Copies

Everything.can.be.scanned is part of a long lineage of what I would call “stunts of tedious comprehensiveness”...

[Kenneth Goldsmith]'s work—especially at the time that we crossed paths—was also part of this cultural landscape. His schtick was retyping or recontextualizing an existing thing and calling the copy a poem. The result was not meant to be read but discussed, and when it was discussed, the emphasis was always on the every: every word of an issue of the New York Times, every movement his body made in a day, every word he spoke for a week, every radio weather forecast for a year, every page of the internet.

When his work was interesting, I would argue that it was not for its tediousness but for its attentiveness. When it wasn’t, it was because there wasn’t enough attention being paid, or because the attention was being directed towards the wrong thing.

Wang tiles (Hao Wang, 1961) are a class of formal systems. They are modelled visually by square tiles with a color on each side. A set of such tiles is selected, and copies of the tiles are arranged side by side with matching colors, without rotating or reflecting them.

The basic question about a set of Wang tiles is whether it can tile the plane or not, i.e., whether an entire infinite plane can be filled this way. The next question is whether this can be done in a periodic pattern.

In 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem.

What keeps me busy in my classes is trying to help my students learn how to think. They say, "Rob holds his hands like this...," and they don't know that the reason I hold my hands like this is not to make myself look that way. The end result is not to hold the gun that way; holding the gun that way is the end result of doing something else.

…The more general issue is that a person who doesn't understand the thing they're trying to copy will end up copying unimportant superficial aspects of what somebody else is doing and miss the fundamentals that drive the superficial aspects. This even happens when there are very detailed instructions. Although watching what other people do can accelerate learning, especially for beginners who have no idea what to do, there isn't a shortcut to understanding something deeply enough to facilitate doing it well that can be summed up in simple rules, like "omit needless words".

This is a very short book about copying. Its contents, unless otherwise noted, are licensed under CC-BY SA 4.0 (more on that in a bit). You can download, copy, remix, excerpt, change, and repost it however you see fit.

There is a large-scale, deliberate effort to manipulate culture and discourse online and in wider culture by utilising a system of bots and paid employees whose job it is to produce content and respond to content online in order to further the agenda of those they are employed by.

Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

“Possibly Real Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol” is a series of 1000 identical artworks. They are all definitely by MSCHF, and also all possibly by Andy Warhol. Any record of which piece within the set is the original has been destroyed.

RENE: Tell me what we have. Of value.

GAEL: Whatever we've bought in cargo so far. I don't know what you want me—

RENE: Anyone can buy goods. What do we really have? What do we sell?

GAEL (realizing): The route.

RENE: Yes. The navigation is our property. To copy a man's route is to steal it.

In the late 1960s, Robert Ryman observed that “there is never a question of what to paint, but only how to paint.” On long-term view since Dia Beacon opened in 2003, these galleries uniquely represent the range of techniques that Ryman pursued throughout his career.

How do we know what’s the right direction [for computers to take]?

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing.

Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasn’t been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them — we all brought to this effort — a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.

At bedtime, I told my daughter how much I enjoy making art with her. She said, “me too, Daddy.” And then she asked an interesting question: Is it art if it wasn’t your idea? I was glad to answer “yes,” and explain to her why — that all art is a copy of something — though I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask her a question beforehand, like, “If I drew a picture of you, would it be art?” My explanation was that all art is a response to something. Sometimes an artist will see a beautiful landscape and try to express that beauty with paint on canvas or by taking a photograph. It’s a copy, in a way, that becomes something else because it goes through the mind, heart, and hands of the artist. What it’s really a copy of — bearing in mind the limits of the word copy — is how the artist feels about what they saw. I remind her how different what we made was from Vogel’s piece, and that because we were limited in what we could do, it had to become something else.

I want to challenge the notion that sequences of words are the only things that can be plagiarized. Rather, there are semantic constructs all up and down the scope of a work that are amenable to copying.

Albums are mixed in order to be reproduced. When that process truly was 100% analog – the last of my own records made that way was Galaxie 500’s second album, in 1989 – the master tape was deliberately mixed with more high end than desired, because it was predictable that some of that would be lost in the reproduction process toward pressed records.

In other words, the original master tape is not how those analog albums were meant to sound. The record is.

A website that provides a comprehensive list of items that can be easily copied and pasted. From text to images to HTML codes and much more, the website offers a wide variety of items that can be used for almost any purpose.

It's an intrinsic part of their nature. As a matter of fact, files replicate all the time. For instance, when editing an image, a computer will contain at least three copies of that image: the first is the original version, the second is the version being used in the image editor and the third is the version that is diplayed on the screen.

Today, everything about the way our personal computers are designed to engage with the Internet goes against this nature: files are contained, commodified, owned, sold and even leased. Our understanding of files is being warped by our human-centrically designed experiences of them.

The 'traditional' Bin is the ultimate example of this notion: As users, we aquire files, consume them, hoard them and eventually, dispose of them, hennce the term "end-user". We need a counter-balance for this behaviour.