[NetBehaviour] God's Little Toys

[Paul Annear]

Dear marc and Ruth and list

There have been a number of postings in the last few weeks on Netbehaviour and elsewhere, and both recent residencies on Netbehaviour, that are beautifully relevant to the mish-mash of unclarity that is described as plagarism and theft and creative collobaration and work inspired by the work of others. 

Why differentiate?

When I hear that the work of artists should be protected it sounds like oratory from a mute dwarf. 

When I see collaboration that looks like an amusinmg game I think that it is an amusing game. 

When I am elevated by the unforeseen rearrangment of the building blocks we all work with I am pleased (or horrified) and excited.
 
When 'the artist' forgets that he or she is merely a channel for a flow of creativity, and much more often than not a flow constricted by the limitations of the individual, and conspicuous more by a need of 'the artist' to believe in his or her special abilities than by any actual special abilities, then I do understand why that 'artist' wants to protect their work. 

But protection against what? 

If the idea needs protecting is it strong enough to deserve to live?

APA


 
-----Original Message-----
From: marc <marc.garrett at furtherfield.org>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:54:33 
To:NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity<netbehaviour at netbehaviour.org>
Subject: [NetBehaviour] God's Little Toys

God's Little Toys
 
 Confessions of a cut & paste artist.
 By William Gibson
 
 When I was 13, in 1961, I surreptitiously purchased an anthology of Beat writing - sensing, correctly, that my mother wouldn't approve.
 
 Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and one William S. Burroughs - author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance.
 
 Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer, and in my opinion, he still holds the title. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever been quite as remarkable for me, and nothing has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing.
 
 Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the '40s and '50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.
 
 By then I knew that this "cut-up method," as Burroughs called it, was central to whatever it was he thought he was doing, and that he quite literally believed it to be akin to magic. When he wrote about his process, the hairs on my neck stood up, so palpable was the excitement. Experiments with audiotape inspired him in a similar vein: "God's little toy," his friend Brion Gysin called their reel-to-reel machine.
 
 more...
 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html _______________________________________________
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Paul Annear
www.xxos.net