TITLE:
Art as Scholarship: New Media Authorship



ABSTRACT:
The production and process of writing a paper is essential to the making of scholarship and the conditions for knowledge authentication and scholarship in the West.

Daily documentation and the rewriting of parts of my paper for the class Arts 270: Information, Property, Resistance, Seminar A (01020), then posting the segments on the Internet, challenges the process of ‘knowledge production’ at Universities (the writing of a paper is a course requirement to pass.) Simultaneously this process of rewriting, like Art, becomes an alternate, scholarly methodology, a method of authorship that is reflexive and constantly being modified, (the topic for writing will depend, on daily media review, what I think is relevant that day and my paper structure). This method of scholarship demonstrates, how the ‘production of knowledge’ is manufactured today, and exposes how the format of "Paper" as qualification for ‘knowledge’ needs to change becoming less exclusive, more open and inclusive (Biagoli & Galison)(Denning).

Recently the ‘production of knowledge’, as objective individual practice and authority is being challenged. Donna Haraway questions the hierarchy of scholarship in scientific research with her study of the Primate Research. Michael Foucault states that the use of authorship reinforces the right to censor, judge and punish. Post, Postmodernist Art relinquishes the authority of artifact replacing it with the theory that it is the process of ‘Art making’ that is Art – take for example Interactive Arts, where the collaborative aspect of user and maker merges into one process of production. (Jeffrey Shaw)

Jeffery Shaw Web of Life

My paper provides a space where the recycling or remaking of Knowledge as Technology (Foucault) and through Technology will influence my daily writings. My paper, my abstracts and therefore my ‘production of knowledge’ will be in a constant form of flux which is a necessary element of the papers structure. Powers such as the News on the Television or Youtube on the Internet, Articles, Papers or Books written by Academics and Conversations will be my inspiration, regulators and facilitators in my ‘production of knowledge’.


Book of Probes: McLuhan, Carson

The technology through which information flows, such as the electronics that was the platform for the decoding of the genome or the radio playing music in the car create, a biasing (mediation) (Bestor) that we are perhaps unaware. (Marshall McLuhan) My alternate paper, based on the idea that Art is a Practice, is an attempt to illustrate how the methods of knowledge production are mediated and problematic. To relinquish the power of authority imposed by intellectual authorship as writing, I am creating a new, valid document for professional scholarship. http://errgomeego.blogspot.com/. (Charter)

INTRODUCTION
The recycling of Technology is often seen as illegal or intellectually inferior. For example the pirating and distributing of products such as medicine, software and media infringes on commercial and artistic licenses, property and ownership and judgment of validity usually ends up in a court of law as patent infringement. (Larkin)(Phillips)

“Microsoft convicted of software piracy.” Delicious irony has geek community in raptures James Middleton, vnunet.com 09 May 2002

“Millions turn to net for pirate TV” By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, BBC News

“Music retailer is fined for pirating” By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune
Published: June 28, 2006

"Downloading tv episodes from tvfreeload.com couldn't be easier!"

Art historians and theorist who discuss post, postmodernist Art of the 21st Century discuss the fact that ‘true’ Art today is about the process of ‘making,’ rather than the actual Artifact. Take for example Andrea Zittel who presented the work A-Z Breeding Unit for Averaging Eight Breed, she had been breeding the Bantam Bird – a perfect pet in her studio for several years and displayed them and the bird cages as art.

A-Z breeding Andrea Zittel

Art, like recycled Technologies (e.g. Linux) sits in the margins of the technological and intellectual worlds. In the margins there is space for the reshaping and creating new ways to inform, invent and interpret without judgment. (Spivak) (Larkin) By looking to the margins of intellectual authorship such as blogs or wiki and engaging in their recent practices of New Media authorship, I am proposing that through art and New Media scholarship I can challenge the notion of academic paper.

watching Hausa video

Everyday methods of authorship, such as who created a piece of software that decodes a DVD blocking device (Phillips), are challenging who is given access to information and how the information is transferred. But our access to information is constantly mediated (filtered) by the apparatuses that transfer the information and this influences our decision making, what is fact or fiction? For example the colors chosen for the different parts of the brain in a visual interpretation of an MRI, or News the from Global headlines.

“Palestinian Rivals Meet to Discuss Cease-Fire”
By STEVEN ERLANGER 11:52 AM ET
The president, from Fatah, and prime minister, from Hamas, also sought ways to quell the fighting with Israel.

“Reporters Without Borders Condemn Israeli Attack on TV Stations in Nablus “ Time:12:23
PARIS, May 23, 2007, (WAFA) - Reporters Without Borders condemned Israeli army raids on five Palestinian radio and TV stations in the West

Brain images of an MRI

How can we disseminate the truth? Why is the truth of an academic paper more valid than the everyday production of knowledge? Making well informed academic decisions, and responses becomes difficult when the information is mediated both overtly, like the News on TV or as ubiquitously as the embedded system of scholarship in the University system?

By engaging the Art form of writing as Process there is a place where the recycling of technologies and information acknowledges and reuses the problematics inherent in knowledge production. You can open up a space where engagement of the concepts of "Art as Process' becomes 'Art as Scholarship' - a viable form of new media authorship.


NOTES:
Mediate for me means not only the transferring of information through an apparatus but also the fact that the actual mode of transference is already conveys a message e.g. a TV monitor that isn't being played makes a statement. It is already contextualised by the participators past and present experiences and therefore prejudices our decisions.

Recycle - to use again

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Bestor. Theodore. Supply-Side Sushi: Commodity, Market, and the Global City American Anthropological Association 103(l):76-95. 2001,
Mediated meaning through which we are to interpret our environment then language is the like ‘labor’
which can be divided in to “specialized realms that are integrated or coupled in multiply contingent ways,
rather than any flat executive flat or managerial omnipresence” (p80)

Biagoli & Galison. Scientific Authorship, Routledge 2003

Denning, Dorothy E. Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism: The Internet as a Tool for Influencing Foreign Policy, Georgetown University

Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge. New York and London, September 1990, Paperback, ISBN: 0415902940.

Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur’ 1969
‘What is an author Language , Counter-memory, practice selected essays and Interviews” wd. Donald F. Bouchard Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1977

Charter, Roger Foucaults Chaismus. Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth An eighteenth Centuries
p15 “Foucault invites us to a retrospective investigation focusing on the function of the author within different discursive practices with the history of the conditions for production, dissemintation, and appropriation of these discursive formations”

McLuhan, Marshal. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man .
McGraw-Hill
Critical edition published by Gingko Press in 2003

Shaw, Jeffery. Network installation with Michael Gleich, Lawrence Wallen, Bernd Lintermann and Torsten Belschner
The audio-visual environment “Web of Life” is formed by an immersive conjunction of projected three-dimensional computer graphic and video images, together with a fully spatialized acoustic experience and a specially conceived architectural surrounding. The visitor interactively influences the performance of the audio-visual environment by imparting to it the unique patterns of his individual hand lines, thus giving symbolic and experiential expression to the action of connecting oneself to an emergent network of relations.

Braudel, Fernand. Every age constructs its own type of war”. p378 / Sarai Reader 2004: Crisis/Media
Information = Politics / 379 War in the Age of Pirate Reproduction N I T I N G O V I L

Larkin, Brian. Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy

Phillips, Kavita. What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property. Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 199–218, 2005

“Microsoft convicted of software piracy”
Delicious irony has geek community in raptures James Middleton, vnunet.com 09 May 2002
Microsoft was found guilty of software piracy last year by a French court, according to facts unearthed today by the geek community.
But the Redmond giant's conviction and three million franc (£285,000) fine somehow managed to escape the headlines. In fact, until today the only place the story has appeared is in French newspaper Le Monde Informatique.
And the only person who noticed the irony of the world's most aggressive anti-piracy firm being fined for piracy was Peruvian congressman Edgar David Villanueva Nunez.
Nunez inadvertently became a hero of the open source movement last month when he penned a letter to Juan Alberto Gonzalez, general manager of Microsoft Peru, arguing that the free software model does not break any intellectual property laws.

“Millions turn to net for pirate TV”
By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter, BBC News
If you are a fan of TV drama Lost but are not able to watch it on US TV, it is not hard to find episodes on the internet.
Popular shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives and 24 are increasingly easy to find for free on peer-to-peer networks, often within minutes of airing in the US.
And many people outside the US are simply not prepared to wait until they come to their own small screens.
"Most episodes come online about half an hour after it first airs in the US," says Dr David Price, head of piracy intelligence at web monitoring firm Envisional.
"Someone with a fast connection in the UK can watch it before it airs on the west coast of the US."

“Microsoft steps up piracy fight”
Around a third of software sold worldwide is counterfeit
Microsoft has stepped up its fight against software piracy by requiring users to verify their copies of the Windows operating system.Anyone downloading updates for Windows XP will be required to check that their operating system is genuine. Security updates are exempt from this in order to prevent people spreading viruses across the internet.
A third of software worldwide is fake, according to industry group, the Business Software Alliance.
Losing billions Microsoft said that more than a third of its software is counterfeit, which it says costs it billions of dollars of lost income. With Windows accounting for 90% of operating systems sold worldwide, cracking down on the pirates is one of the few ways for Microsoft to expand its business.

“Music retailer is fined for pirating”
By Thomas Crampton International Herald Tribune Published: June 28, 2006
PARIS In a rare case of a music retailer turned Internet pirate, the Virgin chain in France said it had been found guilty of downloading and reselling a Madonna hit without permission.
The store's online portal was ordered by the Paris Tribunal of Commerce to pay €600,000, or $754,000, in damages for downloading the Madonna song "Hung Up" from a France Télécom Web site.

The Web site had exclusive rights to distribute the song for one week.

Andrea Zittel is a cross between an artist, a designer, and a social scientist. “I was working with animals and breeding them. But part of that was making these structures, these breeding units for them that they would live in. I had sort of developed a particular aesthetic and technology for building these with these welded steel structures, and then these wooden inserts that were pretty flexible. So, for instance, a breeding unit not only would influence the way that the animal would develop, but also it would have everything built into it that the animal would need for living.
So, after doing this work and living in this tiny space for a while, I think that it started to make perfect sense to try to create structures like that for myself to live in. “

Zittel does research as art. How influenced are our decisions by the local as well as the global? Does this practice highlight the claim that both technology, and social relations influence the symbolic and material production of science and the scientific practice?
3. http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/zittel/clip1.html
http://www.zittel.org/

Larkin, Brian. Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the
Infrastructure of Piracy
“It is through this generative quality that pirate infrastructure is expressive of a
paradigmatic shift in Nigerian economy and capital and represents the extension
of a logic of privatization into everyday life. Piracy’s negative characteristics are
often commented on: its criminality, the erosion of property rights it entails, and
its function as a pathology of information processing, parasitically derivative of
legal media flows (Chesterman and Lipman 1988; Coombe 1998).” p290

“Rather than elide pirate infrastructure by using it as a window into legal ques-
tions of intellectual property, I wish to foreground it. If infrastructures represent
attempts to order, regulate, and rationalize society, then breakdowns in their operation, or the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures, highlight the failure of that ordering and the recoding that takes its place. By subjecting the material operation of piracy and its social consequences to scrutiny, it becomes clear that pirate infrastructure is a powerful mediating force that produces new modes of organizing sensory perception, time, space, and economic networks.” p291

Hausa movie youtube
Old Northern Hausa Praise Singing by Taguimba
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybNu62rbRQU

Hausa Movie Song 419
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtugZs-JXjU&mode=related&search=

Phillip, Kavita. What is a technological author? The pirate function and intellectual property, Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 199–218, 2005

Angela Willcocks
For Kavita Philip
Arts 270: Information, Property, Resistance, Seminar A (01020),