Siebren Versteeg’s Infinite Touchscreens
posted by Frank Pasquale
I had a good afternoon of gallery-hopping today, checking out some of Casey Ruble’s fantastic series “Except in Struggle” and Simon Nicholas’s eerie crowds. For IP and computer experts, Siebren Versteeg‘s work raises a number of fascinating questions.
One of the pieces at Versteeg’s current show is New York Windows, a pair of large touch screens that are much like the screen of an iPod (it’s the image at right). You’re encouraged to touch them and drag the images displayed on them to the center, and then off or back on the screen. The docent for the tour said the images are generated randomly by a computer program that scrapes pictures off the web, then alters their composite display with various graffiti-like “sprayed on” pixels. One of the people in line to try it called it “art for the ADD generation”–and indeed, if any set of images bored you, you could simply drag them off and find new ones. According to the docent, the displays show merely one bit of a digital “canvas” that is thousands of yards long and wide.
Versteeg’s work reminded me of the TV shows “Talk Soup” and “Best Week Ever,” two programs that aggregate the “best-worst” moments of television and celebrity culture each week. I think of these shows as “centripetal aggregators” in an era of entertainment-option overload. Few people may settle upon the same shows given the “daily me” offered via narrowcasting and specialized niches. But the centripetal aggregators can filter out the overflow of banality and dreck now on TV and offer us glimpses of guaranteed entertainment.
Versteeg is more a centrifugal aggregator, giving us each control over the screen as we come upon it. Each visitor to the gallery may come away remembering different images–for me, a cartoon emblazoned with “all rights reserved” and a very fluffy kitten imprinted. As Heraclitus might say: “For the waking there is one world, and it is common; but sleepers turn aside each one into a world of his own.” Infinite images, infinite playlists–in life online, everything is miscellaneous.
Cross-posted: Madisonian.net.
October 18, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Posted in: Cyberlaw, Intellectual Property
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Responses (2)
A.J. Sutter - October 19, 2008 at 9:33 am
Some banal questions about scraping pictures off the web: isn’t he making derivative works? How does he do the clearances, I wonder? Or is this a fair use? (In that regard, does it matter that the show is at a for-profit gallery rather than at a non-profit museum?)
Frank - October 19, 2008 at 10:16 am
I think that the graffiti spray may not merely be an aesthetic choice, but a legal necessity–it helps make the case that the images as displayed are transformed, and that militates in favor of a fair use finding. As for commerciality–that’s also a factor in the fair use analysis, but has come to be less important over the past couple decades because it seems like just about everything can be deemed commercial–or at least (under the fourth factor) having a negative effect on the market for licenses for derivative works like the one in the case at bar.
For very interesting reflections on this area of law, here is Matt Sag’s piece:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1257086
I think Sag’s argument works for pieces like Versteeg’s, but I plan to eventually contest its application to general purpose search engines–more on policy than on doctrinal grounds.
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