Introduction
In the digital environment where
our intellectual and creative works are created and stored in
unified digit format and can thereby be transferred or copied
as 0-1 information, the ease of making digital duplicates quickly
found its way into the sampling culture. Today the term "sampling"
is identifiable with digital sampling. Another computer feature,
namely the ease of updating web sites by erasing, rewriting or
replacing its contents, resulted in fluid publishing, bringing
collaborative authoring such as Wikipedia into its existence while
making the Internet virtually a space for open creative collaboration.
Composed as a free journey with its starting point in sampling,
this essay attempts to provide a brief summary of several relevant
issues. The first part examines the history of sampling, touching
upon its relation to appropriation and postmodern criticism. The
second part focuses on the idea of intellectual property and its
opposing forces manifested in the free software movement, copyleft
and open collaboration. The third and last part briefly states
the new cultural environment of the web, returning to the sampling
culture and its future.
I. History of Sampling
1. Early Sampling
Sampling is a method whose origin
is closely associated with the electro-acoustic music of musique
concréte, especially with its founder Pierre Schaeffer
and his experimentation with recorded sounds during the '40s.
Introducing the idea of electronic manipulation of natural (or
"concrete") sounds recorded on magnetic tapes, he became
the first composer to make music by editing together fragments
of recorded material that were transformed into abstract soundscapes
through alteration in pitch, duration and amplitude. Transformation
of sounds from samples (what was originally recorded) through
manipulation of magnetic sphere on tapes thereby became a major
focus of producing and composing electronic music. Today he is
attributed with playing sounds backwards, speeding them up, slowing
them down, juxtaposing them with other sounds, even loops and
scratches.
In art, the technique "sampling"
can be traced under various names. Already in the mid 1800s photographers
were experimenting composite photography ("combination printing")
by cutting and pasting together a number of photographs. In a
manner that reminds us of the modern recording of classical music
in which sections of perfectly played sequences of a work are
later put together as a whole on a computer, Henry Peach Robinson
made his photographs from different parts in order to perfectly
realise his visions which he first sketched and then went on to
photograph. For example, his "Fading Away" (1858) like
many other of his works is a composite picture consisting of several
different photographs. Victorians also liked the absurdity of
different photos put together like a head put onto a different
body, this probably being the predecessor of photomontage. Collage
technique first appeared in Picasso's painting "Still Life
with Chair Caning" (1912) with a piece of oil cloth patched
onto the canvas, while a little later Berlin Dadaists coined the
term "photomontage" that merged the attitude of collage
with the photo composite technique. Another notable example of
how sampled material was used in history is Dziga Vertov's first
sound film "Enthusiasm" from 1930. In this film "Vertov
employs a catalogue of audiovisual effects: sound distortion,
sound superimposition, sound reversal, and cacophonous aural collage.
Sound is frequently mismatched with the image, as when the noise
of an explosion accompanies a church spire's collapse. It is also,
on occasion, disembodied, as when a symbolic ticking clock is
heard over images of industrial production."[1] With its
common everyday sounds shot on location and then arranged in collage,
Vertov's Enthusiasm is often credited for its creative use of
the new sound medium that came to be known as sound collage.
2. Modern Sampling and Appropriation
With increasing popularity of sampling
over the years via the impact of the art music of music concréte
and minimalism as well as the music of influential pop groups
such as the Beatles, coupled with developments of low-cost sampling
equipments, the 1980s witnessed a huge rise of hip-hop musicians
utilising sampling as the main basis for their music creation.
With the invasion of Dub DJ culture of Jamaica into Bronx, sampling
found its major followers in the hip-hop culture, which by the
late '70s moved into the main stream music scene. The advancement
of hip-hop into the field of sampling broadened its scope of practice
by inducing a major shift within the culture of sampling: sampled
materials, which until then were edited, modified and/or manipulated
to create unique works of art, were now incorporated into the
works of hip-hop artists with the deliberate focus on recognition;
an advantage born out of the very nature of sampling. By their
conscious engagement of well-known music passages, phrases and
sequences, the purpose of sampling shifted from its technical
possiblities to its potenatial ability as a deliverer of references
in the history of popular music. "Recognising, Sharing, Relating"
became the key as the main employment of sampling came to consitute
a way of deconstructing our music heritage. Subsequently the attitude
involved in what is today often referred to as modern sampling
is closely related to what has been known in art as appropriation:
in a way one can call modern sampling a combination of sampling
and appropriation.
Appropriation is an act of taking
possession of something, with or without permission, something
often being someone else's work, and thereby still regarded by
some as a controversial act occupying the border between production
and theft. Despite its controversal position, the act of appropriation
has established a distinguished field of art practice of our time.
Although many argue that appropriation was always done in art,
our conseunsus today is that term dates back again to the 1912
work by Picasso and the collage technique of Synthetic Cubism.
Five years later Duchamp introduced the idea of readymade with
"Fountain," and with another work of his "L.H.O.O.Q."
from 1919 established the method of modern appropriation "that
questions the nature or definition of art itself." [2] Pop
artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol,
employed appropriation technique to their works, but the term
increasingly came to be associated with a certain category of
artists in the '80s, who "raises questions of originality,
authenticity and authorship." [3] In the artistic climate
significantly influenced by postmodern philosophy, Sherrie Levine,
Jeff Koons and Richard Prince became known to us as appropriation
artists.
3. Postmodern Criticism of Author
The Romantic emphasis on the artist
as a creative spring culminated in modernism, which, with its
quest for authenticity and originality, viewed artists as self-contained
geniuses. This notion of autonomous artist came under examination
in the 1960s by some philosophers, notably french poststructuralists,
in relation to literary criticism. Kristeva, introducing the dialogic
understanding of language by the Russian linguist Bakhtin into
the theoretical framework of poststructuralism, coined the term
intertextuality (1966), which came to influence many areas of
cultural theories for decades. Turning our attention to the fact
that language always precedes an author and with it the inevitable
that a text is filled with interconnecting meanings from various
fields prior to the employment of the text by the author, intertextuality
places a text in its relation to its culture and its reader, as
well as to the latter's act of establishing a meaning of the text
through multiple threads and connotations inherent in the language.
Barthes in his essay "Death of the Author" (1968) declares:
"a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological'
meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend
and crash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable
centres of culture." [4]
Foucault's essay "What is an
Author" from 1969 has a similar take on the subject but its
focus is turned to the status of an author and his privileged
authority in discourses. By differentiating our usage of the word
author and other words such as writer and signer, he places our
concept of author in a social and historical context and indicates
that individualisation of ideas is prerequisite for our notion
of the author. For Foucault, an author is an ideological product
whose authority as the originator of a fiction functions as a
constraining figure who "impedes the free circulation, the
free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition and recomposition
of fiction." [5] Analysing the role of the author as the
regulator of the fictive "characteristic of our industrial
and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property,"
Foucault "seem[s] to call for a form of culture in which
fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author"
but with a system of other constraints yet to be determined or
even experienced. [6]
II. Privatised Intellectual Property
vs. Collaborative Intellectual Activity
1. Copyright and Intellectual
Property
The 1980s with its climate fundamentally
shaped by the postmodern discourses produced the rise in the number
of artists increasingly employing sampling and appropriation.
Although incorporation of quotations played a vital role in postmodern
concern with originality, it also led to an increase in copyright
infringement lawsuits against these artists, often with the outcome
that demonstrated the discrepancy between the art world and the
legal environment.
Copyright is a type of law which,
along with patent, trademark, industrial design right and trade
secret, comes under the umbrella of intellectual property (IP).
"The term intellectual property reflects the idea that [certain
types of information, ideas, or other intangibles in their expressed
form] is the product of the mind or the intellect, and that IP
rights may be protected at law in the same way as any other form
of property." [7] In other words, in law, creative works
(e.g. books, movies, music, paintings, photographs and software)
reside under IP laws and are considered to be properties that
can be owned by copyright holders. Seen as "a right to the
ideas one generates and the art one produces," [8] copyright
is viewed as a moral right of an author and protects the following
rights: "the right to reproduce the work, the right to adapt
it or derive other works from it, the right to distribute copies
of the work, the right to display the work publicly, and the right
to perform it publicly. Each of these rights may be parsed out
and sold separately [and in case of USA] [a]ll five rights lapse
after the lifetime of the author plus 70 years." [9]
Validity of the concept Intellectual
Property has been under dispute for some time. In the core of
the critical discourses of IP exist two fundamental questions:
whether the legal perception that intangible resources can be
classified as property to secure ownership is reasonable; and
whether the current IP law upholds or stifles its original function
of promoting free circulation of ideas. Hessinger in his 1989
article "Justifying Intellectual Property" scrutinises
our pre-conditioned justification of IP by bringing into the discussion
insightful analyses on moral, philosophical and socio-economic
conditions. Counter-arguing each of the major arguments that support
the institution of intellectual property (reward for labour, natural
right of the author, utilitarian (incentive) driven, etc.), he
concludes: "Both the nonexclusive nature of intellectual
objects [i.e. "they can be at many places at once" in
distinction from exclusive nature of physical objects] and the
presumption against allowing restrictions on the free flow of
ideas create special burdens in justifying such property....We
must determine whether our current copyright, patent, and trade
secret statutes provide the best possible mechanisms for ensuring
the availability and widespread dissemination of intellectual
works and their resulting products." [10]
2. Free Software Movement and
Copyleft
Challenging the present copyright
condition is the existence of copyleft, probably the first legal
act taken to redefine copyright and its portion of intellectual
property. By legally making use of copyright law, copyleft license
grants, on share and share-alike term, each person possessing
the work the following freedoms which have been traditionally
protected as the exclusive rights of the copyright holder: "1.
the freedom to use and study the work, 2. the freedom to copy
and share the work with others, 3. the freedom to change the work,
4. and the freedom to distribute changed and therefore derivative
works." [11] Copyleft thereby questions validity of private
ownership of intellectual property and is seen by some as a first
step to abolish copyright.
Copyleft is a direct product of
the free software movement, born out of the GNU project started
by Richard Stallman in the early '80s. "[GNU's] goal was
to bring a wholly free software operating system into existence.
Stallman wanted computer users to be free, as most were in the
1960s and 1970s; free to study the source code of the software
they use, free to modify the behaviour of the software, and free
to publish their modified versions of the software." [12]
Part of his GNU vision was realised when he founded the Free Software
Foundation in 1985, which functions today as a register and licenser
of free softwares. The core of the GNU and free software ideology
lies in the belief that software development, when being placed
under strict copyright management and private ownership, suffers
more from its economical and intellectual protectionism than it
benefit from it. Over the years the free software movement and
its ideology have gained wide recognition within the computer
community; for example, the today-much-popular open source movement
is an offshoot of the free software movement, which tries to eliminate
the aspect of the original movement that may be understood as
too confrontational to the present economical structure. Though
the two movements differ somewhat in philosophy and strategy,
they agree that transparency of the process of writing and open
collaboration (open access to codes) are essential to the betterment
of creative ideas.
3. Wiki and Wikipedia
Closely connected to the movements
of free software and open source is the invention of Wiki and
its most successful example Wikipedia. "A wiki is a type
of website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add,
remove and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes
without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and
operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring."
[13]
Developed initially for programmers
to quickly update contents of their communication, wiki's open
editing concept rapidly gained huge popularity after the launch
of the first wiki "WikiWikiWeb" in 1995. Wikipedia,
launched in 2001, is a free web encyclopedia running on a wiki
engine and differs from conventional encyclopedias in the aspect
that no editorial authority exists to control its content. Instead,
"built on the expectation that collaboration among users
will improve articles over time, in much the same way that open-source
software develops" [14], any user regardless of their level
of expertise or qualification can edit or modify any article in
Wikipedia. Copylefted by GFDL agreement (GNU Free Documentation
License), it is an on-going project with no article ever being
declared completed.
Many have criticised the experimental
nature of Wikipedia; its critics argue that its open nature and
lack of authority make it vulnerable to vandalism, inaccuracies,
and biases, resulting in poor quality and unreliability. Though
there have been incidents that validate the above criticism, the
question still remains whether we should consider "something
is more likely to be true coming from a source whose resume sounds
authoritative or a source that has been viewed by hundreds of
thousands of people (with the ability to comment) and has survived."
[15]
III. Virtual Democracy
The democratic nature of the Internet
has been pointed out by many. Whereas the old or analogue media
(to use these words in lack of a better one) such as TV, radio,
books, newspapers, etc., operate with the figures of authority
who select and control what should be introduced to the general
public, the Internet offers instant access to its public domain
to anyone who cares to have a space on the server. In this virtual
space where a web site can be created by anyone with the same
validity as IBM or Tate, the power of authority that grants legitimation
for public exposure becomes nullified. Moreover, in contrast to
the old media which have operated within the boundaries of nationalism
and internationalism by using these as common denominators, the
Internet's multiple communities exist transnationally and operate
according to varieties of unifying principles. Apt to bring forward
diversity of viewpoints rather than protection of prevailing values,
the virtual web, dissimilar to spider webs, lacks a centre; rather
its texture is made of numbers of webs whose threads may cross
one another and become interwoven at some points in its multi-dimensional
space, connected but disunited and disunified. As our world replaces
the vertical hierarchy of the old media with the horizontal existence
of the Internet, our culture shifts accordingly from the macro
culture of the old media to the multiple micro cultures of digital
communities.
The existence of a culture that
offers common ground for standardised knowledge, on the other
hand, seems to be part of the condition vital for modern appropriation
and sampling. Duchamp's "L.H.O.O.Q." needs not only
Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" but also our historical consensus
on the status of her mysterious smile as well as its recognition
by the viewer. In the same way, Warhol's "Marilyn" prerequires
our iconisation of Hollywood film stars and incorporation of our
behaviour into the collective experience. Modern sampling with
its extensive use of quotations engages references from our popular
culture and rests on the same foundation. In short, appropriation
and modern sampling are contextual works, playing with notions
of consensuses and references that we share in common in our culture.
Today, however, the web is diversifying our cultural environment
, transforming its space into a state of complexity in which it
becomes increasingly difficult to find shared grounds for contextualisation.
Technology does not only change
our practice; implementation of new technology also alters the
very context in which the technology is born and applied. Our
behaviours change accordingly, and our state of existence is transformed.
The invention of writing (and thereafter printing) brought us
the idea of fixed text and knowledge; fluidity and flexibility
of oral tradition became fixated and with it we grew used to the
idea of the author to whom creative works became solely attributed.
Individualisation of ideas followed, establishing on the one hand
the author/artist as an original creator, self-contained, set
apart from tradition, culture and history, and fostering on the
other the condition for privatisation of intellectual products.
Today by placing themselves on the opposite end of individual
ownership of text (ideas/creations) by an author, sampling and
collaborative authoring enlivened in the digital environment seem
to be on their way to liquefy the state of writing once again,
opening our eyes to another mode of authorship. The recent popularity
of transparent writing (open source) and sharing intellectual
products via copyleft reflects the deficiency of our present intellectual
property concept, challenging us to redefine our view on intellectual
activities. Furthermore, while serving as a gigantic pool of material
ready to be sampled, the web is already changing the cultural
context in which the approach of sampling has once been transformed
and reinvigorated. Though only time will tell how the new condition
will affect the culture of sampling, the liquefaction process
by the digital media will inevitably continue, disentangling what
has become obsolete and inspiring new modes of existence along
the way.
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