We all mix up things whether consciously or unconsciously. And most of us know that nowadays we have to change the old stuck copyrights for a more “social sharing” habit, called Creative Commons. An article from the magazine Wired (July edition) is just about this topic. Let copyrights go and give writers and/or thinkers the artistic freedom to use and re-use and mashed-up texts.

What I am talking about here originated from an interview given by David Shields, after a presentation of his manifest Reality Hunger. Shields argues that ‘… non-fiction needn’t hew to factual truth, and writers should feel free to commandeer one another’s words and ideas’.

He also explained that ‘the online culture today is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups. He’s not really concerned about originality and imagination in a world where mash-up seems more important than the sources – ‘ … mash-ups are trivial.’ [Okay, he says]. ‘But art will not eat its own feedstock. Art, like science, moves forward.’ Shields gave a nice example. ‘I recently attended a copyright conference and sat on a panel with a video artist and musician named Pogo, who cuts up Disney movies and puts his own beats behind them. The whole thing was very kitschy… Again, though, so what? He should have done what artists have done throughout history – use, re-use an abuse previous works to create his own….’ For saving literature, he thinks it’s important to liberate us from the 19th century conventions. I think the rise of all these new ways of communication comes with a compromise; that being we will have to let go some old rules. With the increasing information overload, mixing and mashing-up becomes a new form of art. Shields even thinks that letting go of some old copyrights will give literature a new status – ‘once liberated by this yoke, it will have the opportunity to catch up with the other arts’.

Watch Pogo’s Toyz Noize:

And for the girls Pogo’s Alice: