MFA and PhD in New Media Arts

My book, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art, was published by Continuum International Publishers (named the top academic press in Britain this year) in 2012. It starts from the premise that the new changes in copyright law are functioning as a new Prohibition, that is to say as something that it so unpopular, so untenable and so unenforceable that it is only a matter of time before public backlash destroys the current corporate monopoly on creativity. This is the first book to discuss the global politics of creative work and emergent models of authorship in a digital age. The book examines the creation of new media forms by artists and groups who use technology to challenge established models of creation. It starts from the premise that creativity is no longer a useful concept in an age of data glut and perfect copies; instead we must now think of creative practice as a kind of creative critique that repurposes existing materials in order to explore the nature of media and how they affect us. It does this through three different aesthetic approaches: interruption (stoppage and repetition), disturbance (critique and event), and capture/leakage (performance and documentation). The book is wide-ranging in its definition of authorship, exploring methods as diverse as sampling, mashups, hacktivism, machinima, social media, tactical media, productive mistranslation, and digital anthropophagy. It includes extensive research in Asia (Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and especially China and Pakistan) to see how and what creative practices flourish when they are not fettered by copyright regulations.

Over the last decade in Asia, there has been a democraticizing effect as access to technology—including cameras, computers, and cheap pirated software—has spawned new creators and new art forms. These new forms, however, do not simply get reapplied in new environments around the globe. Using Western techniques, tools and technologies, it is in the “productive mistranslations” (as theorist Tatehata Akira calls them) of cross-cultural remixes that spaces and gaps for entirely new narratives appear.

Asian cultures by and large are not rooted in the culture of the subject or in identity formations in the same way that Euro-American cultures are. By contrast in our digital culture, the Web 2.0 world revels in egomania and in celebrations of the self. A shift toward personal expression is starting to make itself felt in China where a massive cultural renaissance is leading to explorations of Western themes and media. Digital culture explorers Cao Fei, Miao Xiaochun, and Feng Mengbo insert themselves as subjects into their art. It is important to note that in a country that has no tradition of self-representation that the use of the self as a subject is operating in very different ways that are stock in trade in Euro-American notions of identity. Despite that, these artists take their explorations of identity to extremes:

• Cao’s subject appears as her avatar, China Tracy, in her fantastical digital city where hip-hop, sci-fi and cosplay meet traditional Chinese painting in Second Life
• Miao’s 3D virtual retellings of the Sistine Chapel and Garden of Earthly Delights are populated by identical versions of himself that number in the hundreds
• Feng’s Q4U, a hack of the popular game Quake, features his representation both as fighting self and as camera/gun-toting enemy to be exterminated

While these digital creators are clearly the ‘authors’ of their selves and their art, the very notion of interactivity in exploring China Tracy’s RMB City, touring Miao’s 3D worlds, or in playing Feng’s game problematizes authorship in complex ways.

Collaborative structures of authorship are already in existence in Asian cultures, often for safety’s sake. In a country like China where speaking one’s mind can have dire consequences, the concept of voice can be fluid, contradictory or shared. “In such contexts, voice is just as likely to be a vehicle for the proliferation and scrambling of identity codes” (Teh 173). Power mechanisms are responsible for subject formation, and s/he who controls representation possesses the power to visualize data, shape and share her own narratives. Going far beyond simple remix, appropriation or the reapplication of existing techniques, these authors are adapting technologies and inventing new methodologies. This paper will explore the new subjects and spaces for authorship they are fostering in these virtual worlds.

Works Cited
Akira, Tatehata. “Why Cubism? (2006).” Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader. Melissa Chiu and Benjamin Genocchio, Eds. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2011. Print. 107-115.

Teh, David. “The Video Agenda in Southeast Asia, or, ‘Digital, So Not Digital.’ Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube. Geert Lovink and Rachel Summers Myers, Eds. 08 March 2011. Accessed 10 March 2011. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011. 162-177.

Master of Arts—Integrated Studies 656: Datascapes: Information Aesthetics and Network Culture critically examines the intersections of the information arts and information technologies in our rapidly changing times, and explores how cross-pollination between these fields alters not only art and culture but the world we live in. Through exploring the differences among how contextualized information, data, and knowledge are written in and by a diversity of media, this course maps the unique shapes that information assumes in digital culture. It engages new approaches to understanding the transformation that information is enacting on our temporal, spatial, and visual perceptions. The increasing fragmentation of cultural structures and the rise of connectivity as a new paradigm is evident all around us, from the world of medicine to multinational capital to the World Wide Web. The ascendance of the database as a new pre-eminent cultural form begins to blur the boundaries between art and reality, and representation and simulation, and creates new social networks necessary for interactive engagement.

In the first book to discuss the global politics of creativity and emergent models of authorship in a digital age, Guertin explores the creation of new media forms by artists who use technology to challenge established modes. Redefining authorship within remix culture, the book identifies the potentialities in the social nature of electronic works to foster new creative practices-from sampling to mashups to digital anthropophagy-on a global scale.

Our computer interfaces are increasingly withering away to give us direct access to data in the same way that our bodies interface with the world. Modes are to the computer what senses are to our bodies, and these transparent interfaces are awakening us to a new awareness of our haptic sense as we begin to interface with data on a tactile plane. The iPhone and the iPad are the most ubiquitous of this new range of technologies, but augmented reality interfaces--interfaces that interweave code into our perceptions of the real world--are poised to become the next big thing. Using three such interfaces (SixthSense, Skinput and The Library) as examples, this paper will apply the thinking of Marshall McLuhan to understand the implications of tactile engagement on our roles as consumers and creators of media, and as performers of and within information space.

The Canadian media, especially independent media, has played a pivotal role in counterculture insurgency in the last few years. Adbusters, the Canadian magazine, created the hashtag #occupywallstreet in 2011 and called on its network to implement the “Shift in Revolutionary Tactics” that had been seen in Spain with the Indignados and #15M Movement and in Egypt with the Arabian Spring. The call went viral after it was taken up as a cause by Anonymous and other protest groups. The origin of the revolution and the spirit that fired it, of course, was not from the Middle East or from Spain, but from Mexico, from the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas, who initially rose up to protest NAFTA, “envisioned an international activist communications network as an alternative to a corporate-dominated media landscape” (Stringer 5981). The philosophy and practice of Zapatismo has been tremendously admired, imitated and influential in Canada, the United States and elsewhere.

“[T]ransnational Zapatismo has generated new political imaginations and political subjectivities,” and a narrative framework for “radical expressions of political possibility” (Khasnabish 697). These narrative frameworks operate through the use and subversion of memes, easily reproduced ideas that seed the imagination. Memes are an analytical tool and a change agent for creating new narratives as alternative grassroots models come to the fore. The sincerest form of flattery in memetics is imitation and that is what the Zapatista “movement of movements” has generated. It has birthed the self-replication of occupation narratives, “collectives of collectives” (Stringer) and protests all over the world. The #occupy movement invites people to intervene through direct action as a means of telling their own stories. These new locally-situated, global networks are collaborative and leaderless, and put forward indigenous strategies to achieve their ends via media, as with the “Idle No More” movement and “Blue Dot” meme that have recently emerged out of Canada. Focusing on the protest campaigns originating in Canada and Mexico, I will explore how “The Uninvited” are using digital media to tell stories that seek to enable radical change.

From Charles Baudelaire's roving flâneur to the cold, medical eye of the speculum, the gaze has long been a contested territory for feminists because it is a space of ownership or authority that has traditionally been denied to women. In cyberfeminist space, the gaze belongs to the browser (not to the author or to the feminist flâneuse her sister authors in print envisioned) and it is she who is in control of her own movement, perpetually shifting her orientation in space and time. Cyberspatial browsing marks a new subjectivity that refuses visual notions of progress, past and future by introducing multiple perspectives. Virtual browsing thereby shifts the visual decisions we make about when and how to move within the text back onto our kinesthetic sense. Liberated from the confines of real space but not from material concerns, the browser's use of the digital medium is a new way of moving through literary texts that I call wanderlust. Wanderlust, a form of nomadic voyaging, is the expression of female desire and the condition of being an outsider in the act of leaping in electronic texts where the gaps in the narrative can only be linked, never reconciled.