Today is the 10th anniversary of a very special collaboration with a truly visionary artist who introduced me to a world of REMIX, APPROPRIATION and online creator discourse during the emergence of Web2. I had the pleasure of meeting Elisa Kreisinger at the inception of a social internet and conceptual art initiative I founded in 2011 called Kianga Ellis Projects. Elisa’s solo exhibition at our project space in Chelsea, NYC in February 2014 touched on crucial issues of art practice, new technologies, social media and constitutional rights of free speech.
I’m revisiting this history during my current reboot phase for a new iteration of Kianga Ellis Projects: KEP4 in 2024. Timely indeed as my current work in DeFi considers where the boundaries of Fair Use might be and should be drawn in the emerging AI and Web3 era.
A copy of the text from the original press release is copied below.
Elisa Kreisinger FRAMED! The attack on fair use and digital artists on the Internet.
February 7 ‐ 22, 2014 Kianga Ellis Projects | 516 W. 25th Street, Studio 306B New York, NY 10001
Gallery Hours: Wed. – Sat. 11am – 6pm | Opening Reception: Friday, February 7th 6 ‐ 8pm
The Discussion: Saturday, February 22nd 11am – 4pm (Space is limited, invitation by request)
Closing Reception: Saturday, February 22nd 5 – 8pm
Kianga Ellis Projects is pleased to present the first solo exhibition for Pop Culture Pirate, Elisa Kreisinger. Framed! The attack on fair use and digital artists on the Internet features Kreisinger’s videos Picasso Baby, I’m Feeling 22; Mad Men: Set Me Free (with Marc Faletti) and Mad Med: Don Loves Roger alongside her new Fair Use(r) series of paintings.
Provoked by her experience battling YouTube’s Content ID system, Framed! is a defiant gesture by Kreisinger to reassert her creative autonomy within a sympathetic art context. As conceptual artworks, the Fair Use(r) paintings point to how private agreements between copyright holders and hosting platforms undermine the safe guards for fair use built into the law and cripple creators rights to distribute digital art works online. The material physical presence of the paintings emphasizes the unique challenges facing artists working in the digital realm and presenting work on the Internet as compared to artists working in traditional media, such as oil on canvas, and presenting work in brick and mortar galleries.
Each of the paintings on view at the gallery, 1:18 Iconic TV, 0:01 Canal Plus, and 1:50 Lionsgate, depict the exact frame of the artist’s videos that triggered a potential copyright violation notice on YouTube. Once identified and flagged by YouTube, the work’s fate is in the hands of the claimants who are empowered to block, track or place ads over the artist’s original fair use art works.
Kreisinger recently examined fair use and artists’ rights online as an artist‐in‐residence at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center in partnership with Public Knowledge, the Washington, D.C.‐ based consumer rights organization involved in intellectual property law, choice in the digital marketplace, and an open Internet. She is a featured artist at the Eyebeam 2014 Annual Showcase from January 16 – February 1, 2014 on view at Eyebeam’s headquarters at 540 W. 21st Street, NY, NY 10011.
Special Event, Saturday, February 22, 2014 (11am – 4:00pm):
Saturday, February 22nd has been reserved at the gallery for a discussion among artists, attorneys and other stakeholders in the art and legal issues raised by the exhibition. The event is limited to 25 participants.
Among the attorneys participating in the conversation is Josh Schiller, Counsel at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, whose recent representations include working on behalf of appropriation artist Richard Prince on intellectual property litigation including a successful appeal to the Second Circuit on the issue of Fair Use in the closely‐watched copyright infringement case Patrick Cariou v. Richard Prince, Gagosian Gallery, Inc. and Lawrence Gagosian.
The space remaining is extremely limited, but a lively concurrent discussion is expected to take place on Twitter under the hashtag #fairuser.
The Discussion will consider the following statement and include a report on Kreisinger’s nation‐wide Fair Use(r) Survey:
Copyright was established to grant the creator of an original work certain exclusive rights to its use and distribution. Fair Use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a different creative work. Together, these two legal schemes reflect certain values about the role of artists and creative production in society balanced by economic protections that strengthen financial incentives for innovation.
Today, because of new frontiers in art making that utilize evolving technologies, artists entitled to rely on the fair use exception are being unfairly framed as violators. Private agreements between copyright holders and hosting platforms have undermined the safe guards for fair use provided by the law. What obligations do private technology companies (built, by the way, on innovations that rely on fair use such as Google image search, Google books, etc.) have to support users seeking the ability to easily access a fair system for defending their rights?
For the contemporary art community and general public, private interpretations of what kind of creative work is valuable, good or transformative have disparate impact on artists who are creatively similarly situated. How can our legal interpretation and lay person understanding of what it means for source material to be sufficiently “transformed’” in the making of a new work accommodate the unbounded hotbed of innovation that is the Internet today?
Elisa Kreisinger (b. 1986, Rutherford, NJ) is a pop culture hacker whose video remix practice negotiates the fine line between being a fan of popular culture and being a critic of it. Kreisinger’s participation as an artist in various online communities stems from her desire to create new queer and feminist narratives that challenge the author/reader and owner/user binaries on which media production and consumption is based. Her latest work includes remixing Mad Men into feminists and The Real Housewives into lesbians. The artist’s 2012 US Copyright Office testimony helped win crucial exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, decriminalizing DVD ripping for artistic statements.
Kreisinger speaks around the world on the power of remix and remaking pop culture and recent engagements include SxSW Interactive Festival, Austin, TX; Deutschen Kinemathek/Museum for TV and Film, Berlin, Germany; International Pop Culture & World Politics Conference, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden; and Harvard University Law School, Berkman Center, Cambridge, MA. She is a contributor to the books, The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things (ed. Anna Holmes, Grand Central Publishing, 2013) and The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (eds. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough, forthcoming 2014). Her work has been presented at numerous museums, galleries and non‐profit art spaces including Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California; Municipal Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dresden, Germany; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York, New York; Momenta Art, Brooklyn, New York;