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 behavior 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 showed as film (1 min or 1.5 min long) for screening and also can be exhibited as looped video installation, single channel projection.
Copy Right Now, looped video material for installation, single channel, 2010.