There’s a very interesting discussion going on at Slashdot, about Matthew Crippen, a Cal State student who was arrested recently for possessing illegally modified XBOX, PS3, and Wii consoles, hacked to play pirated games (unmodified consoles will not read pirated discs).  Crippen had hacked his machine for his own profit, but many new media artists, both amateur and professional, stretch their rights as end-users for the purpose of artistic experimentation.  I’m wondering whether new media artists consider, when hacking copyrighted technology, laws like the DMCA as legitimate worries. Where should artistic license end, if anywhere?  Almost nobody thinks Cory Arcangel hacking a Nintendo cartridge is untoward (although the default Photoshop gradient was a clear misfire in the degree to which it condescended its audience), but many people have lodged criticisms against the work of people like Jon Routson, who has filmed and exhibited bootleg copies and other people’s video art, mostly notably Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.  Some support these kinds of gestures, arguing that they are in line with one of the original intentions of video art: to be infinitely reproducible.   See Greg Allen’s  New York Times article When Fans of Pricey Video Art Can Get it Free (2003).  Roberta Smith also finds Routson’s work good enough to be rendered ethical in When One Man’s Video Art Is Another’s Copyright Crime (2004), in response his controversial 2004 show at Team Gallery in New York.  How do the DMCA and other regulations affect practices that involve tinkering with hardware and software beyond the deliniations of Fair Use?  How has the conversation changed since 2004?

Still from Chicago (2003) at Team Gallery — Jon Routson — via artnet

2009 marks the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s conference on “The Two Cultures,” — literary culture and scientific-empirical culture — in which he called for a Third Culture, one in which literature, art, poetry, and politics, are in symbiosis with rigorous scientific thought.  The degree to which Snow’s vision has been realized is the subject of intense debate. Some consider popularizers of scientific thought like literary agent John Brockman (who was also active in the Happenings of the ’60s) to be humanistic heros, while others consider the popularization of science via science writing to be merely palliative, even pathetic, considering, among other things, the astonishing complexity scientific research took on in the 20th century.  What I can’t get enough of is the presence of scientific thought in artistic practice and in art criticism.  If artistic and scientific culture are to be in a constructive alliance, the best artists will be deeply informed about genomics, artificial intelligence, and the cosmos, and will aid in research through their work.  This artistic allegiance to science has been called for since Plato’s Republic, who dreamt of expelling all the poets and diffusers of myths from his Republic, in favor of cultivators of rigorous thought.  This doesn’t mean there isn’t room for artists to pursue wholly mythical, religious, pataphysical, subjective, romantic, inward-looking practices; it just means that as a culture we must all get smarter.  I was thrilled to visit the posthumously maintained website of Bas Jan Ader, the legendary Dutch/Californian artist whose small yet powerful oeuvre dealt principally with the force of gravity, to find a downloadable .pdf of the following scientific text, written for the Dutch paper de Volksrant…

http://www.basjanader.com/dp/Calmthout.pdf

Enjoy.  Then get back to the US Open.

In Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (1998), Linda Kauffman’s broad and well-researched examination of the pornographic side of contemporary art and culture — especially pertinent in the 1990s as taboo-shattering exhibitions like Post Human (1992, Deitch Projects) and Abject Art (1993, The Whitney Museum) were met by the aggressive strategies of the Christian Action Network — the writer dedicates much attention to the “sadomedicinal” art of Bob Flanagan, who lived most of his life with cystic fibrosis and who in part addressed his illness, and his erotic proclivities, by staging masochistic performance pieces along with his dominant partner Sheree Rose.  Kauffman posits that Flanagan’s work is a particularly weighty, complex, and extreme example of baby-ism, a relatively unacknowledged subculture of heterosexual submissive men, who wish to “return unashamedly to the pre-oedipal bliss of harmony with the mother.”  She argues that the regression is not an evasion of masculinity, however, but of “adulthood — adult responsibilities, failures, impossible social problems…” and that women are fleeing from adulthood too, through fashion, for instance.  Kauffman mentions the ’90s trend of waifish pre-teen fashion models wearing schoolgirl outfits, babydoll dresses, and wielding rattles and lollipops.  There is an apparent correlation — and Kauffman is not the only one to see it — between a broad cultural fleeing of adulthood, and economic hard times.  The reality seems more nuanced with regard to contemporary art, however, as the  early 1990s’ recession and downsizing had far-reaching import on artistic practice which led other artists down decidedly progressive, political paths (such as the group of artists termed relational) rather than regressive, escapist ones.  Also, it’s not just economic hardship that leads to what could be called regressive cultural trends; there is always an array of motivating factors at a given political or economic moment.  In Copenhagen in 2008, I came upon a Zombie Walk, a sort of organized public gathering, similar to a flash mob, in which scores of people dress like zombies and stalk urban spaces, often towards an eventual cemetery.  To me, the phenomenon, in its capriciousness and lack of a stated political motive, seems like another manifestation of some of the desires behind baby-ism: namely, a desire to temporarily suspend both social and existential realities.  Here are some things about being a zombie one might find alluring:

-never die

-total slob

-no responsibilities

-slow pace of life

-no real stress/complicated thoughts

-kind of like being stoned all the time

-usually hang out at the mall

Here’s a link to part of the Kauffman book at aaaarg.org.  She is Professor of English at the University of Maryland.

http://a.aaaarg.org/text/2642/contemporary-art-exhibitionists-bad-girls-and-sick-boys-fantasies-contemporary-art-and-cul