User:Emily/20160310

The changing face of Symbolically Charged Object

Abstract

Today, the symbolically charged object is constantly in the mode of reproduction and displacement, this is the means to repurpose it and by which it updates its symbolic meaning in a network of signs. It is an object that draws the viewer into a relation with it, it is productive as much as it is representational. It is not just objects that are of interest, but the complex relations and narrative potentials that develop around (and because of) them. Viewing objects in this way gives them different mode of attention, and gives them a new kind of force.

In the paper, I will consider my own recent work in relation to this question; I will examine the symbolically charged object through discussion of its use in the films of Alfred Hitchcock; I will explore the symbolically charged object in relation to particular art practices, from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917); Duchamp’s text, The Creative Act (1957), which proposes the viewer’s central role as the author of an artwork. I will also address the question through discussion of contemporary art and media practices such as the works from Guy Ben-Ner and Oliver Laric, and Rob Myer. Last I will situate my graduation work in the above context, and further discuss that how I turn the objects in the commons based peer-production platform to symbolically charged objects, which revels ambiguous norms that are regulated them.

Introduction

Fernando Di Leo’s film, Milano Calibro 9 (1972), begins with a sequence of shots showing a package wrapped by newspaper handing from one person to another. The process relies on a precise plan: that we the audience, get to know how valuable this object is. The package is an example of the symbolically charged object with which this thesis concerns itself. Shot by shot in the film shows the package circulating among people, in other words, it becomes a communication device, not only among the protagonists, but also, more importantly with the audience. However the consequence is as much about the package as the relationship among those protagonists since it is reshaped by the object. Thus the function of the object gets revealed by its affects that drives the narration dramatically and makes audiences hooked on to.

Such an exchange of actions might be typically described as a “MacGuffin”. The name "MacGuffin" originates in 20th-century filmmaking, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1930s. In Truffaut’s interviews with Hitchcock, he tells Truffaut a story that explains the origin of the term through a dialogue between two strangers on a train. Two gentlemen meet on a train, and the one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other.

A: “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”
B: “Oh, that’s a MacGuffin.”
A: “What’s a MacGuffin?”
B: “Well, it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
A: “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.”
B: “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!” Hitchcock: “So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.”

Later in his interview, Hichcock illuminates his conception of the MacGuffin, that is simply the pretext driving the plot, the thing that the spies and the hero and/or heroine of the film are pursuing. While place the MacGuffin to a broaden context, Slavoj Žižek mentioned another version of the story in his book The Sublime Object of Ideology, which for him is much more to the purpose of MacGuffin. It is the same as the original story, with the exception of the last answer: “Well, you see how efficient it is!” Žižek here brilliantly explicates on the essence of the Hitchcockian motif, which, despite being “pure nothing,” is nonetheless “efficient” (Sublime 163) or, in the words of Mladen Dolar, “it works”.

My interest goes beyond simply the MacGuffin, and covers symbolically charged objects in the contemporary context. Specifically within the context of this paper, the symbolically charged object is defined as an ephemeral result of circulation within an inter-subjective network. Especially in the contemporary culture, the object masters vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination. Its materiality is shaped by the inter-subjective network, whereas, its value is also altered and constructed by the intersubjective network. Thus no matter in its physical form or its image representation, online or offline, it is always presented in a societal condition at large.

Chapter I

Manipulation (Manipulating to be shared?)

Hitchcock once explains in the same series of interviews with Truffaut, that in the development of his film Notorious, he was looking for a MacGuffin after the basic concept of the film was already on hand. Along the whole process going off in several different directions, it “turned out to be too complex”, Hitchcock finally “dropped the whole idea in favor of a simpler, but concrete and visual object: a sample of uranium concealed in a wine bottle.” It was in 1944, when Hitchcock produced Notorious, one year before Hiroshima. The idea was refused by the producer, he asked Hitchcock, “What is the name of goodness is that?” Hitchcock replied, “This is uranium; it’s the thing they’re going to make an atom bomb with.” And he asked, “What atom bomb?” It was not that the producer didn’t understand the uranium for making atom bomb; it is that he didn’t understand the nature of the MacGuffin. Hitchcock later pointed out “if it had not been a wartime story, we could have hinged our plot on the theft of diamonds, that the gimmick was unimportant.” Hitchcock expounds that “all of this goes to show is that you were wrong to attach any importance to the MacGuffin.” The uranium MacGuffin was taken out of the cinematic frame, and Hitchcock learnt that the FBI had him under surveillance for three months. I don’t totally agree with Hitchcock who simply hinged the MacGuffin to an unimportant gimmick since the real story of what happened to Hitchcock himself gives a good testimony.

Žižek found a most efficient MacGuffin in the real world, the “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction”, which fits perfectly the status of MacGuffin. In his article ‘The Iraqi MacGuffin’, he explains Weapons of mass destruction “as such, they (WMD) by definition cannot ever be found, and are therefore all the more dangerous.” The structure of the refrain that there is the WMD, is to allow the punishment, the real effect, ahead of real proofs. In such case, there are always manipulations to some extent in the pretext or the placeholder to both Hitchcock and Žižek. “Now, in the Fall of 2003, when, after hundreds of investigators were looking after the WMD, none were found, we reached the last line of the story of MacGuffin: ‘Well, said President Bush in September 2003, then that's not a MacGuffin, is it?’”

The usage of the MacGuffin or broadly speaking the symbolically charged object, be it in cinema or in our society, are heavily manipulated to fulfill its efficiency. Borrow the understanding from Jodi Dean towards symbolic efficiency, “a symbol is efficient when it can travel without being stopped and questioned. This in no way implies that people actually believe the symbol, that what the symbol says is true or right; rather, it simply means that people are willing to let it pass… Consequently, symbolic efficiency can coexist nicely with deception or distrust – as long as the general system remains intact. Thus in short, “for a fact to be operative, it has to register with the public-supposed-to-believe”, that is in the end a sharable fact. As long as it works in its time-space, it doesn’t matter that is a diamond or uranium for Hitchcock; it also doesn’t matter if it is WMD or other government conspiracies for Žižek, as long as the audience, we, share the belief.

To alter viewers’ cognitive relation with visual content and to provide the variation of viewing experience are important in my works. In a series of my studio practices, I worked closely with cinematic content and generated serval outcomes in quite different forms. These works realized through a way of deconstructing and reconfiguring cinematic content and structure.

One of them is The Tenant | tnaneT ehT, a split-screen video work. In this work, a duplicated sequence is derived from the most dramatic part of Roman Polanski's film, The Tenant. It consists of the original visual-audio sequences at the left side of the split-screen and together with reversed each single shots at the right side of the split-screen. In other words, the beginning and the end of each shots are viewed at the same time and they go on playing to the end and beginning. It may sound tautological with two identical content, but it is actually the very moment that spectators find quite hard to position themselves along the watching as the time flows continuously both forwards and backwards. There is a very long shot of nearly 70 seconds at the beginning of the video. The camera dollies in from an indoor scene, goes through an open window, reaches the places of other tenants who take reaction to the camera in turn. They are laughing, pointing, applauding, waiting for a drama. The camera goes on tilting up and down, panning to every conner of the outdoor scene. Like viewing a stage, we choose to focus on different areas, however the reactions from each performer are more likely to put whoever in front of the screen as an actor. Remembering that this is a dual-vision work, all that you have seen is doubled, the dolly movement meets with pan, tilting up with tilting down, the dramatic feeling becomes heavier but also seems reversible. The rework with this cinematic content was intrigued by my viewing experience of Polanski's film, The Tenant crafts a creepily bizarre scenario of a group of neighbors appearing to be preying on a new tenant's life and conspire against him for that purpose. The film goes into a loop as if the protagonist is repeating what have happened to the previous tenant. However, the end of the movie is enigmatic as if he was the previous and the only one tenant and everything happened the way as we have seen is all because of his own psychology. So in a sense, the reversed approach to each shots comes from inherent nature of my subject, and my interpretation invites for reinterpretations.

Likewise, I found the interpretation is so inviting that I kept working with the same cinematic content in another work of mine. It ended up in a form of a photo-book, the images and texts (subtitles) are extracted at the moments when characters in The Tenant speak the word "know", and then the frames and sentences are reassembled into a form of a book. I consider the word, “know”, in this film carries quite subtle understandings. Each character in the film, holds his or her own judgments towards the circumstance they share, and all of these may also turn out to be the protagonist’s assumptions or our assumptions. The repetition of the single word “know” and the difference of their following minds serves lots of emotional and empirical details, which for me is quite rich. In the book, not every sentence is placed with still images; and considered the specificity of the book medium, I designed the book to be read vertically (to rotate the book 90 degree and flip the page vertically), which I found suit better with cinematic content as the image frames are set to be 16:9. The image stills from the film are fully placed in whole pages, whereas the text are placing at the bottom of the pages. And I carefully designed to have some of the pages to be shorter than the others. In this way, it provides the opportunity for the reader to read across pages, and at different intervals. The cover images takes from the end scene, which happened twice in the film. Trelkovsky, the main protagonist is bandaged up in the same fashion as the previous tenant, Simone, in the same hospital bed, but we see his own and his friend, Stella's visit to Simone. It is the very moment in the film, revealing to audience all what happened the two tenants might be just illusions from Trelkovsky or everyone could be the next tenant as what happened to Simone and Trelkovsky. So the same but different still image taken from the two moments are placed as front and the back of the book, looping all the content in between.

Another work based on this cinematic content is a browser-based, interactive piece. By scrolling the page up and down, viewers can view a list of videos in the left column, slightly playing forwards and backwards. At the same time, texts in the right column taken from the script will be hidden. Only when scrolling each video at a certain row, the text will be revealed. When the contents meets, the one video will play continually. Both the sound and moving images are affected by scrolling, as if we scroll the timeline. The text, image and audio together affect the transfer of information.

In these works, I provided visual materials in different forms in order to free audiences to some degree for gaining their own interpretation and viewing experience by connecting different components. No matter if they had known the cinematic material before or not, it is quite different as watching a linear film. I was also quite enjoyed to present the changing face of similar content. Repetition, recycling and later reinvention become quite important artistic strategy to work with the chosen content.

Circulation

I. Symbolic network

Žižek who exemplifies the symbolic network in Hitchcockian universe, demonstrates “the interplay between the subject’s own self-experience and the symbolic network that determines how it to be seen from the perspective — the “gaze” — of the Other. The two, however, are always interrelated to the extent that the subject acts in reaction to its own interpretation of the intervention of the Symbolic.” The thoughts and feelings of others are shaped, steered, and determined by socio-linguistic structure and dynamics. Therefore the meaning of the symbolically charged object exists only in so far as it is inter-subjectively recognized. The symbolic is the way of interacting with other people. When the symbolically charged object is circulating, it is not its content but the linkage within the network established maters. In another word, it can be explained with, what we already talked about, the notion of symbolic efficiency that it is most efficient when it can travel without being stopped and questioned. This is the very circulation in the symbolic network that really matters.

Bringing the notion of symbolic efficiency from Žižek, it “concerns the minimum of ‘reification’ on account of which 'it is not enough for us, all concerned individuals, to know some fact in order for it to be operative, the symbolic institution must also know/'register' this fact if the performative consequences of stating it are to ensue.” Žižek brings the symbolic institution into the symbolic network, and indicates that the efficiency heavily counts on whether the relevant institution would provide the credence and trigger its performative consequences. This is exactly, in Žižek’s Lacanian terminology, the “big Other” (with a capital O). “It is worth emphasizing the Lacanian Other refers to the entire socio-cultural network of rules and customs. Although this is sometimes personified in subjects’ imaginations as a figure of symbolic authority, the Other does not just mean another person.”

According to Žižek, “the subject is ‘decentred’, because its most important, symbolic identification are with external social ideals that are ‘experienced as an order (the big Other) which is minimally reified, externalized.’”In the symbolic network, what circulates is what the network produces, its own structure produces, and this symbolic network is intersubjective.

II. The Object of exchange

I found it is easier to exemplify a circulating object in cinematic narration since we keep a distance to that two-dimensional frame. In another Hitchcock’s film, Dial M for Murder (1954), there is a key circulating among protagonists in the whole development of the story which is a tale of a bungled killing based on a hit play. The plot follows Tony plan to have his wife, Margot, murdered so that he can collect on her life insurance policy. Ideally, Tony would steal the key from Margot, and hide her key outside the front door of their flat. Swann is to sneak in their flat using this key to kill Margot. After he would fulfill the murder, the key should be placed back in order for Tony to put it back to Margot’s handbag. But the story doesn’t follow his exact criminal plan, in surprise Margot manages to grab a pair of scissors and kill Swann. Tony goes back and is concerned that the key is still with Swann, thus he places what he thinks is Margot's key from Swann's pocket into her handbag. The next day after investigation, inspector Hubbard claims Swann must have entered through the front door. Since they found no key on Swann and suppose the person who let Swann to get in is Margot, she is found guilty for killing Swann. On the day before her execution, Mark who has an affair with Margot, asks Tony to save her by claiming that he hired Swann to kill her, but he didn’t figure out how to explain the plot of the key. At this moment, inspector Hubbard arrives, and discreetly swaps his own key with Tony’s. After Tony leaves, he uses Tony’s key to re-enter the flat. Hubbard had already discovered that the key in Margot's handbag was Swann's latchkey, and realized that Swann had put the key back in its hiding place after unlocking the door. The key that arose the recognition/misrecognition becomes a reminder of the reality. “What matters here is precisely its presence, the material presence of a fragment of reality—it is a leftover, remnants which cannot be reduced to a network of formal relations proper to the symbolic structure, but it is paradoxically, at the same time, the positive condition for the effectuation of the formal structure.” Žižek defines this object as “an object of exchange circulating among subjects, serving as a kind of guarantee, pawn, on their symbolic relationship.”

We can understand this symbolically charged object, the key, by applying it to the letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Purloined Letter (1845). Exemplified by Žižek on Lacan’s seminar, there are three types of protagonists in this story. “The first which sees nothing (the King and the police); the second which sees that the first sees nothing and deludes itself as to the secrecy of what it hides (the Queen, then the Minister); the third which sees that the two first glances leave what should be hidden exposed to whomever would seize it (the Minister, and finally Dupin).” In Dial M for Murder, we can easily map them to the three types—Margo is in the first type, Tony is in the second type, and the inspector is in the third type, whereas, Mark goes from the second to the third throughout development of the story. The very alike role of the key, as “the role of the letter is assumed by an object that circulates among the subjects and, by its very circulation, makes out of them a closed intersubjective community.” This is exact the intersubjective community network they consist of and the key as an object circulating among subjects is the ‘“tiny piece of real” which keeps the story in motion by finding itself “out of place”’ in another word, by stopping its circulation. Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out how the very fact of exchange attests a certain structural flaw, an imbalance that pertains to the Symbolic, in Žižek’s word, the lack in the Other to the constitutive inconsistency.

III. Small collection of symbolically charged objects from Hitchcock’s

In my studio practice, I created a small collection of symbolically charged objects from Hitchcock’s films in a webpage: http://pzwart1.wdka.hro.nl/~yuzhen/web-guffin/guffin-1.html I accumulated those objects and extracted shots that they are depicted in films, for instance, the lighter in Stranger on a Train, the tie pin in Frenzy, the envelope in Psycho. For me, they are distillations of those films. I like the lighter quite a lot, which is another example of "the object of exchange" that works dramatically in “Strangers on a Train” as a motif of the story. By swapping the exclusive item, the audiences are hooked by the identity of the murder and the innocent and the criminal desire that may shared by both of them. For me, this lighter as the very distillation of the narration, is so strong, that I reproduced it with 3d printer. At that moment from the digital craft to physical realization of this symbol makes the Mcguffin ‘real’. It breaks the space between fiction and reality and brings what is behind the screen forward. However in this situation, the intersubjective community is no longer enclosed within the performers inside the cinema. This transition alters its meaning which only circulates in the intersubjective network. Without the cinematic context, its meaning differs from people to people. For me the very moment when I hold the physical lighter in my hand, the cinematic speculation is gone. Because it is so close to me now, the attached, signed meaning reduces its impact on reality.

Chapter II

The readymade in the informational circuit

What interests me a lot is the selected (fabricated) object that really impact in real world. One of Duchamp’s best-known works is Fountain from 1917, which is a well-known story, but I will give an outline of this smart piece which serves as an important argument for my paper. Duchamp is part of a jury for an exhibition called the independence exhibition in New York in 1917 and it was modeled on similar independent exhibitions that occurred in France where artists like the impressionists who were not part of the official salons could exhibit independently. This exhibition was meant to be open to anyone, who paid one dollar entry fee and five dollars of dues. It was also meant to be democratically installed in alphabetical order. So it was completely open exhibition they thought and said. Duchamp proposed a urinal as a work of art to this jury, under a pseudonym, R Mutt (Richard Mutt, it comes from a comic strip, Mutt and Jeff). The work was basically a urinal he had bought in a plumbing supply company. What happened was that, as we all know, the work was rejected. David Joselit pointed out in his lecture that “the work performances the limit of what can be considered a work of art. In other words, the work here is not so much the urinal but the category of art that is delineated by the point beyond which it cannot go.” The term readymade for Duchamp is not a thing, a commodity but actually an encounter between the artist and a thing. It is the connection that is important to him not the object for eyes. “For planning for a moment to come (on such a day, such a date, such a minute) to inscribe a readymade. The readymade can be later looked for (with all kinds of delay). The important thing therefore is just this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like a speech delivered on no matter what occasion but such and such an hour. It is a kind of rendezvous.”(A Passage from Duchamp, Specification for Readymades 1934). The work was missing afterwards as most of Duchamp’s readymades. However it was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz. In the second issue of The Blind Man, May 1917, an article titled “Buddha of the Bathroom” suggesting many art historians have talked about subsequently.“It is a touchstone of art how valuable it might have been.” As consequence, David Joselit argues, what happens is the object disappears but it reenters immediately into circulation as both a photograph and then instantly as a text, so it initiates a process whereby “the thing is absorbed, dissolved into informational circulation.” Duchamp sustained this process throughout the remainder of his life. He later on, authorized others to reposition, relocation the urinal in several places. The very object against the conventional norms of arts at that time abolished its use value and transferred it to be exchange values, and end up in several versions. He uses it as almost a kind of “cursor moving through different situations” repeating in the way that we repeat words in very different context for very different purposes.

The viewers’ value in the creative act

In the his article “Creative Act”, Duchamp recognizes that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” The intention of the artist is not always communicated, thus there are good works and bad works, but they are all art. The good artwork involves audience in this creative act, thus reveals the significance to a work. This is exactly the process of circulation of meaning and it is proved again to be intersubjective. The artist must enjoyed all the versions of Fountain now extant.

In the video work from Guy Ben-Ner, I'd Give It To You If I Could But I Borrowed It, the artist and his kids rummage through a museum and assemble a bicycle from several readymade sculptures, set parts of the readymade sculpture pieces back to their original shape, which the artist reversed the process of Duchamp’s. The exchange value that Duchamp and other artists imposed on these readymades, are turned back to its use value in this piece. The way to deconstruct and reconfigure the subject, brings new symbolic knowledge here. It is through displacing them, subverting the readymades in this piece, that Guy Ben-Ner deals with the “surplus value” that appended by Duchamp alike artists, and acquires readymade be in a museum institution. For me, it is a reactivation of the strategy of antidote that Duchamp had worked on in his time.

Chapter III

Duplication and relation between duplicates

Let’s take the Milk Drop Coronet as another example, it was once an iconic photograph taken in 1956 by Harold Edgerton. Whereas in 1988, there are two three-dimensional milk crowns produced based on this photograph. One was made by Jennifer Bolande which we can easily view on the artist’s website as a digital image; the other, was made independently only a month or two later, by an artist who showed with the same gallery. “On the dealer’s advice, the second was not shown, but became its own frozen moment, an art historical shadow to the Bolande version.”Here arose a very simple question asked by the writer and artist, Laurie Palmer in her article, “Separated at Birth”, “if one is good, why not two?” It was asked in 1997, and seems less valid if we ask it today, as I found already its industrial products in the form of clock, ashtray that might be understood as bad copying or art derivative products. However, I believe that Palmer’s argument is still valid, not in the art discipline only, but in a broader cultural context. She argues, “Each piece might then be read differently in relation to the nested contexts in which it was seen (exhibition venue, city, surrounding body of work…) Seen together, the two works could become each other’s context, and point of comparison.”Then what is the criteria to exclude the second piece or to maintain the value of the milk crown sculpture? It is said that Bolande made six Milk Crown herself, but it is impossible for a same piece from another artist, even the work itself is an appropriation piece.

What I learnt later may bring more insight to this piece. Beginning in 1875, the British physicist Arthur Worthington started to untangle the complex process of fluid flow. By that time perfect symmetry made sense, his compendium of droplet images launched a branch of fluid dynamics that continued more than a century later. He made thousands of times of experiments that he had let splash mercury or milk droplets, some into liquid, others onto hard surfaces. Finally in 1894, he succeeded in stopping the droplet’s splash with a photograph. Those photographs revealed that “they bear out the drawings in may details, show greater irregularity than the drawings would have led one to expect.” At that very moment, the symmetrical drawings and the irregular shadow photographs clashed, one had go. Worthington named those photographs as “Objective Splash” and wrote “I have to confess that in looking over my original drawings I find records of many irregular or unsymmetrical figures, yet in compiling the history it has been inevitable that these should be rejected, if only because identical irregularities never recur. Thus the mind of the observer is filled with an ideal splash – an Auto-Splash – whose perfection may never be actually realized”. The favor in one and the rejection in the another therefore bears in a total subjective agreement. The symmetrical “histories” has been successes, maybe even in Bolande’s piece, look how perfect it is.

Surely I am aware that the question I asked here lies in a certain era that may differs under different time-space and different social agreement. However once they clashed, we actually make subjective choices in order to keep the “ideal” one going. So again it doesn’t matter in the end if the fact is true or right, what matters is it becomes a sharable fact that the public believe. What keeps in the end is the very fact that circulates.

The one and the variations

The development of the Internet has enhanced a multitude that we produce collectively. In Oliver Laric’s series of video works, Versions (2009-2012), he collages historical and contemporary multiplication of images and objects, whereas the script of the voiceover is also taken from others that re-appropriated as his own. Specifically the content consists from the proliferation of cut-and-paste online memes to the shared myths of antiquity. All high culture and popular culture, as diverse as "the Photoshopping of a publicity photo of an Iranian missile launch, the reuse of character animations by Disney and Warner Bros., and the basis of classical statuary in common iconographies and a library of stock poses." For me, his work is a great testimony of the multi-worlds in collective production. In his own words, “Versions alters the perception and the content of other works. This possibly happens with all new works added to the cloud of existing works, part of a larger cloud of related works by other authors.” The moment that we encounter with the duplication, the multiplicity, the reference to “fact” collapsed and the situation we are dealing with is indeed subjective and mediated. The reproduction, displacement, the following interpretation and reinterpretation co-exist and in a way imply more possibilities that are not visible yet.

Circulationism and open access

In her essay, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” published in the e-flux journal, artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl coined the term “circulationism”, and apply this term to the center of contemporary art. She argues that “What the Soviet avant-garde of the twentieth century called productivism—the claim that art should enter production and the factory—could now be replaced by circulationism. Circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of post-producing, launching, and accelerating it.” She also brings the public relations to the central of circulationism in contemporary art practices and further argues “if circulationism is to mean anything, it has to move into the world of offline distribution, of 3D dissemination of resources, of music, land, and inspiration...”. What Hiterl envisions here is the open access to not only digital data but also material beings, However, the complexity of circulation of physical objects in real life requires a more insightful view.

The digital files representing for physical objects, may be the very instant follow up of what Hiterl coined circulationism. In a fine art discipline, Oliver Laric’s website is a popular one distributing a series of artistic works freely. In his 2014 project Yuanmingyuan 3d, he initiated this project scanning seven marble columns from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. The 3d models can be downloaded on the website http://yuanmingyuan3d.com/english.html, and can also be used without any copyright restrictions. The only information he wants but not compulsive is that he’d like to know how the scans be used. The items open for all to work further, and the project itself becomes an artistic strategy or manifesto to approach ‘copy criticism’, in his word “kopienkritik”, a modern genre and process of his. In his own exhibition, he made material objects out of the scans and some with his post production, which maybe the same, as one of the downloaders did. Similar strategy applied to Laric’s earlier project. In 2013 Lincoln 3D Scans project, 74 objects are scanned from The Collection and Usher Gallery’s archive, and wholly free to download.

Laric’s work still works closely with museum or garllery institutions. To push the sharable artistic work to another degree, in 2015 Rob Myers' published his Shareable Readymades, in which he takes three iconic “readymades” from 20th century art cannon and transforms their value once again. By creating a downloadable, freely licensed 3D model to print and remix, everyone can now have their own Pipe, Balloon Dog and Urinal, a conceptual digital artwork available on demand.

In the production of this work, he also outsourced the whole making, commissioned others to make the models. Myers as “self-defined artist, writer and hacker”, made the one-sentence slogan-like description on his website applied to this work - “returning iconic art historical objects to the cultural commons.” Compare to Guy Ben-Ner’s work I'd Give It To You If I Could But I Borrowed It, which question the exchange value of readymade by reversing it back to use value, Myers’s work redefines the readymades in digital cultural. Sharing, making the work circulate become the artistic project itself. What becomes more interesting is that, The “sharing movement” is largely taken by 3d platform users equipped with easily accessed 3d software and hardware. What Steyerl envisions is a cross-fine art discipline scenario that dives into larger public domain. This robustious 3d printing technology empowered with peer production platforms is taking the initiative realizing what Steyerl talked about 3D dissemination of resources. What is the scenario of this newer public relationship equipped with this so called disruptive technology? Users have been provided new technologies by the service providers, and what is produced is produced as a collective activity. Like the letter arrives at its destination in The Purloined Letter; The key lies in the murder’s hand in Dial M for murder; just as in a film we are also spoken by the structures, a complex structure dealing with the state institution, the community institution and us individuals in such symbolic order.

In 2013 Victoria and Albert Museum has controversially acquired the world’s first functioning 3d-printed gun, Liberator. The prototype 3D-printed gun developed and successfully fired by Texan law student Cody Wilson. The design files was once uploaded in Thingiverse, the biggest 3d printing design repository but has removed after about 90 minutes. Wilson then made the blueprints for the weapon available online through his group’s Defense Distributed website. It received the most attention from both judicial government and wide public. Just a few days after their successful test firing, they were requested by the US Department of Defense Trade Controls to take down the design files on their website as well. On their site, it was headed with a banner reads “...The United States government claims control of the information.” The senior curator Kieran Long talked in an interview about why the museum chose to exhibit this piece, “something he is really passionate about V&A is to show the political background of things even when they are not palatable.” To exhibit the gun is not to advocate people to carry guns. When this scenario is possible then “we may have to do something about it, if we don’t want to proliferate it.” The ethic issue arose here is “how we want to live together, how does new technology affect our relationship to one another...” However the original prototype that Cody Wilson was sending to V&A did not arrive at the museum in time. It was held up in the airport and was waiting for an export license to get to London. The gun parts that were exhibited in the end were printed in London from the once open sourced design. According to Wilson, he never thought the gun is a design work, but rather an act of politics... In doing so, it exposes the institutional construction that condition the subjects, organize looking, and manage attention.

Chapter IV

From readymade to shareable design files for 3d printing

When the very first Urinal knocked on the door of contemporary art, the once invisible boundary of high art suddenly got revealed. However the structure is changing, even reforming. We have Duchamp’s bike sculpture, and also Rob Myers' Shareable Readymades. Look along with these “reproduction” works, they are in a similar discourse from different times. Through the process of selection, reproduction and circulation, the artists fulfill to alter the value of the thing, and our perception of it.

To select industrially produced readymades (other than handmade) is an important choice for Marcel Duchamp. It indicates that he turned his attention to “the architectural contexts, classificatory systems, institutional protocols and authoritative doxas of the gallery-museum.” Whereas the shareable readymade Rob Myers proposed is “the Open Source and unrestricted dispersal of the idea and ability to create your own version.” “By choosing to download and print a version for yourself you have the opportunity to own the work and be a part of that disruptive process.” In Art historian Benjamin Buchloh’s essay, he notes the readymade comprise not found objects, but instead “found structures beyond visible reality and its seeming concreteness.” What matters beyond the found objects is actually the found structure. Having the notion in mind, the shareable items in my graduation research are also aiming to map the structure that regulates them.

“Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of ‘commons based peer production’. This means works made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals.” Since “sharing is a social practice shaped by a range of variables, and sharing practices differ from community to community and from technology to technology” (Kennedy 2013). In my graduation work, I take Thingiverse as the main platform for case studies. Thingiverse is the leading website for 3d printing and one of the most popular 3d printing repositories, owned by Makerbots whose own history can be traced back to the RepRap project. RepRap was an initiative to develop a 3D printer that could re-print most of its own components, which shares the same ideology with open software culture. Designs in its repository are free to upload and download. It is branded in their website, “a universe of things”, which, to some extent, implies it absorbs anything and everything uncritically. “Commons–based production as “a socio–economic system of production is emerging in the digitally networked environment”(Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006, p. 394.). Access to the raw data of the source file might be all that is needed to create them, this is simply the case of sharable 3d design files from online repositories. The scale and means of production, reproduction is changing our relationship and challenging our social norms. “For Duchamp, reproduction was not ever an affair of practical publicity or dissemination and never a mere mechanical process. Neither was it a simple replica of something but, rather, a displacement - a temporal and perceptional shift.” Apart from an object of use, with 3D printing another possibility emerges that 3D printing isn’t the total artifact in itself. In the case of sharable design files on Thigiverse, what enhances the disruptive of 3d printing is not only its physical realization as the printed gun, but also its robust methods of distributions. Thus the reproduction here is closely associated with its circulation. Besides, what is two-folded here, surpassing the informational circuit of readymades, is that 3d design files are initiating further processes of development. It contains the potential to upgrade the design file, to remix, to redistribute. That is to say, what is not functional and proliferated may become so instantly; what is still in private imagination may turn to be realistic collaboratively. Thus the work is in an unstable status and on the threshold of symbolic and actual.

Digital commons in the peer production community – Observation on Thingiverse

I’ve made a selection of objects from Thigiverse to work further. They exist in the grey area and hold controversy on whether they could be shared as digital commons or not. The classificatory system here is complex as it is dealing with multitude institutional protocols —in addition to individuals’ ideology, they are constrained by conventions from community, and regulation from states. Under the great potential and repercussions of this sharing community empowered with 3d printing technology, to understand the “things” in Thingiverse, is to understand diverse norms, values, structures and systems that emerge around them. My practical work is an artistic respond to the controversial things shared in Thingiverse repository, which implies the current ambiguity classificatory systems applied to it. A group of selected things(shapes) are taken to exemplify the ambiguity area they exist in. The changeful intention towards these shapes and the highly customization feature these digital file bear in the process of peer production, make the regulation towards them harder. They obtain both realistic potentials and utopia imagination. The way in which 3D printing will be disruptive may well be in terms of how it influences governance and political action more than what outputs are literally produced by 3D printers.

Commons–based production is “different from market–based and company–based production in that the resources used and the products produced are shared among the participants in the distributed network. Consequently, the resources form a commons, governed by the social and institutional arrangements of the participation (Ostrom, 2010; Bauwens, 2009).A subset of commons–based production is peer production in which participants are self–selected and decision–making is distributed.” Thus at the beginning of the production there are no policies claiming what can be made, what cannot. Although old social norms, like ethic concerns may bear in the minds of individuals, it still differs from participant to participant. Only when certain items pops out, can we really realize some agreement are needed.

What the digital commons in Thingiverse have been confronting is reflecting the problems of current regulations mechanism and implying new norms are required to fit to the new booming type of digital commons. The regulation in 3d printing sphere contains both from 3d printing machines, and distribution means. Since 3d printer are generous purpose machines, it is encouraged to make them available for public. Although a desktop 3d printer is becoming cheaper and easily access as home possession, larger or precise machines which can work with big range of material still stay in industrial field. My research is mainly focus on the digital commons in 3d shape – what individuals or 3d printing enthusiast in Thingiverse make with the additive manufacturing and their distribution. It cannot be simply described as a question of self-interest versus common interests. To understand what 3d printing designs can or cannot be kept as commons and shared to all becomes the central of the research.

The well-known but infamous Liberator gun design file affects that the components of firearm are removed from Thingiverse. Thing:11770, a design of an AR-15 lower receiver uploaded by user to the Thingiverse violated its rule that users not “collect, upload, transmit, display or distribute any User HaveBlue Content… that…promotes illegal activities or contributes to the creation of weapons,” The part has been available since before Thingiverse changed its terms of service to forbid weapons and weapon parts. Besides, what ambiguity in the terms of use is that the designs “contributes to the creation of weapons”, there are several gun-related items remained on the site, including things like a revolver(thing:6392) and a custom grip for the Ruger pistol(thing:15632), no to mention a cluster of plans for Nerf weapons and attachments. To look at them carefully sometimes is just a matter of naming like the thing:86136 returns publicly again with the name “Airsoft foregrip”. The user posted on the thing page, “its back, with a thingiverse friendly name!! Apparently "Gun Foregrip" doesn’t work for them and they pulled it”.

Besides, illegal activities and the special cases around firearms, the states also applies copyright and patent law to regulate sharable designs. To remain the online community as “safe harbor”. The service provider is obliged to respond to takedown notice in a timely manner or risk losing protection under the “Safe Harbor” provision. This is the case for serval items which had been taken down once Thingiverse receive Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notices, namely Leman Russ Tank from Warhammer, Duchamp’s chess set, Tintin Rocket, etc. Sometimes, the take-down procedure starts even before any investigation. The first MDCA takedown notice was received in early 2011 on a design of the famous Penrose Triangle, an illusionistic “impossible object”, published in Thingiverse by user Artur. However the Penrose Triangle design for 3d printing has been uploaded to Shapeways, a rival 3d repository before for sell by Ulrich. It received controversy because “it is unclear whether the former design infringed the copyright in the latter: the designer who alleged copyright infringement was not the original creator of the Penrose Triangle, Oscar Reutersvald, nor is the process of converting the Penrose Triangle image to a 3D printing file a clear infringement of any copyright that might subsist in the initial idea.” Furthermore, it is unclear what the copyright assertion was in, “the structure of the object, the design file, or the image of the Penrose Triangle”, since “the scope of copyright has been limited to particular expression of an idea, not the idea that underlies that expression.” The controversy ended up that Ulrich dropped the DMCA notice and instead release his model to the public domain. “In the meantime new versions of the Penrose Triangle(thing:6513) have been posted on Thingiverse “based solely on the 1934 design painted by Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd” in what is becoming a symbol of defiance against DMCA in relation to 3Dprinting.” The old copyright policy seems is out of keeping with the times. Thingiverse also applies its own filter, such as NTFS tag, to the uploaded “thing”, which widely understood by the community users as Thingiverse “censorship”. Sex toys, Drugs paraphernalia are fallen into this category. Images of designs tagged as NTFS are simply blacked out with an exclamation mark on the site. This procedure is done by algorithm since users found its mistakes that some items has been wrongly tagged as NTFS. Debates raised by users regarding the rights of Thingiverse to censor such content neglecting Thingiverse is a “privately owned” site. Whereas, even naming the “thing” while uploading, users found they have to obey “Thingiverse friendly keywords”. What’s worse is that thingiverse’s own search function won’t search for those “unfriendly content”, even they are still in its repository.

“A big limitation of this standard interpretation is that ‘objectivity’ is always an inter-subjective agreement.” The gap of understanding from different users and the service provider lies a group of design content in grey area. This is the same case as apart from state regulations, community regulations(from Makerbots company), Thingiverse also applies “Report as Inappropriate” method for users in the community to report content which they find as a violation of the Thingiverse Terms of Service. An ABS Knuckles (thing:972) received flag from user vik who would “rather the weapons stuff was kept to a minimum, so things don't get spoiled for the rest of us.” Another user seems aware of the line the distributed 3d files are toeing, “it goes to show the power of certain forms even when they are separated from their function.” However, Thingiverse is not only dedicated for end uses but also allow amateur designers to find help to upgrade their design, or for remix designs. If we consider downloading as importing, then it becomes hard for individuals to judge at the current status of a design blueprint and our intention with it.

So the 3d repository Thingiverse as my case study brings a lot of questions in the social activity at large. “It is not only a regulating mechanism but also produces a structure of institutions that mold social life.”

The shape for speculation

The diverse notions upon 3d printable files urges our considerations around the digital commons become more complex. Instead of leaving the commons in 3d shape to groups of “similar” people, my approach on this subject, is to select a group of controversial objects in the Thingiverse repository and further work with them in a speculative manner. The digital commons in 3d shape master vast variety of methods of dissemination/distribution, with the booming 3d printing technology, they also gain function from their physical materiality. However those shared files are essentially arrays of coordinates that a lot of shapes shared and more shapes can be built upon. The digital and analogue features enhance the hyper towards this media which is both fragile and disruptive. The selected items which exist in a grey zone and imply a disputed boarder – They question what can be shared as digital commons and what can be produced physically in 3d printer. In the practical work, the selection of items will be printed physically. By viewing the printed objects, people are invited to consider on how they recognize them. The interpretations from various considerations are visualized in video format featuring me as an anonymous performing with those objects.

Chapter V

Conclusion

The symbolically charged object in my research, be it in cinema, in contemporary art discipline or in maker community, are distillations of the social relationships. Its materiality is shaped by the inter-subjective network, whereas, its value is also altered and constructed by the intersubjective network. Thus no matter in its physical form or its informational representation, online or offline, it is always presented in a societal condition at large. The meaning of the symbolically charged object exists only in so far as it is inter-subjectively recognized. It is not concerned whether it is real and true. For a fact to be operative, it has to be sharable and believable, which ensure the very circulation of it. The symbolic is the way of interacting with other people. The found objects as the readymades toes the board-line of the art in the museum-gallery institution, the sharable 3d printed files follows the same manner testing the symbolic institutional protocols, which are all in a fuzzy region.