User:Simon/Workshop Eva Weinmayr

the piracy project

Eva Weinmayr's Piracy Project invites submissions of pirated books. The books are collected in public places (e.g galleries, art book fairs) where visitors are available to read them.

http://evaweinmayr.com/work/the-piracy-project-2/

Of particular interest are the editorial decisions made in the pirating of the books. Copying of a book invites an inevitable comparison between the "source" and the "copy". It is not as straightforward as assuming a hierarchy based on chronology - such as in the case of a leaked manuscript - the "origin" may have been published after the "copy". Instead, a list of words describing the possible motivations are devised to examine the possible motivation for pirating:

• Borrowing
• Poaching
• Plagiarising
• Pirating
• Stealing
• Gleaning
• Referencing
• Leaking
• Copying
• Imitating
• Adapting
• Faking
• Paraphrasing
• Quoting
• Reproducing
• Using
• Counterfeiting
• Repeating
• Translating
• Cloning

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We added a few to the list based on our analyses:

• Silencing
• Editing
• Omitting
• Reducing
• Appending
• Redirecting
• Recontextualising
• Focusing
• (Faithfully) Reproducing
• Caring
• Reformatting
• Bootlegging
• Reframing
• Retracing

This reminds me of the list of words I devised for my FTB project - however my list was of names of types of "marks of use" made in books from a section of a public collection in a library. Using verbs instead of nouns is a subtle shift away from concrete definitions of modifications between the published book and its counterpart towards a actions that may have produced these modifications.

two books from the project - an analysis

Artemis & I examined two pirated books, speculating on the strategies behind their duplication and making notes and questions related to each one:

Book 1: Teignmouth Electron - Tacita Dean

Strategies:
Translating, Caring, Reproducing, Bootlegging, Reformatting, Re-Editing, Adapting, Expanding, (re)focusing, fan working, homageing, engaging, fostering, crafting, adding value

Notes & Questions:

• A caring reproduction from an independent editorial project, showing special value on the content. Seems that there is collaboration with the artist, but don't have permission from the previous publisher.
• Has an ISBN. It seems not like a pirate version but as an official published version.
• Making a choice between what should and shouldn't be translated - e.g. Space Oddity appears in both English and Spanish.
• The text is privileged over the images, and reproduction comes into play with the different printing methods. Photography as a visual medium that relies on reproduction.
• It's an adaption in that it drastically changes the format (and slightly changes the content) to meet a need (to connect with a larger audience of Spanish speakers), and can be seen as vastly different from the source.
• Is the translator the author? What happens with copyright in this case?

Book 2: Shampoo by Robert Towne and Warren Beatty, silenced by K. Lassinaro

Strategies:
Silencing, Reducing, Redirecting, Reframing, Recontextualising,(re)Focusing, (Translating (from an aural/oral/visual source to a literate destination), Re-mediating, censoring, critiquing, deleting violating

Notes & Questions:

• What is the source? Is it a film, or the manuscript?
• Is the manuscript published? (we found it easily on the web)
• Is a manuscript a publication? Does this constitute fair use?
• The pirate edition makes space for the imagination of the reader to fill the gaps. The focus seems to be the "container bag" instead of the "content". The "source" was focusing in a visual experience, while the pirate version does the opposite. So the dialogues don't matter, or is it a critique on the content?