Ethics of Remixing Photographs

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Let us first consider the visual image – in digital terms, the most common type of image is a JPG. That’s the technical taxonomy. However, different classes of JPG may variously be, perhaps most commonly first, photographs, but also scanned paintings, drawings, etching or photographs of material objects such as sculpture, models, architecture, people, landscapes – anything that can be seen with they eyes and captured in a single still frame. So, if we use a photograph as an example – let’s imagine a photograph of a man standing in front of the front door of his house. In order to remix it, the photograph must first be considered a ‘finished’ or ‘completed’ piece and the measure of this is generally publication – going to press or even exhibition – when the creator deems the work ready to be seen by the public. So, it may be published in a book, or more likely, on a photography website like Flickr or perhaps on the photographer’s personal portfolio website. Another general trend is that a remixed work is generally not created by the original artist of the source published photograph in this example. It is appropriated from wherever it has been published, whether scanned from a book or downloaded from a website and then altered by the remixer using some kind of software, most likely Photoshop or equivalent in this case, usually without the permission or even knowledge of the original creator.
Perhaps a point may be made that there is now so much media content online, that if you ‘publish’ your work, you have to be willing to make it available for reuse in future works by other people. Perhaps someone likes the image of the man in the photograph – they may use editing and image manipulation techniques to cut the man out of the original image and paste him into a new document, perhaps in front of a different background, like a beach or a forest. So, we end up with a new image, which is a composite of two different images created by a remixer, author ‘C’, without the permission of either author ‘A’ or author ‘B’. But what does author ‘C’ do with the new image then? Is it a ‘finished’ or ‘completed’ work now? In itself? Arguably, yes. So, if author ‘C’ publishes it via the same distribution platform as authors ‘A’ and ‘B’, i.e. on Flickr, and takes credit for the creation of the composite image, even if giving acknowledgement to authors ‘A’ and ‘B’ for their unknowing contribution, surely the original photographers would be less than pleased to see the unauthorized appropriation and repurposing of their work as well as the publication of it in the same market as their own work, thus becoming direct competition to the originals. This is an ethical question. Should author ‘C’ be allowed to create work from author ‘A’ and ‘B’s work without their knowledge or permission?

Aesthetics of Remix

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How can we come to understand the aesthetic of remix? Is there a more academic friendly term other than remix? I am less interested in digital appropriation than in remix. Somehitn gthat is clearly defined. So, what is involved in a discussion on remix and aesthetics? The crux of my research is the ethics and aesthetics of political remix. That’s it. So, aesthetically, as mentioned previously, remix comes in many forms. In fact, any cultural work may be remixed – music, film, literature, animation – anything that may be recorded or performed live through some form of media platform, whether that is a book, a newspaper, a magazine, a poster, a flyer, a brochure, a business card, a CD, a DVD, a website, a YouTube video, a game, an animation, a computer program/software package, any kind of printed or digital media. Of course, it is infinitely easier to remix digital media, due to its fundamentally malleable nature, however, all forms of printed media may be digitized and subsequently remixed more easily. Remix refers to adjustment after the work has been deemed ‘finished’ or ‘completed’.
In that respect, Nicolas Bourriaud’s attempt to label the practive of remix as post-production is somewhat flawed. Post-production is a stage of the creative process that occurs before a work is deemed finished, admittedly, the final stage of the process, but once the axe comes down, the post-production phase is over. Anything that follows this, whether digitally remastering, re-editing a director’s cut, or using samples in the creation of an entirely new work, may be categorized as remix. In plain English, it means making changes to a work after it is finished. Reworking it. Reinterpreting it. Reimagining it, but still using the same words, video, audio, code, imagery or animation that you used in the so-called ‘finished’ piece, just reshuffling them, rejigging, changing their order, the sequence of events, or combining parts of it together with parts from other finished works or adding completely original elements to it.
But where does the original work end and the remix begin and vice-versa? The distinction between an original work and a remixed work is important in understanding both. So, remix may be perceived in the same way that non-remixed or ‘original’ content may be. It can be watched, read, listened to, smelt, tasted, touched, experienced. Eyes, ears, mouth, nose, tongues, fingers/body and of course it may be recollected, imagined, dreamed. But what is different about watching a remixed video and watching a non-remixed video? Do we perceive it differently? How so?

Originality

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Originality is a difficult concept to wrestle with. The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘originality’ as: “The quality or state of being original; freshness of aspect, design or style; the power of independent thought or constructive imagination.” We may infer from this that originality is an entirely subjective term, as ‘freshness’ may differ from person to person. If I am intimately familiar with a novel by a particular author, it is no longer fresh to me, but if I gave it to someone who had neither hear of the book or even the author before, it may seem ‘fresh’ to them. Lived experience certainly plays a significant role in how relatively fresh something is. However, in this context, freshness may be a comparison against all that has gone before, or at least the canonical works in a particular field. In such an instance, the degree of freshness may be determined by how different or novel a piece of work may be when compared to all of the known works in its specific genre or field. The same dictionary defines ‘original’ as “1: The source or cause from which something arises; 2: that from which a copy, reproduction or translation is made; a work composed first-hand; 3. A person of fresh initiative or inventive capacity; a unique or eccentric person.”
Again we see the use of the subjective term ‘fresh’ – which is defined as “having its original qualities unimpaired; free from taint, pure, just recently.” The notion of time is introduced and interestingly in the context of cultural works or ‘media content’, the idea of purity. The myth that somehow when an author writes a book, a musician a song or a filmmaker a movie that it is pure – the finished work is fresh and original – in reality, every ‘new’ work is largely inspired by if not directly contains references to or elements of previous works. Claiming that a new work is pure and original is ludicrous. I suppose we could consider this in the context of a newborn baby – a metaphor I find appropriate on multiple symbolic levels. A newborn baby is certainly ‘pure’, ‘original’ and unique in many ways, but it is also composed of elements of both the father and mother of the child and indirectly, their grandparents and great-grandparents on both sides all the way back through their biological ancestry as far as the family tree will go. Is it possible that there was once an ‘original’ human being – such as Adam, from whom Eve was allegedly created and they then procreated to create the next generation of himans who must have bred amongst themselves to generate more and more families until we reach the unique, original newborn baby, who contains elements of every human being that came before them in their family. We may never know the answer to this question, but it is useful to think of the creation of content in the same way. Far from being truly ‘original’, each new work is the product of elements of works that came before it, whether consumed by the creator of the work or subconsciously ingested intellectually, it is problematic and difficult to call it ‘original.’

Producers / Consumers

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What are the ethics of digital appropriation specifically? To discuss this, we must first understand the issues surrounding digital appropriation and define it to some degree in this context. For the purposes of this discussion, digital appropriation may refer to the taking of digital media content and the reuse of it in a context other than that for which it was intended. To qualify, ‘intended’ here refers to the intentions of those in possession of the copyrights of the content in question. So, we have those who created the content – the artists, authors, musicians designers, producers and then those in possession of the copyright, generally a company like a record company, film studio, book publisher or design house or any media company that produces ‘original’ content. We may consider these stakeholders to be on the traditional ‘supply’ side of the equation, tending to produce the content and then make it available for people to consume. The producer-consumer dichotomy.
On the other side, we have the consumers – people who go out and buy music, books, DVDs, comics etc and sit and watch them or listen to them or read them in the comfort of their own homes, or increasingly in a variety of mobile contexts. This is the way it went – consumers would wait for producers to make new content available for them to buy and enjoy and producers would continue to produce content for the love of their art-form, but also to keep the shillings flowing in. Of course, producers have always been consumers also, getting inspiration from other producers and filtering ideas back into their own work and also consumers have to cross the creative divide in order to become producers and both sides of the scale feed into each other in a continuous loop or cycle. The barriers to entry to become a commercial producer of media content were traditionally very high and so impossible without the financial support and connections of established media companies. Digital technologies changed that, lowering the barrier to entry, breaching the creative gulf and bridging the divide between producers and consumers, or at least, blurring the boundaries significantly. Now, almost everybody is a digital media content producer. Everyone at la=east writes emails, if not Twitter or Facebook status updates, photographs, videos, more music than ever before. And there is no barrier to distribution, thanks to the web, cheap hosting sites and marketing is taken care of through word-of-mouth social media – so to set this up, the entire landscape on which the media content industries were based has utterly transformed in many ways over the last 20 years.

Digital Activism

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Digital Activism is a form of political activism that generally takes place online and has at its core the defence of digital rights, however it may also refer to activism of any kind from the material world, such as Human Rights movements, that may be using digital tools to enhance or augment their real-world activism. What is activism? Comes from the word – ‘active’ – the opposite of passive, sitting idly by while things happen around you. Outrage. That is a word associated with activism. It is the notion that, as an individual, you may see something happening around you that makes you feel uneasy in your bones, you don’t agree with it, but you’re not sure why. Eventually, this things keeps happening around you – you’re letting it happen and you feel a sense of outrage that ‘enough is enough’ – you can’t allow this to continue – you want to do something about it, there may be something you can do to stop it. But what? Direct intervention? Going up to someone and physically restraining them or even assaulting them in some way to get them to stop what they’re doing? Or rallying together with a group of other like-minded individuals who also believe that this person or organization needs to be stopped from continuing to do what they’re doing – to behave in such a way that causes outrage to so many people. What are they doing that’s so bad? Behaving ‘unethically’? According to who? Infringing on people’s rights? Causing damage to people, animals or perhaps the environment? Abusing people in some way? Acting unfairly – abusing positions of authority – making money illegitimately or by exploiting others? Committing social, legal or otherwise injustices? What is unjust? If enough people feel offended or outraged enough by someone’s actions to protest about it in some way, then there’s obviously something to it.
But in what ways may people protest? Civil disobedience. Peaceful protests. Verbal and physical protests. Media campaigns. Self defence. Fighting back. Counter-strike. War. There are many ways to protest, but in terms of digital activism, these may variously take the form of electronic civil disobedience, spamming online forums and comment sections, hacking websites and changing homepages, putting up fake websites that look real, sending parody domain names to legitimate sites, fake videos, posters, radio interviews, any kind of digital media that is intended to act as a form of protest. Why protest? To ultimately get someone to stop doing something, start doing something, do more of something or do less of something else – it’s about changing behavior. Trying to persuade or even force someone to behave differently.

Mix

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What is it about remix that holds an appeal for so many people? For me? For so long I have been consumed by it and I have yet to tire of it. Perhaps I never will. It is more than a fad. It’s a way of thinking, a way of being. When one hears the word remix, long associations and connotation in the media cause the average person to think of music, in particular, DJ and HipHop culture. But this is such a narrow aspect of a much wider culture, although it may have been the first instance of the use of the word ‘remix’. It has many meanings. The word ‘mix’ is often associated with music and sound engineering. Since music could be recorded on multiple tracks simultaneously or in sequence, in other words, layered up and separated, composited together to produce one coherent sound, it was known as ‘mixing’. Very much in the same way a chef follows a recipe using a combination of fundamental ingredients together to produce a specific type of food. The very same way we use letters to produce words, to produce sentences, to produce conversations. A conversation is a mix of words and letters combined in a particular manner to produce a coherent, comprehensible piece of language. Taking the fundamental elements and using them and combining them in increasingly sophisticated ways to be perceived by our senses in different ways.
And just as one may deconstruct an Italian cuisine, or a beer or wine and identify the various individual ingredients that make it up, that constitute it, so too can we deconstruct any mix, whether it is taking a sentence and focusing on the specific letters or listening to a piece of music and picking out the bass line, the drums or the vocals, or watching a film or tv show and identifying the elements that make it up, the acting, the mise-en-scene, the camera work, editing and so on – all of the elements of ingredients that go into the creation of a mix – a composite – a ‘complete work.’ A finished work? We can also listen to a song, watch a film, read a book without deconstructing it – that is, we can perceive it as a whole. We can also do this with natural beauty – e.g. standing on top of a hill and gazing out over a beautiful scene of nature – we can try to take it all in at once, awe-inspiring wonder, or we can focus on specific individual elements, like the clouds, the river, the shoreline etc. Another obvious example is the human face – we may look upon someone’s entire face and see their expression, or we may focus on the individual elements – their eyes, mouth, nose etc. Artistic beauty vs natural beauty. But can a work ever be truly considered finished? Or complete? Adding another brush stroke to a painting, another layer to a song, another chapter to a book, another scene to a movie…who decides when a work is finished and who’s to say they are right? What are the fundamental ingredients that make up the soup of culture? In colour, we may say it is the elements which may not be reduced any further – primary colours, prime numbers, scientific table of elements, letters and so on. That is a mix. A remix then is taking someone’s so-called ‘finished’ or ‘complete’ work and using it as an ingredient in a new work.

Affect

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Bodily affect is the term used to describe this process. There is a philosophical debate over the point in time at which people can respond to stimulus, which asks is bodily affect an emotional response or a physiological one or an intellectual one? In other words, when you hear a piece of music and it makes you feel happier, what is happening there? The sound goes into your ears, and very quickly your mood changes – perhaps instantly. So, does the sound get processed by the brain, triggering certain physiological reactions, such as releasing endorphins in the brain to make you feel happier – or is it a preconditioned phenomenon that all people will repond to in more or less the same way? So a particularly upbeat song will always make people feel a little happier and so perhaps it triggers the reaction instinctively, much like the fight or flight phenomenon. Also parallels with Jungian archetypes or Aristotlian forms. Of course, there is no way to measure this conclusively either way but it does bring up the very interesting idea that the artist or creator of a painting, a piece of music or any cultural work has incredible power. The power to affect those who listen to the song or look at the painting. The power to trigger emotional responses – to change the way the viewer feels and ultimately, potentially change their psychological behavior.

Aesthetics

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Aesthetic is the study of that which involves the senses – sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, possibly intuition. Inputting information into one’s brain – receiving this information through the senses, processing it and responding physiologically, emotionally and intellectually. Stimulus – response. For example, one may look upon a beautiful painting with one’s eyes. The painting exists in the material world so initially a number of elements of the painting are perceived – the size, shape, colours, images, symbolism, texture, position, lighting and once all of this information is perceived and processed in the brain, meaning may be derived from it. Perhaps the meaning intended by the artist is understood or perhaps the viewer attaches their own meaning to it based on their own lived experience. Understanding the meaning of the work is largely an intellectual endeavor. Perceiving a painting with your eyes can also affect the way you feel. Appreciating the beauty of the work, enjoying the specific combination of colours, the composition and artwork may make you feel happy, sad, angry, relaxed or may trigger memories that make you feel particular emotions. Aesthetics is a process – it involves understanding artistic works, and the relationship between the viewer and the work and how it affects them.

Research Question

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What is my research about? I am questioning the prevalent ethical assumptions about appropriation in digital media. What assumptions? Should we start with the laws and work backwards? For example, copyright law is based on a set of ethical assumptions that have developed over time. Do I really think that one research project can change copyright law? Obviously not. What I’m trying to do is show that there is a clear disparity between the prevalent attitudes towards appropriation and actual practice. I aim to try to measure opinions of key stakeholders in the debate. To what extent should cultural works be available for others to use as building blocks in the creation of new works? Not withstanding the Intellectual Property laws, which are effectively ignored in most cases, what are people producing in this space and how does it impact on the source material? Who are the artists, how much have they produced? I want to map the remix landscape in as much detail as possible to paint a picture of what is happening and how things are evolving. Who has the power in this situation? The power is shifting. Media corporations had cultural works under lock and key for most of the 20th century and had complete, almost unquestionable control over who got to see, watch, read, listen to what, when and in what manner. Digitisation has opened the floodgates, making all media accessible to anyone anytime and in whatever manner or by whatever means an individual may choose to consume it. Take a Hollywood movie – previously you would purchase a cinema ticket and see the film in a cinema theatre, wait 6 months to a year and rent it on video or DVD or wait another year to 18 months and watch it on TV. Now you can still do all of these things, but also you can get it on your computer on or before its release date, download it and watch it on any digital device – iPod, iPhone, iPad, media player or you can stream it through a website, e.g. YouTube or any of the multitude of video streaming sites. Equally as importantly, anyone with the file, a computer and internet connection can upload the movie and make it available to everyone from yet another source. This is effectively uncontrollable without infringing on the basic human rights to privacy and freedom of expression. Which do we value more – the aforementioned fundamental rights or the protection of corporate profits? Is it an either / or scenario?

Ethics and Morals

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Ethics, morals – what’s the difference? It’s a difference of scale, essentially. Morals apply to individual choices. If you, as an individual, are faced with any choice in your life, morality comes into play. There are always only two options. Do or do not. There may be multiple choices, but each choice can only ever have two outcomes, yes or no. 1 or 0. Decisions are always reducible to this binary choice and can be reduced no further. Sounds very black and white, absolutist and universal, but in fact, making decisions is genuinely that linear. Whether you choose to do or do not, the decision you make may be right or wrong when held against your own personal moral code. Do you personally believe something is right or wrong? Acceptable or unacceptable? One’s personal code is highly subjective and based on a number of factors including personal background, upbringing, current environment, perceived implications and consequences of the decision etc. Morality may also be considered as a spectrum. Some things are more right than wrong and vice-versa and the same decision may be more wrong than right given a different set of circumstances and parameters, such as time, location, people involved and so on. Personal moral codes are often largely passed down by parents and adjusted according to one’s own lived experience during the course of one’s life.
Ethics on the other hand apply to communities of people and wider society and are essentially ideas about how people should behave collectively. Ethics refers to collective personal moral codes – what’s best for the group to allow enough personal freedoms, so long as they do not infringe on other people’s rights. So ethics could be considered as a set of agreed upon rights and restrictions on behavior, i.e. acceptable or unacceptable personal choices, as agreed by a collective community or society. In most cases, these ‘rules’ for want of a better word, are put into writing by elected representatives of the people such as politicians and leaders of social agencies. What is ethical behaviour? Essentially, it is how well one can stick to the rules. These rules are very dynamic and subjective, however, tend to be perceived as fixed and permanent. A good example is the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament. God presents Moses with a set of ten rules of behavior that everyone should abide by in their daily lives, essentially so that everyone in the community can get on and have protection against infringement on certain fundamental rights and freedoms, by other people. The laws of countries are based on ethics. It is collectively decided that certain ethical rules are universal enough within a given society to be bound by law and anyone who disobeys the rule in question is punished accordingly. Tricky stuff this.