Open Source Culture: Intellectual property, Technology, and the Arts

This is an interdisciplinary graduate seminar offered in fall 2004 at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Course Web Site, including a blog, a discussion forum, and another Wiki.

Course description

Artists have always influenced and imitated one another, but in the 20th century various forms of appropriation, from collage to sampling, emerged as an alternative to ex nihilo creativity. Instead of making things entirely from scratch, artists began to use found images and sounds in their work. The rise of appropriation, driven initially by technologies of mechanical reproduction, became even more pronounced with the appearance of personal computers, the Internet, and peer-to-peer file sharing networks. Meanwhile, the intellectual property laws that regulate access to appropriated material have become increasingly restrictive. As the tension between artistic practices and intellectual property policies has increased, an unlikely alliance of progressive legal scholars, artists, and technologists has developed alternative models, such as CopyLeft and Creative Commons, for sharing intellectual property. This seminar examines artistic practices of appropriation from 1913 to the present as they relate to intellectual property and technology. Specific artistic practices to be examined include Cubist and Dadaist collage, Pop Art, Found Footage Film, Appropriation Art of the 1980s, DJ music, and Net Art. We will consider the ethical, legal, and conceptual implications of these practices, paying particular attention to their relationship to authorship, originality, and authenticity.

Syllabus

Mediography

A compilation of various media items pertaining to Open Source Culture ideas and topics divided into the following sections: Art & Music, Books, Reports, Transcripts & Recordings, and Web Sites. It was originally drafted for Open Source Culture, a graduate seminar at the Columbia University School of the Arts.

Student Work

Wikipedia articles:

Multiple students: Open Source Culture

David Bornstein: extensive revision of Fair use

Kevin Burdette: on-going Wikipedia updates/clean-ups: opera pages (Note: This was moved out of main namespace because it is a maintenance page, not an encyclopedia entry) --[[User:Tony Sidaway|Tony Sidaway|Talk]] 22:44, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Anne Dugan: Open Sourced Community Newspaper, Wrenshall, Minnesota: "Images" Wrenshall Images

Francesco Spampinato: The Art of Michel Majerus The Art of Michel Majerus

Marike Splint & Shira Milikowsky: Intellectual property in the performing arts in the United States

Other projects:

Alex Cummings: Videri, a wiki database of information on works of history; "Open Source, Open Frontiers", presentation on global culture.

Daniel Iglesia: BLANK, curated by Google Project Page