Dockray, Pasquinelli, Smith & Waldorf
There is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing
2010
# There is Nothing Less Passive than the Act of Fleeing
[The Public School](/web/20170523052416/http://journalment.org/author/public-
school)
What follows is a condensed and edited version of a text for a panel that was
presented at UCIRA’s _Future Tense: Alternative Arts and Economies in the
University_ conference held in San Diego, California on November 18, 2010.
The panel shared the same name as a 13-day itinerant seminar in Berlin
organized by Dockray, Waldorf, and Fiona Whitton earlier that year, in July.
The seminar began with an excerpt from Tiqqun’s _Introduction to Civil War_ ,
which was co-translated into English by Smith; and later read a chapter from
Pasquinelli’s _Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons_. Both authors have
also participated in meetings at The Public School in Los Angeles and Berlin.
Both the panel and the seminar developed out of longer conversations at The
Public School in Los Angeles, which began in late 2007 under Telic Arts
Exchange. The Public School is a school with no curriculum, where classes are
proposed and organized by the public.
## The Education Factory
The University as I understand it, has been a threshold between youth and the
labor market. Or it has been a threshold between a general education and a
more specialized one. In its more progressive form, it’s been a zone of
transition into an expanding middle class. But does this form still exist? I’m
inclined to think just the opposite, that the University is becoming a mean
for filtering people out of the middle class via student loan debt, which now
exceeds credit card debt. The point of the questions for me is simply what is
the point of the University? What are we fighting for or defending?
The next question might be, do students work? The University is a crucial site
in the reproduction of class relations; we know that students are consumers;
we know the student is a future worker who will be compelled to work, and work
in a specific way, because she/he is crushed by debt contracted during her/his
tenure as a student; we know that students work while attending school, and
that for many students school and work eerily begin to resemble one another.
But asking whether students work is to ask something more specific: do
students produce value and, therefore surplus-value? If we can assume, for the
moment, that students are a factor in the “knowledge production” that takes
place in the University, is this production of knowledge also the production
of value? We confront, maybe, a paradox: all social activity has become
“productive”—captured, absorbed—at the very moment value becomes unmeasurable.
What does this have to do with students, and their work? The thesis of the
social factory was supplemented by the assumption that knowledge had become a
central mode in the production of value in post-Fordist environments. Wouldn’t
this mean that the university could become an increasingly important
flashpoint in social struggles, now that it has become not simply the site of
the reproduction of the capital relation, but involved in the immediate
production process, directly productive of value? Would we have to understand
students themselves as, if not knowledge producers, an irreplaceable moment or
function within that process? None of this remains clear. The question is not
only a sociological one, it is also a political one. The strategy of
reconceptualizing students as workers is rooted in the classical Marxist
identification of revolt with the point of production, that is, exploitation.
To declare all social activity to be productive is another way of saying that
social war can be triggered at any site within society, even among the
precarious, the unemployed, and students.
_Knowledge is tied to struggle. To truly know is to hate truly. This is why
the working class can know and possess everything of capital, as it is enemy
to itself as capital._
—Tronti, 1966
That form of “hate” mentioned by Tronti is suggesting something interesting
form of political passion and a new modus operandi. The relation between hate
and knowledge, suggested by Tronti, is the opposite of the cynical detachment
of the new social figure of the entrepreneur-artist but it’s a joyful hate of
our condition. In order to educate ourselves we should hate our very own
environment and social network in which we were educated—the university. The
position of the artist in their work and the performance of themselves (often
no different) can take are manyfold. There are histories for all of these
postures that can be referenced and adopted. They are all acceptable tactics
as long as we keep doing and churning out more. But where does this get us,
both within the confines of the arts and the larger social structure? We are
taught that the artist is always working, thinking, observing. We have learned
the tricks of communication, performance and adaptability. We can go anywhere,
react to anything, respond in a thoughtful and creative way to all problems.
And we do this because while there is opportunity, we should take it. “We
shouldn’t complain, others have it much worse.” But it doesn’t mean that we
shouldn’t imagine something else. To begin thinking this way, it means a
refusal to deliver an event, to perform on demand. Maybe we need a kind of
inflexibility, of obstruction, of non-conductivity. After all, what exactly
are we producing and performing for? Can we try to think about these talents
of performance, of communication? If so, could this be the basis for an
intimacy, a friendship… another institution?
## Alternative pedagogical models
Let’s consider briefly the desire for “new pedagogical models” and “new forms
of knowledge production”. When articulated by the University, this simply
means new forms of instruction and new forms of research. Liberal faculty and
neoliberal politicians or administrators find themselves joined in this hunt
for future models and forms. On the one hand, faculty imagines that these new
techniques can provide space for continuing the good. On the other hand,
investors, politicians, and administrators look for any means to make the
University profitable; use unpaid labour, eliminate non-productive physical
spaces, and create new markets. Symptomatically, there is very little
resistance to this search for new forms and new models for the simple reason
that there is a consensus that the University should and will continue.
It’s also important to note that many of the so-called new forms and new
models being considered lie beyond the walls and payroll of the institution,
therefore both low-cost and low-risk. It is now a familiar story: the
institution attempts to renew itself by importing its own critique. The Public
School is not a new model and it’s not going to save the University. It is not
even a critique of the University any more or less than it is a critique of
the field of art or of capitalist society. It is not “the next university”
because it is a practice of leaving the University to the side. It would be a
mistake to think that this means isolation or total detachment.
Today, the forms of university governance cannot allow themselves to uproot
self-education. To the contrary, self-education constitutes a vital sap for
the survival of the institutional ruins, snatched up and rendered valuable in
the form of revenue. Governance is the trap, hasty and flexible, of the
common. Instead of countering us frontally, the enemy follows us. We must
immediately reject any weak interpretation of the theme of autonomous
institutions, according to which the institution is a self-governed structure
that lives between the folds of capitalism, without excessively bothering it.
The institutionalisation of self-education doesn’t mean being recognized as
one actor among many within the education market, but the capacity to organize
living knowledge’s autonomy and resistance.
One of the most important “new pedagogical models” that emerged over the past
year in the struggles around the implosion of the “public” university are the
occupations that took place in the Fall of 2009. Unlike other forms of action,
which tend to follow the timetable and cadence of the administration, to the
point of mirroring it, these actions had their own temporality, their own
initiative, their own internal logic. They were not at all concerned with
saving a university that was already in ruins, but rather with creating a
space at the heart of the University within which something else, some future,
could be risked, elaborated, prefigured. Everything had to be improvised, from
moment to moment, and in these improvisations new knowledges were developed
and shared. This improvisation was demanded by the aleatory quality of the
types of relations that emerged within these spaces, relations no longer
regulated by the social alibis that assigns everyone her/his place. When
students occupy university buildings—here in California, in NYC, in Puerto
Rico, in Europe and the UK, everywhere—they do so not because they want to
save their universities. They do so because they know the university for what
it is, as something to be at once seized and abandoned. They know that they
can only rely on and learn from one another.
## The Common and The Public
What is really so disconcerting about this antinomy between the logic of the
common and the logic of the social or the public? For Jacotot, it means the
development of a communist politics that is neither reformist nor seditious2.
It proposes the formation of common spaces at a distance from—if not outside
of—the public sphere and its communicative reason: “whoever forsakes the
workings of the social machine has the opportunity to make the electrical
energy of the emancipation machine.”
What does it mean to forsake the social machine? That is the major political
question facing us today. Such a forsaking would require that our political
energies organize themselves around spaces of experimentation at a distance
not only from the university and what is likely its slow-motion, or sudden,
collapse, but also from an entire imaginary inherited from the workers
movement: the task of a future social emancipation and vectors and forms of
struggle such a task implies. Perhaps what is required is not to put off
equality for the future, but presuppose the common, to affirm that commons as
a fact, a given, which must nevertheless be verified, created, not by a social
body, not by a collective force, but a power of the common, now.
School is not University. Neither is it Academy or College or even Institute.
We are all familiar with the common meaning of the word: it is a place for
learning. In another sense, it also refers to organized education in general,
which is made most clear by the decision to leave, to “drop out of school”.
Alongside these two stable, almost architectural definitions, the word
gestures to composition and movement—the school of bodies, moving
independently, together; the school only exists as long as that collective
movement does. The school takes shape in this oscillation between form and
formlessness, not through the act of constructing a wall but by the process of
realizing its boundary through practice.
Perhaps this is a way to think of how to develop what Felix Guattari called
“the associative sector” in 1982: “everything that isn’t the state, or private
capital, or even cooperatives”3. At first gloss, the associative sector is
only a name for the remainder, the already outside; but, in the language of a
school, it is a constellation of relationships, affinities, new
subjectivities, and movements, flickering into existence through life and use,
An “engaged withdrawal” that simultaneously creates an exit and institutes in
the act of passing through. Which itself might bring us back to school, to the
Greek etymology of school, skhole, “a holding back”, a “keeping clear” of
space for reflective distance. On the one hand, perhaps this reflective space
simply allows theoretical knowledge to shape or affect performative action;
but on the other hand, the production of this “clearing” is not given,
certainly not now and certainly not by the institutions that claim to give it.
Reflective space is not the precondition for performative action. On the
contrary; performative action is the precondition for reflective space—or,
more appropriately, space and action must be coproduced.
Is the University even worth “saving”? We are right to respond with
indignation, or better, with an array of tactics—some procedural, some more
“direct”—against these incursions, which always seem to authorize themselves
by appeals to economic austerity, budget shortfalls, and tightened belts.
Perhaps what is being destroyed in this process is the very notion of the
public sphere itself, a notion that. It is easy to succumb to the illusion
that the only possible result of this destruction of the figure of the public
is privatization. But what if the figure of the public was to be set off
against not only the private and property relations, but against a figure of
the “common” as well? What if, in other words, the notion of the public has
always been an unstable, mediating term between privatization and
communization, and what if the withering of this mediation left these two
process openly at odds with each other? Perhaps, then, it is not simply a
question of saving a university and, more broadly, a public space that is
already withering away; maybe our energies and our intelligence, our
collective or common intellectual forces, should be devoted to organizing and
articulating just this sort of counter-transition, at a distance from the
public and the private.
## Authorship and new forms of knowledge
For decades we have spoken about the “death of the author”. The most sustained
critiques of authorship have been made from the spheres of art and education,
but not coincidentally, these spheres have the most invested in the notion.
Credit and accreditation are the mechanisms for attaching symbolic capital to
individuals via degrees and other lines on CVs. The curriculum vitæ is an
inverted credit report, evidence of underpaid work, kept orderly with an
expectation of some future return.
All of this work, this self-documentation, this fidelity between ourselves and
our papers, is for what, for whom? And what is the consequence of a world
where every person is armed with their vitæ, other than “the war of all
against all?” It’s that sensation that there are no teams but everyone has got
their own jersey.
The idea behind the project The Public School is to teach each other in a very
horizontal way. No curriculum, no hierarchy. But is The Public School able to
produce new knowledge and new content by itself? Can the The Public School
become a sort of autonomous collective author? Or, is The Public School just
about exchanges and social networking?
In the recent history of university struggles, some collectives started to
refresh the idea of coresearch; a form of knowledge that can produce new
subjectivities by researching. New subjectivities that produce new knowledge
and new knowledge that produces new subjectivities If knowledge comes only
from conflict, knowledge goes back to conflict in order to produce new
autonomy and subjectivities.
### The Public School
Sean Dockray, Matteo Pasquinelli, Jason Smith and Caleb Waldorf are founding
members of and collaborators at The Public School. Initiated in 2007 under
Telic Arts Exchange (literally in the basement) in Los Angeles, The Public
School is a school with no curriculum. At the moment, it operates as follows:
first, classes are proposed by the public; then, people have the opportunity
to sign up for the classes; finally, when enough people have expressed
interest, the school finds a teacher and offers the class to those who signed
up. The Public School is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it
has no affiliation with the public school system. It is a framework that
supports autodidactic activities, operating under the assumption that
everything is in everything. The Public School currently exists in Los
Angeles, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Helsinki, Philadelphia, Durham, San Juan,
and is still expanding.
Sollfrank, Francke & Weinmayr
Piracy Project
2013
Giving What You Don't Have
Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr
Piracy Project
Birmingham, 6 December 2013
[00:12]
Eva Weinmayr: When we talk about the word piracy, it causes a lot of problems
to quite a few institutions to deal with it. So events that we’ve organised
have been announced by Central Saint Martins without using the word piracy.
That’s interesting, the problems it still causes…
Cornelia Sollfrank: And how do you announce the project without “Piracy”? The
Project?
E. W.: It’s a project about intellectual property.
C. S.: The P Project.
Andrea Francke, Eva Weinmayr: [laugh] Yes.
[00:52]
Andrea Francke: The Piracy Project is a knowledge platform, and it is based
around a collection of pirated books, of books that have been copied by
people. And we use it to raise discussion about originality, authorship,
intellectual property questions, and to produce new material, new essays and
new questions.
[01:12]
E. W.: So the Piracy Project includes several aspects. One is that it is an
act of piracy in itself, because it is located in an art school, in a library,
in an officially built up a collection of pirated books. [01:30] So that’s the
second aspect, it’s a collection of books which have been copied,
appropriated, modified, improved, which live in this library. [01:40] And the
third part is that it is a collection of physical books, which is touring. We
create reading rooms and invite people to explore the books and discuss issues
raised by cultural piracy.
[01:58] The Piracy Project started in an art college library, which was
supposed to be closed down. And the Piracy Project is one project of And
Publishing. And Publishing is a publishing activity exploring print-on-demand
and new modes of production and of dissemination, the immediacy of
dissemination. [02:20] And Publishing is a collaboration between myself and
Lynn Harris, and we were hosted by Central Saint Martins College of Art and
Design in London. And the campus where this library was situated was the
campus we were working at. [02:40] So when the library was being closed, we
moved in the library together with other members of staff, and kept the
library open in a self-organised way. But we were aware that there’s no budget
to buy new books, and we wanted to have this as a lively space, so we created
an open call for submissions and we asked people to select a book which is
really important to them and make a copy of it. [03:09] So we weren’t
interested in piling up a collection of second hand books, we were really
interested in this process: what happens when you make a copy of a book, and
how does this copy sit next to the original authoritative copy of the book.
This is how it started.
[03:31]
A. F.: I met Eva at the moment when And Publishing was helping to set up this
new space in the library, and they were trying to think how to make the
library more alive inside that university. [03:44] And I was doing research on
Peruvian book piracy at that time, and I had found this book that was modified
and was in circulation. And it was a very exciting moment for us to think what
happens if we can promote this type of production inside this academic
library.
[04:05] Piracy Project
Collection / Reading Room / Research
[04:11]
The Collection
[04:15]
E. W.: We asked people to make a copy of a book which is important to them and
send it to us, and so with these submission we started to build up the
collections. Lots of students were getting involved, but also lots of people
who work in this topic, and were interested in these topics. [04:38] So we
received about one hundred books in a couple of months. And then, parallel to
this, we started to do research ourselves. [04:50] We had a residency in
China, so we went to China, to Beijing and Shanghai, to meet illegal
booksellers of pirated architecture books. And we had a residency in Turkey,
in Istanbul, where we did lots of interviews with publishers and artists on
book piracy. [05:09] So the collection is a mix of our own research and cases
from the real book markets, and creative work, artistic work which is produced
in the context of an art college and the wider cultural realm.
[05:29]
A. F.: And it is an ongoing project.
E. W.: The project is ongoing, we still receive submissions. The collection is
growing, and at the moment here we have about 180 books, here at Grand Union
(Birmingham).
[05:42]
A. F.: When we did the open call, something that was really important to us
was to make clear for people that they have a space of creativity when they
are making a copy. So we wrote, please send us a copy of a book, and be aware
that things happen when you copy a book. [05:57] Whether you do it
intentionally or not a copy is never the same. So you can use that space, take
ownership of that space and make something out of that; or you can take a step
back and allow things to happen without having control. And I think that is
something that is quite important for us in the project. [06:12] And it is
really interesting how people have embraced that in different measures, like
subtle things, or material things, or adding text, taking text out, mixing
things, judging things. Sometimes just saying, I just want it to circulate, I
don’t mind what happens in the space, I just want the subject to be in the
world again.
[06:35]
E. W.: I think this is one which I find interesting in terms of making a copy,
because it’s not so much about my own creativity, it’s more about exploring
how technology edits what you can see. It’s Jan van Toorn’s Critical Practice,
and the artist is Hester Barnard, a Canadian artist. [07:02] She sent us these
three copies, and we thought, that’s really generous, three copies. But they
are not identical copies, they are very different. Some have a lot of empty
pages in the book. And this book has been screen-captured on a 3.5 inch
iPhone, whereas this book has been screen-captured on a desktop, and this one
has been screen-captured with a laptop. [07:37] So the device you use to
access information online determines what you actually receive. And I find
this really interesting, that she translated this back into a hardcopy, the
online edited material. [07:53] And this is kind of taught by this book,
standard International Copyright. She went to Google Books, and screen-
captured all the pages Google Books are showing. So we are all familiar with
blurry text pages, but then it starts that you get the message “Page 38 is not
shown in this preview.” [08:18] And then it’s going through the whole book, so
she printed every page basically, omitting the actual information. But the
interesting thing is that we are all aware that this is happening on Google,
on screen online, but the fact that she’s translating this back into an
object, into a printed book, is interesting.
[08:44]
Reading Room
[08:48]
A. F.: We create these reading rooms with the collection as a way to tour the
collection, and meet people and have conversations around the books. And that
is something quite important to us, that we go with the physical books to a
place, either for two or three months, and meet different people that have
different interests in relation to the collection in that locality. We’ve been
doing that for the last two years, I think, three years. [09:12] And it’s
quite interesting because different places have very different experiences of
piracy. So you can go to a country where piracy is something very common, or a
different place where people have a very strong position against piracy, or a
different legal framework. And I feel the type of conversations and the
quality of interactions is quite different from being present on the space and
with the books. [09:36] And that’s why we don’t call these exhibitions,
because we always have places where people can come and they can stay, and
they can come again. Sometimes people come three or four times and they
actually read the books. And a few times they go back to their houses and they
bring books back, and they said, I’m going to contact this friend who has been
to Russia and he told me about this book – so we can add it to the collection.
I think that makes a big difference to how the research in the project
functions.
[10:06]
E. W.: One of the most interesting events we did with the Piracy collection
was at the Show Room where we had a residency for the last year. There were
three events, and one was A Day At The Courtroom. This was an afternoon where
we invited three copyright lawyers coming from different legal systems: the
US, the UK, and the Continental European, Athens. And we presented ten
selected cases from the collection and the three copyright lawyers had to
assess them in the eyes of the law, and they had to agree where to put this
book in a scale from legal to illegal. [10:51] So we weren’t interested really
to say, this is legal and this is illegal, we were interested in all the
shades in between. And then they had to discuss where they would place the
book. But then the audience had the last verdict, and then the audience placed
the book. [11:05] And this was an extremely interesting discussion, because it
was interesting to see how different the legal backgrounds are, how blurry the
whole field is, how you can assess when is the moment where a work becomes a
transformative work, or when it stays a derivative work, and this whole
discussion.
[11:30] When we do these reading rooms – and we had one in New York, for
example, at the New York Art Book Fair – people are coming, and they are
coming to see the physical books in a physical space, so this creates a social
encounter and we have these conversations. [11:47] For example, a woman stood
up to us in New york and she told us about a piracy project she run where she
was working in a juvenile detention centre, and she produced a whole shadow
library of books because the incarcerated kids couldn’t take the books in
their cells, so she created these copies, individual chapters, and they could
circulate. [12:20] I’m telling this because the fact that we are having this
reading room and that we are meeting people, and that we are having these
conversations, really furthers our research. We find out about these projects
by sharing knowledge.
[12:38]
Categories
[12:42]
A. F.: Whenever we set our reading room for the Piracy Project we need to
organise the books in a certain way. What we started to do now is that we’ve
created these different categories, and the first set of categories came from
the legal event. [12:56] So we set up, we organised the books in different
categories that would help us have questions for the lawyers, that would work
for groups of books instead of individual works. [13:07] And the idea is that,
for example, we are going to have our next events with librarians, and a new
set of categories would come. So the categories change as our interest or
research in the project is changing. [13:21] The current categories are:
Pirated Design, so books where the look of the book has been copied but not
the content; recirculation, books that have been copied trying to be
reproduced exactly as they were, because they need to be circulating again;
transformation, books that have been modified; For Sale Doctrine, so we
receive quite a few books where people haven’t actually made a copy but they
have cut the book or drawn inside the book, and legally you are allowed to do
anything with a book except copy it, so we thought that it was quite important
so that we didn’t have to discuss that with the lawyers; [14:03] Public
Domain, which are works that are already out of copyright, again, so whatever
you do with those books is legal; and collation, books gathered from different
sources, and who owns the copyright, which was a really interesting question,
which is when you have a book that has many authors – it’s really interesting.
Different systems in different countries have different ways to deal with who
owns the copyright and what are the rights of the owners of the different
works.
[14:36]
E. W.: Ahmet Şık is a journalist who published a book about the Ergenekon
scandal and the Turkish government, and connects that kind of mafioso
structures. Before the book could be published he was arrested and put in jail
for a whole year without trial, and he sent the PDF to friends, and the PDF
was circulating on many different computers so it couldn’t be taken. [15:06]
They published the PDF, and as authors they put over a hundred different
author names, so there was not just one author who could be taken into
responsibility.
[15:22] We have in the collection this book, it’s Teignmouth Electron by
Tacita Dean. This is the original, it’s published by Book Works and Steidl.
And to this round table, to this event, we invited also Jane Rolo, director of
Book Works (and she published this book). [15:41] And we invited her saying,
do you know that your book has been pirated? So she was really interested and
she came along. This is the pirated version, it’s Alias, [by] Damián Ortega in
Mexico. It’s a series of books where he translates texts and theory into
Spanish, which are not available in Spanish. So it’s about access, it’s about
circulation. [16:07] But actually he redesigned the book. The pirated version
looks very different, and it has a small film roll here, from Tacita Dean’s
book. And it was really amazing that Jane Rolo flipped the pirated book and
she said, well, actually this is really very nice.
[16:31] This is kind of a standard academic publishing format, it’s Gilles
Deleuze’s Proust and Signs, and the contributor, the artist who produced the
book is Neil Chapman, a writer based in London. And he made a facsimile of his
copy of this book, including the binding mistakes – so there’s one chapter
upside down printed in the book. [17:04] But the really interesting thing is
that he scanned it on his home inkjet printer – he scanned it on his scanner
and then printed it on his home inkjet printer. And the feel of it is very
crafty, because the inkjet has a very different typographic appearance than
the official copy. [17:28] And this makes you read the book in quite a
different way, you relate differently to the actual text. So it’s not just
about the information conveyed on this page, it’s really about how I can
relate to it visually. I find this really interesting when we put this book
into the library, in our collection in the library, and it sat next to the
original, [17:54] it raises really interesting questions about what kind of
authority decides which book can access the library, because this is
definitely and obviously a self-made copy – so if this self-made copy can
enter the library, any self-made text and self-published copy could enter the
library. So it was raising really interesting questions about gatekeepers of
knowledge, and hierarchies and authorities.
[18:26]
On-line catalogue
[18:30]
E. W.: We created this online catalogue give to an overview of what we have in
the collection. We have a cover photograph and then we have a short text where
we try to frame and to describe the approach taken, like the strategy, what’s
been pirated and what was the strategy. [18:55] And this is quite a lot,
because it’s giving you the framework of it, the conceptual framework. But
it’s not giving you the book, and this is really important because lots of the
books couldn’t be digitised, because it’s exactly their material quality which
is important, and which makes the point. [19:17] So if I would… if I have a
project which is working about mediation, and then I put another layer of
mediation on top of it by scanning it, it just wouldn’t work anymore.
[19:29] The purpose of the online catalogue isn’t to give you insight into all
the books to make actually all the information available, it’s more to talk
about the approach taken and the questions which are raised by this specific
book.
[19:47]
Cultures of the copy
[19:51]
A topic of cultural difference became really obvious when we went to Istanbul.
A copy shop which had many academic titles on the shelves, copied, pirated
titles... The fact is that in London, where I’m based, you can access anything
in any library, and it’s not too expensive to get the original book. [20:27]
But in Istanbul it’s very expensive, and the whole academic community thrives
on pirated, copied academic titles.
[20:39]
A. F.: So this is the original Jaime Bayly [No se lo digas a nadie], and this
is the pirated copy of the Jaime Bayly. This book is from Peru, it was bought
on the street, on a street market. [20:53] And Peru has a very big pirated
book market, most books in Peru are pirated. And we found this because there
was a rumour that books in Peru had been modified, pirated books. And this
version, the pirated version, has two extra chapters that are not in the
original one. [21:13] It’s really hard to understand the motivation behind it.
There’s no credit, so the person is inhabiting this author’s identity in a
sense. They are not getting any cultural capital from it. They are not getting
extra money, because if they are found out, nobody would buy books from this
publisher anymore. [21:33] The chapters are really well written, so you as a
reader would not realise that you are reading something that has been pirated.
And that was really fascinating in terms of what space you create. So when you
have this technology that allows you to have the book open and print it so
easily – how you can you take advantage of that, and take ownership or inhabit
these spaces that technology is opening up for you.
[22:01]
E. W.: Book piracy in China is really important when it comes to architecture
books, Western architecture books. Lots of architecture studios, but even
university libraries would buy from pirate book sellers, because it’s just so
much cheaper. [22:26] And we’ve found this Mark magazine with one of the
architecture sellers, and it’s supposed to be a bargain because you have six
magazines in one. [22:41] And we were really interested in the question, what
are the criteria for the editing? How do you edit six issues into one? But
basically everything is in here, from advertisement, to text, to images, it’s
all there. But then a really interesting question arises when it comes to
technology, because in this magazine there are pages in Italian language
clearly taken from other magazines.
[23:14]
A. F.: But it was also really interesting to go there, and actually interview
the distributor and go through the whole experience. We had to meet the
distributor in a neutral place, and he interviewed us to see if he was going
to allow us to go into the shop and buy his books. [23:31] And then going
through the catalogue and realising how Rem Koolhaas is really popular among
the pirates, but actually Chinese architecture is not popular, so there’s only
like three pirated books on Chinese architecture; or that from all the
architecture universities in the world only the AA books are copied – the
Architectural Association books. [23:51] And I think those small things are
really things that are worth spending time and reflecting on.
[23:58]
E. W.: We found this pirate copy of Tintin when we visited Beijing, and
obviously compared to the original, it looks different, a different format.
But also it’s black and white, but it’s not a photocopy of the original full-
colour. [24:23] It’s redrawn by hand, so all the drawings are redrawn and
obviously translated into Chinese. This is quite a labour of love, which is
really amazing. I can compare the two. The space is slightly differently
interpreted.
[24:50]
A. F.: And it’s really incredible, because at some point in China there were
14 or 15 different publishers publishing Tintin, and they all have their
versions. They are all hand-drawn by different people, so in the back, in
Chinese, it’s the credit. So you can buy it by deciding which person does the
best drawings of the production of Tintin, which I thought it was really…
[25:14] It’s such a different cultural way to actually give credit to the
person that is copying it, and recognise the labour, and the intention and the
value of that work.
[25:24]
Why books?
[25:28]
E. W.: Books have always been very important in my practice, in my artistic
practice, because lots of my projects culminated in a book, or led into a
book. And publications are important because they can circulate freely, they
can circulate much easier than artworks in a gallery. [25:50] So this question
of how to make things public and how to create an audience… not how to create
an audience – how to reach a reader and how to create a dialogue. So the book
is the perfect tool for this.
[26:04]
A. F.: My interest in books comes from making art, or thinking about art as a
way to interact with the world, so outside art settings, and I found books
really interesting in that. And that’s how I met Eva, in a sense, because I
was interested in that part of her practice. [26:26] When I found the Jaime
Bayly book, for me that was a real moment of excitement, of this person that
was doing this things in the world without taking any credit, but was having
such a profound effect on so many readers. I’m quite fascinated by that.
[26:44] I'm also really interested in research and using events – research
that works with people. So it kind of creates communities around certain
subjects, and then it uses that to explore different issues and to interact
with different areas of knowledge. And I think books are a privileged space to
do that.
[27:11]
E. W.: The books in the Piracy collection, because they are objects you can
grab, and because they need a place, they are a really important tool to start
a dialogue. When we had this reading room in the New York Art Book Fair, it
was really the book that created this moment when you started a conversation
with somebody else. And I think this is a very important moment in the Piracy
collection as a tool to start this discussion. [27:44] In the Piracy
collection the books are not so important to circulate, because they don’t
circulate. They only travel with us, in a way, or they travel here to Grand
Union to be installed in this reading room. But they are not meant to be
printed in a thousands print run and circulated in the world.
C. S.: So what is their function?
[28:08]
E. W.: The functions of the books here in the Piracy collection are to create
a dialogue, debate about these issues they are raising, and they are a tool
for a direct encounter, for a social encounter. As Andrea said, building a
community which is debating these issues which they are raising. [28:32] And I
also find it really interesting – when we where in China we also talked with
lots of publishers and artists, and they said that the book, in comparison to
an online file, is a really important tool in China, because it can’t be
controlled as easily as online communication. [28:53] So a book is an
autonomous object which can be passed on from one hand to the other, without
the state or another authority to intervene. I think that is an important
aspect when you talk about books in comparison with circulating information
online.
[29:13]
Passion for piracy
[29:17]
A. F.: I’m quite interested in enclosures, and people that jump those
enclosures. I’m kind of interested in these imposed… Maybe because I come from
Peru and we have a different relation to rules, and I’m in Britain where rules
seem to have so much strength. And I’m quite interested in this agency of
taking personal responsibility and saying, I’m going to obey this rule, I’m
not going to obey this one, and what does that mean. [29:42] That makes me
really interested in all these different strategies, and also to find a way to
value them and show them – how when you make this decision to jump a rule, you
actually help bring up questions, modifications, and propose new models or new
ways about thinking things. [30:02] And I think that is something that is part
of all the other projects that I do: stating the rules and the people that
break them.
[30:12]
E. W.: The pirate as a trickster who tries to push the boundaries which are
being set. And I think the interesting, or the complex part of the Piracy
Project is that we are not saying, I’m for piracy or I’m against piracy, I’m
for copyright, I’m against copyright. It’s really about testing out these
decisions and the own boundaries, the legal boundaries, the moral limits – to
push them and find them. [30:51] I mean, the Piracy Project as a whole is a
project which is pushing the boundaries because it started in this academic
library, and it’s assessed by copyright lawyers as illegal, so to run such a
project is an act of piracy in itself.
[31:17]
This method of doing or approaching this art project is to create a
collaboration to instigate this discourse, and this discourse is happening on
many different levels. One of them is conversation, debate. But the other one
is this material outcome, and then this material outcome is creating a new
debate.