The advantages of having an “open source” or “open content” culture is that it provides an avenue for extended dialogues and interplay between people of all disciplines and backgrounds. The internet provides a forum for information to be shared, appropriated, augmented and re-shared. The ability to easily access the information (like an image) and alter it (in whatever program or way you want) also “levels the playing field” in the sense that anyone, anywhere of any age who can access the internet, also has the opportunity to utilize this resource.

Questioning the cultural impact of the ability to reproduce and appropriate information, and particularly, creative or intellectual works goes all the way back to Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and his theory of the aura. Using the idea that the original work of art has an aura that cannot be reproduced, it seems that open source culture shouldn’t be a problem. Nothing can ever be as good as the original.

I think it is appropriate to look back to intention when thinking about the traditional ideas of copyrights. Copyrights are intended to protect individuals and their intellectual property from fraudulent uses (plagiarism). Now, mixing theories, writings, sound clips, reusing images or appropriating visual and audio materials in a way that nods to a larger history or original sources, contextualizes information, and creates a dialogue between past present and future individuals and movements is not the same thing…It seems petty to cry over spilled milk or bad reproductions taken on low quality handheld camcorders of Prince songs. After all, the 13 month old didn’t claim to have written the song, he just wanted to star in a new rendition…and we all know that Prince and Universal sold way more mp3s and cds with that song on it after the youtube clip went viral.

20 Dead Swiss, 1990. Images taken from Swiss Newspaper Obituaries.

I am constantly fascinated by the use of lost and found photographs in Christian Boltanski’s work. What I find so compelling about his appropriation of these photographs is that many are taken from institutions (school and club year books, newspaper clippings or obituaries, the french mickey mouse club, phonebooks). Through altering these photographs and appropriating the images into larger works of art, Boltanski is able to make work that speaks not just to these particular images, rather to the condition of humanity.

The Children of Dijon

The appropriated images serve as a punctum and a stand in for you, me, him and every individual. The use of older photographs is essential. These images connect the viewer to a time period and a place that is specific (1930′s and 40′s in Europe) and that already has a history of fear, of struggle, of loss, of hope and hopelessness. He isn’t always clear about where these photos come from, nor does he need to be. His work, like may photographers, questions the truth of photography (are they dead, is this what the original looked like, are they really from Switzerland, did they die because of the Shaoh or because of life?). His images lead you to a conclusion that may, or may not, be correct or founded. His work stands as a memorial to everyone, and no one.

His way of presenting, or re presenting these images as material for other sources speaks to community and to the idea of open content: His role as the artist isn’t to take an image without a copyright and own it, rather to give it a new life and open a new dialogue about what we remember, what we forget and to reflect on the collective memory and the collective experience.

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