NEWSgrist - where spin is art

The Treachery of Images

Above: Robert Hovden's four nanolithographs in When Art Exceeds Perception at the Jill Stuart Gallery, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Courtesy of Robert Hovden.

 

When Art Exceeds Perception is an exhibition of works produced and conceived by Robert Hovden, a PhD candidate in Applied Physics at Cornell University. Hovden has mounted an exhibition to probe our assumptions about the copy, authorship, and ownership. Predictably, he has provoked the ire of one (dead) artist's estate and the admiration of those who dispute the wisdom of overreaching copyright, including the editor of this blog. See below for excerpts from blurbs and press.

~ the editor, NEWSgrist (where spin is art)

 

Cornell Council For the Arts - Intimate Cosmologies Projects Biennial
WHEN ART EXCEEDS PERCEPTION
Robert Hovden
Dates:  Oct 30, 2014 - Dec 15, 2014
Location: Jill Stuart Gallery, Human Ecology Building
Link

When Art Exceeds Perception explores the implications of replication and plagiarism by reproducing famous works of art inscribed onto the surface of a silicon crystal wafer at 500x smaller than the eye can see and 5x smaller than the wavelength of light.

The art was inscribed by accelerating charged ions to high-speeds and focusing them on the silicon wafer. By scanning an ion beam in an image pattern, molecules on the wafer surface were sculpted and etched like clay. The material sculpted at this scale is high-purity, crystalline silicon with an atomically smooth, flat surface. This is the same silicon medium used in modern digital devices for transistors and provides an exceptional medium for physical manipulation and design.

In a digital era where information is encrypted and stored in the atomic bits of nanoscale devices, answers to philosophical, moral, and legal questions surrounding artistic ownership and copyright become muddled. When Art Exceeds Perception focuses on this issue through the creation of tangible, if immediately inaccessible, art — not stored as bits, but rather as an indirectly interpretable image. Its final representation is not digitized or encrypted, but identical in image to the original, if merely too small to be perceived.

Above: Source images used for nanolithography. Courtesy of NEWSgrist.

 

via Torrentfreak:

This ease of copying has provoked legal aggression and endless debate as to the purpose of copyright law and its role in protecting the interests of artists. In particular, entertainment industry companies often declare that no matter what its nature, infringement negatively affects those creators. But is that always the case?

A new project developed by Dr Robert Hovden at Cornell University aims to provoke discussion on that very topic by pushing replication of content – and indeed the law – to their absolute limits.

A self-confessed gradeschool downloader and former undergraduate at Jet Propulsion Labs, NASA, Hovden went on to study nanoscience at Cornell. His passion for studying the world at the tiniest possible levels has given birth to “When Art Exceeds Perception”.

The project, which will be exhibiting at Cornell University this November and December, explores the implications of copyright infringement, replication and plagiarism when the ‘pirated’ works are so tiny they cannot be perceived by human senses.

To this end, Hovden has ‘pirated’ four famous works of art by scribing them into the surface of a silicon crystal using a focused ion beam. The features in the artwork replicas are five hundred times smaller than the eye can perceive and five times smaller than the wavelength of light. [...]

Above image courtesy of Robert Hovden.

via Torrentfreak, cont'd:

 

“To take a piece of art, copy it, and share it with the world without the original artists’ permission is traditionally viewed as wrong and, in most cases, violates copyright laws,” Hovden says.

“Such laws are intended to protect an artist’s financial interests and provide incentive to create. However, in a digital era where information is encrypted and stored in the atomic bits of nanoscale devices, answers to philosophical, moral, and legal questions surrounding copyright become muddled.”

This leads to Hovden’s big question: When a copyright work is copied, framed and presented for public consumption on a nanoscale as it will during November and December at Cornell, has something been taken from the original artist?

“Thus far, people have discussed this project from a science or art perspective, but I believe that the readers of TorrentFreak are best equipped to understand this work. The exhibition is highly conceptual – completely beyond perception – and critical of current views on replication,” Hovden told TF.

 

via The Verge:

Artist M.C. Escher died in 1972, leaving behind iconic optical illusions that are now generations old. Painter Joy Garnett was born in 1965, and her career is in full swing. But when nanoscience researcher Robert Hovden copied works from both for a recent project, he could use Garnett’s with impunity. Escher’s estate, meanwhile, thinks he’s breaking the law.

Unless he told you, though, you’d never know he’s ripping off someone else’s work.

When Art Exceeds Perception looks like an exhibit of blank gray discs. Those silicon discs, however, hold a series of miniscule etchings: sketches made by a process called nanoscale lithography, in which charged ions blast away silicon atoms like an invisible chisel. The technique can be used for beautiful effects, like sandcastles printed on a single grain of sand. In this case, the images' individual details are roughly a tenth of a micron wide, and each picture is so small that it’s impossible to see even with a high-powered optical microscope — you’d have to turn to more recent inventions like the scanning tunneling microscope. At Cornell University’s Jill Stuart Gallery, where the installation will hang until December, "people will stare, and they usually find small imperfections in the disk," says Hovden. "They think maybe that's where the art is. But probably not."

Above: Joy Garnett, "Laylah K.", 2003, oil on canvas, 26x36 inches. Courtesy of the artist. CC-BY-SA.

via CNET:

You're looking at a reproduction of an M.C. Escher drawing, but you'd never know it. It's inscribed onto the surface of a silicon crystal wafer at a scale 500 times smaller than the eye can see.

Robert Hovden etched the Escher tessellations using focused high-speed ions. Why? Because he's a nanoscientist who spends his days studying objects with electron microscopes. And because maybe no one will notice he's copying famous works of art if the reproductions are so tiny.

But don't call the intellectual-property cops just yet. Hovden has copied famous works of art deliberately and openly for his exhibit “When Art Exceeds Perception,” an exploration of plagiarism in the age of bits and bytes.

"To take a piece of art, copy it and share it with the world without the original artists' permission is traditionally viewed as wrong and, in most cases, violates copyright laws...However, in a digital era where information is encrypted and stored in the atomic bits of nanoscale devices, answers to philosophical, moral and legal questions surrounding copyright become muddled," reads Hovden's statement for the exhibit, part of the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial  "Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale in an Age of Nanotechnology."

For the campus-wide show, which runs through December 22, artists and scientists "explore the cultural and human consequences of seeing the world at the micro and macro levels, through nanoscience and networked communications." Participants have done things like render the microscopic textures of a sheet of paper as a 3D inhabitable landscape and create wearable sensors to detect methane and poisonous gases.

Hovden, a Cornell Ph.D. student in applied physics, etched works of art onto the atomically smooth, flat surfaces of silicon wafers used in modern digital devices. He chose works "where copyright is relevant to the discussion" -- pieces by Escher, Magritte, Matisse and contemporary artist Joy Garnett, who releases work under a Creative Commons license.

Above: Robert Hovden: "Nano-Laylah K," 2014, nanolithography. Dimensions: diminutive. Courtesy of Robert Hovden.

via Art Law Blog:

M.C. Escher is well-known for his finely crafted compositions integrating mathematics and art, creating brain-teasing images, transforming creatures and impossible architectures. Escher’s optical illusions, explorations of geometric patterns and perspectives make him a favorite among scientists and mathematicians. So it is no surprise that Nanoscientist Robert Hovden chose Escher’s Regular Division of the Plane  as one of the microscopic etchings in his new show, When Art Exceeds Perception. Hovden chose this Escher work for its ” lovely tessellation with symmetries that can be found in the crystalline silicon substrate on which it was etched.” Unfortunately, the Escher Estate sees the use of Escher’s image as nothing more than a copyright infringement.

As readers of the Art Law Journal are keenly aware, Copyright Law has few bright lines, made even hazier when confronting issues surrounding new technologies, such as nanolithography. Is copying art that nobody can see an infringement? Does this new technological process, or the pattern created by millions of Escher’s, transform the work such that it is considered fair use? Does an analysis of this issue even work within the bounds of the Copyright Act and current case law? Let’s take a look.

Above: Focused Ion Beam device. Courtesy of Robert Hovden.

LINKS

Cornell Council For the Arts
Exhibition: WHEN ART EXCEEDS PERCEPTION
Artist:  Robert Hovden (Applied Physics)
Dates:  Oct 30, 2014 - Dec 15, 2014
Installation Location: Jill Stuart Gallery, Human Ecology Building

Cornell Council For the Arts - Intimate Cosmologies Projects Biennial


PRESS

Torrentfreak
Scientist Deliberately Pirates Art on a Nanoscopic Scale
By Andy on November 2, 2014

ACM News
Cornell Biennial Celebrates Nanotech as Art
By Anne Ju, November 4, 2014

WIRED (Germany)
Design | Robert Hovden schrumpft Raubkopien, bis sie keine mehr sind
06 November 2014 von Max Biederbeck

Above: "Rofl"

The Verge
These are the tiniest copyright violations ever made:
Good artists copy. Great artists steal, in nanoscale
By Adi Robertson on November 19, 2014

CMOA Blog (Carnegie Museum of Art)
How Museums Affect the Brain, the Art of the Cover, and Other News
By Matthew Newton, Associate Editor, Friday, November 21st, 2014

Art Law Journal
Artist is in Trouble for Nanoscale Copies of an M.C. Escher
Steve Schlackman, November 22, 2014

CNET
These works of art are too tiny to see (but trust us, they're there)
A Cornell Ph.D. student in applied physics etches famous works of art -- Escher, Magritte, Matisse -- onto silicon wafers used in modern digital devices.
by Leslie Katz, December 3, 2014

Every Eye (Italy)
Robert Hovden: copyright e nanotecnologia - Speciale
Inviato il 03/12/2014 da Luca Chiappini


+++

They Are the World

This article first appeared in Art21 Magazine, Oct/Nov 2013 Issue: 'Becoming an Artist':

For the new Art21 Magazine, Joy Garnett launches her new column with some thoughts on copying and archival tendencies in the 21st century.

 

Christian Marclay. The Clock (video still), 2010; single-channel video with sound; 24 hours. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

 

Copy That!

They Are the World

 by Joy Garnett | Oct 8, 2013

I sometimes forget that my students have always lived with digital media, not to mention with the ethos of information sharing that digital technologies engender. As digital natives, they were born at or after the onset of digital mainstream culture. They have never experienced a world before laptops, personal computers, and smartphones. They have never traveled abroad without the convenience of ATMs or booked a flight without the ability to check-in online and print their e-tickets. They have probably never received paper bills for their credit cards, and they don’t use stamps. They have never lived outside the network or off the grid; the grid is the air around them.

My students were teenagers when Aaron Swartz (at fourteen years old) cowrote the specification for the RSS feed. They are his peers. As young adults, they have eased off their PlayStations (for the most part!) to enter more challenging pursuits with the help of ever-more sophisticated personal gadgetry and software. They came of age with participatory reblogs like Tumblr, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, and all manner of social media. They tend to stream their music and watch movies via torrents; they learn of world events through online news channels and blogs and, since 2006, Twitter.

Now, as studio artists in college or graduate school, they face a career landscape that offers them more varied choices than mine did. For one thing, the boundaries between careers in so-called commercial art and more personal, gallery-driven art have become blurred or nonexistent. The business of art has become a preoccupation, even as the art world is transitioning away from its entrenched and outdated models. New possibilities and strange bedfellows are welcome. But regardless of whether my students are interested in pursuing careers in academia or animation, or in the less dependable world of commercial galleries, their studio practice is part of the digital world—their world. Priorities have shifted away from an earlier paradigm of authorship with its well-worn image of a creator in isolated reflection. This is probably true for the rest of us, too, we analogue natives. But even if one works in relative solitude, the ethos of the creative commons and the practice of “share and share alike” has infused all our thinking to a much greater extent than we realize or are willing to admit.

Penelope Umbrico. For Sale/TVs From Craigslist, 2009; C-print on metallic photo paper; dimensions variable. Courtesy LMAK Projects, New York.

 

Whether primarily invested in painting or animation, glitch art or video, net art, conceptualism, or social-media performance, most artists today, but especially younger artists, lean decidedly towards research and experimentation across all mediums. We are nothing if not interdisciplinary.

As an artist and analogue native, I first became enamored of new media art in the late 1990s. Along with countless other artists, including those who would continue to work with traditional mediums, I began using the Internet to transmit and share images and information, to index my source material, and to archive my work. The Internet, so many of us felt, was really a medium. As such, we knew it would afford us new possibilities to juxtapose and recontextualize—to copy, repurpose, and share—methods understood to be part of the artist’s tradecraft at least since Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, echoed nearly a decade later by Hal Foster in his October essay, “An Archival Impulse.”

Foster identified this archival tendency as an impulse that is present in certain artists who prefer to “elaborate on the found image” and object, and who harbor an insatiable desire to “make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present.”[1] I would argue that this impulse, rather than being the domain of what Foster calls “archival artists,” is in fact present in all artists. Historically, artists have referenced, appropriated, and quoted from the world around them as well as from other art in order to produce new meanings and contexts. We are all archival artists.

Bernd and Hilla Becher. Gas Tanks, 1983–92; gelatin silver prints. Courtesy C4 Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

 

Today, being an artist means negotiating the vast digital library that we, as a global culture, have created for ourselves. For all of us, the archive and its exigencies are paramount, and we dip in consciously or unconsciously as we think and play and tinker with ideas, meanings, mediums, and forms. The tools we use to access this archive have changed. And so it follows that our perception of the archive has changed.

Along with change comes discomfort. The most obvious point of intergenerational dissonance I sense while teaching digital natives is their attitude toward copying: they haven’t got one. While artists of previous generations are often painfully aware of the shift away from the possibility of controlling copies and reuse of their work, or parts of their work, my students don’t see copying as problematic, either from a practical or ethical standpoint. They don’t think about it, not just because they take copying for granted; it is implicit in everything they do. There is no question that we inhabit a living archive that we generate.

 

Dina Kelberman. I’m Google (screen grab), 2011; Tumblr blog.

 

Copying is as old as humankind’s foray into making things. Image-making processes and technologies, from oil painting to digital imaging, all entail some form of copying. And of course, not long ago, photography was a new and, to some, threatening copying technology that married hardware to wetware long before software was invented. So it is strange to think that copying, a most natural human act and one that is integral to creative production, has come to be seen in such a negative light. One could say that copying has been given a bad rap, demonized by an old system trying to close the floodgates or at least contain the creative behavior that new technologies have engendered. I have written elsewhere about the steady stream of anti-copying propaganda launched over the past few decades by the music and movie industries and how mimicry, memory, and archiving—all processes integral to making art—require copying.

It seems to me that younger artists, the digital natives among us, will help us to ease away from our conflicted attitudes towards copying, appropriation, remixing, and mashing. They have fully embraced the archive. They are the archive. And they see, naturally more clearly than we do, the beauty and creative potential inherent in the technologies that they live and breathe.

___________

[1] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 4.

 

Joy Garnett is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. She blogs about art and open source culture at NEWSgrist.com, and is Arts Editor for Cultural Politics, a contemporary media theory journal published by Duke University Press. She is currently writing a book and working on a visual archive. She is addicted to Instagram. 

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Aaron Swartz: The world was a better place with him in it

Here's to Aaron Swartz.

An all-too-brief compendium:

BoingBoing
RIP, Aaron Swartz
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NYTimes
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Lessig Blog, v2
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ARTINFO
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Aaron Swartz found dead Friday
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Time Magazine
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Boingboing
2600 radio tribute to Aaron Swartz
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Techdirt
Internet Freedom Day, Watch Aaron Swartz Explain How SOPA Was Stopped
by Mike Masnick, Fri, Jan 18th 2013

 

Tonight: Fair Use & Contemporary Art: A Panel Discussion

FAIR USE & CONTEMPORARY ART: A PANEL DISCUSSION
Wednesday, October 24, 2012, 7pm – 9pm

Visual Arts Center of New Jersey
Main Gallery, 68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901
www.artcenternj.org

This event is free and open to all

Join us for a dynamic panel discussion that will explore the creative methods and ideas associated with fair use in contemporary art. The concept of fair use, described as the right to use another’s copyrighted material, under certain circumstances, for purposes such as criticism, news reporting, teaching, and research without the need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder is a contentious issue in the art world today. Joy Garnett, New York painter and writer who is featured in Picture Takers, will moderate the panel. Participants include Nicole Fleetwood, Associate Professor of American Studies at Rutgers University, Nate Harrison, New York artist and writer, Chad Rutkowski, a partner with the law firm of Woodcock Washburn in Philadelphia, and Penelope Umbrico, New York artist featured in Picture Takers.

RSVP is required for this free event. Please call 908.273.9121

This panel is in conjunction with the exhibition Picture Takers curated by Mary Birmingham.

Participating artists: Paul Chiappe, Willie Cole, Anne-Karin Furunes, Joy Garnett, Gail Gregg, Diana Jensen, Cassandra C. Jones, Whitfield Lovell, Penelope Umbrico and Aaron Williams.

An exhibition catalog is available.  More info.


MODERATOR

Joy Garnett
Joy Garnett is a New York painter and writer who also works with social media to create objects and images. Garnett's paintings, based on found images of explosive events, locate instances of the apocalyptic sublime in mass media culture. Her social media performances examine the intersections of our digital and material worlds. Garnett studied painting at the École des beaux-arts in Paris and is the recipient of an MFA in painting from The City College of New York. She has received numerous fellowships, including a grant from Anonymous Was a Woman and a commission from The Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. Her work is in the collections of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, Philip Morris, The West Collection, and numerous private collections. She is represented by Winkleman Gallery, NY.

PANELISTS

Nicole Fleetwood
Nicole Fleetwood is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She researches and teaches in the areas of visual culture and media studies, black cultural studies, gender theory, and culture and technology studies. She is the author of Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press 2011). Her articles appear in American Quarterly, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, Art Journal, and edited anthologies. Fleetwood has worked as a consultant and has collaborated with a number of arts organizations and programs, including the Ford Foundation’s Artography initiative, New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Visual Knowledge Program, Walker Art Center, Southern Exposure, San Francisco Arts Commission, and Youth Speaks. Fleetwood is currently researching a study on prison art and visuality.

Nate Harrison
Nate Harrison is an artist and writer working at the intersection of intellectual property, cultural production and the formation of creative processes in modern media. His work has been exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Kunstverein in Hamburg, among others. Nate has also lectured at a variety of institutions, including Experience Music Project, Seattle, the Art and Law Residency Program, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, New York and SOMA Summer, Mexico City. From 2004-2008 he co-directed the Los Angeles project space ESTHETICS AS A SECOND LANGUAGE. Nate earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts and is a doctoral candidate, Art and Media History, Theory and Criticism in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego. Currently Nate is on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and lives in Brooklyn, New York with a lovely wife and two pesky cats.

Chad Rutkowski
Chad Rutkowski is a partner with the law firm of Woodcock Washburn in Philadelphia, PA and chairs the firm’s New Media practice group. Chad’s clients include traditional print media companies experiencing the transition to new forms of media; a platform provider that is helping top universities embrace web-based learning; and a software company that creates tools for enhancing social media experiences. Chad is the chair of the Philadelphia chapter of the Copyright Society of the USA, and regularly counsels his clients on copyright and trademark issues, including fair use issues. In addition to his work as a lawyer, Chad acts as the Business Manager for Throwaway Horse LLC, creator of the well-known Ulysses Seen iPad app and website.

Penelope Umbrico
Penelope Umbrico has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. She has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany; Rencontres d’Arles, France; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge; Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY; International Center of Photography, NY, among others. Her work is in permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tampa Museum of Art, FL.; International Center of Photography NY. Umbrico is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Deutsche Bank Fellow - New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, a Peter S Reed Grant; an Anonymous Was A Woman Award; a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; and an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship. Her first monograph, "Penelope Umbrico (photographs)", was published by Aperture in the spring of 2011.

Exile in Princeville: Canal Zone Panel at Printed Matter - full audio

 

Iron Chef meets Canal Zone at Printed Matter. Photo Courtesy Brent Burkett (aka @HeartAsArena)

 

Apparently, our recent panel discussion from last Saturday at Printed Matter has legs. Organized by Greg Allen with Chris Habib, and me... and a lively audience.... we tried to focus on Richard Prince's contested Canal Zone series itself, instead of becoming hopelessly embroiled in another hyper-emotional discussion about copyright. Good idea from Greg, who felt it high time we take a serious look at the actual paintings, which where coldly ignored by the very court that banished them.

I made a recording which can now be freely streamed, downloaded and redistributed via Archive.org:

 

Printed Matter held a panel over the weekend about Prince v. Cariou, [sic!] the ongoing legal battle about Richard Prince’s “Canal Zone” with Joy Garnett, Greg Allen, and Chris Habib. It’s archived online, and well worth a listen! [Internet Archive]

~ Rozalia Jovanovic 9/24 9:04am, Morning Links, The Flâneur Edition, GalleristNY

 

Thanks GalleristNY!

Our talk also seems to have caught the attention of Richard Prince (not least because Prince is a passionate bibliophile and an exhibitor in the upcoming New York Art Book Fair, as is Printed Matter):

(To be read from the bottom up)

 

More from greg.org:

 

September 24, 2012

The Secret Ingredient Turned Out To Be Infringiness

Well that cat's out of the bag.

Joy Garnett posted audio from the Richard Prince Canal Zone discussion she, Chris Habib and I had Saturday night at Printed Matter. It's available for streaming or download at the Internet Archive. OR for remixing, autotuning, and stop-action animating, whatever you want, since artpanelsjustwanttobefree it's public domain.

It clocks in at almost an hour and a half, and who knows what you'll find in there. I was too high on life and drunk on power--I was running the projector, too-- to really remember what was said. Though I do remember something about megayachts, Perry Mason vs Law & Order; and wishing you were Rasta and/or punk. So really, something for everyone.

Many thanks to Chris and Joy, to Keith and Max and the PM Crew, and especially to the awesome and engaged audience. We'll do it again for either the damages hearing or the Supreme Court phase.

Cariou v. Prince Meets Iron Chef, Discussion & Crit at Printed Matter, NYC [archive.org]
Joy Garnett's flickr photoset clearly reveals I have no veto power over her photos of me [flickr]

 

What more can I say? Oh yeah: Rasta La Vista baybe!