Guest Editorial Statement by Joshua Pablo Rosenstock (Guest Editor)
Essays:
Routing Mondrian: The A. Michael Noll Experiment (Grant Taylor)
A {Digital} Stitch in Time (Alexia Mellor)
The New Aesthetic and The Framework of Culture (Eduardo Navas)
Appropriating Web Interfaces: From the Artist As DJ to the Artist As Externalizer (Marialaura Ghidini)
Dadaist Game Art: The Digital Ready-Made and Absurdist Appropriation (Steve Gibson)
Remixology (A Theoretical Fiction) (Mark Amerika)
Curatorial experiments in liberating copyright-free material for artistic re-use (Sarah Cook)
Soup & Yogurt: A Guantanamo Archive (Margot Herster)
Copyright Cowboys Performing the Law (Cornelia Sollfrank)
Although the term “appropriation art” came into widespread use during the 1980s to describe the work of a particular group of artists, appropriation-based concepts and practices are at the core of many of the key moments in modern and postmodern art history. Media artists today emulate appropriative movements from across the past century, from Dadaist readymades, to Pop Art’s ironic reuse of mass media detritus, to Hip-hop’s sampling and DJ remixing. Indeed, appropriation strategies and remix thoroughly permeate contemporary artistic practices of creation, archiving, and dissemination. Although appropriation is now a familiar part of contemporary art, recent evolution in the legal, conceptual, and technological landscapes of media art have brought to the fore newer discourses concerning copyright, sharing, memes, data, and the ever-increasing penetration of networked computing into all aspects of daily life. This issue of Media-N brings together a fine assortment of artists, art historians, curators, and theorists to present a lively chorus of viewpoints on the state of appropriation in new media art.
