<videovortex> if value then copy / rough notes from Oil of the 21st century

[vera tollmann]

Hi all,

some notes I took during two panels at the Oil of the 21st century
conference might be interesting to follow up during videovortex in
January.
Maybe others who attended the conference could add to the following?

panel "The File-Sharing as Culture Industry"
Jamie King (UK), The League of Noble Peers (UK), Mininova (NL), The
Pirate Bay (SE), Torrentfreak (NL)

One consensus among the panelists was that "youtube has not changed
much since google bought it". Torrents were discussed as archives,
because they keep rare stuff in circulation, even the BBC supposedly
makes public calls for VHS material to fix the wholes in their
archives.
I think that's a great claim for bittorrent-durability.


"The Poverty of the Small Author" with Christian von Borries (DE),
Ariane Müller (DE), Cornelia Sollfrank (DE), Palle Torsson (SE)
updated the old concept of the "death of the author" the
becoming-producer and becoming-distributor of the capitalist consumer.

Christian von Borries discussed authorship as a strategic tool, one
can define it differently depending on the contexts: depending on who
you talk to, you stress one or the other aspect of what you do. The
other extreme is an all-in-one authorship: A very good example for von
Borries is the practice in Northkorea, everything is made by Kim
Jong-il.

Is the appreciation for the non-original equivalent to a devaluation
of authorship?  How important is artistic reputation? Is it bad for an
artist to put videos on youtube?

Palle Torsson claimed "stop being artists". Cornelia Sollfrank for
example prefers visibility, to be addressable as an author. More
people should be recocgnised as authors. Sollfrank mentioned the
concept of a performative author (from the feminist concept of
performativity): Authors have to reenact their identities all the
time.
Christian von Borries said to unclarify the function of the author,
"to unclarify our position as artists against political action", is
the most interesting strategy behind authorship. In his understanding,
artists make a prototype for how the society could deal with property.

Sebastian Lütgert's notion of the Small Author was taken up by the
moderator Ariane Müller to talk about the historic figure of the
"Small Man", a working class man (not really translatable as "average
man"). It is a diminuitive for the majority of the people who cannot
act politically efficient from their lower position, because they have
to spend all their time with earning money etc. The first pocket book
printed by rororo (Rowohlts Rotationsroman / rotation novel) in
Germany was "Kleiner Mann was nun", 1932 (What's next, Small Man...),
dedicated to the struggle to survive with poor jobs in Berlin.
Its more to be understood as a metaphoric comparison; an excursion
into historic terminologies and rethoric tactics to keep the working
class people in place, to stigmatise their minor role in society.

For more information, see http://www.oil21.org/

All best,
Vera



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/videovortex_listcultures.org/attachments/20071103/63fd6af0/attachment.html>