Awkward Situation[ism]
Wednesday, 16th April, 2008
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.