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Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud these theories and ideas recently led to my collaboration with American artist Mike Kelley for our work Esprits de Paris (2002-2003) shown 13 as part of the Sonic Process show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Wishing to explore the ground built through these explorations into these unintelligible signals, we recorded some of the most haunted places in Paris, as well as loca­ tions loaded with an electrical presence-everywhere from author Isidore Ducasse's (Lautreamont) apartment in Montmartre where he died in 1870; the grave of Charles Cros, inventor of the phonograph and alien contactee, in Montpar~asse cemetery; to recordings inside I'Eglise de la Sainte-Trinite where composer Olivier Messiaen famously played the organ. is that somehow certain places may become some subtle physical the thoughts and emotions of those and dying within them. An analogy can be found in the medium, which seems to become surcharged with a energy, from which phenomena doubtless radiate during the course of a seance. Recording using a thermal camera that allows one to tune into a particular temperature culture is always derivative, and music perhaps especially so. New art on the film and also a series of acoustic recordings in each of the locations, on old art. We hear music, process it, reconfigure it, and create some­ sometimes with the microphone itself connected but switched off, allowed us derivative but new-folk melodies become Liszt's Hungarian Rhapso- to explore a form of "audio mirage" that can emerge from prolonged listening Roy Acuff's "Great Speckled Bird" becomes Hank Williams's "Wild to an identiqll recording, where you almost begin to hear not of Life"; and Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things" becomes recorded on the original tape or disc. Somewhere beneath the surface we were Coltrane classic. able finally to reveal acoustic data and information, voices formed from the distortions in recording. In even the most subtle passages one could to a new leveL Artists can now build upon hear the most dramatic parts, the hidden shifts in detail and language we the fixed artifact of an earlier artist's perform were searching out. A space would thus be orchestrated in which the audience new work. Early sonic collage, in the analog era, was could experience the essence of these voices from beyond, a densely orches­ ,,.-intensive. It took John a year to make his four-minute-long Wil­ trated hiss of information. We listened to the spaces to hear the detail, the Mix.1 William Burroughs untold hours constructing cut-ups with silences offering up a narrative unknown. blades and tape. And of course, artists' raw materials for these projects All of my works have explored the hidden resonances and meanings within limited to whatever recorded sound was physically at hand. the memory and in particular the subtle traces that people and their actions Digital recording technology revolutionizes and democratizes this recycling leave hehind_ The "ghosts" within sound and memory making complex manipulation of recorded fragments easy and rela­ these moments, affordable. And the Internet and other digital communications media stream enables one to construct an ar­ a treasure trove of recorded sound directly to the sonic cannibal­ Iformation formerly fixed in discs or and missed a rnArnAnt-"'~l future. It is a form of found futurism. pure thought or something very much like around the Net at the of light, in conditions which one With thanks to iHike Kelley for historical detail in effect, as glowing or transmitted sounds, but never touch or Daphne Keller claim to 'own' in the old sense of the word."2 Contemporary music, from the of older intellectual goods to produce new ones-are reflected in U.S. copy­ top forty to the most obscure live DJ set, reflects this tedmological change, right law. The law limits the rights of intellectual property owners, and grants taking the music that came before as raw material for reuse and reconfigura­ the public rights to share in the intellectual property's value, in ways that tion. As David Sanjek has noted, this cultural practice profoundly blurs the would be unthinkable for tangible property like cars or bushels of wheat. In­ line between creators and consumers of culture, turning listening itself into a deed, many argue-based on the First Amendment and the Constitution's platform for creative production and performance. I Copyright Clause-that expansive copyright protection of the sort assumed The cultural practice of sampling meshes very poorly with copyright, the by Judge Duffy in the Biz Markie case exceeds Constitutional parameters. body of law which turns creative expression into private property. The first This essay will not detail those arguments. (I refer you to sonic appropriation­ 6 U.S. sampling case held rapper Biz Markie liable for infringing Gilbert O'Sul­ ists Negativland if you are interested in the legal niceties of this issue. ) But it livan's copyright in the song "Alone Again (Naturally)." Judge Kevin Duffy will lay out a framework for considering the relationship between copyright, began his opinion with scripture-"thou shalt not steal" -and ended it with culture, and digital technology. a referral for criminal prosecution. 4 The law has changed very little in inter- According to the Constitution, copyright law grants limited rights to authors years, despite the burgeoning of sample-based music. As a result, much of in order to "Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts." The point is to most innovative cultural production takes place in the shadow of the create the economic and legal conditions within which science, learning, and law: many Drs and other artists produce their work in the knowledge that a culture can flourish. In pursuit of this goal, a copyright holder is generally copyright holder could sue, that distribution of their work could be enjoined granted the right to stop other people from selling copies of her work or de­ and the sampler held liable for substantial monetary damages. rivative works based on it? This ensures that she can get paid, that she will The law doesn't have to work this way. Judge Duffy's "thou shalt not steal" have economic incentives to create and distribute culture. As the Supreme a deeply flawed analogy between physical property and the intellectual Court has explained, the "Promote the Progress" goal is deeply utilitarian: property protected by copyright law. Property rights over informational the immediate effect of our law is to secure a fair return for an works, such as music, don't work the same way as property rights over land this incentive, to stimulate artistic pro- or material goods, for reasons eloquently expressed by Thomas Jefferson: If nature has made anyone thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, the Progress" is a goal defmed by collective interests, not indi­ it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclu­ vidual desert. (This utilitarian function of copyright can, in a characteristic possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces Enlightenment-liberal way, be a little harsh. U.S. law has no equivalent to itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Europe's "moral rights" for a songwriter to control exploitation of her Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other pos­ sesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself work-she cannot necessarily stop a cruel parody; and if she sells her copy­ without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without dark- she retains no power to stop commercial or other uses that she finds me. That ideas should freely from one to another over the globe, for the distasteful. ) moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to As well as rewarding authors for their work, the law also protects the gen­ have been and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like eral public interest in cultural progress by maintaining some public access to fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any Doint, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, old works as raw materials for new ones. All copyrights eventually expire, and ment or exclusive dllDwDriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a the works feed into the public domain where anyone may copy them or pre­ property.5 pare derivative works. In addition, certain reuse rights never belong to the author-they are The peculiar properties of intellectual goods-that we can all use them at . handed off to the public, and to secondary users, You are always once without diminishing their value, that we consistentlv build on elements Daphne Keller free to copy the, underlying ideas or facts contained in a work; only the recordings-just compositions), Anyone who wants to record a new version author's individual expression is protected by copyright. And you can copy of a copyrighted composition can do it, as long as he pays the songwriter a fee elements of a work that were not original to the author-like 4/4 time, an set by the government. So the owner of the copyright in the composition gets a-b-a-b rhyme scheme, or a boy-meets-girl plot. Moreover, under the doc­ paid whenever someone records a cover -but in most circumstances she can't trine of "fair use," certain criticism and parodies can copy a work without stop the cover artist or set the terms of payment.

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