THE COPY AND PASTE SHOW
Projects by

SETH PRICE
IDA EKBLAD &
ANDERS NORDBY
808

Curated by Hanne Mugaas


This show is part of Time Shares, a series of online exhibitions
co-presented by Rhizome and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Time Shares was launched in tandem with Rhizome's Tenth Anniversary Festival.

The Copy and Paste Show explores the evolution of copy-and-paste culture, through which the copying of digital material has become a major technique in the construction of online identity and style. As with any visual style, web aesthetics often rely on the appropriation of non-original media.
In design, people often copy html codes from other websites in order to sample existing material.
In constructing online profiles or personal websites, participants often call upon found images, video or graphics. In this context, software and tools gains importance, as they enable new kinds of sharing and distribution amongst cultural producers, and amateurs become empowered to create and distribute sophisticated and layered work. The artists in The Copy and Paste Show explore how technical and digital tools alter web aesthetics, music production, and online and offline relations through the use of copy and paste techniques.


PROJECTS:

SETH PRICE:
TITLE VARIABLE (2001- )

Through an ongoing series of music compilations, each concentrating on a technologically transitional moment within recent history, Seth Price suggests that the evolution of production tools has changed music across distribution, structure and genre. From early video game soundtracks to New Jack Swing to Industrial music, Price exploits the genre of "mix tapes" as sound art. As a mass form operating outside commercial channels, the mix tape seems to stubbornly and perversely retain its purchase on the imagination long after actual mix-tapes have slipped free of storage constraints and lost any clear definition. This is evident in recent music aggregation phenomena, such as "celebrity play lists" or mixes freely available on specialist file-sharing blogs, which themselves often focus on musical moments presented as obscure or lost.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/price.html


IDA EKBLAD & ANDERS NORDBY:
WILLY WONKA´S WUNDERKAMMER

Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby suggest that online identity can simply be a matter of preference. In an original MySpace profile, the artists turn their 'list of links', generally used to reference users' inspiration or friends, as a curated exhibit of fan sites for musicians of all types, including Space Lady, Jonathan Richman, Sun-Ra, R. Stevie Moore, Ariel Pink, and Charles Manson. Ekblad and Nordby's fan sites comment on MySpace's essential role: a platform to gain attention, acknowledgment, and eventually fame.

http://www.myspace.com/willywonkainc_oslo


808:
MYOWNSPACE

The Internet activist 808 has taken the concept of copy-and-paste further and copied the whole structure and design of MySpace to create MyOwnSpace. The site looks and functions like MySpace, but is operated by 808, and the advertisement on the site links to other Internet activist projects. Although the site is a copy, it is homemade, based on php/GPL programming. While Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby make use of MySpace by visualizing its popular use, 808 creates a new version by programming a new site that copies Myspace Design.


http://myownspace.fr/


808:
POPAUTOMATE/ 1000 ANS DE JAZZ/ BILLIE JEAN COLLECTION/ PALINDROME RECORDS

The Copy and Paste Show also presents several web-based music projects by 808. Popautomate is a project made in collaboration with the Internet personality Talk-Over that lets participants write their own pop hits. If the participant writes a text, the software performs this text as music by stitching together small samples consisting of these words from different pop hits. 1000 ans de Jazz, founded in 1999, has been collecting, sorting, and recycling "cultural waste" from various fields within pop music, and sharing the material over the P2P (peer-to-peer file-sharing) Network. The net label has released many compilations of backwards music, automated-noise-pop, exotic covers, and obscure karaoke singers.

Examples of projects released at 1000 ans de Jazz are the Billie Jean Collection, comprising covers of the hit-single found on the Internet, and Palindrome Records, which lets users download songs played in reverse to combat copyright laws. Together, the projects show different aspects of how music is distributed online, and how pieces of music are copied and pasted in order to subvert standard rules of copyright. The project relates to Seth Price's Title Variable (2001-), in which he documents the historical impact of new technology using texts and mp3s. In this case, 808 is putting into operation new forms of music creation and distribution through the use of new media
.

PALINDROME RECORDS: http://palindrome.rec.free.fr/
1000 ANS DE JAZZ: http://1000ansdejazz.ath.cx/
BILLIE JEAN: http://copyright.rules.it/
POPAUTOMATE: http://popautomate.fr.nf,
on MyOwnSpace: http://myownspace.fr/19 and http://myownspace.fr/16


SUGGESTED READING:

DAN PERKEL:
"COPY AND PASTE LITERACY: LITERACY PRACTICES IN THE PRODUCTION OF A MYSPACE PROFILE"

In this paper, Dan Perkel argues that MySpace is an informal learning environment that fosters the development of new literacies. Perkel says that the expressive power found in the creation of a MySpace profile concerns a technically simple but socially complex practice: the copying and pasting of codes as a way to appropriate and reuse other people's media products.

http://www.indexof.no/dperkel.pdf


• SØREN POLD:
"POPAUTOMATE- THE CRITICAL INTERFACE"

In this excerpt, Søren Pold explores how 808's project Popautomate points to the fact that there has been a change in music culture from autonomous works to music as material for on-going production.

http://www.indexof.no/popautomate.html


Project links:

INTRODUCTION TO 'THE AUTHOR AS (DIGITAL) PRODUCER'
BY GEOFF COX & JOASIA KRYSA
http://www.data-browser.net/02/DB02introduction.pdf#search=%22walter%20benjamin%20author%20producer%22

MYDEATHSPACE
http://www.mydeathspace.com

MY CREATIVITY
http://www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity/index.php?onderdeelID=6&paginaID=26

IDA EKBLAD & ANDERS NORDBY´S WEBSITE
http://www.indexof.no/rdbyekblad.html

SETH PRICE WEBSITE
http://www.distributedhistory.com

The project is supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)