Technology created and perceived

Technology Changes"

It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist; a play, a playwright. You could assume that the work actually erupted more or less full-blown from these folks. In addition, the book, film, musical composition, painting or play was a discrete object or event that existed in time and space. You could hold it in your hands or watch or listen to it in a theater or your living room. It didn't really change over time unless the artist decided to revise it or a performer reinterpreted it.Well, not any more. For years now numerous observers have described the process by which the very fundaments of art are changing from the old principle of one man, one creation. Songs have remixes through which anyone so disposed can alter the original music; videos have mash-ups that use footage to reposition and change the original meaning; the visual arts have communal canvases and websites; poetry has Flarf, which allows one to generate verse from random words; , and books have collages, like David Shields' recent "Reality Hunger," which was assembled entirely, paragraph by paragraph, out of other authors' words. Recombinant art is the rage.

What all these fnology Chrms have in common is appropriation and a sense of rampant collaboration in which every work of art is simply raw material for anyone who decides to put his or her imprint on it, which then allows someone else to put his imprint on the imprint, which allows still someone else to put his imprint on the imprint on the imprint, and so on ad infinitum. You could call it Wiki-Culture after its prototype, Wikipedia, because like Wikipedia, it is a new form of democratic cultural construction in which everyone can make a contribution.

Of course communal culture is not a new concept. The process began a long time ago in folk art — who is the artist of the Lascaux cave paintings? — and it eventually entered the precincts of fine art with the borrowings of Duchamp, Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and others who deployed the detritus of popular culture in their work, albeit reformulated by them. If art was about life and life was now increasingly a product of mass consumption, then popular culture was a vast warehouse to be rummaged through and repurposed. That made the industrial designer of the Campbell soup can label or the Brillo box a collaborator with Warhol, Betsy Ross a collaborator with Johns, or little-known comic book artists collaborators with Lichtenstein.

Still, with Warhol and the Pop artists, there is a commanding sensibility: an artist using the larger culture for, and in a way, subordinating it to, his or her own ends. But over the last five years or so — and it is happening at a head-snappingly fast pace — the degree of appropriation and the number of collaborators has proliferated to the point at which there are not only literally millions of new art objects but also millions of new "artists" working in conjunction with one another, so that the very notion of authorship is becoming attenuated and archaic. Where people are invited to add to or edit an object, whose sensibility governs and who gets credit for the evolving creation? The most logical answer, as with Wikipedia, is that the author is the collective whole.