“Teleshopping”

Test, March 2017

“Bettered by The Borrower” Audio and Visual Plunderphonics: Rebellion Against Copyright Law

The term ‘Plunderphonics’ refers to a form of music which takes one or more pre-existing recordings and manipulates them to create an entirely new composition, often contradicting or questioning the artistic intentions of the original works, or as artist Dana Birnbaum puts “isolating and changing its vocabulary and syntax”. This technique can be applied to film and video art with a similar philosophy. The medium has a long history of interrogating and criticising copyright law which often prohibits the use of licensed material, I will use this as a theme to examine the relationship between these laws and the artists who rebel against them. I will explore this concept through several specific examples: John Oswald, Soda_Jerk, Christian Marclay and Neil Cicierega, with reference to several artists who paved the way for this kind of work to be made.

 John Oswald’s seminal 1985 essay presented at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto both coins the term Plunderphonics as well as first discussing its integral relationship with audio piracy. Plunderphonics has its roots in ‘Music Concretè’, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s, using raw audio tape he created sonic collages which made use of exclusively pre-recorded material, despite a similar working methodology to that of later Plunderphonic artists what I think sets the two movements apart is largely the humour and prankishness of the latter. Schaeffer’s vision was more akin to abstraction within other art forms, he sought to devolve familiar sounds into something alien and disorienting. John Oswald deliberately chooses recognisable melodies and tunes in order to create something slyly goading to the author but simultaneously funny and engaging. His ‘Plunderphonics’ EP was his first major clash with copyright law, after receiving a barrage of cease and desist orders from Michael Jackson’s label ‘Epic’ over his heavily plundered version of ‘Bad’. Oswald’s argument is that there is nothing in the realm of sound which is equivalent to literature’s quotation marks, which allows one author to reference another’s work without it becoming an issue of theft, "Without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud.” He is constantly trying to create dialogue with the pieces which he chooses to work with, his blatant ‘mis’-use of them seems to be a defiant protest of the restrictions put on artists that prevent this kind of artwork from being distributed.

 Christian Marlclay’s 24 hour film work ‘The Clock’ draws on hundreds of sources to produce one overarching ‘narrative’ of time passage. This epic work was made laboriously over a period of four years, but when asked about the legal risks of such a work Marclay was adamant that "If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.” This harks back to a familiar saying within the music industry in regards to legal infringement that “where there’s a hit there’s a writ”, essentially that the original authors are only likely to object to the work if it somehow trespasses on the integrity of the initial source. Many of Oswald’s works, for instance, were provocative and could be perceived as devaluing the sources in some way, so they could therefore be more vulnerable to corporate intervention. The interesting thing however is that according to the American definition of ‘Fair Use’ parody is fairly well protected, it doesn’t rely on consent from the original author, as criticism is seen as an essential aspect of the 1st amendment. It seems to me that if work either satisfies the author of the original or, on the other end of the spectrum, satirises the work thoroughly then it could be either not held to account or considered fair use and therefore exempt from legal action.

 The Australian visual art duo Soda_Jerk create ridiculous, hilarious works which directly reference the copyright laws which they are knowingly impeding upon, they pay homage to classic sample based video artists such as Craig Baldwin and Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us. They have described their work as “a considered form of civil disobedience. We understand each work as a probe to test and map the contours of the legal systems in which it circulates”, they are deliberately pushing the limits of what could be legally accepted. Hollywood Burn is their 2006 epic, which stitches together hundreds of Hollywood film clips in order to form a loose narrative, in which Elvis leads a gang of rebels against Charlton Heston’s copyright preaching Moses. This seems to be in line with Dana Birnbaum’s philosophy that “if it’s a corporately made image then it’s mine for the taking”, these kinds of films exist to be a part of the public consciousness, by re-appropriating them nobody really loses out, the iconography and characters from these works are so much a part of one’s childhood and lives in general, there becomes a sense of social ownership. Oswald has also commented in this issue stating that “all popular music essentially if not legally exists in a public domain, listening to pop music isn’t a matter of choice... we’re bombarded by it”. The films of Soda_Jerk are deeply critical of copyright, seeing it as a kind of censorship, they see the inability for the masses to control cultural history as crucial, to take back control from the hegemonic few. But despite this palpable anger within the work they never lose the appealing aesthetics or the ludicrous humour which makes the work so likeable. I feel that despite their works into this area of ‘visual plunderphonics’ there is a lot of room for exploration into this style of working, they feel more akin to the rough-edged sound of Oswald as opposed to the intricately produced work of Neil Cicierega.

  The sound artist Neil Cicierega is someone who I feel is brilliantly developing the core concepts of Plunderphonics further. Alongside others such as Girltalk, he has made the ideas explored by John Oswald become suddenly mainstream, reinventing it as the less intimidatingly titled ‘mashup’. The comedy is achieved though finding combinations of pre-existing songs fit together seamlessly, finding a deliberate sense of dissonance in the context but not in terms of the actual sound. He perfectly reforms songs, isolating vocal tracks and changing the instrumentation to totally rework meaning, clashing the ‘well respected’ with the irritating to creating something highly listenable. For example, his track which takes the vocals from ‘YMCA’ by the Village People and transposes them over the almost comically dramatic strings from the Inception soundtrack; the result is something disarmingly emotive, the track ties off with the iconic meme-centric whistle from the end of Smash Mouth’s All Star, coming full circle by making you feel stupid for getting so emotionally invested in the whole thing. Cicierega and Girltalk both released their albums for free, maybe suggesting a donation, in order to get around the copyright infringement which, they are both blatantly guilty of. At the moment digital music appears to have little monetary worth anyway, just as they pirated the music to make the albums so too do you pirate the end product.  Due to the inhibitions of the law they are unable to profit from their work, but like Oswald’s Plunderphonic EP, if you are to release the music for free then there is little grounds for being sued by the record company of the original. Despite the stranglehold that these kinds of ownership laws have upon many artists, the internet has proven itself to be the perfect tool for finding loopholes and likeminded work.

“Nothing Important” 

October 2016

Short excerpts from over 5 hours of portrait film. Participants were invited to sit in an isolated, cordoned off booth to be filmed doing ‘nothing’. They returned back to the same setting but this time video of themselves was projected through the cloth of the area. These results were also filmed, showing a direct reaction to oneself. 

“Heft of Tunes” 

March 2016 

Short experimental diary film. 

March 2017

Visual Plunderphonic/mashup, combines Katy Perry’s Hot N’ Cold with Coil’s Cold Cell. 

“Eye”

April 2016

Short diary film, shot digitally.

“Notes and Sketches”

Filmed throughout 2016

A visual diary filmed on super 8. Music composed and performed by myself and Billy Cooke.

“Foetus”

March 2017

Sculpture modeled out of balloons, the colour scheme is intentionally fleshy and the scale makes it slightly disconcerting. The work is part of the project about clash and expectation, unlike the usual imagery of balloon modelling this is unchildlike and figurative.

“Drawing”

November 2016

Using a GPS watch I ran a half marathon around Leeds city centre, loosely trying to trace the key roads. At the end of the day I was able to render the data into a single line drawing which traced the route.

“Human Statue”

March 2017

Photo and two video stills from performance. Playing a human statue, but by being fairly average at staying still made passers by react curiously. Some seemed almost annoyed I was there without having done the proper practice whilst others seemed to humour me. What’s the point of a moving human statue?

“Rub”

December 2016

For this piece of audio I set up a wine glass connected to an amplifier via several effects pedals, inviting anyone to play and experiment with the sonic possibilities.

“Underwater”

January 2017

Stringed instrument to be played underwater, amplified through contact microphone. The aim was something which people had never encountered and therefore unafraid to experiment with.

“MIDI”, untitled

January 2017

Image of the MIDI output when converting ambient sound of studio into linear notes on a piano.

“Breathe and Blink”

November 2016

Short piece of indeterminate sound performance, participants were instructed to play a given note when they inhaled, and a separate note when they blinked, around 5 performers in this case. 

“What If I Told You I Was Scared of Violating Copyright”

February 2017

Another comedic-leaning work, after looking up “most iconic movie monologues” I chose the top result and removed all the actual dialogue, leaving only the silences in-between, creating something much more awkward and uncomfortable. By destroying the integrity of the original clip it was more likely to be considered ‘fair use’ by the standards of YouTube

“As We Know...”

December 2016

Text based work, participants were given a sentence to copy out, after intervals of ten lines they were given a new instruction to manipulate the words, gradually deteriorating the semblance of meaning until the letters became more like shapes than recognisable letters.