Below you find several art projects concerning intellectual property & copyright issues which evolve aspects of authorship:






Copy Right Now, film, 1 min, 2010.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation"
Oscar Wilde


Querying whether copying is similar to imitation and even to creativity where contemporary practices such as mixing, jockeying, open-source, reflection have become a norm. This line of inquiry focuses on mimesis as practice: acts of imitation, simulation, or assimilation. Are copyright rules and licenses suitable for nowadays potency of creativity?

The techniques, agents, and methods come into play at sites where similarities are being produced – whether in artistic, cultic, technological or scientific processes. Following Walter Benjamin, all these kinds of mimesis can be understood as expressions of a “mimetic capacity” that encompasses the recognition as well as the production of similarities and thus combines cognitive, practical, and aesthetical dimensions. Mimetic practices are at the same time both active and passive; they can be playful or strategic, intentional and goal-oriented or involuntary and aimless.

While the “mimicry” of animals was interpreted as a strategy in the evolutionary “struggle for existence” by its discoverers in the 19th century, Roger Caillois finally expanded the term into a theory of mimetisme that strived to expose analogies between biological and cultural phenomena of imitation, simulation and adaptation.

Thus art, religion, as well as cultural phantasms, appeared as repetitions of animal behaviour patterns. This background can serve as a point of departure to inquire into the ambivalence that is inherent in seeing similarities: The organization of the world according to similarities, to perceive patterns and make them legible through their semblance, is as much part of the creative economy as it is a characteristic of such forms of knowledge that are regarded as being pseudo-scientific.

This artwork can be shown as a film (1 min or 1.5 min long) for screening and also can be exhibited as a looped video installation, single-channel projection.

The project has been exhibited:

2011 Open Studios, Black Box, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, Sweden;
2010 BAC! Barcelona Art Contemporary Festival, Entering the Fourth Dimension: Time, Encapsulated Times, H2O gallery, Barcelona, Spain;
2010 Madatac, Audiovisual Contemporary Art, Room Berlanga de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;

2010 4th Cairo Video Festival, Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt;

2010 Transfera video arte #44, art TV broadcast, Madrid, Spain;




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Copier Right, original artworks, copy machine, copies, 2011.

15th Tallinn Print Triennial, Kumu art museum (Estonia) has invited me to exhibit new work Copier Right. Artwork consists of a copying-machine and it produces xero-copies of well known and copyrighted pictorial artworks. Copies are made on A3 and show very zoomed-in parts of the artwork. Copies are free of charge. New artworks could be patched from copies.

Vygandas Simbelis is interested in the topic keywords of the contemporary artistic practices, such as citing, mixing, sampling, copyrights and open source. The focus of his installation is a copy machine that prints out Paul Gauguin’s painting Tahitian Women on the Beach square-by-square. Anyone who has used file-sharing programmes knows that copyright problems can be avoided by dividing files into small components. This is why musical works or films can not be downloaded whole from a specific Internet page but must come piece-by-piece from friends’ computers around the world. In other words, when the work has been split into sufficiently small pieces, the author is no longer relevant in the legal sense. The Tahitian Women on the Beach that appears in small squares from the copy machine poses questions about copyrights in the sense, as well as in the broader cultural sense. Did Gauguin live and work on Tahiti as a white man of his era, ending up on an island paradise that offered him extraordinary nature, exotic models and unselfconscious culture, which he could use as material in his work? Or was his relationship with the island and its inhabitants deeper, more synthesizing and more participatory? Many authors and cultures have not had a say in the reproduction of their creative legacy and for many Europeans, the conception of Tahiti that still prevails today originated with Gauguin.

Liisa Kaljula, catalogue of 15th Tallinn Print Triennial.



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The photographic investigation into already made and composed still lives was a surprisingly strong flashback to my personal experience. Educated as a traditional artist in the academic way I had experienced the power of still life in drawing and painting from young days.

This documentation is taken within Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, in 2007-2009. There are still lives constructed by professors in the painting department. And it is also a heavy presentational message from this institution with all practices around. Visual criticism towards academic discourse experienced in the period of academic studies for practice-based PhD. The title of the project is metaphorical and could be paraphrased into Stagnated Academic Life.

Academia Nature Morte / Academic Still Life, photography series, 2007-2009. Photograph is accompanied by student's study painting of the same still life. Link to photographs.



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Coopyright, collective drawings from 1999.

Drawing rules are set up and participants draw their own part of the cooperate picture. One participant can draw no more than abstract, and pass the drawing to the next participant. The artwork can not be finished by one participant. One person can draw just a few lines and the other can continue. Cooperative art act.
Continuous, still lasting project from 1999.

Rules. Try it at home with some others:

1. Draw as little as possible. (No more than 1 line. No more than 1 colour.)
2. Extend already existing drawing.
3. Do not draw a finished object, recognizable forms.
4. Leave picture unfinished.
5. Pass a drawing and pen to another participant.

Next participant follows the same rules. Drawing passes from one to another till someone finishes it.

Some great pictures are already made, but sorry no pictures have been uploaded yet.