Is
there really all that much difference, on a technical level, between
0100101110101101.ORG, Marcel
Duchamp and Andy Warhol? Putting aside any qualitative judgments, on one level or another they are all just appropriators of images. They are all
combining elements of other people's works in order to create new ones, in effect challenging the old
model of authorship that presupposes that the building blocks of creativity should spill forth
directly from the mind of the artist.
While everyone (particularly the companies touting the
technologies that make all this possible) predicted a flood of original images and websites
spewing forth from the desktops of bedroom auteurs, no one anticipated that large numbers of people
would be more interested in using their computers to combine, mash together, or remix other people's work. Sharing one's unauthorized creations via the Net is even easier. It's a dramatic
change from just a few years ago, when an artist's sole option would have been to exhibit his works inside
small underground events.
Such
Hybrids are also, technically, illegal, but from the
perspective of Net.artists and cultural jammers at the forefront
of the explosion of Net.art, copyright laws
don't look like anything other than the means by which one group of artists limits the work of
another.
Illegality can actually be a large part of the allure of Hybrids. Using
other people's art without permission
used to be the point of historical avantgarde's collages. Back in the ‘10s and
early ‘20s, when Dada and
Surrealists collagists like Annah Hoch and John Heartfield released their
first works, collages
had a decidedly subversive edge to them. Collages were typically created as
statements about pop culture and
the media juggernaut that surrounds us. Traces of that element remain in the Hybrids being
made today.
Eventually
recombining and remixing is likely to become so prevalent that it will be all
but impossible to even
identify the original source of samples, making questions about authorship and origins largely irrelevant,
or at least unanswerable. We're already seeing the beginnings of that, like
the Hybrid that samples
another