hydrarchist writes:

" The following long essay was prepared by Negativland for the forthcoming conference organised by the Center for the Public Domain. The essay provides a detailed analysis of some of the issues raised by intellectual property, a legal category that has been unrelentingly expanded in the last decade. Criminal liability now attaches to uses made by individual consumers of cultural products,a nd works produced in our lifetime will never be avaliable for recombination before our deaths - unless the 'life scientists' manage to pull off the immortality thing...

A full report on the conference will be published after the event here at slash.autonomedia.org.

We make this text available as a HTML document - it was released only in PDF format- in homage to the first victim of the DMCA's war to disable users' rights through criminalising those that make the tools required to exert those rights.

Dimitry Sklyarov was arrested at Defcon during the summer for his part in creating tools which allow the circumnavigation of Adobe's e-book reader encryption program.

Drop the Charges against Dimitry!

N© 10/14/2001 by Negativland;

Editor’s Note: See http://www.negativland.com for more
details.

TWO RELATIONSHIPS TO A CULTURAL PUBLIC DOMAIN

By Negativland

INTRODUCTION

It's been ten years since Negativland was sued by Island Records for the copyright
infringement, trademark infringement, defamation of character and consumer fraud
contained in our 1991 "U2" single. In the big wide world of idea ownership, a lot has
changed since then - the Internet and its worldwide empowerment of individuals through
personalized interconnection, the effects of globalization and how it bypasses both the
ideologies of local governments and the rule of their national laws, and the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act with which intellectual property owners are attempting to survive
all these rugs being pulled out from under them. There is a contemporary realization that,
on one hand, the fate of all content is now in the hands of its receiving audience more than
ever before, and on the other hand, that worldwide commerce is scrambling to forge all
kinds of new laws and regulations to maintain their traditional control over the fate of
“their” content.

Over the last 10 years, Negativland has continued to be associated with these
issues, sometimes because we volunteer ideas on these subjects, sometimes because we
continue to make art that ends up evoking them. Other than the two lawsuits against us in
the wake of the "U2" single, we've never been sued again. There have been other threats,
scares and skirmishes against us over the years, at various times from the RIAA, PepsiCo,
Beck, Geffen Records, Philip Glass, Fat Boy Slim, and even attorneys for ax murderer
David Brom. But, surprisingly, we've actually been left alone throughout the 90's as we
continued to release work that appropriated from privately owned mass media (often times
in much more glaring ways than anything we were ever sued over). Perhaps it's because
we've been flying under the radar as “alternative” music, or perhaps that highly publicized
suit, which we publically defended as “anti-art" because we couldn’t afford to defend it in
court as Fair Use, caused others to think twice before suing us again. Or perhaps, at least
these days, it's because, in the wake of Napster, DSL lines and MP3s, the music industry
now has much bigger things to worry about than a bunch of fringe audio artists chopping
up and re-using bits of their privately owned intellectual property.

Whatever the reasons, Negativland has remained appropriatively unrepentant and
continues to work in the same ways we always have. And, in the wake of those lawsuits,
we expanded our own self run record label, Seeland Records, to help out other artists who
also "infringe" in order to collage. Most notably in the compilation DECONSTRUCTING
BECK, and our recent re-release of John Oswald's hostoric PLUNDERPHONICS
project, both of which, unlike our own work, are each made up entirely of other peoples
music.

We've continued to work this way because we like the sound of it. We like the
results, we get inspired by what we find out there, it's simply FUN to do, and we sense we
are not alone in these perceptions. In continuing to pursue collage and found sound as
elements in our music, we have continued to set our work out as public examples of how
appropriation from our media surroundings is neither culturally harmful nor dangerous to
anyone else’s business, but hopefully does represent some interesting art perspectives
which are well worth having around.

At this late date in the proliferation of collage, we no longer see this "appropriation"
approach as particularly daring, edgy or trangressive, as it once truly was. The "aesthetic"
of collage (though not always the actual thing) has by now been very mainstreamed. We
see it in mass media everywhere we look. We see it in the many web based CD stores that
now have a "Plunderphonics" category, in the frequent appropriation based film and music
festivals around the world, and in the way our own phrase "culture jamming" has entered
into routine anti-corporate and anti-advertising activist lingo. We see it in the way it has
become a common subject matter in courses in film schools, law schools, art schools and
music schools. At some level, even though it's all STILL tacitly illegal, this way of working is now really nothing unusual at all. And observing this now generally culture-wide
acceptance of collage’s appropriation methodologies, one would think that sympathetic
laws of allowance would also emerge to keep it legal. But that has not happened yet.
What’s wrong with this picture?

PART ONE: FREE EXCHANGE IN THE DIGITAL DOMAIN

TWO POSITIONS

Any argument over what should or should not be considered a public domain for cultural
works stems from one of two positions.

Position One: Everything created by humans is “work” that is done in order to gain
income and which cannot continue to be done without that income. Therefore, all pieces
of cultural “work” need to be compensated, usually on a per-unit basis, if we expect such
work to continue. And therefore, becoming a “user” of such work without compensating
the creator for that work is a theft of the creator’s rightful and necessary compensation.
This position- the ethical and economic standard within our usual practice of cultural
creation- stems directly from our evolution through a pre-digital, hard copy based world
in which the supply of anything made was necessarily physical and so also supply-limited
in nature. The physical supply of any thing made was controlled by the maker of that thing
and the units or copies of it were doled out by the maker exclusively. That condition quite
naturally evoked and supported the above ethic in a material world which provided
virtually no other options in it.

Position Two: Digital technologies of reproduction have dragged the above ethic into a
virtually new world of production realities in which there is still the creation of

individual
“works,” but once a digital copy of that work is released, it’s up for grabs. Anyone on the
receiving end of it is capable of making their own indistinguishable copies ad infinitum and
distributing them ad infinitum as well. And they can do this as individuals at home, at

little
cost, and using consumer technology available to anyone. In other words, we have begun
to allow the receiving end of cultural output to put themselves in charge of the

reproduction
and distribution of that work- above and beyond what the original producer accomplishes
in that realm. As music makers, for instance, we are no longer in charge of our own music
once it actually leaves our hands in digitized forms. We cannot control what further
duplication and distribution of it is done by those who receive it. This unexpected and
perplexing reality has begun to encourage a different ethic and economic standard for
digitized cultural work which is somewhat oblivious to those that have always ruled in
Position One. This new ethic is nothing new at all, actually, emerging as it does from a

very
old ethic. An ethic that every effort of private capitalism over the last century has sought
to deflect, delay, and smother: the concept of public domain.

THE DEATH OF FOLK ART AND THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNET

It is primarily computers and the Internet that have prompted Position Two, and out of
them come a renewed interest in the free and open exchange of cultural works. This new
digitally driven ethic of free exchange emerged so easily because the ideal of an
unhindered, wide open, and free cultural exchange has always held a deep philosophical
appeal for the receiving end of culture, and the receiving end has now suddenly been given

an effective technological tool to actually make this happen. To that was added the lack
of any need to pay for anything in this new domain, which does nothing to limit its popular
appeal either. But deep within these unfamiliar realizations about how reality is working
now is the remaining conundrum of how to pay for cultural production. This is the one
nagging residue of practicality from Position One which Position Two does not yet have
a good answer for. But interestingly enough for our limited human brains, on the Internet
we don’t really appear to have a viable choice! All digitized media, particularly on the
Internet, has actually turned the world of traditional copyright controls upside down,

putting
the general public in a distribution driver’s seat that simply did not exist before. And, in
doing so, digitally reproduced media has opened up the public’s imagination to what
THEY would like to do with whatever forms of culture come their way. The audience can
now bypass the creator’s control over sales and distribution. Once again in the history of
human technology, new technology has thrown us and our society’s prior “values” for a
loop.

In much earlier times, prior to the corporately driven modern era of hands-off,
privately owned and copyrighted cultural material, the natural human approach to their own
culture was to participate in it by not only absorbing it as an individual, but also by
remaking it, adding to it, removing from it, recombining it with other elements, reshaping
it to their own tastes, and then redistributing the adjusted results ourselves. The whole
history of human culture virtually consisted of altering, reusing, and copying from the
universal public domain in various re-imagined ways until copyright came along.

Copyright has made true folk music, for instance, illegal and impossible. It is extinct
as a process. What’s left are professional “singer/songwriters,” each one “original,” each
one intending to remain legal by being lyrically and melodically distinguished from all the
others, and all having little to do with any kind of true, evolving “folk” process at all.

Any
kind of modern folk music (as opposed to that which has already reached the legally
defined public domain) became impossible when it became possible to sue it out of
existence. Along with this general direction in the modern parameters of creativity, came
complete twists in human perception itself, such as the very concept of copying (which is
how this species actually got to where we are) becoming a term of disrepute, something
to be avoided, an UNcreative act! So now all music, which is always chock full of copying
regardless of any laws, continues under self-delusional standards of “originality” based on
carefully delineated degrees of copycat provability.

Acknowledging the strengths and realities of human nature (monkey see, monkey
do) has now become a disrespected practice in our commercialized culture. Nothing is
allowed to incrementally evolve through various individuals. Each individual must make

alegally defined leap from anothers (phony) “originality” to their own (phony)

“originality.”
We wonder if the whole history of human culture would agree with copyright lawyers and
content owners that this is a good thing for the evolution of human culture?

As for the Internet, digital distribution does not remove the right to sue copying or
“unauthorized” reuses of existing work, but it does remove a great deal of practicality in
actually enforcing such legal mandates. These are “crimes” committed by countless
individual citizens inside countless homes, and tracking any of this criminal multiplicity

is so
difficult it just becomes expensively pointless. Now we are discovering just how difficult
it is becoming for copyright’s relatively short lived repression of the public’s urge for a
public domain culture to continue. The success of Napster showed that the public’s desire
to engage in cultural reprocessing and/or redistribution for themselves had not become
extinct. It seems the general public will always take control of revising the destiny of
cultural products which enter their sphere of possession if given the opportunity. With
digital technology, they suddenly can and so they do. But this new opportunity has also
evoked a newly awakened awareness of the economics of modern culture and the

all-encompassing
colonization of the arts by commercial interests which have come to
characterize our popular culture as a whole. These commercial interests have actually come
to rule what’s “important” and what’s not in cultural material. Among other things, when
private cultural income threatens to go out the window, some very different sorts of
standards for popular “worth” may start to emerge.

SCREAMS OF INDIGNATION

The music industry, in which virtually all mainstream music is, at the moment,
owned and controlled by five trans-national corporate entities, now screams that free
digital exchange will kill music if left to its own home reproduction devices. Well, it

could
possibly kill THEIR kind of expense laden music, but their self-absorbed assumption that
they ARE all the music that counts is one of the reasons it’s so appealing to subvert their
economic grip on music by reproducing it and passing it on for free. But such an emotion,
regardless of how justifiable it may be if focused, is vague at best and merely a general
feeling about what ALL music is “worth” in this commercially compromised culture. This
newly empowered free exchange attitude does not apply much of any distinguishment
between musical examples. So this “subversion” extends equally to the small independent
varieties of music too, and thus we have a potential support problem for ALL music,
whether it’s made in a corporate music factory at great expense or for very little in a home
studio. What may shake out of this situation, however, is that if payment for any and all
music significantly diminishes, all the other-than-profit motivated home studios can hang

onand keep producing music a lot longer than the big, extravagant, corporate music factories
will ever care to. Music will not disappear under present conditions any more than it did
throughout most of human history when no one was being paid to make it. However, it
may change in nature, and it may not be much of a living if it never escapes an Internet
format.

The Net, however, opens up self production as a finally significant alternative to
the notorious corporate label slavery which has ruled modern music production because
it potentially provides, at very low cost, what has always been missing before - self
distribution that can actually get beyond one’s own neighborhood. A single master is now
all that’s needed to be a potential world wide distributor. When manufacturing multiple
hard goods is no longer the only way to distribute music, literally anyone can play. It is

still
a question as to how crucial exactly how much income from such activities is going to be,
but so far, the Net’s unique ability to encourage the self control and self ownership of

one’s
own musical career by utterly bypassing the former only game in town - corporate labels’
usurpation of control and ownership rights - is not to be dismissed just because the
resulting living may be smaller.

This may be the main future of music on the Net, as yet still filled with corporate
hand wringing over economic collapse. The Net motto for the future may well be “Get
small or get off.” The Net may end up being characterized as a people’s medium, primarily
designed by and for individuals rather than yet another comfortable bed for the mass
culture of corporate marketing which has so far successfully taken over all other available
mass mediums. Such a medium, geared to the interconnection of individuals, may also
become inevitably divorced from the copyright constraints which will go on ruling the
material world. The Net may become a simultaneously operating alternative in which
everything that remains within it is functionally in the public domain and open to anyone’s
reuse. This is not to assume there will be no ways for creators to garner individual incomes
in a digitized public domain, but they will probably be unusual in the history of making
livings, perhaps including voluntary payment, and are mostly yet to be invented.

For the time being, there are still persistent and expensive efforts on the part of
corporate producers of cultural content to somehow maintain the Position One economic
standard for digitized media (per-unit payment) within the new Position Two functioning
reality (free exchange by default). With sparkling dollar signs in their eyes, the music
factories dream of charging for those millions of “unauthorized” downloads which are now
happening, when of course, any charges for them will instantly dry them up to an unknown
degree. At any rate, practically none of these efforts at placing a toll on what everyone
knows is an infinite and virtually expense free supply in the digital domain has ever worked
well, and none of them have worked at all for long. And there is not much hope that they
ever will because no matter how many very smart encrypters and digital security specialists
the private producers employ, the world is always much bigger and there will always be
someone else out there who is just as clever and who is, by nature, opposed to a privately
controlled culture of limited supply. All private exclusivity codes will be cracked by the

vast
and alternatively motivated population at large, given enough time. Why are they doing
this? The Position Two ethic. How will we pay for cultural production? Nobody knows.
Can we pound a square peg into a round hole? Probably not.

THE CONSUMER AS CRIMINAL

Meanwhile, all this has landed us in an era in which the traditional business of
culture is in the impossible position of seeing its customer base as criminally dangerous to
their business. This paranoia stems from the essence of capitalist logic - charging is good,
free is bad. And not just bad, but impossible! But in the realm of the Internet, cultural
materials - text, images, and audio - are all constantly moved around by an on-line
audience operating under the assumption that free is good and charging is bad. On-line
users express this notion there because, for the first time in in their lives, they actually

can.
And they see how the Internet can apparently go on and on this way, that western
civilization is perhaps not so threatened by it, and most significantly, that not one

off-line
business concern, individual or company, has yet gone out of business because of
ANYTHING that’s happening on-line. The Internet was never designed as a
commercially structured medium for selling. It was designed as a medium for a free, open,
and decentralized exchange of information. This tenacious, foundational nature of the
technology and software is proving extremely difficult to convert into various forms of toll
taking. Only cultural content as apparently irresistible and indispensable as porn has
succeeded in making non-physical content pay there. There are few if any other economic
success stories on the Net which are not offering off-line material goods as the lure.

So far, all forms of paid advertising (a major way that cultural content has always
supported itself) have proved themselves to be largely ineffectual on the Net. Few people
click through those banners. It’s just a whole different kind of place, suggesting an

attitude
among its users who change their usual media expectations upon entering. It’s a world
wide place that somehow suggests personal direction and individualized participation more
than any other medium that has ever been available to us. What we seek on the Net seems
to be something more individually specific to us, as individuals. The medium, itself, seems
to prefer unmodulated individual expression and priorities. Homogenized, generic,
conglomerized corporate intrusions into this arena always appear antagonistic,

disruptive,and annoying. Logos, branding, and selling itself - all the things we now accept

as
characterizing our corporate culture in the off-line material world - do not yet get the

same
free and willing pass inside Internet culture. There also appears to still be some kind of
choice there, an inherent flexibility to make of it what we will, a choice which no longer
strikes us as possible in the commercially locked up brick and mortar world.

It’s often surprising how oblivious the mentality of corporate commerce is with
regard to how self damning their own unconsidered nature appears to be when it reaches
the Net. They are looking at the Net as a new and lucrative nut to be cracked, but they are
basically proceeding to do this in the same old ways they tackled every other new medium
that ever appeared. They either ignore the basic design of Net technology which is so
persistently opposed to that form and function, or they are hard at work with their well
greased pals in Congress to legally change the basic design into something they can work
with. Failure after failure has not made a dent in their assumptions that this, too, can and
will be turned into another medium for commercial placement and selling products. The
RIAA's attack on Napster (and by default, their attack on 25 million music fans who used
Napster) was a public relations disaster for the music industry, a disaster that the

industry
still seems to fail to grasp. They are still looking at the Internet as the biggest mall of

all. The
vast majority of users, however, seem hardly interested in more malls at all. This may be
because, for the majority of users, the Internet still represents a very new expression of
public domain ethics and possible procedures, a place where cost and content are not
necessarily bound together. It’s a way of thinking which has been denied to us in all other
forms of mass media, all of which succumbed to commercial domination and sponsored
purposes long ago.

ART OVER PROFIT?

Life is often engaged in a series of overlapping contradictions fighting for survival
and predominance. Music on the Net has just become a new example of this evolutionary
principle in action. Music might even evolve (or devolve if you prefer) into a dual life,

one
being its present status as private property, copyrighted and supply-controlled in the
material world, and the other being a non-proprietary “vapor service" as long as it remains
digitized within the confines of the Internet. From the “art over profit” perspective that

is
ours, this perfectly possible legal distinction would pull the rug out from under many of

the
significant dangers to the Internet as we know it from corporate capitalism's compulsion
to change it all to suit their own purposes.

Many assume that such a dual tracked distribution of cultural material (all
copyrighted in the material world and all subject to Fair Use on the net) is not a plausible

option. They assume this would be a form of “competition” the material world could not
economically sustain, that no one is going to pay for something here that they can get free
over there. But actually, if experience is a somewhat more reliable teacher than theory, we
might notice that this is exactly what is happening now. One can download practically any
music for free somewhere on the Net, yet CD sales, for year after year while this has been
possible, continue to remain the same or even increase! There are many factors at work
in this paradox which may actually be more than a temporary pause while download quality
catches up to CD quality. The Net approaches being a functioning public domain for
whatever enters it. It is accessible worldwide. The amount of material found there is
inestimable, as is the total population of users who access it. The numbers involved in both
amounts of content and amount of access distinguish the Internet as an unprecedented
phenomenon with which we have no previous familiarity.

The key to the paradox may be found in this unprecedented scale. Most music
buyers will very likely always find a certain preference for hassle free, glitch free (in

other
words, computer free), audio perfection, along with the relevant packaging which CDs or
their hard copy successor will always provide. But everyone’s CD budget is forever limited
to what is most important to them. They purchase music they are SURE they like, sure
they want to add to a physically permanent collection. Computer housed music, on the
other hand, has all the aura and charm of disposable music, a way to sample unknown
things with no obligation to buy, a way to try out or collect a whole lot of stuff one would
never ordinarily buy in any case, and a place where a great deal of unknown music is easily
checked out and deleted without losing any investment at all. Every free download whim
definitely does NOT represent a “lost” sale, and in fact, the literally unconsumable

plethora
of available free music on the Net can and does create sales.

Free digitized music still appears to be excellent advertising. Whatever amount of
the salable variety of music is supplanted by free downloads, they also produce enough
sales for “permanent” music which is first discovered through all this disposable digital
sampling, that it balances out to keep CD sales no less than they were before the Internet
came along. The amount of free music downloading going on (perhaps now in the billions)
really scares the recording industry, but they seem to forget the scales of practicality
involved. They only need sell a tiny fraction of that amount to become sinfully rich anyway.
So far, this digital public domain for all music exists in tandem with record stores selling

the
same stuff, and surprisingly, the relationship may not be any more destructive than it is
helpful to sales. Live and learn.

But such a dualistic reality appears relatively unthinkable to commercial interests
who remain deep in the habit of assuming that exclusive and protected ownership is the only

guarantee of private profit. The Net has been no significant part of that habit yet, but
business interests seem incapable of noticing the Net’s more innovative suggestion that this
assumption may not, in fact, be true at all. Especially in terms of how this new medium
interacts with and informs the whole world of copyrighted experiences that they do profit
from.

PARADOXES OF PRACTICALITY

What may be even more difficult for commerce to swallow is the very possible
ultimate realization that any alternative to the whole Net remaining a public domain by
default may be bound to fail anyway. All it takes to subvert copyright constraints there is
for one individual to purchase access to a work on or off the Net, and from that point on
it is potentially up for grabs on the Net for nothing. The basic functionality of this

medium
was beautifully designed to promote and facilitate copying and spreading, and unless its
basic nature is significantly altered (efforts are underway as we write), it will always be
prone to do this well. As paranoia grows among the corporate owners of culture and
content, the net becomes all the more curiously fascinating to its vast majority of
commercially unaffiliated users precisely because it just sits there, a profound enigma in

the
midst of a society so otherwise firmly entrenched in capitalist formulas for success. How
can this commercially unworkable anomaly be accommodated? The psychic and societal
shifts these paradoxes of practicality may eventually produce among us reaches far beyond
the arts to question the value of intellectual property ownership itself, which has suddenly
been turned into a revitalized question for so many since the Internet appeared.

All other previous mass mediums have been one way in nature and designed for
sponge-like spectatorship almost exclusively. Mass mediums value their audiences first and
foremost as target consumers representing demographic statistics with which they can sell
advertising. The Internet, however, still appears to be the only medium for the masses, a
medium for active, individual exchange and interchange, without a center of control or
executive offices making decisions about its future, where personal contribution rather than
anonymous absorption is what is suggested by the technology. The difference consists of
who and what is really in charge, and who and what it’s really for.

The Internet is currently the biggest and most widely perceived symbol of a
reawakening passion for vaguely realized concepts of a public domain culture. But long
before, and still continuing outside the Internet, this philosophical ideal concerning our
cultural surroundings has also been evident throughout the modern arts.

PART TWO: STICKY FINGERED HISTORY

GRIST FOR THE MILL

Beginning with the Industrial Revolution and extending all the way up through the
entire 20th Century to this point in late, high capitalism, there has been an intertwined
relationship between the co-option of our mental and physical environment by private
commercial interests on the one hand, and on the other hand, a simultaneous awareness
of this unilateral encroachment on everyones personal and public spaces within the
evolution of art.

This awareness was not always displayed by art that was trying to point this out
in particular, but much art has taken it into account, nevertheless. Some art is concerned
with the social consequences of what is happening around it, other art is not, but it all

tends
to pass on whatever it is seeing, no matter how unconsciously assimilated or openly
displayed these perceptions may be. There is a certain perceptual stance most artists have
always taken in relation to their work and their environment, and that perception sees
everything out there as grist for their mill. Whether they are painting a tree in a

landscape
or sampling music, for artists it’s just what’s out there, and it’s all equally usable if it
“works” to make the art they want to make. It matters not who “owns” the music they
sample any more than it matters who “owns” the tree they paint. Ownership has never had
anything to do with creativity.

This ancient and universal artist’s view of art’s potential subject matter proceeded
just fine for quite a while. For centuries there were no lawsuits against landscape painters
by land owners, and neither did they demand a cut of the painting’s price (presently,
however, Disneyland claims copyright on any photos you take inside their imagineered
landscapes). Throughout the 20th Century, America was surprised by many unforeseen
new technologies which, as usual, began to produce new forms of thinking and new forms
of creative activity. For instance, one technology - the ability to capture and reproduce
sound electrically - began to allow those involved in creating music to think differently
about what music might consist of. Electrical transcription meant that music no longer
needed to be live to be heard. Music as an artifact frozen in time and space was almost
immediately seen by composers as having recombinable possibilities. Pre-recorded sounds
and music began appearing in musique concrete performances by the second decade of
the last century. At the same time that electrical invention was spreading, so was the brand
new techniques of visual collage (recombining disparate elements or imagery into a single
new composition, also the founding attitude of surrealism in general.)

Collage first appeared in the brand new reproduction technology of the late 1800's
called photography (another form of freezing time into material form which makes it
capable of post-creation manipulation), and quickly spread to painting. Lawsuits against
early photography were unknown. There were also no lawsuits against the early painters
who embraced collage around the turn of the 20th Century. They began to attach actual
material found in the world around them to their canvases, sometimes including
commercially produced products like candy wrappers or fragments of advertising. Still no
offense taken. Musical collage, for the most part, remained in the realm of classical music
up until mid century. However, all through the endless, live-only centuries of music
creation, many composers had routinely included pre-existing music within new work
which might range from including familiar folk melodies to borrowing fragments from their
classical predecessors or contemporary colleagues. When recorded music came along, it
was no great leap for some composers to add that into their compositional concepts.
Music was proceeding exactly as it always had and as it wanted to then, with hardly a
hassle from those early commercial copyright laws starting to congeal over in the shadows.

In the fine art realms of creation, there was a clear understanding that copying and
appropriation was not only a tradition in art, but also seemed to be growing in relevance
as the modern perceptual world around the artists of the last century fragmented into all
sorts of reproduction possibilities that electric imagery and sound began to shower
civilization with.