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, so-called
"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.
Transformation of sounds from samples, i.e., what was originally
recorded, by manipulation of magnetic sphere on tapes through
alteration in pitch, duration and amplitude 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 called "combination
printing" by cutting and pasting together a number of photographs.
In a manner that reminds us of the modern recording of classical
music where 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. The Victorians also liked the absurdity
of different photos put together, such as 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 development of low-cost sampling
equipments and increasing popularity of sampling over the years
via the impact of music concréte and minimalism as well
as the music of influential pop groups such as the Beatles, 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 pop 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 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
possibilities to its potential ability as a deliverer of references
in the history of popular music. Recognising, Sharing, Relating
became the key as the main assignment of sampling came to constitute
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 disputable act occupying the border between production
and theft. Despite this controversy, 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 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 witnessed the increase in
the number of artists employing sampling and appropriation techniques.
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, such as 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.
The GNU Public License, born out
of the GNU project started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, was the
first legal copyleft licensing. "[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)
In 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation 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 based on open access to codes are essential
to the betterment of creative ideas.
Another notable licensing body is
Creative Commons, founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessing. The Creative
Commons license, released in 2002, is designed to promote a legal
infrastructure that will not hinder digital sharing and creativity
while still working within the existing copyright law. Today Creative
Commons issues four basic licenses and eleven combinations that
comprise a condition in which one or more of the above-described
rights of the copyright holders is waived for the benefit of recipients.
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 Internet server. In
this virtual space where a web site can be created/erected 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 used nation
as the common denominator and conducted within its national boundary,
the Internet's multiple communities operate transnationally according
to varieties of unifying principles. Apt to bring forth diversity
of viewpoints rather than protect 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.
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 in our 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 shared grounds for contextualisation become
increasingly difficult to find.
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 and creations, modern sampling and collaborative
authoring enlivened in the digital environment appear 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 such as open source and of 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 from a macro-unified existence to micro-diverse communities.
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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