"KOP(kingdom of piracy)" web exhibition

online pilot launch:
December 9, 2001
http://kop.adac.com.tw/

*work-in- progress with around 15 comissioned works, links and texts*

onsite exhibition at "ArtFuture 2002" March 2002
at Acer Digital Art Center, Taiwan
http://www.adac.com.tw/

Joint Curation: Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch, Yukiko Shikata

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Kingdom of Piracy [KOP] is an online, open work space which explores piracy
as the net's ultimate art form. Hosted by the Acer Digital Art Center
[ADAC] in Taiwan as part of ArtFuture 2002, [KOP] will include links,
objects, ideas, software, commissioned artists' projects, critical writing
and online streaming media events. The exhibition will launch a pilot
website in December 2001, and during the following three months the
project's curators will begin a process of commissioning projects and
written work. While remaining an online exhibition, the totality of the
workspace will be presented on site in ArtFuture 2002, to be held in Taiwan
in March. An edition of all works commissioned will be kept on the ADAC
server as an open-ended online exhibition, whilst artists and authors will
remain sole copyright owners of their works.

With the increasing shift towards an immaterial or 'weightless' economy,
the concept of intellectual property rights has become one of the key
battle lines of our times. IP is at the core of big industries from IT
(including hardware and software) to entertainment (music, film and books)
to pharmaceuticals and biotech. A handful of high profile cases such as
Napster, DeCSS (DVD content encryption system), SDMI and the Russian eBook
hacker recently arrested in the US have highlighted this battle.

The idea that IP rights should be rigidly enforced around the world through
patent and anti-piracy laws is hotly contested by a growing alliance of
researchers, open source developers, crackers and hackers, artists and
intellectuals. The patent law applied on plants, seeds and other natural
resources is further contested as biopiracy by environmentalists. The
purpose of Kingdom of Piracy [KOP] is to consider the law and order
provisions surrounding intellectual property in the context of geographical
and cultural borders, and to examine the changes and challenges presented
by information technology.

The concept of intellectual property rights has no history in Asia. The
recent show destruction of millions of pirated CDs and DVDs in China, a
preliminary to the country's entry into the WTO, does not change the fact
that much of the Asian continent is still operating completely on its own
terms. The burst bubble of dot-commerce in the early 21st century has
plunged Taiwan and Asia's electronic supply industries into recession,
keeping the divide between Western and Eastern economies as wide as ever.
The Kingdom of Piracy will consider this digital divide, and its sustaining
strategies, from a global perspective. Theorist Arthur Kroker speculated in
1994 about 'digital abundance', imagining Taiwan as a tetra-gigabyte data
heaven, 'the largest data storage dump in the virtual world' (ctheory.net).
[KOP] envisions a virtual free state outside of geography, time, corporate
power and sovereignty; a decentralised, fragmented, immanent entity in
which everyone can be an autonomous agent.

The Kingdom of Piracy is everywhere: on the fringes and in the mainstream
high-tech economies, from Asia to Eastern Europe to the data havens of
Sealand and hackers' garages in Silicon Valley. The digital commons is
bathing in millions of MP3s and an endless supply of warez. Codes for
appropriation, cut-and-paste, replication, sampling and remixing have long
been established as artistic practice. [KOP] challenges artists, writers
and practitioners to use these techniques to question, contribute to,
analyse and otherwise address this growing Kingdom. It also asks them to
become intimately involved in the processes of the Kingdom itself, a place
in which all productions are part of an innately collaborative, derivative
and intimately interconnected environment of intellectual 'properties'.

Sponsored by Taiwan's Acer Group and hosted by Acer's Digital Art Center
server, Kingdom of Piracy invites allied crews of crackers and artists to
plug into the supply lines of digital abundance. The [KOP] site will be an
active public sphere for global data trafficking, descrambling and jamming.
Commissioned works are encouraged to engage in acts of piracy for the
causes of intellectual enhancement and poetic intervention.