Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Douglas Gordon on his 24 Hour Psycho

Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho:

24HourPsycho_mouth24 Hour Psycho
The exhibition begins with 24 Hour Psycho (1993), a slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho. A different take on a familiar classic, it introduces many of the important themes in Gordon's work: recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.

24hourpsycho2 Douglas Gordon in his own words:
"24 Hour Psycho, as I see it, is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation... it wasn't a straightforward case of abduction. The original work is a masterpiece in its own right, and I've always loved to watch it. ... I wanted to maintain the authorship of Hitchcock so that when an audience would see my 24 Hour Psycho they would think much more about Hitchcock and much less, or not at all, about me...

A little change can make a great transformation


Henry McKervey and Declan Long, in "Makers and Takers: Art and the Appropriation of Ideas:

[I]t is the expression of an idea which is subject to legal protection. While perhaps this has meant that an artist such as Gillian Wearing can be faced with difficulties over the unattributed re-application of her work, the law also could be said to give artists a relative amount of freedom to take and re-use material in any number of subtly different ways without the spectre of plagiarism remaining ever-present. In a work such as Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, for instance, there is in one sense very little of the artist's 'own' work (Hitchcock's classic thriller being merely re-played at a radically slowed-down pace) yet Gordon's intervention makes for a powerful, transformative artistic statement. The question of "knowing originality when you see it" is almost beside the point in cases such as this: artists' strategies of appropriation prompt questions of originality to become thematically intriguing on, one level, while also being critically irrelevant and, on occasion, inappropriate, on another.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Freedom depends on the use of the past

Lawrence Lessig, from this flash presentation of his speech at the Open Source Convention 2002:
Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.

How to survive zombie attacks

This movie was created initially for a challenge posed by freeculture.org. It uses clips from the film "Night of the living Dead", and "Amid the Dead". Both of these films were acquired from archive.org. This film is an amusing instructional video on how to survive a zombie epidemic.