The term ‘Plunderphonics’ refers to a form of music which takes one or more pre-existing recordings and manipulates them to create an entirely new composition, often contradicting or questioning the artistic intentions of the original works, or as artist Dana Birnbaum puts “isolating and changing its vocabulary and syntax”. This technique can be applied to film and video art with a similar philosophy. The medium has a long history of interrogating and criticising copyright law which often prohibits the use of licensed material, I will use this as a theme to examine the relationship between these laws and the artists who rebel against them. I will explore this concept through several specific examples: John Oswald, Soda_Jerk, Christian Marclay and Neil Cicierega, with reference to several artists who paved the way for this kind of work to be made.

John Oswald’s seminal 1985 essay presented at the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto both coins the term Plunderphonics as well as first discussing its integral relationship with audio piracy. Plunderphonics has its roots in ‘Music Concretè’, pioneered by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s, using raw audio tape he created sonic collages which made use of exclusively pre-recorded material, despite a similar working methodology to that of later Plunderphonic artists what I think sets the two movements apart is largely the humour and prankishness of the latter. Schaeffer’s vision was more akin to abstraction within other art forms, he sought to devolve familiar sounds into something alien and disorienting. John Oswald deliberately chooses recognisable melodies and tunes in order to create something slyly goading to the author but simultaneously funny and engaging. His ‘Plunderphonics’ EP was his first major clash with copyright law, after receiving a barrage of cease and desist orders from Michael Jackson’s label ‘Epic’ over his heavily plundered version of ‘Bad’. Oswald’s argument is that there is nothing in the realm of sound which is equivalent to literature’s quotation marks, which allows one author to reference another’s work without it becoming an issue of theft, “Without a quotation system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from plagiarism and fraud.” He is constantly trying to create dialogue with the pieces which he chooses to work with, his blatant ‘mis’-use of them seems to be a defiant protest of the restrictions put on artists that prevent this kind of artwork from being distributed.

Christian Marlclay’s 24 hour film work ‘The Clock’ draws on hundreds of sources to produce one overarching ‘narrative’ of time passage. This epic work was made laboriously over a period of four years, but when asked about the legal risks of such a work Marclay was adamant that "If you make something good and interesting and not ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original material will like it.” This harks back to a familiar saying within the music industry in regards to legal infringement that “where there’s a hit there’s a writ”, essentially that the original authors are only likely to object to the work if it somehow trespasses on the integrity of the initial source. Many of Oswald’s works, for instance, were provocative and could be perceived as devaluing the sources in some way, so they could therefore be more vulnerable to corporate intervention. The interesting thing however is that according to the American definition of ‘Fair Use’ parody is fairly well protected, it doesn’t rely on consent from the original author, as criticism is seen as an essential aspect of the 1st amendment. It seems to me that if work either satisfies the author of the original or, on the other end of the spectrum, satirises the work thoroughly then it could be either not held to account or considered fair use and therefore exempt from legal action.

The Australian visual art duo Soda_Jerk create ridiculous, humorous works which directly reference the copyright laws which they are knowingly impeding upon. Hollywood Burn is their 2006 epic, which stitches together hundreds of Hollywood film clips in order to form a loose narrative where Elvis leads a gang of rebels against Charlton Heston’s copyright-loving Moses. This seems to be in line with Dana Birnbaum’s philosophy that “if it’s a corporately made image then it’s mine for the taking”, these kinds of films exist to be a part of the public consciousness, by re-appropriating them nobody really loses out, the iconography and characters from these works are so much a part of one’s childhood and lives in general there becomes a sense of social ownership. Oswald has also commented in this issue stating that “all popular music essentially if not legally exists in a public domain, listening to pop music isn’t a matter of choice… we’re bombarded by it”. The films of Soda_Jerk are deeply critical of copyright, seeing it as a kind of fascistic censorship, but despite this palpable anger within the work they never lose the appealing amateurism of the aesthetics or the ludicrous humour which makes the work so likeable. I feel that despite their works into this area of ‘visual Plunderphonics’ there is a lot of room for exploration into this style of working, they feel more akin to the rough-edged sound of Oswald as opposed to the intricately produced work of Neil Cicierega, I’ve not yet seen a visual artist who takes the philosophy of Plunderphonia and applies it to a well-crafted video work.