What's the most valuable resource in a forest? It's not the tallest tree, a biologist might say - it's the nutrient-rich carpet of organic detritus decaying on the forest floor, from which all new life springs.
On Friday, Web designer Steev Hise will launch a new site called detritus.net, dedicated to the kind of recycling - in matters of culture and art - that keeps a forest thriving, and makes copyright lawyers sick.
A resource for the sly plagiarist, the subversive satirist, the artful appropriator, and the canny cut-up artist, detritus.net is aiming to be a central clearinghouse for those involved in the kind of culture hacking that is thriving in the digital domain.
Detritus.net will highlight artists - like John Oswald, Negativland, and the Tape Beatles - whose pursuit of their own recombinant visions have landed them on the front lines of the intellectual property wars. Along with archives of texts on the subject, continually changing exhibits, and community-building resources, detritus.net will go out on a legal limb to offer a haven for what Hise calls "endangered" art: works that have been legally banned or threatened by court actions, like Oswald's Plunderphonic, Negativland's U2, and Mark Napier's "Distorted Barbie" Web site.
"Like never before in history, we have a vast array of previous culture that's available to anyone, and available to be bent to anyone's creative vision," Hise declares, recalling that one of his former teachers used to call the range of cultural data available to contemporary artists the "Great Smorgasbord."
Though renegade DIY and the erosion of the Big Media monopoly on culture-making have practically become synonymous with the Web, composer and detritus.net contributor Bob Ostertag points out that recombining elements of other work to create new work is a lot older than Photoshop and trip-hop sampling. What detritus.net is tapping into, Ostertag says, is a timeless source of creative vitality.
"Folk music is all about appropriation, and lifting music from older sources is how all those classical composers learned to write," says Ostertag, who has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet and exponents of edgy improvisation like Fred Frith. "Taking elements from pop culture and recontextualizing them is supposed to be this radical thing, but drag queens have been doing it for 100 years.... People say, 'Anything can be an instrument now - you can bang two garbage can lids together and sample them,' but 50 years ago, John Cage was banging garbage can lids together to make music. Digital technology makes it easier - but you didn't need a computer to paint a beard on the Mona Lisa."
Ostertag's own music so deeply challenges entrenched assumptions about intellectual property, he explains, that the US Copyright Office has declined to issue copyrights for several of his compositions. In one instance, he asked the members of his trio, Say No More, to improvise solos, which were recorded by Ostertag, and digitally reconfigured into a composition. Then he asked the members of his band to learn their transformed parts, and play them live in clubs. Then Ostertag recorded those performances, and wove the tapes of those shows into another composition, which the musicians learned and played live.
By the time the third Say No More album arrived at the Copyright Office, Ostertag says, the agency was confounded - who owned this music, the composer or the musicians?
It's knotty questions like that that will be the bread-and-butter of detritus.net, Hise promises. He says he'll offer free bandwidth and server space to artists working in these areas, like a small record label called Illegal Arts, whose releases will consist of "plundered," transmuted recordings of popular artists like Beck. Hise - who refined his community-growing skills as a producer and sysadmin at Cyborganic - hopes that a "highly focused community" of artists will evolve on his site.
Other areas of detritus.net will be devoted to discussions of copier art, collage, critical theory, and the legal challenges facing artists like Napier, whose "Distorted Barbie" site was stripped of much of its content following a cease-and-desist order from Mattel last month. With Napier's original site mirrored at detritus.net, is Hise himself worried that he'll be getting a letter from a lawyer someday?
"I'm hoping that there will be enough support from our colleagues doing similar work that if we're approached by lawyers, we can band together and get pro bono legal defense," Hise says.
"Big corporations are trying to intimidate people with scary letters," he adds, "but they don't really want those cases to get to court. If they did, and a decision was found against them, it would be a huge breakthrough for artists. Eventually, sites like detritus.net are going to change the way intellectual property is looked at."
