Kingdom of Piracy <KOP>
Online Exhibition
http://kop.adac.com.tw
Acer Digital Art Center, Taiwan
Joint Curation: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, Yukiko Shikata
Pilot launch: december , 2001
Onsite exhibition: March, ArtFuture2002
Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> is an online, open work space which explores
piracy as the net's ultimate art form. Hosted by the Acer Digital Art
Center [ADAC] in Taiwan as part of ArtFuture 2002, [KOP] will include
links, objects, ideas, software, commissioned artists' projects,
critical writing and online streaming media events. The exhibition
will launch a pilot website in December 2001, and during the
following three months the project's curators will begin a process of
commissioning projects and written work. While remaining an online
exhibition, the totality of the workspace will be presented on site
in ArtFuture 2002, to be held in Taiwan in March. An edition of all
works commissioned will be kept on the ADAC server as an open-ended
online exhibition, whilst artists and authors will remain sole
copyright owners of their works.
With the increasing shift towards an immaterial or 'weightless'
economy, the concept of intellectual property rights has become one
of the key battle lines of our times. IP is at the core of big
industries from IT (including hardware and software) to entertainment
(music, film and books) to pharmaceuticals and biotech. A handful of
high profile cases such as Napster, DeCSS (DVD content encryption
system), SDMI and the Russian eBook hacker recently arrested in the
US have highlighted this battle.
The idea that IP rights should be rigidly enforced around the world
through patent and anti-piracy laws is hotly contested by a growing
alliance of researchers, open source developers, crackers and
hackers, artists and intellectuals. The patent law applied on plants,
seeds and other natural resources is further contested as biopiracy
by environmentalists. The purpose of Kingdom of Piracy <KOP> is to
consider the law and order provisions surrounding intellectual
property in the context of geographical and cultural borders, and to
examine the changes and challenges presented by information
technology.
The concept of intellectual property rights has no history in Asia.
The recent show destruction of millions of pirated CDs and DVDs in
China, a preliminary to the country's entry into the WTO, does not
change the fact that much of the Asian continent is still operating
completely on its own terms. The burst bubble of dot-commerce in the
early 21st century has plunged Taiwan and Asia's electronic supply
industries into recession, keeping the divide between Western and
Eastern economies as wide as ever. The Kingdom of Piracy will
consider this digital divide, and its sustaining strategies, from a
global perspective. Theorist Arthur Kroker speculated in 1994 about
'digital abundance', imagining Taiwan as a tetra-gigabyte data
heaven, 'the largest data storage dump in the virtual world'
(ctheory.net). <KOP> envisions a virtual free state outside of
geography, time, corporate power and sovereignty; a decentralised,
fragmented, immanent entity in which everyone can be an autonomous
agent.
The Kingdom of Piracy is everywhere: on the fringes and in the
mainstream high-tech economies, from Asia to Eastern Europe to the
data havens of Sealand and hackers' garages in Silicon Valley. The
digital commons is bathing in millions of MP3s and an endless supply
of warez. Codes for appropriation, cut-and-paste, replication,
sampling and remixing have long been established as artistic
practice. <KOP> challenges artists, writers and practitioners to use
these techniques to question, contribute to, analyse and otherwise
address this growing Kingdom. It also asks them to become intimately
involved in the processes of the Kingdom itself, a place in which all
productions are part of an innately collaborative, derivative and
intimately interconnected environment of intellectual 'properties'.
Sponsored by Taiwan's Acer Group and hosted by Acer's Digital Art
Center server, Kingdom of Piracy invites allied crews of crackers and
artists to plug into the supply lines of digital abundance. The
<KOP>site will be an active public sphere for global data
trafficking, descrambling and jamming. Commissioned works are
encouraged to engage in acts of piracy for the causes of intellectual
enhancement and poetic intervention.
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