[ISEA2011] Panel: Anna Lena Seiser – Y’arr, what be yer share of the booty, matey? De­viance as Strat­egy

Panel Statement

Panel: How dare you? Acts of Deviance and Strategies of Discreditation

The term ‘Piracy’ has been used by copy­right hold­ers to de­clare dif­fer­ent forms of copy­right in­fringe­ment and sim­ple non­profit peer-to-peer file shar­ing tech­niques as crim­i­nal and de­struc­tive an­ti­so­cial acts. How­ever, the use of this de­val­u­at­ing de­nom­i­na­tion has de­vel­oped its own dy­nam­ics.  What was meant to dis­credit a set of cul­tural prac­tices has back­fired, as the so called pi­rates grad­u­ally co-opted the name by ac­ti­vat­ing the in­her­ent heroic and re­bel­lious con­no­ta­tions.  Piracy as a label has be­come a ubiq­ui­tous sym­bol in the on­line- and of­fline world. Sail­ing under the flag of piracy as a form of de­viance is now even un­der­stood as a rad­i­cally lib­eral po­lit­i­cal ac­tion.

  • Anna Lena Seiser stud­ied Me­di­a­cul­ture and So­cial Com­mu­ni­ca­tion at Bauhaus Uni­ver­sity Weimar and Uni­ver­si­dade Fed­eral de Minas Gerais in Belo Hor­i­zonte, Brazil. In 2009/2010 she was part of the pro­gramme team of trans­me­di­ale.10 FU­TU­RITY NOW! – fes­ti­val for art and dig­i­tal cul­ture Berlin. Her re­search in­ter­ests in­clude data piracy, aes­thet­ics and the value of dis­tur­bance, so­cial im­pli­ca­tions of soft­ware ar­chi­tec­ture and tac­tics of cul­tural can­ni­bal­ism à la Os­wald de An­drade.