Ron Silliman’s blog today highlights a story on chronicle.com in which Guy Debord’s wife is threatening to sue Alexander R. Galloway for his development of Kriegspiel, a war game explicitly based on Debord’s own Game of War.
The irony here is obvious and needn’t be repeated — the chronicle story sums it up adequately enough. It is a bizarre world when the work of a man whose political orientation sought to subvert artistic ownership for bureaucratic ends has his work defended against FREELY distributed software.
A realistic and substantial rethinking of how intellectual property should be approached in terms of digital art / creative writing (which includes any form of coding) is desperately needed to avoid this sort of purely symbolic nonsense. Code is writing, and the development of something which is freely available and not-for-profit, as well as clearly defining its influence in Debord’s original is surely defensible as unique, albeit with heavy influence, work, might be seen as a unique incarnation of an idea. Code is also very often détournement, remixing existing code and subverting existing work, wittingly or unwittingly collaboratively.
I haven’t figured out how to play the game yet, but get it while you can, before they pull it down.
Detournement means taking an existing image, text etc and subverting its meaning so it becomes absolutely destructive to the original, and to the ideas the original was communicating. I doubt that code is ‘very often’ this, tho it could be sometimes.
SituationISM, of course, is a meaningless word used by the recuperators of the Situationist International, who were in any case an almost completely imaginary group that everybody goes on about but very few people seem to have read.
Thanks, Sean, for taking the time to comment. It’s great to see some reactions up here.
Though I agree with both your semantic clarifications, I would push the fact that code often IS (or yeah, ok, can be) destructive to the intentions of an original. Bastardised code can be a simple tweaking, but can also be a remapping of algorithms onto unintended arrays, variables, etc. which can entirely transform or fundamentally reconfigure the original, based on subversive social political motivations. Brian Kim Stefan’s Fashionable Noise book makes a compelling case for this.
The other form this can take is in the political or the licence-oriented aspects of the original. Take the iPhone firmware, for example, which has not only been hacked to achieve the things explicitly prohibited by the authors of the original firmware (legal, contractual limitations), but which has allowed for collaborative production of independent applications, again against the original allowances of the code’s producers. [EDIT] — I forgot to mention that, perhaps due to this movement of iPhone hacking, Apple will release an SDK in June which will legally allow for the production of software for teh iPhone. Though there are still limitations to what is allowed to be produced, and though this does not unlock the phone from it’s designated service carrier, it’s nonetheless a step towards controlling the movement under the guise of lifting a restriction. [EDIT]
I’ll go with “can often be” but still think that ‘détournement’ can adequately be ascribed to many hacking / remixing processes and motivations.
I think where this becomes particularly woolly is in the varying licensing freedoms which exist in code writing. For example, if you rewrite code, perhaps you are being a subversive little rascal. Does using a paid-for consumer product like Dreamweaver have an impact on the success or integrity of your subversion? Are you a worse rascal? I guess this feeds back into the spectacular society’s tendency to (correct me if I’m wrong) present freedoms inherently tied into restrictions, giving IDEAS of and therefore having ultimate control over the subversions it is possible to achieve through using (or on the terms of) the software.
Open source doesn’t really help resolve this. Restrictions being necessary to operate a program effectively, etc. But the distribution of open source code invites a (oftentimes collaborative) remix culture, and this admittedly could probably not be called détournement, since it whole-heartedly embraces the intentions of the original writing, to be distributed and rewritten freely.
Yeah, I did and do understand the problematic use of banding around the ISM. But remember that SituationISM is also a meaningless word used by people who like lame title puns in their blog post. I stand my my decision to use it.
Also, got to do something about the size of the comment text here. It’s f**king huge.