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04.12.03 The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice.
Sometimes, grafting concepts one on top of another can clarify, or at least correlate, complex relations between the different points of view from which a set of data can be critically examined. The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice, by Robert Luxemburg, merges the paradoxes of bodylessness and the possibilities of their obfuscation in an artifact which can cast a light on several different problems at once. In a single screenshot, in fact, the author encrypted the whole content of the massive novel 'Cryptonomicon' by Neal Stephenson and, in this image, there are several elements, none of which was chosen randomly: a background by Jon Haddock, an artist who reconstructs famous photos with the perspectives and techniques of a videogame, the video 'Burn Hollywood Burn', by a.s.ambulanzen, the unauthorized .pdf version of 'Empire', by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, as well as the icons of the applications used by the author, taken from the dock of mac os x. All the materials fall on the fine border between fair use and illegality, between legal and illegal digital material, a challenge to the american laws which are trying to obfuscate it even more. The possibility of 'hiding' an information inside another intersects the technical field with the political and legal ones, turning into a contemporary comprehensive collection of the means of reproduction and manipulation of data, impossible to regulate with traditional techniques of protection. Thus, this image synthesizes a manifesto of the endless duplicability of digital information and, at the same time, of its invincible ability to spread and manipulate real-world artifacts, making it immune to any kind of censorship.