PERFORMANCE: COPIES & CONTEXTS IN THE AGE OF CULTURAL ABUNDANCE

Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer

We are both co-founders of Piratbyrån, a Swedish group that has been
around for four years. Piratbyrån explores how file-sharing and other
copying technologies interact with creativity and change how people
relate to everyday culture. We analyze tendencies and cases and
discuss possible future scenarios and opportunities.

Internationally we are mostly known for starting up the The Pirate
Bay, which we no longer run but are in close contact with. By this
and many other projects, campaigns, performances, talks and media
appearances, we have intervened in the discussion known as "the file-
sharing debate".

Almost exactly a year ago, at the time of the last Reboot conference,
The Pirate Bay was taken down in a controversial raid that involved
about 180 confiscated servers and pressure on the Swedish government
from US officials and lobby groups. Still today, over 100 servers
remain in custody and the prosecution is just about to be delayed for
several months more.

The raid was followed by demonstrations just three days after co-
hosted by Piratbyrån and other piracy organisations as well as
political parties from different sides of the Swedish political
spectrum. At the very same day, The Pirate Bay came back online.

Since then, a lot of light has been put on the alleged Swedish
"pirate safe haven" and we have had an extensive public debate in
Sweden on file-sharing issues. Although it's great that we have this
debate, it is often stuck in pre-internet frameworks, copyright
abstractions and outdated perspectives.

Piratbyrån is often perceived as being primarily anti-copyright and
we often have to answer questions on how artists should make a living
if there was no copyright. On this topic we have very little to say
for several reasons: Talking about that implicates that we have (at
least until now) a perfectly working copyright economy that has
somehow provided wages for artists, an economy that would be
nullified by a future removal of copyright laws.

What we instead prefer to talk about is the present: The concrete and
complex workings of cultural economies, the cracks and grey zones in
contemporary copyright, and the massive sharing of files that is
already going on.
In fact, we got so tired of answering the questions of right versus
wrong, that this spring on the last night of April, we climbed
Stockholm's highest mountain in order to perform a kind of ritual.
There we burned and buried the very same file-sharing debate that we
had initiated four years ago, read a communique, and celebrated the
ancient Walpurgis festivity around a fire. It's all documented in a
video, that we will now show some brief clips from.

[[[ VIDEO DOCUMENTATION WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES: http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnaol8QQruw ]]]

As I said before, we buried the debate by performing this ritual
since we felt that the debate was stuck in the same frozen positions
it had been for years. Still discussing if file-sharing was right or
wrong, if we should allow it or stop it, if it was good or evil. But
to us the consequences of file-sharing, or rather the general
accessibility of culture today, is much more far reaching than just
another way for consumers to get access to content. Today we are
going to talk about how it shapes the very ways we use, value and
experience culture, especially music.

Since we used The KLF as a soundtrack for the film, and since we
built a fire, we sent this video to Bill Drummond from the KLF. He
sent us a very interesting response, saying that he enjoyed and
understood the message. Then he attached this letter:

- -

AN INVITATION

A time has arrived where we can (in theory and almost in practise)
listen to any recorded music, from the entire history of recorded
music, wherever, whenever while doing whatever we want.

This has meant our relationship with music is rapidly and
fundamentally changing faster than it has done for many decades.

This is good for numerous reasons.

But a by-product of this is, recorded music will no longer contain
the meaning it once held for us. This will entail it no longer gives
us what we need and desire from it. Once a music has lost it?s
meaning it has no value.

Thus as we edge our way deeper into the 21st Century we will begin to
want music that can not be listened to wherever, whenever while doing
whatever. We will begin to seek out music that is both occasion and
place specific, music that can never be merely a soundtrack. We will
demand music where we are no longer just the consumers, unwitting or
otherwise.

The era of recorded music is now passing and within the next decade
it will begin to look and sound like a dated medium. Recorded music
will be perceived as an art form very much of the 20th Century.

The above notions excite me. This excitement has brought about The17.
The17 rejects all that the era of recorded music had to offer and
attempts to embrace the unknown opportunities of what lies ahead.

Please accept my invitation to embrace the unknown opportunities of
what lies ahead in whatever way excites you.

Bill Drummond

www.the17.org

- -

This is not only due to file-sharing but the general presence of free
music. You can't walk around the city, enter a store or café without
hearing music. Today, free music is omni-present. All this decreases
the value of recorded music, perhaps of music-in-itself in general.
We will probably no longer hear a new song, a new sound or a new
style of music that will turn our world upside down as music has done
many times in the past.

The pop-star Momus touches upon this when he summarized the music
year of 2006 on his blog:

"If music didn?t exactly die in 2006, it certainly felt sidelined,
jilted, demoted, decentred, dethroned as the exemplary creative
activity, the most vibrant subculture.

"

Are Momus (born 1960) and Drummond (born 1953) just getting old and
bored? Maybe, but there seems to be more to it. Momus concludes by
quoting his artist friend Anne Laplantine, who expresses similar
feelings towards the uncertain state of music with these words:

"I think we?re also living now in a transitional period which I?m not
sure I can define. All I know is that I feel the need to wait a bit."

We agree with Drummond, Momus and Laplantine that we are in the
middle of some kind of transition. Something that has been
fundamental to humans is losing its meaning, and only the active
destruction of it may open up ways to create new meaning ? the
philosophical term for such an ambiguous process is nihilism.

Ernst Jünger once wrote about overcoming nihilism, that optimism and
pessimism should not be considered as opposites, but can rather be
complementary ways of moving forward to new possibilities. Thus,
disgust and enthusiasm are both feelings which have their legitimate
place when we assess the contemporary state of music and what
digitalisation does with it.

What clearly stands in the way of a successful transition is,
however, copyright-centred reasoning with its extremely biased idea
of creativity. As long as we limit our discussion to the rights or
wrongs with copyright, we will continue to reduce cultural processes
to the end products they leave behind. Because the only things that
count, from the standpoint of copyright, are these end products which
were once called "artworks" and today usually goes under the
disgusting name of "content".

Books, records and pictures are all end products. But not
performances, communication, festivities, or anything else happening
in the moment, in real time. These more volatile or ephemeral aspects
of culture basically falls outside the scope of copyright.

The copyright industry wants us to mentally reduce culture to
content, while ignoring the context. They want to define "creativity"
as the ability to create as many reproducible end products as
possible, while everything performative is degraded to an
instrumental status. That perspective is not only boring and sterile,
it is also dangerous for the very idea of internet as a communication
medium. Sadly, that perspective is also getting very popular on the
top political level of the European Union. The recent so-called
"Strategy for a creative Europe" concludes with the simple equation
that using bigger weapons in the war against piracy will naturally
lead to more creativity (that is, more "content"), which will in turn
lead to economic growth, and save us all when the factories move to
Asia.

Record companies want to rechannel our musical passions, from the
excess of the living moment, into stockpiling of dead objects. George
Bataille brilliantly analysed, 60 years ago, how such denial of
sacrifice will only lead to its much more fatal return in form of war.

However, we'd like to emphasize that not only the copyright industry
is guilty of copyright-centred reasoning ? also many copyright
critics fall into the trap, by taking a "consumerist" standpoint.
It's all too easy to polemize "for" file-sharing (as if that was
needed) with arguments about broadened access to copyrighted
material, something which will only strengthen the abstracted and
reductive idea of culture as accumulation of content.

Avantgarde composer John Cage ? who was otherwise reluctant to make
any value judgements, once presented a clear hierarchy of musical
activities. Basically, he put participation over passive consumption:

"It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to
perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to
misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment or acquisition of
'culture'".

This quote works on two levels. On the one hand we can agree, and
applaud, Cage for creating this scale, for daring to value different
uses of culture differently. His argument is in line with Gregory
Batesons definition of information as "difference that makes a
difference". But we also want to pose a question to Cage about the
hierarchy: Can really making and performing a piece of music be
seperated; and in the case of your music, performing and listening?
And can one musical experience only fall into one category?

Copyright ? based as it were on literary text and not musical
experience ? built its own peculiar world of abstractions, where the
composer, the performer and the producer appeared as three different
roles, each represented by their own copyright collective. But today
they converge into the singular figure of "the bedroom producer".

A convergence driven by the development of recording and mixing
technology, from the multitrack tape recorders of the 1960s, to the
contemporary average computer able to simulate what only some years
ago demanded very expensive studio time.

What does technology do with participation? Today, it should be
obvious that such a question is wrongly put. Different technologies
affect musical cultures and habits in different ways. But during
large parts of the 20th century, many music professionals and
especially their unionist representatives assumed the opposite: that
all sound recording, editing and transmission technologies basically
were parts of one singular tendency, usually named "mechanization".
Thus technology was understood as the opposite of performance, in a
very pessimistic way. Synthesizer players and discjockeys were
initially not allowed into the narrow definition of musical
performers, but were rather seen as something external, threatening
to displace genuine musicianship altogether. We can exemplify with
the following words, written by a music sociologist as late as 1989:

"As the rationalization of technique continues to its logical
conclusion, a specific musician is no longer necessary. Technology
can create a simulated musical world without performers. /.../
Through technology, music can be removed from the web of human
relationships in which it has been traditionally rooted"

We must remember that live performances were though of as the way to
make money as an artist, up until the CD came into the picture. Then,
during the golden age of the CD ? which in retrospect looks like a
short historical parenthesis ? record companies in their reasoning
reduced live performances to marketing spectacles, which did only
exist in order to sell more recordings.

Thinking of reproduced recordings as the core product fitted well
with the discourse about so-called creative industries, popularized
around Tony Blair's election victory in 1997. Creative industries
were defined as businesses ?which have a potential for wealth and job
creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual
property?. Clearly, what that politics favoured in the area of music
was not live performances, but end products. Relegating real-time
experience to such a secondary position, as was increasingly the
trend during the end of the 20th century, was something unique in the
history of music.

But since year 2000, when the file-sharing explosion began, the
pendulum has turned the other way. Turnover for concerts and
festivals have went up to the same extent that record sales has gone
down; as has been demonstrated with hard data from Danish copyright
collectives. And more and more managers and artists are confirming
that the pendulum is swinging back; many has already started to
regard recorded music as mainly a way to market performances, where
the real money are. Beyond doubt, we witness an economic shift, to
some extent, from reproduced objects to real-time experiences. Such a
shift inevitably brings a move of resources from the hits towards the
long tail, as each artist can only be at one place at a time.

To us, this is great news. It promises greater diversity and less
conformity. To the record industry it's obviously bad news, and when
this topic is brought up, they typically start arguing on behalf of
all the poor songwriters who supposedly do not perform at all.
However, we shouldn't spend too much energy trying to prove that the
changes are benefiting a majority of all musical artists (if only
because it's impossible to quantifty the abstracted group of "the
artists"). A more interesting question regards what we mean with "live".

Why is it so hard to discuss live music's role in the music economy,
without always falling back at the image of an rock band standing on
a stage in front of an audience, with someone selling ugly t-shirts
in the back of the room? According to rock ideology, live music
authenticates the recorded object, and the recording is imagined as a
document of something that once happened live. But the recorded
object may not be re-performed, according to this ideology. (Just
think about the silly character of the air guitar player...)

This dualism between live and recording is pure mystification, and an
obstacle for any serious attempt to reconsider the role of the
performative. Obviously, examples from DJ culture works a lot better.
For the dub DJ, the sounds produced by operating echo deks or
turntables are not less "live" or real-time, than the sounds produced
by a human voice, a trumpet or whatever.

But this is not about putting different musical genres against each
other. Culture, including end products like music recordings, always
gets its meaning from humans, in real-time and contained within the
limits of a certain context ? regardless if the context is a physical
or virtual space, or if it includes just a couple of persons or
millions of them.

It is not so much about a return of living music on behalf of the
dead, recorded object. Instead, what happens is that the concepts of
live, communication, interactivity and performability in themselves
become transformed by technology. The main challenge is about how to
widen our definition of the "live". How can music as a real-time
experience be re-thought, as an aesthetic and an economic activity?

Our experience from the copyfight is that the discussion has focused
entirely on the production of new culture, while ignoring how culture
is used and by whom. So the real question should be: How do we create
meaningful contexts around music?

Let's try to define what a live performance is: Something that
happens in real-time, a specific time and place. Something
establishing an relation between different people sharing a similar
taste for something. An experience you are part of creating. These
features can also be observed in the actual uses of recorded music;
in the domains where people share music, meta-data, tags, ratings and
stories.

Think about sharing musical taste with Last.fm. The most significant
effect it has on us, is that it suddenly makes listening to MP3's a
two-way activity: While music is streaming from our loudspeakers,
metadata are sent back to a central server, continually building on
your personal profile, which you know will be used not only by the
system for calibrating you personal radio, but also by other humans
to judge you. In short, that makes listening to MP3's a performative
act. Listening overtakes traits from artistic performance, to some
extent.

Do we actually want this? Let's leave that question open. Maybe it
would be nicer to keep a more ephemeral way of listening, less
focused on producing visible metadata, while letting the will to
perform take other outlets. Anyhow, this is something we should talk
a lot more about.

The time and place of culture today is dictated by digital media.
Culture, as human communication par excellence, is as it were
technical. A live gig, a club or a conference today can hardly be
imagined without internet buzz, friends coordinating online, blogs
writing it up, digital cameras and mobile phones documenting it and
users commenting afterwards.

So what we have here is not so much, or at least not only, technology
being humanized but new domains of the human experience being
subjected to a new technology.

What we are looking for now is something completely different from
the imaginary utopia of a perfectly working copyright economy, that
all coordinates remain the same, only shifted to a new map. What we
are looking for here is realistic utopia. From an analysis of the
present condition think the unthought. There are still hidden
performativities remaining to be discovered!

http://www.piratbyran.org/?view=articles&id=114

http://www.reboot.dk/artefact-2318-en.html

http://video.google.com/videoplaydocid=1098484580210269821

http://copyriot.se/reboot9/Reboot9.pdf

http://www.piratbyran.org/walpurgis/

http://nettime.freeflux.net/blog/archive/2007/05/05/nettime-four-
shreddings-and-a-funeral.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnaol8QQruw