Seen Enough?

Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me and we understood
-The Caves of Altamira, Steely Dan (1977)

Triplets 14th Street, heather, 2007

No-one is ever paid royalties for Robin Hood and the Monk - the oldest attested ballad of the titular archer. Look at the diverse productions derived from the folk tale of Robin Hood. Where would the modern entertainment industry be without the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm? Such public domain works preceded the shift from cultural to economic capital. The wealth of the developed nations is today largely composed of intangible assets, mainly concepts and ideas and their resultant products, which once known are easily reproducible. This is a problem as our wealth then lies in a naturally infinite source. In this context it's plain to see why copyright terms are continually extended; and if the industry lobbies are correct in their assertions of economic clout, then I can confidently predict that in twenty years a defrosted Cliff Richard and a waxwork Mick Jagger will once again be campaigning for the prolonging of terms for another generation. When these terms exceed the average lifetime they will in effect be infinite. The only ones around to observe the passing of a century-scale 'time limited monopoly' will be perpetual corporations.

Here we see how technology disrupts: the post-industrial economy is reliant on abstracts which have to be bound to hold value - the story in the book, the song in the album, the article in the newspaper. The new hyper-medium we call the web/internet is stripping content from media to the point we could say that Amazon.com has divorced shopping from shops. In the digital age electronic formats are just as intangible as the abstracts they encode and an economy grounded on these now teeters on the edge of devaluation unless it broadens copyright and patent law into restricting the abstract itself. It's a very strange world where you can buy a digital single from an online retailer but cannot legally sell on that same file to a third party. If resale is not permitted on the account that a resale of a infinitely reproducible file would result in profit without incurred losses, then the same is true of the retailer and the record label that produced it. This is the state of affairs because legislatures are in their pockets as well as the pockets of other corporate interests.

As the works that will enter the public domain will soon be a century old, we will find participation only in the culture of our grandparents. If it were the case today we would inherit the works of the primitive motion-picture era. It sounds like an impoverished public domain when we similarly look forward and wonder what advances will shame our 3D CGI blockbusters. However, new media never really obsoletes the old; rather, it creates an expressive niche. Photography didn't obliterate sculpture or painting despite being superior in reproducibility and accurate depiction. Television didn't bankrupt cinema in the 1950s despite greater reach and live communication. Digital photography didn't completely replace film photography despite even greater reproducibility. New media are technical advances while the old media are reinterpreted as expressive modes. Consider the artistic talent required and necessary expensive to commission a portrait as opposed to a professional photoshoot in turn compared to family snaps from a cheap digital camera. For a customer they form a tier of expression, in this case signalling how wealthy one is. For a photographer, the available technologies form a palette rather than a tier. The simple choice of film or digital can invoke nostalgia or modernity. Deliberate misuse of the technology of photography gives rise to several artistic styles: the removal of filters in digital cameras for infrared, incorrect size film for sprocket-hole, bleach-bypass to gain a high contrast desaturated image. It is at the boundaries that new definitions are created and the limitations of obsoleted media end up saving them. Chiptune music is a great example of an extremely poor medium becoming an artform. Just as a wood-carver struggles to recreate shapes within the physical limits of the chosen medium, an 8-bit musician must create the illusion of pitch and rhythm from sonically-primitive hardware. Television has been the dominant medium for the latter half of the twentieth century, but will be subsumed like all the others by the super-carrier (internet) into just another style.

When we reverse our advances in media back through television and back through the printed word, we come back to oral culture. The spoken word is the genesis of culture and it emanates from the individual experience. Media is understood as the means to collate and transmit art, rather than the artist being the true medium. Declining CD sales and rampant piracy destroy the cultural economy, not culture. Musicians are increasingly reliant on live performance for income because they have always been the medium, not vinyl or the compact disc nor downloads. The concept of authorship is a by product of the advent of media. The legal recognition of ownership and monopoly on the mechanical reproduction of a muse is a direct result. Very rarely do people understand their inspiration, hence credit is often given to a deity or explained as coming to them in a dream. Putting it to paper and claiming recognition is peculiarly modern. More perverse is the legal ownership by immortal corporations, fronted by a few mortal old rockers, who are continuing to hold popular culture hostage so that they may extract endless profits. As culture has industrialised we have ceased to participate beyond exchanging money for access to entertainment. The passive medium television long ago turned viewers into pebbles on the beach because there was no means to engage the audience and therefore lead to an active cultural explosion. The means to realise that did not come about until the widespread adoption of the web.

The old adage is 'information wants to be free', but that sentence lacks an active subject. In our age it should read 'we want to gather information freely'.

[1002;26]