Researching 'Kingdom of Piracy'

Kingdom of Piracy as described on their website is "an online, open work space to explore the free sharing of digital content - often condemned as piracy - as the net's ultimate art form".

(http://kop.fact.co.uk/)

The curators and creators behind this are Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch and
Yukiko Shikata. The site features a vast range of projects and ideas all of which are intended to encourage the sharing of digital media and content using a number of licences based around Open Source and aims to challenge artists, writers musicians to create works to be shared and collaboratives to be made within this on-line environment.

In the emergent information, or immaterial, economy, Intellectual Property (IP) - copyrighted content and patented ideas - constitutes the central resource of many of its biggest industries, from IT to entertainment, pharmaceuticals and biotech. The definition of Intellectual Property Rights in the digital domain has emerged as one of the central struggles to shape the culture of the information society.

Kingdom of Piracy «KOP» is an online, open work space to explore the free sharing of digital content - often condemned as piracy - as the net's ultimate art form. Commissioned by the Acer Digital Art Center [ADAC] in Taiwan for ArtFuture 2002, «KOP» was designed to include links, objects, ideas, software, commissioned artists' projects, critical writing and online streaming media events. Hailed as the first international online exhibition sponsored by Taiwan's computer giant Acer Group, a pilot website «kop.adac.com.tw» was launched in December 2001 and presented with a press conference at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipai, Taiwan.

In April 2002 the leadership and direction of ADAC changed. At about the same time a major anti-piracy initiative was launched in Taiwan. «KOP» became a politically sensitive issue in Taiwan and by May, the curatorial and artists' FTP access to the «KOP» server was denied. By mid-June, «kop.adac.com.tw» was taken offline. ADAC demanded editorial rights to artists' links and requested a change of the title, Kingdom of Piracy. The joint curatorial team rejected this demand and sought ways of preserving the project as both a Taiwanese initiative and an International online art project. Through the efforts of ADAC's former director Ray Wang, «KOP» server access at ADAC was resumed. However, an IP address 211.73.224.150 was assigned, the use of the domain name is denied.

(Shu Lea Cheang, http://kop.fact.co.uk/KOP/html/proposal.html)

It seems to me that the Kingdom of Piracy idea seems to have many similarities to the art form of Dadaism, in the sense that in order to create content, the user must follow instructions to a certain degree in order to achieve the intended outcome. In my opinion, culturally the ideas behind the two are similar in the way in which the movement of Dada was about being against the way the contemporary art movement of the time was being appreciated and defined; just as the Kingdom of Piracy idea is against the laws being pinned upon digital media and content. Both seem to utilise the idea of setting instructed tasks to provide new Art and in the case of KOP music, literature video.....