KOP - Kingdom of Piracy, online exhibition, Taiwan

[anna balint]

Kingdom of Piracy
online exhibition
http://kop.adac.com.tw/
launch: December 9, 2001 onsite exhibition- ArtFuture 2002 -  March 2002
Acer Digital Art Center. Taiwan Joint Curation: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin  Medosch, Yukiko
Shikata
	
	exhibition proposal 
	
	Kingdom of Piracy [KOP] is an online, open work
space which explores piracy as the net's ultimate art form. Hosted
by the Acer Digital Art Center [ADAC] in Taiwan as part of  ArtFuture 2002,
[KOP] will include links, objects, ideas, software, commissioned
artists' projects, critical writing and online streaming media  events.
The exhibition will launch a pilot website in December 2001, and  during
the following three months the project's curators will begin a  process
of commissioning projects and written work. While remaining an  online
exhibition, the totality of the workspace will be presented on site
in ArtFuture 2002, to be held in Taiwan in March. An edition of all
works commissioned will be kept on the ADAC server as an open-ended           
online exhibition, whilst artists and authors will remain sole  copyright
owners of their works.
	With the increasing shift towards an immaterial or 'weightless' economy,
the concept of intellectual property rights has become one of the key battle 
lines of our times. IP is at the core of big industries
from IT (including hardware and software) to entertainment  (music,
film and books) to pharmaceuticals and biotech. A handful of high             
profile cases such as Napster, DeCSS (DVD content encryption  system),
SDMI and the Russian eBook hacker recently arrested in the US  have
highlighted this battle.
	The idea that IP rights should be rigidly enforced around the world
through patent and anti-piracy laws is hotly contested by a  growing
alliance of researchers, open source developers, crackers and  hackers,
artists and intellectuals. The patent law applied on plants,  seeds
and other natural resources is further contested as biopiracy by  environmentalists.
            The purpose of Kingdom of Piracy [KOP] is to consider the law and             
order provisions surrounding intellectual property in the context             
of geographical and cultural borders, and to examine the changes  and
challenges presented by information technology.
	The concept of intellectual property rights has no history in Asia.
The recent show destruction of millions of pirated CDs and DVDs  in
China, a preliminary to the country's entry into the WTO, does  not
change the fact that much of the Asian continent is still  operating
completely on its own terms. The burst bubble of dot-commerce in  the
early 21st century has plunged Taiwan and Asia's electronic  supply
industries into recession, keeping the divide between Western and             
Eastern economies as wide as ever. The Kingdom of Piracy will  consider
this digital divide, and its sustaining strategies, from a global             
perspective. Theorist Arthur Kroker speculated in 1994 about  'digital
abundance', imagining Taiwan as a tetra-gigabyte data heaven,  'the
largest data storage dump in the virtual world' (ctheory.net).  [KOP]
envisions a virtual free state outside of geography, time,  corporate
power and sovereignty; a decentralised, fragmented, immanent  entity
in which everyone can be an autonomous agent.
	The Kingdom of Piracy is everywhere: on the fringes and in the mainstream
high-tech economies, from Asia to Eastern Europe to the data  havens
of Sealand and hackers' garages in Silicon Valley. The digital  commons
is bathing in millions of MP3s and an endless supply of warez.  Codes
for appropriation, cut-and-paste, replication, sampling and  remixing
have long been established as artistic practice. [KOP] challenges             
artists, writers and practitioners to use these techniques to  question,
contribute to, analyse and otherwise address this growing  Kingdom.
            It also asks them to become intimately involved in the processes  of
the Kingdom itself, a place in which all productions are part of  an
innately collaborative, derivative and intimately interconnected  environment
of intellectual 'properties'.
	Sponsored by Taiwan's Acer Group and hosted by Acer's Digital Art
Center server, Kingdom of Piracy invites allied crews of crackers             
and artists to plug into the supply lines of digital abundance.  The
[KOP] site will be an active public sphere for global data  trafficking,
descrambling and jamming. Commissioned works are encouraged to  engage
in acts of piracy for the causes of intellectual enhancement and  poetic
intervention.