Ownership of Bits and Bytes
In what seems like several former lives ago, I was a student at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The institute was founded in the 1960s to reinvigorate the professional art lithographic community by training new generations of professional printers, printers who work in tandem with fine artists to produce limited edition fine art lithographs. So for a year I labored to learn the craft of lithography front to back. Now one of the interesting issues that came up, for me at least, was the idea of producing collaborative prints over long distances using the brand new Internet thingy (yes, I know it had been around for years before I discovered it, but the year was 1994 and the Internet was finally entering conversations outside of Darpa and Computer Science institutes). So while there, I did what might have been the first "electronically-derived" edition at Tamarind, with a friend of mine creating an image in Kansas City, digitally sending it to me, and then having me edition it in Albuquerque. I'll probably not exist as a footnote in the Tamarind archive, however, for two reasons: first, because I was a student as opposed to a professional Tamarind printer, and second, because the image was of only passing interest artistically.
Still, the experiment got me first thinking about how the nature of the art object might change in the new technological age. Well before Napster, kaZaa, and MPAA/RIAA lawsuits, I proclaimed that the new technologies would significantly change the nature of ownership in regards to visual art. I mean, once you're constructing a piece digitally, the idea of singular ownership is blown - one can continue to make entirely faithful digital copies of the file for distribution (both legally and illegally). Anyone with a decent printer can output the visual result; what is of prime importance is who owns and maintains the digital file, not the subsequent outputs. Now this is not an entirely new development; the history of printmaking is strewn with stories of abuse by printers and their business organizations. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, one had to buy prints carefully as many printers printed unauthorized editions from original stones, plates, etc. (Indeed, one still has to take care with certain artists, such as the late Salvador Dali, because of wide-scale abuse by printers and galleries.) The digital phenomenon just takes this problem and blows it up in scale; now anyone with a modem can own the file, be it visual, music, film, or what have you.
Now why does this come up today? Well, I just stumbled along an article on Slate that brings up many of these same thoughts in regards to visual art. So take a look, and consider yourself forewarned: the ground on which visual art stands is shifting beneath your feet. Go plate tectonics!