Books by Martin Zeilinger
Found Footage & Collage Films: Selected Works, 2022
An essential reading for understanding the aesthetics and contexts of found footage filmmaking an... more An essential reading for understanding the aesthetics and contexts of found footage filmmaking and handmade cinema in contemporary moving image culture.
How do artistic experiments with artificial intelligence problematize human-centered notions of c... more How do artistic experiments with artificial intelligence problematize human-centered notions of creative agency, authorship, and ownership? Offering a wide-ranging discussion of contemporary digital art practices, philosophical and technical considerations of AI, posthumanist thought, and emerging issues of intellectual property and the commons, this book is firmly positioned against the anthropomorphic spectacle of “creative AI.” It proposes instead the concept of the posthumanist agential assemblage, and invites readers to consider what new types of creative practice, what reconfigurations of the author function, and what critical interventions become possible when AI art provokes tactical entanglements between aesthetics, law, and capital.
Journal Articles by Martin Zeilinger
Video Game Art Reader 2.1, 2018
The subject of survival in virtual environments has emerged as a potent site of critical and arti... more The subject of survival in virtual environments has emerged as a potent site of critical and artistic intervention in video games. Influenced by traditions in performance art practices, in particular the critiquing of socio- political power systems through the radical, performative use of bodies, many current artists effectively use existing game platforms to address conflicts at the intersection between the individual and system. This essay explores the performative affordances of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) game worlds as a research tool, subject of critique, or theatrical stage. Though survival is difficult to address successfully in virtual interventions, the trope of survival as coded in game environments can be mobilized by virtual performance artists to address problematic limits and constraints dictated by the algorithmic systems framing gameplay.
Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 2017
This essay explores how mētis – understood as the appropriation of dominant power and its inscrip... more This essay explores how mētis – understood as the appropriation of dominant power and its inscription in the resistant force of alternative practices – can serve as a framing device for theorising tactical practices of digital culture. Revisiting critical discourses on mētis here serves as a framework for arguing that digital practices can simultaneously exist within and without (i.e., against) capital, and as such can become a viable oppositional stance that derives its power from precisely the contradictions that also delin-eate its limits of criticality. My discussion is linked to theories of appropriation, biopower, the multitude, and cognitive capitalism; my arguments are supported by reference to a series of examples in the form of experimental media art works which, as I argue, inhabit the critical potential of digital mētic action.
(NOTE: FULLY OPEN ACCESS – Download using the attached link)
In a global economic landscape of hy... more (NOTE: FULLY OPEN ACCESS – Download using the attached link)
In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial artmarket have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.
[CONTACT ME FOR A DIGITAL COPY] This essay concerns the emerging practice of live coding (i.e., t... more [CONTACT ME FOR A DIGITAL COPY] This essay concerns the emerging practice of live coding (i.e., the real time programming) of electronic music in text-based programming environments), and explores how this practice can be deployed as a tactic of resistance against the overreach of restrictive intellectual property regimes. I begin by surveying copyright and patent law discourse to situate live coding in the field of existing perspectives on cultural ownership. Drawing on legal theory and critical discourse on improvised music in other genres, I then argue that the dynamic, palimpsestic, and improvisational qualities of live coding contradict many of copyright law’s core assumptions regarding the nature of ‘fixed’ works of art. These contradictions can be usefully mobilized for the purpose of resisting the large-scale legal and economic enclosures of the digital cultural commons. As I conclude, live coding can, from its current, inherently ambivalent position on copyright matters, develop a strong, performance-based critical stance against the imbalances and shortcomings of intellectual property regimes and outdated notions of exclusive cultural ownership. Integrating artistic practices with evolving IP critiques, such resistance can go a long way towards highlighting readily available opportunities to oppose and confound the law creatively.
Through a multitude of restrictions imposed on how creative expressions bound in digital media ca... more Through a multitude of restrictions imposed on how creative expressions bound in digital media can be produced, accessed and disseminated, contemporary intellectual property regimes strongly impact how musicians are able (or unable) to practice their craft. This essay considers how chipmusic, a fairly recent form of electronic music to emerge from the underground into popular awareness, deals with this impact. I survey the chiptune scene’s creative approach of reusing outdated technology and content from the era of 8-bit video games as well as the community’s dissemination strategies, and highlight points of contention between the critical perspectives embodied in this art form and contemporary intellectual property policy. In exploring chipmusic’s close ties to appropriation-based production techniques that are frequently seen as interfering with narrow concepts of intellectual property rights, I describe this music scene as an active site for implicit critiques of restrictive copyright regimes. In doing so, I draw, in part, on the art form’s important, if idle, links to the ‘demoscene’ amateur hacking culture of the 1980s. This will be contrasted with the chiptune community’s current reliance on Creative Commons licenses in regulating use of and access to its creations. I question whether discussing this alternative dissemination and licensing scheme can adequately describe the shared cultural norms and values that motivate chiptune practices. Responding to this question, I conclude this essay by offering the concept of a moral economy of appropriation-based creative techniques as a new framework for understanding digital creative practices which – like chiptune music – resist conventional intellectual property policy both in form and in content.
Remixing Cultures and the Imagining of Alternative Intellectual Property Policies
In theory, legal taxonomies acknowledge how creative, productive, and beneficial remixing practic... more In theory, legal taxonomies acknowledge how creative, productive, and beneficial remixing practices can be. This does not reflect the realities of how such law is enforced, however. This paper is concerned with how creative practitioners and users deal with this problem. I argue that it is in the lived praxis of remixing communities that ‘para-legal’ contexts which challenge traditional intellectual property policies are established.
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2009
If driving has today really become a Western "metaphor for being" (Hutchinson), then common roads... more If driving has today really become a Western "metaphor for being" (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming "Right lane must exit" or "Through traffic merge left", inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel indivi-dualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, "nomad science" and "state science" (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic "amnesia of driving" (Baudrillard). Are a city's multitudes of cars resistant "projectiles" (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic "sites of containment" (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between "untamable" democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the "masking screen of the windshield" (Virilio). As they "quit stal-ling", both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad - one a driver who remains on the road but goes "under the radar", the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films' metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the innercity road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control.
Chapters by Martin Zeilinger
Parsing Digital, 2018
This short essay introduces my ongoing project Pattern Recognition, which explores how evolving m... more This short essay introduces my ongoing project Pattern Recognition, which explores how evolving machine agency in artist–computer collaboration impacts our understanding of concepts such as ‘authorship’ and ‘cultural ownership’. Based on the appropriation and reworking of early works
of computer art, Pattern Recognition develops
a combined critical and artistic approach, in which detailed analysis of the original works is an inevitable prerequisite for reworking them artistically. In this way, ‘authorship’, ‘creative agency’ and ‘originality’ are engaged both critically and creatively, and the project contributes to ongoing aesthetic discourse on digital art practice, while simultaneously intersecting with emergent socio-legal issues connected to contemporary art. Interloping on both theory and practice, the project lastly also provides a context
for exploring the critical role artistic practice can play in – or as – research.
The Perils of Pedagogy, 2013
Eyes Everywhere: The Global Growth of Camera Surveillance, 2012
In a recent essay, the urban geographer Amy Siciliano recounted a curious anecdote: from the vide... more In a recent essay, the urban geographer Amy Siciliano recounted a curious anecdote: from the video surveillance control room of a public housing project in Toronto, she observed how two teenagers dismantled and destroyed a surveillance camera -while being recorded by the very device they were in the process of demolishing (Siciliano 2007). Siciliano was not a live witness to this event; what she watched from the safe confines of the housing project's remote control room was, rather, an archival copy that provided an equally safe temporal remove. Yet, despite this spatial and temporal distance, the tape had an oddly visceral effect on the researcher: watching it, Siciliano suddenly felt implicated in the 'narrative' that played out on the screen, and became very conscious of how surveillance technology can distort and invert the social relations and, indeed, the logic of the 'reality' it seeks to con trol. 'The movements of the youth were methodical and unhurried. They made no effort to conceal their identities ... I became acutely aware that as the viewer, I, in fact, was what was "represented" and they-the youth-the "reality'" (Siciliano 2007: 53-4). The surveillance camera, then, had not simply recorded reality, but instead had somehow constituted it -'[b ]y destroying the instrument that marked my presence as a viewer, the youth effectively made me present, exposing the mediating agent as a determining factor of the event itself (54). How, then, has this camera served the assumed purposes of surveillance technology, considering that all the device was able to document was its own destruction? Can such a recording be accepted as an authoritative, unbiased document, or must it be acknowledged, rather, that the recording is an effect of the presence of the surveillance apparatus -which in tum prompted the action that was being recorded? Who, by extension, is the 'author' of the recorded act -the youths who performed the destructive event, or the surveillance apparatus that staged it?
SAGE Handbook of IP (eds. Deborah Halbert and Matthew David), 2014
This chapter concerns the emergence and growing popularity of the international pirate party move... more This chapter concerns the emergence and growing popularity of the international pirate party movement. We survey critical approaches to the phenomenon of piracy, consider the usefulness of this concept in discussions of digital practices commonly labeled ‘media piracy,’ and discuss the role of the pirate parties in opposing conflicts around these practices. Contrasting the international pirate party movement with the historical figure of the maritime pirate, we approach the modern-day pirates through Christopher Kelty’s concept of the ‘geek,’ which describes individuals motivated by the desire to preserve their ability to use digital tools for the sharing of information, communication, and creative purposes. Our discussion highlights some of the gross imbalances imposed by current copyright laws on digital culture and on the private use of digital technologies, and proposes that the activities of today’s so-called pirates can be understood as a critical commentary on the vilification and criminalization to which everyday users of digital technologies are often subjected. In considering how these imbalances are reflected in the rhetoric of the pirate party movement, ultimately we suggest that the movement represents an experimental arena of political dissent and policy reform efforts.
Curatorial Essays by Martin Zeilinger
Curatorial essay for 'The Algorithmic Imagination'
Improvisation and Play in New Media, Games and Experimental Sound Practices
Editors’ Note: Welcome to Sounding Out!‘s December forum entitled “Sound, Improvisation and New M... more Editors’ Note: Welcome to Sounding Out!‘s December forum entitled “Sound, Improvisation and New Media Art.” This series explores the nature of improvisation and its relationship to appropriative play cultures within new media art and contemporary sound practice. This series will engage directly with practitioners, who either deploy or facilitate play and improvisation through their work in sonic new media cultures.
The first essay in this series draws from a constellation of disciplinary perspectives that investigate these critical valences, and posits both play and improvisation as critical interventions which can expose, critique and interrupt the proprietary techniques and strategies of contemporary consumer media technologies.
This essay approaches the audio-visual works and installations included in the exhibition A Total... more This essay approaches the audio-visual works and installations included in the exhibition A Total Spectacle (Atomic Arts Centre, Winnipeg, 2013) through the critical writing of Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord. In discussing a variety of media events, I consider how the spectacle oscillates between a powerful tool of propaganda and persuasion, on the one hand, and a radical tool of political resistance, on the other. Drawing on Baudrillard’s discussion of the mass- mediated simulation of reality, I begin by surveying how the mainstream spectacle, deployed through news media and the entertainment industry, continues to serve capitalist agendas. This is contrasted with Debord’s concept of detournement, which aims to re-appropriate the spectacle for counter-cultural political purposes. These critical perspectives are then linked to the art works in the exhibition through the discussion of a several spectacular media events that bridge the divide between Baudrillard’s ‘hyperreal’ (exemplified by the famous footage of the O.J. Simpson car chase and a more recent viral YouTube video) and Debord’s detourned, politically ‘activated’ everyday event (exemplified by Christoph Schlingensief’s theater performance Please Love Austria! [2000] and Nam Jun Paik’s installation piece TV Buddha [1974]).
Feb 8 - 23 2014, InterAccess Media Arts Centre, Toronto
Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival 2... more Feb 8 - 23 2014, InterAccess Media Arts Centre, Toronto
Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival 2014
Co-curated with Skot Deeming and Diana Poulsen
Feb 20-23 2014, Videofag, 187 August Ave, Kensington Market, Toronto
Vector Game + Art Convergenc... more Feb 20-23 2014, Videofag, 187 August Ave, Kensington Market, Toronto
Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival 2014
Co-curated with Skot Deeming and Diana Poulsen
Uploads
Books by Martin Zeilinger
Journal Articles by Martin Zeilinger
In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial artmarket have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.
Chapters by Martin Zeilinger
of computer art, Pattern Recognition develops
a combined critical and artistic approach, in which detailed analysis of the original works is an inevitable prerequisite for reworking them artistically. In this way, ‘authorship’, ‘creative agency’ and ‘originality’ are engaged both critically and creatively, and the project contributes to ongoing aesthetic discourse on digital art practice, while simultaneously intersecting with emergent socio-legal issues connected to contemporary art. Interloping on both theory and practice, the project lastly also provides a context
for exploring the critical role artistic practice can play in – or as – research.
Curatorial Essays by Martin Zeilinger
The first essay in this series draws from a constellation of disciplinary perspectives that investigate these critical valences, and posits both play and improvisation as critical interventions which can expose, critique and interrupt the proprietary techniques and strategies of contemporary consumer media technologies.
Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival 2014
Co-curated with Skot Deeming and Diana Poulsen
Vector Game + Art Convergence Festival 2014
Co-curated with Skot Deeming and Diana Poulsen