The project 'BURN' featured on Kingdom of Piracy is "a web interface and installation, addresses the collateral damage of the international copyright regime, recalls the burning of pirated CDs in China and celebrates the act of BURN (CDs) as common cultural practice in the age of digital reproduction. BURN acknowledges the file sharing practice of P2P (peer to peer) and the abundance of MP3 files on the net, while creating a browser based public upload and download sharing space on the web. The BURN interface further encodes MP3 music files uploaded in assorted colors. Free for download and burn, the media lounge installation consists of piled up CDs available for free public consumption".
(http://kop.fact.co.uk/burn/html/about.html)
Created for the media lounge at Fact in Liverpool. BURN as was an installation piece in which users would take a blank CD and fill them with uploaded music files created by participants of the project. Each song uploaded would be categorised into coloured categories, where the user would choose which coloured category their song belongs. Participants of the project were asked to fill the Cd with songs from any category and take the disc full of songs away with them. The purpose of this installation according to Kingdom of Piracy is to focus upon the act of duplication and allows people to participate in the 'Illegal' act of piracy.
The alternative web based interface lets users again choose a number of tracks to be burnt onto disc by simply choosing a file and dragging it onto an image of a Cd and downloading an .iso image of the disc ready to be burned into an audio Cd. The uploaded tracks are obviously a part of the project and added by participants to avoid actual copyright laws.
Being around six years old now, this project had and still does have a strong relevant cultural link in the form of peer to peer file sharing and the technology to create custom audio Cd's. I like the way in which this project is a simplified demonstration of the way in which people use peer to peer sharing to both upload and download media illegally, and incorporates the use of technology most popular at that time to allow the user to use that media in a certain way, in this example creating an audio Cd.
Obviously technology has advanced within the six or so years that this idea was created, so therefore it could improved to make it even more relevant.
I can't remember the last time I burned an audio CD for playing back due to the fact that my music collection is all in digital format and played backed from my Laptop and also synced with my iPod. This seems to be the current case with many people so rather than allowing a user to burn a Cd, the 'BURN' interface could be redesigned allowing users to upload audio aswell as video that could be downloaded in a format that could be perhaps tailored to a portable media device, such as an ipod. In particular the video format inorder to run at the correct resolution and be the right kind of .mp4 format.
This would still hold a relevance to that of piracy and illegal download, whereas it wouldn't necessarily break any laws, for example uploading self create youtube style videos to the project, Possibly the uploading of videos added to sites like youtube from other users or compaies would start breaking piracy laws but perhaps that could be the point by disguising the application as a curatorial project which pokes fun at copyright laws, but actually holds elements of illegal piracy within it.
'DIVE' was originally a Cd-Rom, again created for the Media Lounge at Fact. Dive is also featured on Kingdom of Piracy and features additional works not included in the Cd-Rom
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