speech-thorn’ for ‘tongue’, ‘floor of the hall of winds’ for ‘earth’, ‘tree-wolf’ for ‘wind’, etc., he is setting his hearers poetic riddles which are tacitly solved” (Huizinga 1980, 134).

This is just the type of play that’s at work in the practice of détournement. By recontextualizing words and images – removing them from their expected milieu and juxtaposing them in new, unexpected ways – détournement creates new meanings, a new “poetic” language endowed with new meaning, creating a kind of “riddle” for its audience to decipher. This type of play not only provides a new sense of agency for the artist who is being playful with these cultural relics, but also for the audience, who is allowed a new sense of freedom in that they are able to create a personal meaning which may or may not be the one intended by the detourner. In this way, détournement creates what can be considered to be a “ludic challenge to the meanings established by authority” (Smith 2005, 424). Additionally, the creation of this poetic language is tantamount to what Debord and Wolman called a “secret language” and this sense of secrecy, the sense of creating something that exists only for the initiated, is something that Huizinga considers to be a key aspect of play. He wrote,

“The exceptional and special position of play is most tellingly illustrated by the fact that it loves to surround itself with an air of secrecy. Even in early childhood the charm of play is enhanced by making a “secret” out of it. This is for us, not for the “others”. What the “others” do “outside” is no concern of ours at the moment. Inside the circle of the game the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count. We are different and do things differently” (Huizinga 1980, 12).

Finally, it’s important to note that the concept of détournement did not limit itself to words and images alone, but could be applied to almost anything. In “The Users Guide to Détournement,” Debord and Wolman are clear that the practice can be used to detourn clothing (1956), and in the events of May-June of 1968, it was used to detourn an entire city.

Situations

The creation of “situations” is perhaps the practice most commonly associated with the Situationists (in no small part because of their name, I would guess) one that can be considered an extension, of sorts, to the practice of détournement (Debord and Wolman 1956). Part of the SI’s credo was dissociation from the art world, which they felt had been too completely absorbed in the spectacle and dependent on commodity relations (Bryant 2006). Instead of the fixed forms of painting and sculpture, the SI believed that liberation would come instead in the performance of spontaneous situations, which, because of their existence ‘in the moment’ would jolt us into a state of awakening and mobility. “Our situations will be ephemeral,” Debord wrote, “Passageways. Our only concern is real life; we care nothing about the permanence of art or of anything else” (Debord 1957). In other words, situations were the SI’s way of providing creative resistance to the spectacle.

One of the most interesting distinctions Huizinga makes in Homo Ludens is one between the ‘arts of the Muses’ (music, poetry, and dancing) and the plastic arts. The former, he says, “have to be performed,” whereas “a work of art, though composed, practiced or written down beforehand, only comes to life in the execution of it, that is, by being represented or produced in the literal sense of the word – brought before a public,” and therefore, he concluded, did not fit into his concept of play as neatly as did music and poetry (Huizinga 1980, 165). This exclusion of painting and sculpture from the realm of play seems to be reflected, or at least play a part, in the SI’s antagonism toward the art world and their privileging of situations. Situations are, after all, performative, whereas painting could be more easily (and probably rightly) considered to be a ‘thing,’ a commodity, and thus a part of commodity culture. Huizinga emphasizes that the plastic arts have inherent “limitations of form” and that the artists “all fix a certain aesthetic impulse in matter by means of diligent and painstaking labour.” In other words, artists are laborers who make things, things are devoid of action and, according to Huizinga, “where there is no visible action, there can be no play.” (1980, 166) This is analogous to the situationist goal of re-imagining the world as poets rather than industrialists, privileging poetry over ‘information’ as Jan Bryant points out in Play and Transformation. “One [poetry] is formed on the logic of multiplicity and flow, of becoming, while the other [information] belongs to the deep cavern of fixed forms” (Bryant 2006).

Despite the SI’s theorizing about the creation of situations, it’s worth noting that they didn’t actually execute the practice often. One notable attempt was a project called Cavern of Anti-Matter in which artist Pinot Gallizio made “industrial paintings” using painting machines and sold rolls of them by the meter in the public market. The goal of the project was a merging of art and everyday life that provided a critique of the “professionalism [of the artist] and the sanctioned space of the art gallery” (Andreotti 2000, 49). Despite its reliance on painting as a key element, the whole ‘production’ of the event more resembled a performance than a static art object. The invitations to the opening event promised audiences an “encounter between matter and anti-matter,” and opening night audiences experienced explosions and pyrotechnics, as well as an interactive sound installation in which ‘sound machines’ would be activated as observers moved closer to the walls of the gallery (Andreotti 2000, 47-49).

It’s interesting to note that, even though the SI did not consider themselves to be performers in the theatrical sense, much of the language they use to describe situations uses nomenclature borrowed from the performance world. For example, in ‘Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation’, Debord wrote, “during the initial period of rough experiments, a situation requires one individual to play a sort of ‘director’ role” and should include “a few passive spectators who […] should be forced into action” (Debord 1958c). This latter concept of passive spectators forced into action would later be appropriated by Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal who, in his classic Theatre of the Oppressed would write,

“In order to understand this poetics of the oppressed one must keep in mind its main objective: to change the people – ‘spectators’, passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon – into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action.” (Boal 2008, 97)

Finally, it bears mentioning that the SI recognized that they were not the only contemporary avant-garde with an interest in creating playful situations towards revolutionary ends. They made occasional passing reference to other work being done in this area, particularly the ‘happenings’ in the artistic avant-garde in New York, but claimed that those were situations based on poverty (of material, of humanity, of philosophy) while those of the SI must be based on “material and spiritual richness” (Situationist 1963).

Unitary Urbanism

An analysis of the SI’s play tactics wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of one of its most legendary projects, Constant Nieuwenhuys’ work on ‘New Babylon’ – a series of architectural plans for creating a utopian social space which challenged traditional notions of urbanism. While Constant makes reference to Huizinga as a seminal influence on the project (Nieuwenhuys, 1974), there seem to be a number of incongruities between the New Babylon project and Huizinga’s theory. First, we must make a distinction between the work of the architect as play – which Huizinga clearly states it cannot be because “there the aesthetic impulse is far from being the dominant one, as the constructions of bees and beavers clearly prove” (Huizinga 1980, 168) – and the architect as the creator of works of play, as was Constant’s goal with New Babylon.

The decades-long project was a part of the SI’s concept of ‘Unitary Urbanism,’ a theory of reconstructing urban space based more on the dynamic concept of ‘ambiences’ than on commerce, politics, or fixed material environments. The concept, and Constant’s project, adopted the idea of a play-space on a grand scale. “The more a place is set apart for free play,” Ivan Chtcheglov wrote in Formulary for a New Urbanism, “the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater its forces of attraction” (1958).

Unitary Urbanism was a means to an end, a way of “discovering and activating the positive revolutionary potential” of a physical structure (Bryant 2006). New Babylon was an infrastructure for a permanent dérive, and the concept of ambiences allowed Constant to imagine a structure which could have changeable sectors (Andreotti 2000, 51-52), an idea that he believed would radically transform and sustain the subjective quality of life from one of boredom to one of play. New Babylon, Constant believed, would be an environment that would further adventure, where “play and creative change is privileged” (1974), enabling the coming together of “those who are capable of creating and directing their own lives.” Nowhere, however, does Constant allow provision for those who might not subscribe to the same theory of play, or think like a Situationist. In this way, and although Constant thought his vision was practical and achievable (Bryant 2006) we can call New Babylon a utopian ideal, with little grounding in the real world. It paid lip service to ludic theory, but ignored Huizinga’s key concept that play exists outside of ‘real life.’ Huizinga defined play as “an intermezzo, an interlude in our daily lives […] it adorns life, amplifies it” (1980, 9). As I pointed out earlier, play as an interlude or parallel world wasn’t enough for the SI, their agenda settled for nothing short of a ludic transformation of the real world itself. Like much of SI theory, it takes boredom as a first principle, and sets out to eradicate it by replacing it with play.

Huizinga is also very clear on the voluntary nature of play, going so far as to call it a defining characteristic. “All play is a voluntary activity,” he wrote, “play to order is no longer play (1980, 7). This contradicts Constant’s goal of placing citizens into a structure where ‘play’ is inevitable. Adam Barnard takes this critique even further, claiming that New Babylon simply recreates alienating conditions instead of practically supplanting them with something new. “[New Babylon] may have been big and futuristic,” he wrote, “but lacked a critical coherence and was not commensurate with social practices” (2004, 109).

New Babylon was also based on a certain amount of technical determinism, and the variable ambiences Constant imagined were technologically based. In ‘The Great Game to Come,’ he stated that “the investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends on a higher plane is one of the most pressing tasks required to facilitate creation of a unitary urbanism on the scale demanded by the society of the future” (1957). Technology, Constant believed, was a key factor in creating a ludic society of the future,as automation freed people from productive work, and thus enabled them to develop their creativity (Nieuwenhuys 1974). However, at least in ‘New Babylon,’ Constant never went into any detail about exactly which technology he was referring to, beyond the example of using air conditioning to vary the ambience, as well as the very broad category of ‘telecommunications.’ He was slightly more specific in ‘The Great Game to Come,’ citing the potential of “cinema, television, radio and high-speed travel and communication.” He calls for the “investigation of technology and its exploitation for recreational ends,” (1957) but never elaborates on their specific use, or how they would contribute to the ludic nature of his society.

The Society of the Spectacle

The Society of the Spectacle, written by Debord in 1967 is, of course, the de-facto flagship text of the Situationist International. In many ways, it seems as thought the text is Debord’s final grand détournement – a recombining and recontextualizing of all of the SI’s previous writings as well as those of their literary and intellectual influences. Although teasing out all of the elements of play theory that present themselves in Society of the Spectacle is beyond the scope of this paper, it’s interesting to consider the work in light of one of the recurring concepts of Homo Ludens – that of the “spoil-sport.” Huizinga defines the spoil-sport as one who refuses to play the game and, in so doing, “shatters the play world itself” (1980, 11). Considering this concept in relationship to Debord’s polemic, I wonder if we can begin to think of the spectacle itself as a kind of play, and the SI the “spoil-sports” of its game. Huizinga himself refers to the world of play as consisting of illusion, a quality which is robbed by the spoil-sport (1980, 11). In stanza 20 of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord calls the spectacle, “the material reconstruction of the religious illusion […] the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond” (Debord 1967, 4). It’s interesting that Huizinga spends much of Homo Ludens situating myth and religious practices in the world of play, but it’s this particular play-world that Debord opts out of. Interestingly, Huizinga also states that spoil-sports are the world’s “apostates, heretics, innovators, prophets, conscientious objectors, etc.” saying that these spoil-sports often go off and create a new community with rules of its own. This is certainly what Debord and the SI have done, what all avant-gardes do. Likewise, the SI had its own spoil-sports – the factions and individuals that disagreed with Debord and were summarily expelled from the SI’s game.

Conclusion

I hope that this paper has adequately demonstrated that, although the Situationists adopted Huizinga’s Homo Ludens as a primary text, their use of it to support their theories did not always conform to the rigorous logic used by Huizinga to craft his brilliant and complex theories of play. Partly as a result of this non-adherence, the SI created an ideal of a world so utopian that it could never be accomplished. In fact, many of their ‘practices’ could not be practiced, as there was no practical way to do so without falling into the catch-22 of having to practice them within a cultural milieu that they wanted no part of. An application of ludic ideals that adhered more closely to Huizinga’s theories may have allowed them to participate in practices that point the way to a more playful culture, without being burdened with the unrealistic demand that the culture change completely, immediately, and for everyone. One of a ways that some of these failures have ostensibly been corrected by such inheritors of the SI’s tradition – such as the ‘culture jammers’ of the 70s and 80s – is that these artists seem to have a more realistic understanding of how change occurs, and are able to work subversively within the system to create change that they know, from experience, is incremental at best. The refusal of the Situationists to allow the ludic any association with the spectacle is summed up concisely by Douglas Smith in his essay, “Giving the Game Away,” where he states, “Situationism views system and play as two diametrically opposed principles and refuses to engage with the complexities of their interdependence” (Smith 2005, 432).

References:

Andreotti, Libero. 2000. Play-tactics of the Internationale Situationniste. October 91
(Winter): 36-58.

Barnard, Adam. 2004. The legacy of the Situationist International: the production of
situations of creative resistance. Capital & Class 84 (Winter): 103-124.

Boal, Augusto. 2008. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. (Orig. pub. 1979)

Bryant, Jan. 2006. Play and transformation: Constant Nieuwenhuys and the Situationists.
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Debord, Guy. 1957. Report on the construction of situations and on the International
Situationist Tendency’s conditions of organization and action. Conference at Cosio de
Arroscia, Italy. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/report.htm (accessed May 6, 2012).

— — — 1958a. Contribution to a Situationist definition of play. Trans. Reuben
Keehan. Internationale Situationniste 1 (June).
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— — —. 1958b. Definitions. Trans. Ken Knabb. Internationale Situationniste 1 (June).
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— — —. 1958c. Preliminary problems in constructing a situation. Trans. Ken Knabb.
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— — —. 1958d. Theory of the dérive. Trans. Ken Knabb. Internationale Situationniste 2
(December). http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm (accessed May 6, 2012).

— — —. 1967. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Ken Knabb.
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm. (accessed May 6, 2012)

Debord, Guy, and Gil J. Wolman. 1956. A users guide to détournement. Trans. Ken
Knabb. Les Lèvres Nues 8 (May).
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Hearn, Francis. 1977. Toward a critical theory of play. Telos 30 (Winter): 145-160.

Huizinga, Johan. 1980. Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Orig. pub. 1938)

Ko, Christie. 2008. Politics of play: Situationism, détournement, and anti-art. Forum
special issue 2. http://www.forumjournal.org/site/issue/special/play/christie-ko
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Nieuwenhuys, Constant. 1957. The great game to come. Potlatch 30 (15 July).
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— — —. 1974. New Babylon: A nomadic town. Exhibition Catalogue.
The Hague: Haags Gemeetenmuseum. http://www.notbored.org/new-babylon.html (accessed May 6, 2012).

Situationist International. 1963. The Avant-Garde of Presence. Trans. Ken Knabb.
Internationale Situationniste 8 (January).
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Smith, Douglas. 2005. Giving the game away: Play and exchange in Situationism and
Structuralism. Modern & Contemporary France 13, no. 4 (November): 421-434.

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minds. Internationale Situationniste 8 (January).
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The post (It Will) Never Work: A critique of the Situationists’ appropriation of Johan Huizinga’s theory of play first appeared on Tom Tenney.

click to play.  TRT ~33 mins 

Introduction

Radio began as a DIY endeavor, invented by amateurs and tinkerers – the hackers of the late 19th and early 20th century. The Radio Act of 1927 allowed the government to privilege certain groups, particularly the radio corporations, in the allocation of the radio spectrum, and effectively locked the amateurs out.  Since that time, unlicensed broadcasters – or pirates – have roamed the airwaves and tried to elude the FCC. Through a series of interviews, this 33 minute “broadcast” looks at some of the motivations of these radio hackers – why they started doing it, and why they stopped. It also takes a critical look at the recently passed Local Community Radio Act (LCRA) – legislation which intends to open the airwaves to broadcasters under 100 watts, but may not be able to accommodate broadcasters in the largest urban areas. Finally, the migration of many microbroadcasters from the airwaves to the Internet is examined, particularly how this move allows for broadcasts to proliferate, but may not serve the public in exactly the same way the traditional radio medium is able to.  It concludes that there still is much more work to be done towards equitable distribution of the airwaves, and that while Internet radio may be able to meet the needs of certain communities, its very distribution methods indicate a much different audience than would be served by local radio.

Concept & Methodology
The original idea of this project was to investigate the “disappearance” of pirate radio broadcasters from the airwaves over the past decade.  I had noted, observationally, that as Internet adoption grew in the United States and Internet technologies were better able to accommodate the transmission of live audio over digital networks, the “buzz” about illegal microbroadcasters I’d previously heard in underground performance and alternative media communities had diminished.  This observation was corroborated by other recent examinations of the pirate radio phenomenon.  For example, in a video entitled Pirate Radio Frequencies (2010), a short documentary produced by Vice Magazine on the London (UK) pirate scene, one DJ declares, “the Internet has killed pirate radio, and I don’t think it can come back.”  In this study, my intent was to investigate the phenomenon of pirate radio and DIY microbroadcasting in New York City specifically, whether the phenomenon still exists, whether the broadcasters have moved to the Internet and if so, why.  I also wanted to examine the Local Community Radio Act, new national legislation allowing the licensing of community stations of under 100 watts and what effect, if any, this might have on the future of microbroadcasting, pirate and DIY radio.

Instead of conducting and presenting my research in the traditional way, it was decided that it would be presented as a short “radio show” which could be played over the airwaves, on Internet radio, or otherwise distributed by means that were more relevant to the medium being discussed than they were to traditional academic methods of writing and submitting a research paper.  To this end, I conducted a series of five interviews with people who were involved in DIY radio and microbroadcasting in a variety of ways, after reading several essays and articles on DIY radio to familiarize myself with the territory.  I chose my subjects not only based on relevancy to the topics being explored, but according to accessibility within the time frame given to complete the project.   The five subjects interviewed for the project were:

• Hank Hayes:  Hayes was a pirate radio DJ that started in the late 70’s while he was still a teenager.  For over 30 years, Hayes and his partner, Jim Nazium, broadcast illegally in NYC – often moving to different spots on the dial in order to elude the FCC. In 1986, Hayes was a member of a loose coalition of pirate broadcasters that purchased – and operated from- a ship, The Sarah, in international waters off the coast of New York.  The ship was raided and shut down by the FCC after just five days. In the early 2000s, Hayes and Nazium went “legit” by moving their broadcasts to the Internet.
• Andre Alleyne:  Andre isn’t a pirate broadcaster, but hosted a pirate transmitter in his Brooklyn apartment for four days in 2009 for a friend of his brother’s, a young man who ran a pirate radio station broadcasting Caribbean and urban music to the community.  Despite his lack of meaningful involvement in the operation, the FCC raided Alleyne’s apartment, and he was fined $10,000.  I found Andre through an Internet search of public records of people in New York that had been cited by the FCC for illegal broadcasting.
• Candace Clement:  Clement is an outreach manager at Free Press, a New England based media advocacy organization that lobbied for the passage of the LCRA.
• Brandy Doyle: Doyle is the policy director for Prometheus Radio, a Philadelphia-based micro-radio advocacy group that was among the most outspoken lobbyists for the LCRA.  The organization started as a pirate radio station – Radio Mutiny – that operated out of West Philadelphia in the late 90’s before being shut down by the FCC.
• Katrina Cass: Cass is one of the founders of BBOX Radio, an Internet radio station that has been broadcasting from a 160-square-foot shipping container in Brooklyn’s DeKalb Market since July of 2011.  The station was set up after she and her friends won a contest sponsored by the market, which asked, “What would you do with a shipping container at the DeKalb Market?”  Along with the space, the group won $5000 in seed money, and recently raised an additional $15,000 through a Kickstarter campaign.

Hayes, Clement and Doyle were all interviewed via Skype, and recorded with Audio Hijack, software designed to record computer system audio. Alleyne and Cass were interviewed in person. The specific interview questions, listed in Appendix A, were tailored specifically to each interviewee’s area of expertise, but were all designed to answer the following fundamental questions related to DIY radio and microbroadcasting:

• How did pirate broadcasting come about – what were the motivations for illegal broadcasting?
• Where is DIY Radio happening today in New York City?
• Did the advent of the Internet cause DIY radio stations to move online, or are there still pirates on the airwaves?
• What are some of the economic considerations of microbroadcasting vs. Internet radio?
• How will the passage of the Local Community Radio Act affect microbroadcasting, particularly in cities like NYC?

Outcomes

The outcomes that were revealed through the process of interviewing the five subjects could be categorized under four broad topics: motivations, benefits, limiting factors, and economics.

Motivations

In her interview, Candace Clement stated that the motivations for all microbroadcasters, whether pirate or legitimate, could be summed up by stating that

“they see a need that’s not being met. They might not see that they’re doing it that way but that is ultimately why they’re doing it, because something doesn’t exist and they’re making it exist because it’s not there.” (Airwaves 19:30)

This conclusion was borne out by both my reading on microbroadcasting and the interviews I conducted.  For example, Mbanna Kantanko started pirate radio station Black Liberation Radio (now Human Rights Radio) in Springfield, Illinois because his community wasn’t provided an outlet by mainstream media to express the violence and inequality they experienced in their neighborhoods. He said that the FCC put radio broadcasting

“out of the reach of the people what we’re trying to reach – people who live in public housing…who have no hope at all… of ever achieving any economic success in this country.  That regulation [requiring a minimum 100-watt transmitter] systematically excludes the disadvantaged… When you’re facing the conditions that our community in particular is facing, you have a duty as a human being to do whatever you can to try to turn those conditions around.  And we feel that communications is one of the things that we have to take control over.”  (qtd. in Bekken, 1998)

By clearly perceiving his reality and creating a radio station as a way to overcome the oppression he perceived in his community, Kantanko’s creation of  BLR can be seen as a prime example of the use of praxis as a method for overcoming a “limiting situation” as described by Paolo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).  In that work, Friere wrote,

“In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. This perception is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for liberation; it must become the motivating force for liberating action.” (49)

In a 1996 interview, Napoleon Williams – another leader of Black Liberation Radio – also spoke to the necessity of constructionist principals in education for teaching technology as a tool for liberation to children in oppressed neighborhoods, echoing the writings of Papert and Harel (1991).  Williams said,

“I don’t know why we are not taking technology that is at our disposal and running classes to teach our kids to read schematics. Give your child some kind of electronic intelligence.  You got to realize that technology exists to create a radio station almost on a matchbook, and our kids would be fascinated by that if we would direct them toward it.” (Williams 1996)

     Not all radio pirates were as political as Kantanko and Williams. Hank Hayes began pirate broadcasting because he felt that commercial broadcasters were destroying the “fun” of radio.  In my interview with him, he says that a primary motivation was a change in commercial broadcasting in the 70’s that emphasized

“the DJ not talking. And we liked the DJ. And what happened was, we said ‘well, if we can’t get it anymore we’re going to do it ourselves.  And that’s exactly what we did.” (Airwaves 05:49)

Whether the motivations for pirate broadcasting were political or not, I agree with Clement’s assessment that for microbroadcasters, a primary motivator is to meet a need that is perceived as “not being met” by mainstream media.

Benefits

Much of the discussion, with all of my interviewees, revolved around the benefits of microbroadcasting over Internet radio or vice-versa, depending on which side of the philosophical fence the subject happened to be on.   For Clement and Doyle, the prevailing opinion is that, when it comes to broadcasting that is able to serve local communities,  “radio offers something that the Internet just doesn’t at this time” (Doyle 22:55).  Neither argues against the inherent values of the Internet as a medium that can reach a mass audience, but their concern is more for providing a medium that speaks to a local audience in a

“globalized moment when people are really yearning for that local, and they’re looking for local food and local businesses and local artists, and a sense of being part of a local community at a time when that has been wiped out.” (Doyle 22:39)

Katrina Cass of BBOX Radio tends to disagree, and finds that the Internet is able to not only serve a local community, but provide a “local flavor” to a global audience and thinks that

“there will be an audience that’s interested in what’s happening locally here in Brooklyn.  I think people in Mississippi and California are interested in what’s happening in Brooklyn.  There are things that are different. And you might not be seeing that on the larger national networks.”

(Cass 24:03)

Cass raises an excellent point, in the fact that local broadcasting is not available on the “larger national networks” which is precisely why Clement and Doyle are interested in opening the airwaves to community broadcasting.

Regarding some of the other differences between radio and Internet broadcasting, one of the most salient ones that I tried to have each interviewee address was the concept of “discoverability” i.e. how one finds a broadcast without knowing about it and specifically seeking it out.  While both Clement and Doyle see this as an advantage of radio, both Cass and Hayes have been able to find an element of discoverability in their Internet broadcasts.  For Cass, the element of discoverability comes from the studio’s physical location in the Dekalb Market, with people literally stumbling upon the station.  For Hayes, he thinks that discoverability comes from being a part of a larger network of Internet stations (stickam.com) where people who listen to one show on the network are likely to check out another.  He also thinks that once people are exposed to his show, they hear something they’ve “never heard before” – which is the old school style of broadcasting that he and Jim practice.

Limitations

Through my interviews, I found that there are several limitations to microbroadcasting, particularly if one seeks to become licensed under the LCRA. First, the way the bill is written doesn’t allow for a set percentage of the radio spectrum to be allocated to low power radio, but only for community broadcasters to be able to set up shop in whatever portions of the spectrum commercial radio isn’t using.  Therefore, in large markets like New York City, there will be very little opportunity for community broadcasters to become licensed.   This is a limitation that is acknowledged by both Doyle and Clement, and a reason that Cass sees Internet broadcasting not necessarily as a solution to the problem, but as a necessary alternative.

Another limitation to microbroadcasters getting a license under the LCRA is the fact that all licensees must be non-profit corporations.  Given the amount of organization and paperwork this requires, not to mention the time it takes to be recognized by the government as a nonprofit, this places a serious limitation on DIY broadcasters who place a premium on getting things done quickly.  An example I raised in the interviews was the Occupy Wall Street movement, which emerged fairly rapidly and could have potentially benefitted by having a low-power FM station broadcasting to the protesters.  The licensing restrictions and nonprofit requirement, then, would effectively eliminate a movement like OWS from having legitimate low power broadcasting available to them as a viable option.

Finally, a limitation to legitimate broadcasting raised by Andre Alleyne, is that becoming licensed can be “price prohibitive.”  This was certainly true before the passage of the LCRA, when setting up for a station of 100 watts or more could cost in the tens of thousands of dollars.  Certainly the new bill will lower the economic barrier to entry for many, but compared to the Internet, setting up a terrestrial radio station can still be an economic barrier, and will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

Economics

The last outcome of the research I’d like to discuss is how the economics of local community radio compares to that of Internet broadcasting.  According to Candace Clement, local radio is more cost efficient in the sense that it places the economic threshold to entry for the average listener much lower than it is for Internet radio listeners. Her feeling is that with Internet radio, there are economic barriers for the listener such as equipment, access, and data caps whereas “broadcast radio is totally free.  You just have to get yourself a radio and you’re in, you’re all set, you’re good.” (Clement 21:50).

On the other hand, Cass sees the Internet as being more cost efficient, at least for the producers if not necessarily for the listeners.  She emphasizes that for her station, the startup costs were low enough that they could get up and running easily, and that BBOX started with only

“a small stipend that pretty much covered the insurance for [the studio] and everything else was coming out of our pockets. So if we wanted to try and go get a transmitter for a space that doesn’t even exist for us, it just didn’t make any sense.  A web server is like a hundred bucks a year at most.  It’s very reasonable.”  (Cass 25:10)

After listening to arguments about the economics of microbroadcasting vs. Internet radio from both perspectives, it appeared that an inverse relationship exists between the economics of each media.  On the one hand, participation in microbroadcasting is much more inexpensive for the listeners but more expensive for the producers, both in startup costs and time and energy involved.  On the other hand, Internet radio is very inexpensive for producers to get a station up and running, while access to listeners is limited by the availability of equipment such as smart phones and computers, as well as Internet access – all resources that are far more expensive than an average transistor radio.

Conclusions and Limitations

Although the topic requires more research, I was able to reach at least two conclusions from the outcomes of this project.  The first is that, while the passage of the LCRA is a step in the right direction, it isn’t a solution that works for everyone.  New York City, a city that could benefit from community broadcasting due to it’s several ethnic and cultural communities, will be eliminated from participation due to the fact that there is no room in the radio spectrum because of the space inhabited by commercial broadcasters.   It would seem to me that a more equitable solution would be legislation that ensures a certain percentage of the spectrum is guaranteed to be available to community broadcasters in any market.  This has precedent in the 1984 Cable Communications Act that required that all cable companies allocate a certain amount of their resources to community access television, and would certainly allow for a more equitable distribution of the airwaves.

Another conclusion is that, until allocation of the spectrum becomes more equitable, Internet radio may not be able to provide a solution to the problem, per se, but an alternative to those producers who want to get their message out in a way that is cost effective and has few barriers to entry.

Some of the limitations of the research include the fact that, due to the temporal limitations of the project, speaking to listeners of both microbroadcasters and Internet stations was out of the scope of the project.  I believe that hearing the opinions of those who are actively engaged in these types of broadcasts would provide invaluable insight, and should be addressed in future studies.  Another limitation is that my roster of interviewees didn’t ultimately include microbroadcasters or pirate radio operators that are currently active.  One reason for this is that it can be extremely difficult to locate pirate broadcasters, if only for the simple reason that they don’t want to be found.  After all, if I can find them, so can the FCC, and they have a vested interest in remaining underground.  Ultimately, my hope is that if I continue this research in the future, I will be able to overcome these limitations.  Hopefully by that time, we’ll be able to better understand the effects of the LCRA on the state of microbroadcasting as well.

WORKS CITED

Bekken, Jon. “Community Radio at the Crossroads: Federal Policy and the Professionalization of a Grassroots Medium.” Seizing the Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook. Ron Sakolsky and Stephen Dunifer (eds.) San Francisco: AK Press. 1998. p 39.

Friere, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: Herder and Herder. 1970.

Papert, Seymour & Harel, Idit (eds). Constructionism: Research Reports and Essays 1985-1990.  Epistemology and Learning Research Group, The Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ablex Pub. Corp, Norwood NJ. Chapter 1: Situating Constructionism. 1991.

Pirate Radio Frequencies. Dir. Matt Mason. Palladium Boots. 2010.

Williams, Napoleon.  “A New Drum for Our People: An Interview with Napoleon Williams (Black Liberation Radio). Seizing the Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook.  Ron Sakolsky and Stephen Dunifer (eds.) San Francisco: AK Press. 1998. p 114.

APPENDIX A – INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

Andre Alleyne (interview on 11/30/2011)

1. Describe the radio station you hosted the transmitter for.  What was the content of the broadcasts?  How often did they broadcast?
2. Who were the listeners?  Was there community involvement in the station?
3. Describe what happened with the FCC.  How did they first contact you?  How would you characterize their attitude towards you?
4. You said in your email you feel you’d been made an “example” of – can you elaborate on this?
5. Do you feel your persecution – and subsequent fines – by the FCC had a negative effect on other pirate broadcasters in NYC?
6. Has there been subsequent consideration of resurrecting the station?   Did your brother or his friend at any time consider trying to become licensed by the FCC?  Why or why not?  What do you consider the biggest obstacles to an individual obtaining a broadcast license?
7. Was there consideration given to broadcasting over the Internet? What effect, if any, do you feel Internet broadcasting has had on the state of community, low power, or pirate stations on the airwaves?
8. Do you consider yourself a political person?  How does community broadcasting fit in with your personal politics?
9. Last year, a bill was passed to allow FCC licensing of micro-power and community radio stations.  Do you think this helps or undermines the pirate radio movement?  Is it worth it to get a license?

Hank Hayes – Radio Free New York (interview on 12/1/2011)

1. Your story is incredible. You and Jim have known each other since childhood, correct?  How did you start getting into radio?
2. You’ve been shut down by the FCC several times, and yet kept coming back for more.  Why?  What kinds of penalties did the FCC impose on you guys?
3. It says on the site that you mainly started doing pirate radio because there wasn’t any good commercial radio on the air.  As you continued to do it, and continued to get harassed by the FCC, did political motivations, like free speech issues, come into play as well?
4. Did you have day jobs?  How did you guys make money?
5. I read on the site that your signal could be heard up and down the eastern seaboard.  That’s pretty impressive for microbroadcasters. Is that mainly because you were on the AM band? How powerful was your transmitter?
6. The story about RNI and the Sarah is amazing.  I was kind of horrified to read about the apparent violence of the FCC – smashing equipment, cutting wires, etc.   also the shotgun bearing Marshalls of 1989 bust.  Seems like a bit of overkill for a couple of radio pirates. What’s your take on that?
7. The case was dropped, so basically the message was “don’t fuck with us, because we’ll shut you down any time we want, right?”   So, why DO you think they shut down RNI?  or any of your other stations for that matter?
8. Did you ever consider getting licensed, as opposed to just leasing time?
9. I know you guys did radio because of the sorry state of radio at the time.  What do you think of radio today?  Has it gotten better or worse?
10. When did you make the move over to the Internet, and why?
11. What about this move from the airwaves to the Internet?  Do you feel like you’re accomplishing the same things?  How do you perceive the difference between Internet radio and microbroadcasting?
12. What advice would you give to someone today who’s interested in getting into microbroadcasting? Is it worth it to broadcast on the airwaves or would they and their listeners be better served on the Internet?
13. Last year Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act, which will allow licensing to microbroadcasters under 100 watts.    How do you think this will affect DIY broadcasters?  Is this a good thing, or is this just FCC’s way of getting microbroadcasters to play by their rules?
14. Talk about what you guys are up to now – anything else, etc.

Candace Clement – Free Press (interview on 12/1/2011)
Brandy Doyle – Prometheus Radio (interview on 12/2/2011)

1. What is LPFM and why is it important?
2. Last year Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act (LCRA).  Can you describe this bill and talk a bit about its importance?  Who will benefit most from this law?
3. Do you know how who gets licensed will be decided? It seems like this could be a big win for progressives, but only if the fundamentalist don’t swoop in and snap up all the licenses.
4. It seems as though, with the Internet, radio has almost become a “forgotten” medium.  Do you think the LCRA will change that?  How will it/could it affect the overall radio landscape in this country?
5. What do you see as the benefit of LPFM broadcasting over the airwaves vs. using the Internet?  How is radio different?
6. What about communities, urban diasporas, in big cities where spectrum space is scarce.  Will there be opportunities for them as well?
7. The FCC has up to 2 years from passage of the LCRA to start taking applications – any idea when that will happen?
8. I’ve heard that the waiting list could be up to five years after application. It would seem that this could be frustrating to those with an immediate need to get up and running.  It also seems like it would effectively put the kibosh on anyone whose intent is to use the airwaves for discussion of any current political events (OWS comes to mind).   Any thoughts on that?  Could this be a way of the FCC to gain even *more* control of the airwaves?
9. I understand that licenses will only go to registered nonprofits.  Doesn’t place even more restrictions on who can and cannot broadcast?
10. One of the most frequent complaints (or rationales) heard by unlicensed LPFM broadcasters in the past was that they couldn’t get a license from the FCC.  Now, if they become licensed under the LCRA, they will have to play by the FCC’s rules.  Is that a trade off you think will be worth it for them to make, or has the Internet effectively killed the pirate radio movement, rending the point moot?

Katrina Cass – BBOX Radio (Interview 12/4) /2011

1. Tell me the story of BBOX.  What’s your mission and how did you guys get started?
2. Did you or any of the other founders have a background in broadcasting?  What sparked this particular idea when you came up with it as your entry to the shipping container contest?
3. What do you see as the principal differences between broadcasting on the Internet vs. micropower broadcasting on the airwaves?
4. Do you think that the Internet has diminished the public’s interest in broadcasting on the air?  Is the Internet a competing technology or a complementary one?
5. Do you have any data on *how* people are listening to your station?  Do they listen at work on their computer with headphones? via Smartphone apps?
6. BBOX appears to be a very DIY effort – what have you found to be the biggest challenges in running an Internet radio station?
7. Aside from the Kickstarter campaign, what are some other ways BBOX is funded? Do you have sponsorships, lease airtime, or have other means of bringing in an income?
8. One of the reasons I find this project particularly interesting is that you’re doing something that’s very locally focused (community radio) on a decidedly non-local medium (the Internet).   How has the local response been to BBOX and how do you feel you  serve the local Brooklyn community?
9. What’s your process for selecting programming?  What criteria do you use?  Can anyone apply to have a show on BBOX?
10. Are all of your shows broadcast from the shipping crate studio, or have you done any remote/on location broadcasts from other places?
11. What’s the future of BBOX?  Are there any plans/desires to broadcast over the airwaves? What would be your advice to would be DIY broadcasters on the Internet?  What’s the best, easiest way for them to start?

The post We Want the Airwaves: An Investigation into Pirate and DIY Broadcasting first appeared on Tom Tenney.

In this paper, I will argue that artists calling themselves “cyborg artists” represent only a small fraction of the ways in which cybernetics has infiltrated art and ideas about art. I also hope to demonstrate that, in fact, their work often isn’t cybernetic at all, if we adhere to Norbert Wiener’s definition.  The “artist as cyborg,” I will contend, can refer not only to the materiality of the forms used to create art (i.e. machines and/or new media technology) but also to an aesthetic which is modeled on the core principles of cybernetics: negative feedback used within a system to achieve a goal.  Soraya Murray calls this “Cybernated Aesthetics,” and in her analysis of Korean artist Lee Bul, explains that “while [Bul is] calling upon an array of technologies that include (but are not limited to) media arts, [her works] are nevertheless fully engaged with cybernated life.” (Murray 47) This is a perceptual shift away from thinking of “cyborg art” exclusively as those that utilize new media technology, and towards a more holistic theory that situates art in Wiener’s more inclusive theory of cybernetics.

To this end, I will first examine the epistemological meanings of the terms “cybernetics” and “cyborg” as defined by Wiener, Haraway, Katherine Hayles and others. I will then focus on the process of creating art and cybernetics’ role in its evolution.  I will conclude by focusing on several “cyborg artists” and the way they are using technology in performance and new media art, and examine whether or not they are truly cybernetic or “cyborg,” either within Wiener’s framework or Haraway’s.

Defining Cybernetics, Cyborgs and the Posthuman

In order to discuss cybernetics in art or “cyborg artists,” it is first necessary to define what is meant by these terms.  In Wiener’s 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings, he defines cybernetics as classing “communications and control together,” (16) or, as Michael J. Apter has describes it, “the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine.” (257) For Wiener, the theory of cybernetics was meant to embody a complex of ideas that included communications theory (how messages are sent and received), systems theory (the complex entities in which those messages are sent and received), and well as control theory, i.e. the effects that those messages have in the system.  But Wiener’s theory was more than simply a sum of these parts; it meant to explain the relationships between them.  As Apter explains, “Underlying cybernetics is the idea that all control and communication systems, be they animal or machine, biological or technological, can be described and understood using the same language and concepts.” (257) Control theory is a cornerstone of Wiener’s theory and especially its two essential ingredients: feedback and goals.  “Negative feedback” is a process wherein a machine is controlled “on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance” (Wiener 24), or, as Apter explains, where “some part of the output of the system is fed back into the system again in a negative direction in order to control that system.” (258).  In order for this concept of feedback to be effective – or even relevant – it must have some sort of goal toward which this feedback, or corrective behavior, is applied. In homeostatic systems, this goal is often the maintenance of some desired state, such as a comfortable temperature in the case of the thermostat.  But whatever the goal is, the existence of one seems to be an essential component of control theory and therefore, by extension, of cybernetics as well.  In Wiener’s theory, feedback and goals work hand-in-hand.  As he says himself, “effective behavior must be informed by some sort of feedback process, telling it whether it has equaled its goal or fallen short.” (Wiener, 58-59)

Although the term “cyborg” didn’t appear until 1960 (Biro 2) the concept of a man-machine hybrid has been present in art and  sci-fi literature since at least the early 20^th century. It’s use by the Dadaists in 1920’s Weimar Germany anticipated Wiener’s theory (Biro 2) by their use of photomontage as a technique of exploring and blurring the boundaries between man and machine.  For example, Dada artist Raoul Hausmann’s depictions of the cyborg as a militaristic other “anticipated the uneasy play between friend and enemy, self and other, characteristic of Wiener’s account of early cybernetics.” (Biro 120)

Perhaps because of the various cultural contexts in which the cyborg has appeared, it is difficult to settle on a single definition.  One of these difficulties lies in the fact that, as Katherine Hayles says, “cyborgs are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living being and narrative constructions.” (Hayles 114)  Matthew Biro agrees, stating, “the cyborg has long possessed a duel life as both an image and a concept.” (2) In her 1991 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway posits a theory that the cyborg is both a “creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” (Haraway 149)  She argues that the cyborg is a form of human identity that allows us to finally transcend gender, race and class and uses it as a model for contemporary feminism in a way that situates woman as an “other,” while at the same time operating “ beyond both the sex binary and the social realities that accompany it, [which] positions the cyborg as a possible metaphor for standing outside of phallocentric, rational thought.” (Murray 39)  Thus, by assuming the identity of cyborg – one empowers herself to transgress boundaries which may stand in the way of political work.  Compared to Wiener’s mechanistic definition of a system of communications and control, Haraway’s definition of the cyborg draws upon the cyborg’s presence in culture both before and after Wiener, and situates it in the realm of social theory.  While Wiener has been described as a liberal-humanist (Biro 2), Haraway’s cyborg theory is decidedly posthuman in that it “blurs several intermediary boundaries between the human and non-human.” (Garoian 336)  Katherine Hayles picks up on this idea of cyborg as posthuman and, in her 1999 book How we Became Posthuman, posits the characteristics of this posthuman condition that include thinking of the body “as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate,” and configuring the human being “so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.” (Hayles pp 2-3)

While it’s beyond the scope of this paper to indulge in an in depth comparison between Wiener’s humanist theory of cybernetics and Haraway and Hayles’ posthuman concept of the cyborg, it’s my hope that this somewhat cursory look at the different ways of perceiving cybernetics and cyborgs will be useful when we examine the ways in which art and artists have utilized these concepts.

Cybernetics as a Model for Artistic Creation

Both Wiener’s cybernetic theory and Haraway’s concept of cyborg as discussed above have had significant impact in the arts and artists of the 20^th century.  Often, Wiener and Haraway’s concepts are both represented within a single artist or work.  For example, Apter’s comment that “the contemporary artist’s obsession with randomness may be seen as an attempt to increase the information he is conveying,” (258) could easily describe the composer John Cage and the way some of his works based on randomness utilized, intentionally or not, Wiener’s concept of information as “the negative logarithm of its probability […] the more probable the message, the less information it contains.” (Wiener 21)  At the same time, as Garoian points out, Cage was an artist who “[experimented] with the analog sounds and movements of machine culture” (334) which resonates with Haraway’s idea of the cyborg. Both of these concepts can be found in Cage’s 1952 composition Imaginary Landscape #4, a piece that calls for the “performers” to tune 12 radios to different random stations.   But cybernetics can be applied not only to experimental music, but to many, if not all, other forms as well.  Apter argues that, indeed, the whole process of art-making “is one which involves many feedback processes including those between the artist and the work of art he is in the act of creating, between the work of art and its audience, and between the audience and the artist through criticism in the short-term and, in the long term” (Apter 263) This is nowhere more evident than in the arts of theatre and live performance, which “functions as a closed-loop feedback system” whereby audience and performers provide an environment, or system, of stimulus-and-response that regulates itself via the feedback that an audience provides to performers and vice-versa. (Lichty 352)  Of course, this “system” of stimulus-and-response in the theatre existed well before the concept of cybernetics, but it’s just one example of the way in which Wiener’s ideas can be applied to the traditional arts.  It’s interesting to note that the rise in American theatre of theatrical improvisation – a form that further heightens and exploits the feedback loop between audience and performer, can be roughly mapped historically to just before the birth of Wiener’s theory.   Improvisational theatre as we know it today dates back to 1939 when Viola Spolin was at the Compass Theatre teaching what she was calling “Recreational Theatre,” or “Socio-Drama.” The forms she developed evolved into the improv theatre we know today, and is generally accepted as a viable art form. (Feldman)  This may serve as a reminder that, although we are trying to identify causal influences, every system exists within a still larger one, and similar ideas may be developed from the greater cultural zeitgeist.

While we’re able to establish that Wiener’s idea of feedback-and-response exists in a live performance space, what of other types of work wherein the artist and viewer are not together in physical or temporal space? Other types of art work – both static and interactive – are still conveyors of information, but the way the feedback loop works must be significantly different because the artist and viewer are not in the same space together at the same time.   In the case of interactive new media works, the feedback loop may exist, but there is a temporal disconnection between artist and audience.  In these cases, it may be the work itself that contributes to the cybernetic feedback loop. In Dan Graham’s installation, Time Delay Room, there are 2 rooms of equal size that viewers can move between, each is equipped with a surveillance camera at the point where the two rooms meet, and 2 monitors on the far wall.  As viewers move from one room to the other, the monitor they first encounter provides a live view of the room they just left, while the other provides a view of the room they just left, but with an 8-second delay. According to Gregor Stemmrich:

“The time-lag of eight seconds is the outer limit of the neurophysiological short-term memory that forms an immediate part of our present perception and affects this (from within). If you see your behavior eight seconds ago presented on a video monitor (from outside) you will probably therefore not recognize the distance in time but tend to identify your current perception and current behavior with the state eight seconds earlier. Since this leads to inconsistent impressions which you then respond to, you get caught up in a feedback loop. You feel trapped in a state of observation, in which your self-observation is subject to some outside visible control.”  (qtd. in Media Art Net)

One may question whether this installation is a truly cybernetic system and ask whether the work itself is a participant responding/adjusting to viewer stimulus.  However, I would argue that it does, in the sense that the machine provides “feedback” in the form of live and delayed projections in response to the viewers very presence and movement, which in turn affects the behavior of the viewers.

Another phenomenon worth considering when examining the relationship of cybernetics to art is that of art-making machines, or the machine-as-artist as opposed to the artist-as-machine. In 2007 Perry Bard, a NYC-based visual artist and filmmaker, created a conceptual work entitled Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake.  The concept of the project was to solicit a global audience, via the Internet, to remake scenes from Dziga Vertov’s 1929 classic documentary, Man with a Movie Camera. The scenes are then uploaded to a database and matched to the corresponding timecode in the Vertov film. A software program then “constructs” each iteration of the film by randomly selecting one user-version of each scene. The resulting work is then screened side-by-side with Vertov’s original.   Examples like these clearly raise questions of authorship – who is the author in this case?  Is it the artist, the machine, or the audience?  Further, the very concept of a machine that makes art would seem to run directly counter to Dewey’s aesthetic theory, specifically his notion that an art object must be created using the artist’s “images, observations, memories and emotions.” (Dewey 74).  Certainly those human qualities were used by the artist and the participants, but not by the machine that actually constructed the piece. This is an example of where it may be helpful to turn our thinking from the notion of art-as-object towards one of art-as-process, and how that concept may relate to cybernetics.  Apter says,

“The emphasis of cybernetics on process and change may have been one of the factors generating an increasing feeling among artists that art should be regarded as a process rather than as the production of static objects. This feeling has manifested itself in a number of ways including the production of works of art which are impermanent, the advent of the ‘happening’ as an art form and the deliberate and creative utilization in some works of kinetic art.” (263-4)

Bard’s project may not be a “happening” or kinetic art, but I think there are parallels in that the emphasis is placed on the process of collaboration itself.  Meaning is created not only by the art-object but also – but perhaps more importantly – by the way in which it’s created. It is this emphasis on process that Murray refers to when she writes, “this turn from discrete singularities into spaces of flows, information patterns and data clouds, this is the mark of a cybernated aesthetics.” (43)

In each of the cases mentioned in this section, artists have utilized the cybernetic concepts of feedback and response, and can be understood as a part of an integral system.

Cyborg Artists

We now come to the difficult question of cyborg artists and whether, in fact, the artists that make this claim are truly utilizing the principles of Wiener’s cybernetic theory of communication and control, or if they perhaps represent the cyborg as defined by Haraway and Hayles. To attempt to answer this, I will examine two artists who have identified themselves as “cyborg artists”: Stelarc, an Australian performance artist that uses his body connected to various forms of technology as a medium; and Orlan, a French performance artist who, through extensive use of plastic surgery, creates a ‘body’ that serves as both vehicle and medium.

When discussing Stelarc, Charles Garoian claims he “raises the issue of the history of our cyborg identity…. [Stelarc] argues that humans have always been cyborgs through their connections to technological devices and that a reconceptualization of technology in contemporary culture suggest that we interiorize technology rather than locate technology outside the body.” (340) In 1993, Stelarc created a piece entitled Stomach Sculpture, in which he lowered a small camera into his stomach that moved about, lit by tiny diodes. The image was then projected onto a video monitor.  In describing the piece, Stelarc said, “The idea was to insert an artwork into the body – to situate the sculpture in an internal space.  The body becomes hollow, with no meaningful distinctions between public, private, and the physiological spaces.” (qtd. in Asma).   While this piece certainly speaks to the way we relate our bodies to technology, and perhaps creates dialectic between the two, I question whether this can be considered cybernetic in the Wienerian sense strictly because he uses technology.  In order to be truly cybernetic, according to the definitions established at the start of this paper, the artist must enter into a relationship, either with his audience or with the technology used, which establishes a negative feedback loop to regulate behavior towards a desired goal.  Perhaps the piece could be better understood as “cyborg art” if we consider it vis-à-vis Haraway’s concept of the cyborg as a transgressor of natural boundaries – after all, he is inserting an unnatural element into a natural, private space for public consumption. But I would argue that, unlike Haraway’s cyborg who transgresses physical and social boundaries as a way to move beyond gender and race, Stelarc’s insertion of a camera into his stomach does nothing to blur the boundaries between the human and non-human. The camera does not become part of him, so the question of identity – critical to Haraway’s metaphor – is not present.

One of Stelarc’s most well-known performances was a 1994 piece entitled Ping Body.  In this piece, an audience on the Internet was able to access a network of muscle-stimulation electrodes on the artist’s body.  A person participating on the Internet could activate a node on Stelarc’s body that would cause an involuntary muscle spasm.  As James Geary described the performance, “[Stelarc] wired himself to Internet. His body was dotted with electrodes – on his deltoids, biceps, flexors, hamstrings and calf muscles – that delivered gentle electric shocks, just enough to nudge the muscles into involuntary contractions.” Each time a node was activated, a photo of the artist was uploaded to the website. In this way, the audience did receive a measure of response correlating the stimulus they were providing.  While this performance comes closer to Wiener’s concept of cybernetics, there is a feedback loop, it still falls short of being truly cybernetic.  First, while the audience’s behavior does create a response from the artist, this response is not one that creates a corrective behavior from the artist, or vice versa. In other words, since there is no goal that is trying to be achieved through this system other than, perhaps, an aesthetic one, then it falls short of being truly cybernetic.  In considering this piece as “cyborg art” as it relates to Haraway’s definition of the cyborg, Stelarc does create a system in which human boundaries are transgressed but the performance still doesn’t manage to blur the boundaries between “natural” and “unnatural” technologies of the body which is an important component of Haraway’s manifesto: “Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms.” (Haraway 165)

Orlan is another single-name artist who has been characterized as a “cyborg artist” in that she utilizes medical technology as her method and her body as her medium. In other words, she uses plastic surgery as performance.  Her most famous work, officially entitled The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan, was an ongoing performance piece in which she transformed herself, via plastic surgery, into a feminine “ideal” based on various art works.  For example, in one surgery she had a facial alteration so that her forehead would be exactly like the forehead of the Mona Lisa. In this way the artist makes a social commentary on transmutability of the human body; but the question arises, as it does for Stelarc, as to whether these performances are truly cybernetic, or cyborg, in nature. While the technologies and artificialities she employs (the implant in her forehead, for example) do arguably “become” her in ways that Stelarc’s stomach-camera do not, there is still the question of how, or whether, they are integrated into her bodily “system” in a way that utilizes Wiener’s negative feedback loop.  The surgeries are, after all, “cosmetic,” in that they don’t communicate with the organic elements of her body in a way that creates a system of communication and control.

On the other hand, I concede that Orlan’s work fits a bit more neatly into Haraway and Hayles’ concept of the posthuman cyborg. The very nature of plastic surgery does begin to blur the boundaries between “natural” and technological objects. In her article, “Orlan: Offensive Acts,” Carey Lovelace notes that “it was first assumed that Orlan’s plastic surgery epic was a feminist polemic dramatizing the unimaginable lengths women will go to achieve an ideal of beauty defined by men. However, after some contact with the piece, one began to realize, slowly, uneasily, that this was not the case. In fact, after hearing a few words from Orlan it became clear that not only is she not against surgical interventions to alter appearance, she seems veritably positive on the subject: [Orlan says]  ‘In future times we’ll change our bodies as easily as our hair color.’”(13-14) This seems to be right in line with Haraway’s rejection of the “natural” woman in favor of one that is empowered to transform herself at will.  Therefore, Orlan’s performance may not be truly “cybernetic” but aligns itself with cyborg theory from a feminist perspective.

Conclusion

We have seen that, while it can be problematic to define exactly what we mean by “cybernetics” or “cyborg,” undoubtedly Wiener’s 1948 theory of cybernetics has had an impact on not only new media art, but traditional arts as well.  The idea of art as self-regulating “system” of communication and control has influenced not only the way we create art, but how we think about it as well.

While this essay does not examine the entire body and breadth of work that the “cyborg artists” in the final section have created, the works I have presented raise important questions as to whether they can truly be considered cybernetic or cyborg at all.  Both Stelarc and Orlan fall short of Wiener’s definition of cybernetics, although it can be fairly stated that they come closer to Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Neither, however, has transformed into a truly man-machine hybrid that exists as a holistic system wherein both technical and organic elements communicate with and regulate each other.

That isn’t to say that these artists are entirely devoid of a cybernetic sensibility. In this essay, we’ve hopefully seen that there are many ways to view cybernetics and its impact on art.  I don’t think that cybernetic art needs to necessarily be technological or digital.  I agree with Murray when she says that cybernated aesthetics are “in conversation with electronics and the digital, but not bounded by them.  Cybernated aesthetics reflect the impact of cybernated life, though they may not take digital or electronic form.”  (Murray 48)

Works Cited

Apter, Michael J. “Cybernetics and Art.” Leonardo. Vol. 2. Pergamon Press. 1969. pp. 257-262.

Asma, Stephen T. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Work in Progress.” Chronicle of Higher Education. Vol. 47, Issue 19. January 19, 2001.

Bard, Perry. “Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake.” Accessed 16 December 2010. <http://dziga.perrybard.net/>

Biro, Matthew. The Dada Cyborg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009.

Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books. 1980.

Feldman, Lee Gallup. “A Brief History of Improvisational Theatre in the United States.” Yale-Theatre. 1974 Mar 01.  Vol. 5, Issue 2.  p.128

Garoian, Charles R., and Yvonne M. Gaudelius. “Cyborg Pedagogy: Performing Resistance in the Digital Age. Studies in Art Education. 2001. 42(4). p. 333-347.

Geary, James. “The Body Electric.” Time Europe. Vol. 159, Issue 10.  March 11, 2002.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. 1991.

Hayles, N.K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago. 1999.

Lichty, Patrick. “The Cybernetics of Performance and New Media Art.” Leonardo. Vol. 33, No. 5. 2000. pp. 351-354.

Media Art Net. “Dan Graham Time-Delay Room” <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/time-delay-room/> Accessed 15 Dec 2010.

Murray, Soraya. “Cybernated Aesthetics: Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. PAJ 89. Vol. 30, No. 2. May 2008. pp. 38-50.

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. New York: Anchor Books. 1954.

The post Cybernetics in Art and the Myth of the Cyborg Artist first appeared on Tom Tenney.

How do changing copyright laws and a participatory media landscape impact the fitters theorized by Chomsky two decades ago? To try to answer this, I will look specifically at Chomsky’s ideas of media ownership and examine how they may be challenged by contemporary media practices.  I will examine not only the concept of content ownership, but also ownership of the media companies themselves and try to discern how interactive media both challenges Chomsky’s theory, as well as how it has created an environment in which new censorship filters have emerged, and whether it’s possible for old economic models to survive in the digital age.

Content Ownership

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman present a critique of corporate ownership of media, showing that consolidation of ownership arose due to the “increase of capital costs […] which was based on technological improvements, along with the owners’ increased stress on reaching large audiences.” (3-4) In other words, it simply became too expensive for independent producers to create content and compete with large corporations.  As a result, the major producers of media today are owned by wealthy people with a vested interest in preserving their wealth.   The remainder of Chomsky’s arguments about media ownership (relationships with banks, deregulation, ties to government) is dependent on this basic assumption that a wealthy power elite owns media content.

Partly due to the rise of interactive technologies and the way they allow content to be extracted, appropriated and recontextualized by consumers, there are two ways to consider ownership of media today: ownership of content, and ownership of the media organizations themselves.   For the former, the concept of content as property depends on the metaphors we use to describe it, and it’s important to take a look at the history of copyright before we examine how it has been transformed in the 20^th century by metaphors of physical property.  Copyright began in Britain in 1710 with the Statute of Anne, conceived as a contract that allowed publishers a limited monopoly on the copying of books.  As such, it had nothing to do with “property,” but existed as a way for authors and publishers to profit from their work for a prescribed time period.  It wasn’t until 1967 that the term “Intellectual Property” came into popular usage (Lemley 1003 n.4) and became the dominant metaphor for copyright.   Clearly, this isn’t the kind of “ownership” that Chomsky was referring to in Manufacturing Consent, but the current battles around copyright protection are important to consider and play a role in shaping how we think about corporate ownership of media.  With the rise of interactive and media sharing technologies, consumers can easily appropriate media created by corporate producers and use it to create transformative works that are critiques or commentary on the original, and that make potentially subversive statements about our culture.  This presents a challenge to Chomsky’s ownership filter in that, while corporations may still control the output of content, their grip on its distribution and how that content is “read” is diminishing.  Through the recontextualization of corporate content, remixers have the ability to re-examine and critique the content and redistribute it in such a way that it provides consumers with an alternate, often critical reading of the original.  This loosening of “control” of their brands and messages has spurred a backlash among corporate content creators, which has led to copyright infringement litigation against consumers who reuse their content.  While such transformative use is legally protected under the fair use doctrine of US copyright law, the usual result of corporate litigation of individuals is that the consumer, due to the inability to pay legal costs, will back down and the litigator will have won by default.  Thus, we can think of this tactic of using the market to achieve dominance over independent producers, as another kind of “filter” in the Chomskian sense.  While it pertains directly to ownership of content, this tactic is akin to Chomsky’s filter of “advertising” in that, like the use of advertising to subsidize media, it forces smaller players out of the market, effectively silencing them.

Media Ownership

Enforcement of copyright protection can also be seen as having led to a deterioration of discourse in the public sphere.  In 2008, The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported the removal of the presidential debates by corporate broadcasters from the video sharing site YouTube, which points to a critical failure of copyright protection – the censorship of political discourse from publicly available resources.   This indicates not only problems with content ownership, but refers directly to Chomsky’s critique of corporate ownership of media organizations.

On one hand, it can be said that Chomsky’s filter of media ownership is not only still in effect, but perhaps even stronger than it was 20 year ago in that the number of controlling corporations has now dwindled to six: NewsCorp, GE, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom and Bertelsmann. In a statement that reinforces Chomsky’s view of media ownership as a propaganda filter Amy and David Goodman wrote in the Seattle Times, “These are not media that are serving a democratic society, where a diversity of views is vital to shaping informed opinions.  This is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is repackaging government spin and passing it off as journalism.”  However, in a networked society where information can so freely be copied and distributed, large news organizations are facing a crisis of ownership. Thus, when considering corporate ownership of media organizations themselves, it is useful to look at news organizations and the economic troubles they are currently facing, largely due to the ubiquity of free news enabled by interactive distribution technologies.

According to Keiyana Fordham, there are three ways interactive technologies have disrupted the news: 1. They can freely distribute news at zero cost; 2. They have greatly increased competition since anyone can distribute news; 3. They have changed consumer behavior so that buyers and sellers can connect directly, making advertisers increasingly irrelevant. (944) These disruptions have forced corporate news producers to not only reexamine their business models, but also to file suits against bloggers, aggregators, and search engines as a first line of defense. Aggregators like Yahoo News argue that what they do, i.e. excerpting headlines and linking back to the source, is fair use and should be protected (980-981).   In 2006 Field v. Google a federal district court upheld Google’s claim to fair use, citing the enormous public benefit that search engines offer.  Thus, it remains unclear where lines of ownership can be drawn, and news organizations continue to fight for control of their content, the loss of which threatens to obviate their businesses.

However, some entrepreneurs and scholars are positing solutions to save the news industry that would mitigate the problem of corporate media consolidation while at the same time allowing the industry to endure.  In a 2009 presentation to the Duke Conference on Nonprofit Media, Penelope Muse Abernathy put forward several options for the New York Times that entailed bringing the organization into the nonprofit sphere, including: establishment of an endowment, foundational support for certain of the Times’ journalistic endeavors, and purchase of the paper by an educational institution. (Abernathy 7-10)

Conclusion

Because interactive technologies radically change the way content, particularly news, is delivered, it will be necessary for the concept of ownership, both of content and the media themselves, to change along with it. In the 80’s, when Chomsky wrote his critique of media ownership, electronic mass media entailed the necessary licensing of airwaves by private companies.  Today, the Internet, which is available to private citizens with a computer and a connection, is one of the primary ways that information and media is distributed.  It can be likened to telephone lines, which are free for all to use.  When AT&T, in the mid-20^th century, attempted to place a ban on technologies that utilized this network in a nondestructive manner.  This ban was overturned in 1968 and paved the way for devices like the modem, without which the Internet never would have come about. (B. Herman 272)    Now, in the 21st century, there are lobbies to place the same types of bans and restrictions on the Internet – such as those opposed to Net Neutrality who would allow corporations to become the gatekeepers of content.

Constitutional Law professor Lawrence Lessig and other free culture activists call for a preservation of the commons, which are public amenities free for all to use such as parks and streets.  It is their view that media content should be a part of this, free for artists and scholars to use for the betterment of society.  Can this metaphor also extend to concepts of ownership not just of media content, but of media organizations as well?  Given the importance of the media to governmental and private interests, it seems unlikely that the media will become a public utility any time soon, but there are steps that can be taken in the meantime to insure that Chomsky’s idea of media ownership as a propaganda filter isn’t simply replaced by another set of filters applied to new technologies.  First, there needs to be a reversal of the copyright extensions applied over the past half-century that have served the interests of corporate media creators, and stifled innovation by mitigating opportunities for citizens to access their culture in order to build upon it. To do this, it’s imperative that we re-examine the discursive metaphors we use to define copyright – and begin to see it is what it was originally intended to be, i.e. a monopoly granted to artists and publishers for a limited time, after which the work falls into the public domain.  It’s also essential we re-examine the importance of news and information to the public sphere, and develop protocols to determine what kinds of content can be privately owned and which must be ceded to the public for the sustainability of a democratic society.  Most importantly, we need to recognize the importance of individual media producers who are using new technology to add their voices to public discourse.  Only by doing so can we begin to eradicate the first filter of Chomsky’s propaganda machine, and work towards a free and open culture.  But there is a battle ahead on all these fronts – as professor Henry Jenkins wrote in his essay on the cultural logic of media convergence in 2004, “In the new media environment, it is debatable whether governmental censorship or corporate control over intellectual property rights poses the greatest threat to the right of the public to participate in their culture” (40)

Works Cited

Abernathy, Penelope Muse. “A Nonprofit Model for the New York Times?” Duke Conference on Nonprofit Media. 4-5 May, 2009.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. “TV Networks Must Stop Blocking Election Videos on YouTube.” 2008.  http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2008/10/20. Accessed October 17, 2010.

Fordham, Keiyana. “Can Newspapers Be Saved? How Copyright Law Can Save Newspapers from the Challenges of New Media.” Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. Spring 2010, v20 i3, p939-990.

Goodman, Amy, and David Goodman. “Why Media Ownership Matters.”  Seattle Times.  3 April 2005. <http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002228040_sundaygoodman03.html>

Herman, Bill D. “Breaking and Entering on My Own Computer: The Contest of Copyright Metaphors.” Communication Law & Policy. Spring 2008, Vol. 13 Issue 2, p231-274.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent. 1988. New York: Pantheon. 2002.

Jenkins, Henry. “The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 7(1): 33-43. 2004.

Lemley, Mark A. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83.4 (2005): 1031-1075. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 17 Oct. 2010.

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