Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art more

My book, Digital Prohibition: Piracy and Authorship in New Media Art, is forthcoming from Continuum International Publishers (named the top academic press in Britain this year) in 2012. It starts from the premise that the new changes in copyright law are functioning as a new Prohibition, that is to say as something that it so unpopular, so untenable and so unenforceable that it is only a matter of time before public backlash destroys the current corporate monopoly on creativity. This is the first book to discuss the global politics of creative work and emergent models of authorship in a digital age. The book examines the creation of new media forms by artists and groups who use technology to challenge established modes and models of creation. It starts from the premise that creativity is no longer a useful concept in an age of data glut and perfect copies; instead we must now think of creative practice as a kind of creative critique that repurposes existing materials in order to explore the nature of media and how they affect us. It does this through three different aesthetic approaches: interruption (stoppage and repetition), disturbance (critique and event), and capture/leakage (performance and documentation). The book is wide-ranging in its definition of authorship, exploring methods as diverse as sampling, mashups, hacktivism, machinima, social media, tactical media, productive mistranslation, and digital anthropophagy. It includes extensive research in Asia (Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and especially China and Pakistan) to see how and what creative practices flourished when they are not fettered by copyright regulations.