[artinfo] cfp: Culture Machine: Pirate Philosophy

[Gary Hall]

CULTURE MACHINE 10 (2008)
http://www.culturemachine.net

PIRATE PHILOSOPHY
Edited by Gary Hall

The Pirate Philosophy issue of Culture Machine will explore how the
development of various forms of so-called internet piracy are affecting
ideas of authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use,
patent, trademark, content creation and cultural production that were
established pre-internet.

We are looking for contributions which, among 
other things, engage critically with:

    * the philosophy of internet piracy, peer-to-peer file sharing,
      Grokster, Kazaa, Gnutella, EDonkey, BitTorrent, Pirate Bay and so on;
    * attempts to develop new, different or alternative philosophies of
      content creation, intellectual property and/or copyright (e.g.
      those associated with open editing, open content, Creative Commons
      and copyleft licenses, Lawrence Lessig’s ‘free culture’, the free
      software and open source movements, the work of Richard Stallman
      and Eric Raymond
);
    * the implications and consequences of the above for conceptions of
      the academic author, scholarly writing, publishing, pedagogy, the
      book, the journal, peer review and the institution of the
      university in the era of digital reproducibility;
    * efforts that have been made to scale-up the relations of production
      and distribution associated with peer-to-peer networks to form new
      participatory regimes of culture or new kinds of networked
      institutions, even plans for the future organisation of society.
      See the German Oekonux debate of 2000-2002, for example
      (http://www.oekonux.org);
    * the emergence out of peer-to-peer file networks of actual political
      Pirate Parties’ in Sweden, Spain, Austria, Germany, USA, UK,
      France, Australia, Poland, Italy, Russia, Norway, and Belgium.

We envisage contributions to Culture Machine’s Pirate Philosophy issue
as falling into two broad (albeit crudely defined and distinguished)
categories: those that address the theme of piracy in their content; and
those that approach the subject by playing 
provocatively with the form of their text.

We would especially like to encourage contributors to explore the
philosophy of internet piracy by creating actual ‘pirate’ texts we can
publish as part of the issue. We are open to and indeed very much
welcome suggestions as to what forms such ‘pirate philosophy’ might take
in practice. Possible examples include:

    * Mash-ups, only in this case with written texts - philosophical,
      literary, historical, psychoanalytic, political etc. - rather than
      music tracks being mixed together. (Instead of The Beatle’s The
      White Album and Jay-Z’s The Black Album, think Deleuze’s
      ‘Postscript on Control Societies’ and the US Bill of Rights);
    * Experiments with plagiarism and appropriation along the lines of
      Jonathan Lethem’s ‘The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism’
      http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387;
    * Texts generated by large groups of often anonymous people working
      according to open source, free content and 
open editing principles. Wikipedia is
      the most well-known, but Culture Machine would like to promote the
      development of other instances of open 
source, open content and open editing
      (and wikimedia), specifically with academic 
writing and publishing in mind.

The idea is to push the boundaries surrounding notions of piracy,
authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use and so forth,
not just intellectually but legally too.

Deadline for submissions: February 2008

Contact:
Gary Hall
Coventry School of Art and Design
Coventry University
Priory Street
Coventry CV1 5FB
UK

e-mail: gary.hall at connectfree.co.uk

-------------------------

ABOUT CULTURE MACHINE

Culture Machine is an umbrella term for a series 
of experiments in culture and theory.

The Culture Machine open access journal http://www.culturemachine.net

The Culture Machine book series, published by Berg, and including:
Paul Virilio, City of Panic (2005)
Charlie Gere, Art, Time & Technology (2006)
Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip (2006)

The Culture Machine open access archive: CSeARCH
http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch


The Culture Machine journal publishes new work from both established
figures and up-and-coming writers, and welcomes original, unpublished
submissions on any aspect of culture and theory. 
All contributions to the Culture Machine journal
are refereed anonymously. Anyone with material they wish to submit for
publication is invited to contact:

Culture Machine c/o Dave Boothroyd and Gary Hall
e-mail: gary.hall at connectfree.co.uk and d.boothroyd at kent.ac.uk


--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media and Performing Arts
School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Director of the Cultural Studies Open Access Archive
http://www.culturemachine.net/csearch
Co-founder of the Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
My website http://www.garyhall.info