Common Property feature in Elephant Magazine

Posted on 15/02/2016 by hellocatfood

Elephant Magazine published a a review of the Common Property exhibition by Robert Shore on their blog on 10th February.

Roberts mentions the ‘Amen Break’, a six-second drum loop taken from a 1960s recording by the funk and soul group The Winstons which, according to whosampled.com, has been sampled 1,862 times since—without a single royalty or clearance payment being made to the original musicians for its use. ‘It’s basically been in every hip-hop song since the Eighties,’ says Roberts, who is pleased that a recent crowdfunding campaign raised £24,000 for the Winstons’ frontman Richard Spencer. At the same time he’s clear that artists and musicians should be allowed to work more freely with copyright-protected sources where the uses are, to repeat the term mentioned above and employed in the courts (just in case you find yourself summoned), ‘transformative’. ‘It’s not plagiarism,’ he says. ‘It’s cutting and pasting. Culture is made in that way. People take it and morph it into something new. If you had to pay for everything, it would be impossible.’

Read the full feature on their website.

What rights in Copyright? Interview with Filippo Lorenzin

Posted on 12/02/2016 by hellocatfood

Following the opening of the Common Property exhibition at Jerwood Visual Arts I was interviewed by Filippo Lorenzin about the exhibition and my views on copyright in general. On 8th February this interview was published on the Furtherfield website.

furtherfieldcommonproperty

I think Copyright as a whole is in a terrible state. As Cory Doctorow suggests in the exhibition programme (which is in itself an excerpt from his book “Information Doesn’t want to be Free”) Copyright as we know it isn’t written for artists or any individual. Its verbose terms and complexities cannot be understood and are probably not even read by most of us. They are written for other lawyers. If, in order to go about our creative business, we are expected to read and understand the terms and conditions and law – it is estimated that it would take 76 days to read all of the Ts and Cs of websites we use – what time do we have to be creative?

Read the full interview on the Furtherfield website.

Common Property exhibition tour, 15th February

Posted on 01/02/2016 by hellocatfood

On 15th February there will be a tour of the Common Property exhibition at Jerwood Space. To end the tour I’ll be doing a Sonification Studies performance tailored to the exhibition.

An Exhibition Tour of Jerwood Encounters: Common Property led by curator of the exhibition, Hannah Pierce, and Jerwood Visual Arts’ Writer in Residence, Tom Overton.

As a finale to the tour Antonio Roberts, exhibiting artist in Common Property, will perform Sonification Studies. Using Pixel Player (a piece of software created and released by the artist) Roberts will, in real time, translate a selection of images into audio and glitched visuals.

Pixel Player is an update of Pixel Waves, also created and released by Antonio Roberts. It was developed after a visit to The Cyborg Foundation in Barcelona in 2013, and allows the sonification of images based on the colour/RGB values of individual pixels.

Sonification Studies has previous been performed as part of the exhibition, glitChicago, Chicago, 2014..

This event is free but booking is required via Eventbrite

Artists and copyright: “Everything is a remix” – article in a-n

Posted on 01/02/2016 by hellocatfood

On 20th January a-n published an article/interview/writeup with myself, Hannah Pierce and Owne G Parry. The article focuses on the Common Property exibition and more broadly asks for our thoughts on the state of Copyright. One excerpts from Hannah Pierce discussing the motivation behind the exhibition:

“I remember going through art school and never at any point having any conversations around copyright or what it meant to be working with somebody else’s image. I was really interested by this lack of knowledge that we have; I thought that a really good way to work that out would be through a show.”

And one from me discussing the four video pieces:

His second installation, featuring four video pieces, is inspired by four songs that have been at the centre of copyright lawsuits. “I thought, how can I share this song and get away with it. How else can I share this song with the world?”

[…]

The copyright conundrum this throws up goes to the heart of the debate around creative ownership in the digital age. “It’s still the same song, the data is still the same data, it’s just being reinterpreted,” says Roberts. “So, is that an infringement of copyright?”

Head over to a-n to read the whole article.

Common Property opening

Posted on 28/01/2016 by hellocatfood

Common Property held its opening event at Jerwood Space on 14th.

Jerwood Encounters: Common Property seeks to demonstrate how artists engage with and relate to copyright through the work of six emerging and mid-career artists, including three new commissions. The exhibition and accompanying events programme seeks to generate new conversations about how copyright is currently impacting the way visual artists make and distribute their work, and demonstrates how artists are challenging the limitations of copyright through their practice.

The exhibition features new commissions by myself, Owen G Parry and Hannah Knox alongside existing works by Edwin Burdis, Rob Myers and SUPERFLEX.

I’m really impressed by curator Hannah Pierce‘s selection of artists and artworks that each deal with the broad topic of Copyright in very different ways.

For this exhibition I developed two new works, Transformative Use and a collection of four works, I Disappear, Blurred Lines, My Sweet Lord and Ice Ice Baby.

Photos in this post by Hydar Dewachi.

Transformative Use

This work builds upon the Dead Copyright piece made for the Permission Taken exhibition at Birmingham Open Media and targets one corporation.

I Disappear, Blurred Lines, My Sweet Lord, Ice Ice Baby

These four pieces use the sonification techniques developed in 2013 to create audiovisual data remixes of songs that are well known due to being involved in course cases about copyright.

Already there has been a writing and events surrounding the exhibition. a-n published an interview with myself, Owen G Parry and Hannah Pierce, and on 21st January a panel discussion took place at London Art Fair about Copyright and Intellectual Property. The panel consisted of myself, Hannah Pierce and Shane Burke and was chaired by Shonagh Manson. Future events include a fan club event by Owen G Parry on 29th January and a tour of the exhibition on February 15th that will conclude with a Sonification Studies performance by me.

Thanks

My thanks go out to Hannah Pierce for selecting me for inclusion in this exhibition and to the whole of the Jerwood Visual Arts team for their help installing the works. The exhibition continues at Jerwood Space until 21st February.

Common Property, 15th January – 21st February

Posted on 09/12/2015 by hellocatfood

For my first exhibition of 2016 I’ll be taking in Common Property at Jerwood Visual Arts fom 15th January – 21st February 2016

Curated by Hannah Pierce, Jerwood Encounters: Common Property seeks to demonstrate how artists engage with and relate to copyright through the work of six emerging and mid-career artists, including three new commissions. The exhibition and accompanying events programme seeks to generate new conversations about how copyright is currently impacting the way visual artists make and distribute their work, and demonstrates how artists are challenging the limitations of copyright through their practice.

The exhibition takes its title from a response Sol LeWitt made in Flash Art in 1973 to the accusation that he had copied the work of Francois Morellet and Jan Schoonhoven. He stated: “I believe that ideas once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they can only be given away and not stolen…”

Copyright has expanded exponentially over the past two decades in line with the unprecedented free-exchange of information and content that takes place over the Internet. In October 2014, in an attempt to make the copyright system better suited to the digital age, changes to UK legislation came into effect allowing the parody of copyrighted works. This change allows individuals to make limited but reasonable use of creative content previously protected by copyright, through ‘Caricature, Parody and Pastiche’, without having to gain permission of the rights holder – provided that it is considered ‘fair and appropriate’.

Jerwood Encounters: Common Property comes at a hugely significant time in the continuing chaotic development of the law on copyright. It comes also at a time of markedly increasing interest in the nexus between art and law generally. Copyright law is currently in a state of flux amidst the coincidence of emergent new digital realities, a proliferation of appropriation based cultural expression and the prospective move towards a more creativity based standard for protection. Further complexity is added to the terrain by impending and potentially radical EU reforms and a growing awareness of the importance of achieving balance within the IP system, with an increased emphasis being placed on exceptions and limitations to the scope of copyright protection. The works in Common Property address many of these concerns exploring, inter alia, the themes of cultural transformative re-use, technology’s impact on the boundaries of infringement and the contemporary challenges to the fundamental notions of authorship inherent in copyright law.

There will be a number of new commissions in Common Property, reflecting the current and evolving artistic interest in ‘playing’ with copyright frameworks and associated issues.

I’ll be debuting some newly commissioned work alongside new and existing work from Edwin Burdis, Hannah Knox, Rob Myers, Owen G Parry and Superflex.