The P0litics of S0und / The Culture 0f Exchange. 31 January - 24 March 2005
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 15, 2005 4:49 PM
Ken:
First of all, in my commentsI was more interested in the other server you mentioned, not UbuWeb. Not knowing much about it, the main issue seems to break down to a matter of scale. On a smaller scale, it might emulate the type of swapping among friends that all media have experienced. On a gradient toward larger scale, it will have more financial impact. The important part is that a larger scale operation has the potential to have a beneficial financial impact as well as a deleterious one. A beneficial impact might not always be in terms of dollars, but it should be clear how they might be beneficial.
It’s true that many of the sound and music works of the type we’re talking about don’t make much money, and perhaps it was unwise for me to repeatedly say livelihood. However, I could recognize among the categories in your server list ones in which individuals (artists, writers, composers, performers, etc.) rely on their works to make a living, even if not in Nauman/Holzer-esque style, and in which many small labels live and die in the tides of cash flow.
Also, often a small amount of money at the right time can make a very big difference, especially when it can contribute to getting the next work done or, in the case of the “Unconventional Ethnic” category, eating or acting against environmental destruction or Chinese oppression.
Finally, I think there are many possible economic realities between the poles of the Naumans and Holzers of the world and those who are happy just to have their work heard. And there are plenty of micro-economies at the poles (Nauman, for instance, wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth), so it’s not a matter of individuals, but of the operation of systems. It would be preferable for networking systems to benefit communities of independent practitioners through systems of support.
First of all, in my commentsI was more interested in the other server you mentioned, not UbuWeb. Not knowing much about it, the main issue seems to break down to a matter of scale. On a smaller scale, it might emulate the type of swapping among friends that all media have experienced. On a gradient toward larger scale, it will have more financial impact. The important part is that a larger scale operation has the potential to have a beneficial financial impact as well as a deleterious one. A beneficial impact might not always be in terms of dollars, but it should be clear how they might be beneficial.
It’s true that many of the sound and music works of the type we’re talking about don’t make much money, and perhaps it was unwise for me to repeatedly say livelihood. However, I could recognize among the categories in your server list ones in which individuals (artists, writers, composers, performers, etc.) rely on their works to make a living, even if not in Nauman/Holzer-esque style, and in which many small labels live and die in the tides of cash flow.
Also, often a small amount of money at the right time can make a very big difference, especially when it can contribute to getting the next work done or, in the case of the “Unconventional Ethnic” category, eating or acting against environmental destruction or Chinese oppression.
Finally, I think there are many possible economic realities between the poles of the Naumans and Holzers of the world and those who are happy just to have their work heard. And there are plenty of micro-economies at the poles (Nauman, for instance, wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth), so it’s not a matter of individuals, but of the operation of systems. It would be preferable for networking systems to benefit communities of independent practitioners through systems of support.
Posted by Kenneth Goldsmith, Mar 18, 2005 4:47 PM
On UbuWeb, we mostly post stuff without permission. If we had to get permission, there would be no UbuWeb. Occasionally, someone gets pissed when they find their stuff there and demand that it be taken down, which we do promptly. But every other time, we find that people are thrilled to find their work on our site, in a context that they feel is compatible for their work. We also find that having audio works in a "nude" state or degraded state (MP3) leads people to want to have the "clothed" release, complete with great sound and liner notes, not to mention the need to possess the artifact itself; so often, by giving work away on UbuWeb, it leads to sales for the artists featured. For example, I recently got a note from Paul Dutton. 5 years ago, I asked Paul if he would consider putting up his amazing CD "Mouthpieces" on Ubu. He replied that he wanted to give the disc a few years to circulate, but that at the end of 5 years, he'd be happy to contribute it to the site.
I'm a senior editor at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Sound, which is sort of a sister site to UbuWeb, focusing on more conventional poetry readings. There, everything is permissioned before being hosted. The artist donates the work (we don't buy anything, we just accept donated works) and, in turn, it becomes a part of the UPenn library, complete with a card catalogue number, etc. Founded by the poet Charles Bernstein, it's a very clever way of having Penn "acquire" avant sound works that they never would have touched with a ten-foot pole before.
UbuWeb, while independent, is given technical support by universities. They provide us with unlimited server space and bandwidth, making it possible to host what we want without limit -- a very, very rare situation. Hence, at the moment, UbuWeb hosts nearly a terabyte in media files. We hope to double that amount over the next year.
I'm a senior editor at the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Sound, which is sort of a sister site to UbuWeb, focusing on more conventional poetry readings. There, everything is permissioned before being hosted. The artist donates the work (we don't buy anything, we just accept donated works) and, in turn, it becomes a part of the UPenn library, complete with a card catalogue number, etc. Founded by the poet Charles Bernstein, it's a very clever way of having Penn "acquire" avant sound works that they never would have touched with a ten-foot pole before.
UbuWeb, while independent, is given technical support by universities. They provide us with unlimited server space and bandwidth, making it possible to host what we want without limit -- a very, very rare situation. Hence, at the moment, UbuWeb hosts nearly a terabyte in media files. We hope to double that amount over the next year.
Posted by John Oswald, Mar 21, 2005 12:06 PM
Audio artifacts, unlike visual art things (paintings for instance), are mass-produced, & have been since just after the earliest days of recording; when, for technical reasons, cylinders were limited editions (performers would do multiple takes for multiple masters which would wear out quickly in making copies). An interesting result of this mass production is a general standardized pricing for recordings, independent of their production costs or perceived value by society. So while painters will scale the price of their works based on the size of the painting (more canvas costs more, and usually takes more effort to cover with paint), and the market will pay a thousand times, or even a million times more for something by one painter than for another's work, a Michael Jackson CD which cost millions of dollars to produce, tens of millions of dollars to promote and video-ize, and is manufactured in millions, will cost about the same to purchase as any one of a dozen of this year's Eugene Chadbourne releases, which may have been recorded in one take on a dicta-phone in Eugene's bathroom, and come packaged in a recycled cookie bag: both have the same retail price tag. The financial advantage of Michael over Eugene comes from sales of large quantities of the Jacko things. But no one, including his 'employer', Sony Music, pays more than a few bucks for a Jacko CD. The millions of dollars Sony (formerly CBS) have given Michael were in the form of advances loaned in anticipation of future sales; and now that Michael hasn't sold as many of those discs as anticipated, it turns out that Eugene (who is his own record company) is probably richer, albeit not conspicuously so, than Michael.
I use Jacko as an example, because back in the '80's i created a photo-collage portrait of him as a naked white woman as the cover art for a CD i distributed. Around the same time Jeff Koons was selling ceramic portraits of Michael as a prissy white guy and his chimpanzee in the art world for, i would guess, over a hundred thousand dollars a pop. I was jealous of Koons' prosperity, because i thought that my portrait was an aesthetically superior representation. But there was no exclusive and therefore particularly valuable version of my image of Jacko (except perhaps the original paper paste-up which i probably won't be able to sell until Sony Music goes out of business) which was intended to be infinitely reproduceable and available. Someone, on the other hand, buying one of the Koon things for a lot of money was also buying into an agreement of limited production exclusivity. Even though Koons could have manufactured lots of these things, and then perhaps a few of of them for substantially more than production costs, in an unlimited edition, there are relatively so few people interested in his stuff compared to the pop music world, that banking on the richness and proprietary exclusiveness of art collectors seemed like a better way to make money.
An historical footnote of a crossover example of the fine-art-limited-edition world meeting the pop music world was The Beatles white album with cover art by Richard Hamilton, which was initially pressed and printed in a limited, numbered edition of (as i recollect, approximately) one million.
I've been confronted with the distinctions of these two systems over the past year or so, because for the first time some of the pictures i'm making are being sold through the commercial art system. I initially tried selling my 'flatware' (as dealers call the relatively easy to sell pictures on walls) on my own in numbered unlimited editions for about double the production cost, but as was the case with the Burrows tapes back in the '70's, no one was buying. Now they are selling for a lot more money in arbitrarily-determined limited editions (there is a practical limit to the number of prints that can be made because i'm supervising the manufacture of, and inspecting each one (which, come to think of it, was also the situation with each and every $8. Mystery Tape copy (that process is described in another posting, above)) plus signing each one; but the absolute practical quantity of an edition could be much higher than the the one we've chosen.
The edition thing gets a little more bizarre with the chronophotic works i've been making, which are stored on DVD or in high-resolution versions on hard drives. A DVD currently takes me a few minutes to manufacture and costs less than a dollar in materials, but depending on the edition-size limitation, i can and have sold these DVDs for $5,000 each, and the hard-drive-stored works, which are in multiple segments, go for $10,000 per screen. Or, on the other hand, you can purchase, in an unlimited edition, a copy of my DVD, The Arc of Apparitions from the publisher OHM/Avatar, for about the same price as any mass-produced CD (about $20.).
When one venerable art museum decided to exhibit AoA, they insisted on having contracts signed that established the insurable value of the art, cost of returning the art after the exhibition, etc. There was quite a bit of paperwork to go through, even though i kept insisting that the value of the the piece was $20,. and if something went wrong with the copy they were using, they could always just grab another copy from their own gift shop.
This selling of the art itself, in its ultimate pristine form is quite contrary to what is commonly available in these art gallery gift shops.The AoA DVD is the prime manifestation of this piece, and the copy in the shop is an exact clone of the original; whereas the postcard or poster of the Mona Lisa being offered for sale in that shop is a less less-exclusive, i.e., less-unique, facsimile of something closer to the artist's intention.
The AoA DVD is also an example of why something exists in the form it does, which thereby fits into a certain market. A lot of movies, like audio tracks, seem to be reasonably apprehendable and satisfying in their downloadable form. AoA was designed and programmed as a set of related tracks which link invisibly in a random access process which is programmed right into the DVD's playback instructions. The DVD is endless and, although not infinitely variable, it rarely repeats in the same way. A download of the segments of this DVD will not do this, which is an important aspect of the character of this work. Theoretically, this insures that the work has some value, however small and temporary, as an object, independent of the 'information wants to be free' tendencies of digital distribution.
I so far have been managing to almost break even with this system of object making without hardly anything in the way of public institutional funding (art grants, etc.).
Otherwise i feel that part of my day-to-day survival, as a full-time artist, rests on this making of things that a lot of people seem to appreciate, and consequently a few of these people have the peripheral goodwill to endeavour to pay me to keep busy (this Tate Online discussion being an example). It's like the livelihood of pop music stars indigenous to countries which have virtually no market in licensed recordings - all recordings sold are black market copies : the artist doesn't make any money at all from recordings, but they are universally known through these recordings, and survive through live performances, gifts, and goodwill.
I hope.
I use Jacko as an example, because back in the '80's i created a photo-collage portrait of him as a naked white woman as the cover art for a CD i distributed. Around the same time Jeff Koons was selling ceramic portraits of Michael as a prissy white guy and his chimpanzee in the art world for, i would guess, over a hundred thousand dollars a pop. I was jealous of Koons' prosperity, because i thought that my portrait was an aesthetically superior representation. But there was no exclusive and therefore particularly valuable version of my image of Jacko (except perhaps the original paper paste-up which i probably won't be able to sell until Sony Music goes out of business) which was intended to be infinitely reproduceable and available. Someone, on the other hand, buying one of the Koon things for a lot of money was also buying into an agreement of limited production exclusivity. Even though Koons could have manufactured lots of these things, and then perhaps a few of of them for substantially more than production costs, in an unlimited edition, there are relatively so few people interested in his stuff compared to the pop music world, that banking on the richness and proprietary exclusiveness of art collectors seemed like a better way to make money.
An historical footnote of a crossover example of the fine-art-limited-edition world meeting the pop music world was The Beatles white album with cover art by Richard Hamilton, which was initially pressed and printed in a limited, numbered edition of (as i recollect, approximately) one million.
I've been confronted with the distinctions of these two systems over the past year or so, because for the first time some of the pictures i'm making are being sold through the commercial art system. I initially tried selling my 'flatware' (as dealers call the relatively easy to sell pictures on walls) on my own in numbered unlimited editions for about double the production cost, but as was the case with the Burrows tapes back in the '70's, no one was buying. Now they are selling for a lot more money in arbitrarily-determined limited editions (there is a practical limit to the number of prints that can be made because i'm supervising the manufacture of, and inspecting each one (which, come to think of it, was also the situation with each and every $8. Mystery Tape copy (that process is described in another posting, above)) plus signing each one; but the absolute practical quantity of an edition could be much higher than the the one we've chosen.
The edition thing gets a little more bizarre with the chronophotic works i've been making, which are stored on DVD or in high-resolution versions on hard drives. A DVD currently takes me a few minutes to manufacture and costs less than a dollar in materials, but depending on the edition-size limitation, i can and have sold these DVDs for $5,000 each, and the hard-drive-stored works, which are in multiple segments, go for $10,000 per screen. Or, on the other hand, you can purchase, in an unlimited edition, a copy of my DVD, The Arc of Apparitions from the publisher OHM/Avatar, for about the same price as any mass-produced CD (about $20.).
When one venerable art museum decided to exhibit AoA, they insisted on having contracts signed that established the insurable value of the art, cost of returning the art after the exhibition, etc. There was quite a bit of paperwork to go through, even though i kept insisting that the value of the the piece was $20,. and if something went wrong with the copy they were using, they could always just grab another copy from their own gift shop.
This selling of the art itself, in its ultimate pristine form is quite contrary to what is commonly available in these art gallery gift shops.The AoA DVD is the prime manifestation of this piece, and the copy in the shop is an exact clone of the original; whereas the postcard or poster of the Mona Lisa being offered for sale in that shop is a less less-exclusive, i.e., less-unique, facsimile of something closer to the artist's intention.
The AoA DVD is also an example of why something exists in the form it does, which thereby fits into a certain market. A lot of movies, like audio tracks, seem to be reasonably apprehendable and satisfying in their downloadable form. AoA was designed and programmed as a set of related tracks which link invisibly in a random access process which is programmed right into the DVD's playback instructions. The DVD is endless and, although not infinitely variable, it rarely repeats in the same way. A download of the segments of this DVD will not do this, which is an important aspect of the character of this work. Theoretically, this insures that the work has some value, however small and temporary, as an object, independent of the 'information wants to be free' tendencies of digital distribution.
I so far have been managing to almost break even with this system of object making without hardly anything in the way of public institutional funding (art grants, etc.).
Otherwise i feel that part of my day-to-day survival, as a full-time artist, rests on this making of things that a lot of people seem to appreciate, and consequently a few of these people have the peripheral goodwill to endeavour to pay me to keep busy (this Tate Online discussion being an example). It's like the livelihood of pop music stars indigenous to countries which have virtually no market in licensed recordings - all recordings sold are black market copies : the artist doesn't make any money at all from recordings, but they are universally known through these recordings, and survive through live performances, gifts, and goodwill.
I hope.
Posted by Douglas Kahn, Mar 22, 2005 2:28 AM
On the 23rd this chariot turns back into a pumpkin, so it's time to say thanks and goodbye.
Starting early tomorrow morning I will be engaged in an economy and culture of exchange the old-fashioned way, from city to city transported on networks of airplanes, from the Sacramento airport to the University of Iowa, where I’ll participate in a conference called Collage as Cultural Practice, and then on to Amsterdam for another conference called Sonic Interventions at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. All this sound and exchange is in the air right now so flying seems to be the best way to get close to the action.
The disembodied action on this online panel has been great. I’ve met John before so there is an active memory puppet to go with the words. With Kenneth, all the nude media talk goes well with his bum in the photo with Vicki Bennett from People Like Us. I saw People perform in Newcastle, Australia in September 2001, and we had Vicki for a talk here at University of California at Davis a couple years later but it’s still difficult to interpolate his bum from hers to animate a proper puppet. UbuWeb has a huge presence with contents cloaked in such sumptuous layers that looking for nude would be like peeling labels from a Klein bottle, but e-meeting the person pulling the strings on the web has been a pleasure.
Anyway, I’ve found the whole panel very appealing and would like to thank Lina and Kelli for moderating and organizing it.
In the future, if not before.
Starting early tomorrow morning I will be engaged in an economy and culture of exchange the old-fashioned way, from city to city transported on networks of airplanes, from the Sacramento airport to the University of Iowa, where I’ll participate in a conference called Collage as Cultural Practice, and then on to Amsterdam for another conference called Sonic Interventions at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. All this sound and exchange is in the air right now so flying seems to be the best way to get close to the action.
The disembodied action on this online panel has been great. I’ve met John before so there is an active memory puppet to go with the words. With Kenneth, all the nude media talk goes well with his bum in the photo with Vicki Bennett from People Like Us. I saw People perform in Newcastle, Australia in September 2001, and we had Vicki for a talk here at University of California at Davis a couple years later but it’s still difficult to interpolate his bum from hers to animate a proper puppet. UbuWeb has a huge presence with contents cloaked in such sumptuous layers that looking for nude would be like peeling labels from a Klein bottle, but e-meeting the person pulling the strings on the web has been a pleasure.
Anyway, I’ve found the whole panel very appealing and would like to thank Lina and Kelli for moderating and organizing it.
In the future, if not before.
Posted by Lina Dzuverovic, Mar 23, 2005 3:38 PM
Just before the chariot turns into a pumpkin, I wanted to thank you all for taking part. I hope you have enjoyed the ride as much as I have. I thought we landed a great combination here: with Doug’s brilliantly illustrated and detailed historical accounts, John’s highly personal experiences of navigating the strange terrain of art and music production across a variety of contexts (so well illustrated in his last post), and Kenny the ‘net guy’s’ take on offline vs. online sound consumption, we couldn’t have done better.
The fact that we set off to wander across what was deliberately a rather vague and open-ended area led us in many directions and resulted in us covering ground that we perhaps never anticipated we would. Looking back over the posts , there are topics we touched upon that I can see myself returning to many times and that I think are worth exploring further and deeper, at some other time and place. There are specific threads that could spark off several panel discussions or essays all by themselves. Whatever Kelli and I might have meant by ‘cultures of exchange’ and ‘politics of sound’ at the beginning of the forum has proven to be much more complex than we expected when we set out. Starting off with discussions about The Tate and its ‘new’ interest in the arts of sound spiraled off into wider thinking about arts institutions’ engagement with sonic culture and with collaborative (or participatory) practice. The topic of economies of production, commissioning, and collecting as well as distribution mechanisms and exhibition platforms came in at that point and thank you John for expanding on this with such clarity in your last post. As far as the relationship between networks and sound goes, which Doug had some fascinating thoughts on, I look forward on chewing on this one for a while longer (in my phd). Kenny’s term ‘nude media’ will,no doubt, stick beyond the forum as it describes so well the climate of exchange that has been central to our discussions. All in all I feel wonderfully priviledged to have had the opportunity to throw these questions at you all and grateful for a fascinating discussion.
Once again – thanks everyone and many thanks to Kelli for initiating this, for posting all the useful resources, and for keeping an eye on the technical aspects of this outrageously long page. I know I’ll be missing the ritual of checking the forum for updates first thing every morning as I sit in front of the computer with a cup of coffee.
So long, and hope to chat to y’all in real space over a drink sometime soon. Lina
The fact that we set off to wander across what was deliberately a rather vague and open-ended area led us in many directions and resulted in us covering ground that we perhaps never anticipated we would. Looking back over the posts , there are topics we touched upon that I can see myself returning to many times and that I think are worth exploring further and deeper, at some other time and place. There are specific threads that could spark off several panel discussions or essays all by themselves. Whatever Kelli and I might have meant by ‘cultures of exchange’ and ‘politics of sound’ at the beginning of the forum has proven to be much more complex than we expected when we set out. Starting off with discussions about The Tate and its ‘new’ interest in the arts of sound spiraled off into wider thinking about arts institutions’ engagement with sonic culture and with collaborative (or participatory) practice. The topic of economies of production, commissioning, and collecting as well as distribution mechanisms and exhibition platforms came in at that point and thank you John for expanding on this with such clarity in your last post. As far as the relationship between networks and sound goes, which Doug had some fascinating thoughts on, I look forward on chewing on this one for a while longer (in my phd). Kenny’s term ‘nude media’ will,no doubt, stick beyond the forum as it describes so well the climate of exchange that has been central to our discussions. All in all I feel wonderfully priviledged to have had the opportunity to throw these questions at you all and grateful for a fascinating discussion.
Once again – thanks everyone and many thanks to Kelli for initiating this, for posting all the useful resources, and for keeping an eye on the technical aspects of this outrageously long page. I know I’ll be missing the ritual of checking the forum for updates first thing every morning as I sit in front of the computer with a cup of coffee.
So long, and hope to chat to y’all in real space over a drink sometime soon. Lina
Posted by Kenneth Goldsmith, Mar 24, 2005 8:42 PM
Thanks everybody for this great discussion! As a parting note, I'd like to let you know that we just opened a section of historic artist's films on UbuWeb. The first batch includes films by Kenneth Anger, Luis Buñuel, John Cage, Guy Debord, Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Robert Morris & Stan VanDerBeek, Isidore Isou, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Richter, Harry Smith, Jack Smith and a set of 37 short Fluxus films. It's bound to keep growing so please stop by:
www.ubu.com/film/
Ciao!
Kenneth
www.ubu.com/film/
Ciao!
Kenneth