In recent years, increased access to sophisticated tools in the domains of artificial intelligence (AI) and decentralized computation (in particular blockchain-enabled technologies) is leading to significant developments in the landscape of digital art. In the creative experiments of artists, designers, and technologists, such developments are evident, for example, in a focus on generative processes (e.g., AI-enabled text-to-image generation) and on the production of unique digital artifacts (such as blockchain-enabled non-fungible tokens, or NFTs). For now, the bulk of creative experimentation and theoretical reflection appears to have taken place in an occularcentric mode, and with a primary focus on visual, non-time-based artforms. Drawing on this existing discourse, in this chapter I will begin to explore some opportunities that emerging AI and blockchain technologies represent for new compositional practices, performance, collaboration, and distribution of music and sound-based aesthetic artifacts. Throughout this discussion, the underlying focus is on the shifting contours of creative agency effected by AI and blockchain technologies. With this focus in mind, key concerns include the following: How can creative agency be encoded in AI-augmented and blockchain-enabled musical objects? What are the implications of this 'becoming-agential' for questions related to authorship and ownership? It will not be possible to provide conclusive answers to these questions here. Instead, my aim in this chapter is to stake the relevance and importance of the questions raised by outlining underlying concerns and perspectives. In the following sections, this is done first by offering detailed contextualization, and subsequently by discussing an ongoing multimodal art project that is of great relevance to the concerns outlined above.

In Perception Engines and Synthetic Abstractions, two generative AI art projects begun in 2018, Tom White experiments with visual abstraction to explore the indeterminacy of perception, interpretation, and agency. White's AI systems produce images that will be interpreted as abstract artworks by human viewers, but which also confront human audiences with the realization that what is here deliberately rendered indeterminable for them will remain near-perfectly legible for AI-powered image recognition systems. This difference in perceptual and interpretive agency foregrounds an underlying politics of visual indeterminacy. White's projects thus increase awareness of how machine vision-for example in automated online filtering systems-can diminish the horizon of what human audiences can or cannot see in an AI-driven digital cultural landscape, and how, in the process, underlying biases are normalized and human viewers become habituated to the dramatic shrinking of perceivable/viewable online image content mediated by AI.

This paper situates artificial intelligence as a vehicle that can allow human agents to engage with complex issues such as global warming. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s conceptualisation of global warming as a ‘hyperobject’ which, by its very nature, resist knowability on a human scale, I consider the extent to which AI, when it is itself approached as hyperobject-like, can become a useful medi- um for engaging critically with the issue of global warming. The argument, then, is not that AI can make global warming human-knowable, but that through AI, human agents can access the quasi-unknowability of global warming. I begin by surveying Morton’s theory of the hyperobject and its valence in critical discourse on contemporary/digital art, and then explore the positioning of AI as hyperob- ject-like. This discussion is bookended by analysis of a representative artwork, Tega Brain et al’s Asunder (2019), which, as I argue, addresses global warming issues by incorporating AI as a hyperobject-like technology.

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression.

This book constitutes an interdisciplinary conversation about the opportunities and constraints that Canadian intellectual property laws pose for cultural activities in digital environments. Our focus is not on Canadian cultural content per se, but on the specific policy issues that arise when engaging with digital content in a Canadian context. How do the particularities of Canadian IP laws, educational and cultural institutions, media forms, creators’ collectives, geographical diversity, technologies, traditions, and audience expectations create problems or shape opportunities for more open and democratic approaches to the use of digital culture? We provide a wide range of critical perspectives on what it means and what it should mean to deal fairly in Canada. Rather than treat fair dealing as an abstract legal concept, our authors reframe it as a practice in which all participants in digital cultural exchange necessarily engage during the course of their daily activities. What the contributions to this book share is the conviction that if we want to bring Canada’s IP laws back into step with the everyday norms and practices of Canadian cultural production, then copyright reform is necessary and inevitable, if far from simple and self-evident. Accordingly, this volume provides an inclusive, interdisciplinary venue for a discussion of how everyday practices are relevant to IP reform as a matter of cultural policy.

Dynamic Fair Dealing argues that only a dynamic, flexible, and equitable approach to cultural ownership can accommodate the astonishing range of ways that we create, circulate, manage, attribute, and make use of digital cultural objects.The Canadian legal tradition strives to balance the rights of copyright holders with public needs to engage with copyright protected material, but there is now a substantial gap between what people actually do with cultural forms and how the law understands those practices. Digital technologies continue to shape new forms of cultural production, circulation, and distribution that challenge both the practicality and the desirability of Canada's fair dealing provisions.Dynamic Fair Dealing presents a range of insightful and provocative essays that rethink our relationship to Canadian fair dealing policy. With contributions from scholars, activists, and artists from across disciplines, professions, and creative practices, this book explores the extent to which copyright has expanded into every facet of society and reveals how our capacities to actually deal fairly with cultural goods has suffered in the process. In order to drive conversations about the cultural worlds Canadians imagine, and the policy reforms we need to realize these visions, we need Dynamic Fair Dealing.

This article concerns the emerging creative practice of live coding i.e., the real-time programming of electronic music in text-based programming environments, and explores how this practice can be deployed as a tactic of resistance against the overreach of restrictive intellectual property policy. I begin by surveying definitions of copyright and patent law, and related issues, to situate live coding in the field of existing perspectives on cultural ownership. Drawing on legal theory and critical discourse on improvised music in other genres, I then argue that the dynamic, palimpsestic, and improvisational qualities of live coding contradict many of copyright law's core assumptions regarding the nature of "fixed" works of art. These contradictions can be usefully mobilized for the purpose of resisting legal and economic enclosures of the digital cultural commons. As I conclude, live coding can, from its current, inherently ambivalent position on copyright matters, develop a strong, performance-based critical stance against the imbalances and shortcomings of intellectual property regimes and outdated notions of exclusive cultural ownership. Integrating artistic practices with ongoing and emerging critiques of intellectual property, such resistance can go a long way towards highlighting readily available opportunities to oppose and confound the law.

flow of transnational capital across borders (in both media and non-media industrial sectors) have led to the automatic re-engagement of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and offers data (as case studies) employing the same empirical rigour that Lenin demonstrated (p. 176). In part III, which runs for a limited 40 pages, Fuchs offers some hopeful alternatives through the construction of a typology of critical alternative media that distinguishes between critical form and critical content (p. 310). Fuchs advocates for the development of a counter-public sphere, the implementation of a participatory approach, the reduction of unproductive time of labour, as well as a more intellectual engagement of labour with societal issues and the extension of public discourse, changes which will provide a true meaning to the democratic processes of the media (p. 304). He identifies the internet as the sole medium for the emergence of large alternative critical media. Fuchs has to be complimented for taking on the Herculean task of trying to revive Marx in a postmodern era, using Marxist critique as reinterpreted (p. 34) through the works of Fraser and Honneth (2003), Badiou (2007) and Harvey (2010). Theoretically, Fuchs may seem to be succeeding, but how far academia will be eager to embrace the vision of the non-competitive and participatory lifestyle that he advocates in this book is an interesting question. Furthermore, to accept Lenin’s work relating to the media raises fundamental questions with regard to the historical applications of these ideas and their results (p.174). The book’s theoretical and empirical grounding, and parallels between the current global scenario and Marx, Engels and Lenin’s ideas that date back a century make the book an invaluable asset for all social science scholars in general and media scholars in particular.

John Greyson’s 1997 film Un©ut explores the cultural consequences of intellectual property enforcement through the act of penile circumcision and the social semiotics of the foreskin. It’s unlikely, if not absurd, juxtaposition reveals social anxieties around authorship, art, and politics in mass-mediated environments. Un©ut’s relates male sexual identity with intellectual property practices in a criticism of contemporary legal regimes. Greyson effectively shows how intellectual property has become the peculiar foundation through which the state has involved itself in surveillance in the expression of our (queer) desires.

A multitude of legal restrictions imposed on digital creative expressions impact how musicians are able (or unable) to practice their craft. This essay considers how chipmusic deals with this impact. In exploring the form’s close ties to appropriation-based production techniques and its use of Creative Commons licenses, I describe it as an active site for implicit critiques of restrictive copyright regimes. I conclude by considering the concept of a moral economy of appropriation-based creative techniques as a new framework for understanding digital creative practices that are characterized by shared cultural norms and resist conventional intellectual property policy.

If driving has today really become a Western “metaphor for being” (Hutchinson), then common roadside signs proclaiming “Right lane must exit” or “Through traffic merge left”, inventions such as the automatic transmission, and the agreeable straightness of freeways can all be understood as symptoms of an ongoing socio-political struggle between the driver as democratic agent, and the state as institu-tionalized regulatory force. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of urban traffic, where private motorized transportation represents both the supreme (if illusory) expression of personal freedom, and official efforts to channel individualism by obliterating its sense of direction and ideological divergence. On the concrete proving grounds of the clogged inner-city freeway, “nomad science” and “state science” (Deleuze & Guattari) thus oscillate between the pseudo-liberatory expressivity of mainstream car culture and the self-effacing dromoscopic “amnesia of driving” (Baudrillard). Are a city’s multitudes of cars resistant “projectiles” (Virilio) or, rather, hegemonic “sites of containment” (Jane Jacobs)? This essay approaches the complex tensions between “untamable” democratic mobility and state-regulated transit by way of two Hollywood-produced films that focus on traffic in Los Angeles: in Collateral (2004), a cab driver comes to recognize and transcend the hopelessly directionless circularity dictated by his job; in Falling Down (1993), a frustrated civil service employee abandons his car on a rush-hour freeway and decides to walk home, forced to traverse the supposedly unwalkable city without the “masking screen of the windshield” (Virilio). As they “quit stalling”, both protagonists become dangerous variants of the defiant nomad – one a driver who remains on the road but goes “under the radar”, the other a transient pedestrian whose movement becomes viral and unpredictable. My analysis of the films’ metropolitan setting and of the incessant movement that marks both narratives links political and philosophical economies of motion, speed, and transit to a discussion of the various bandes vagabondage (Deleuze & Guattari) that are formed between city and driver, driver and car, and car and pedestrian. In this discussion, the inner-city road emerges as a primary site of conflict between civic rule and individual subject, and the flow of urban traffic comes to represent the tensions generated in spaces where movement is understood as both liberating and as a form of control.

This essay explores how mētis – understood as the appropriation of dominant power and its inscription in the resistant force of alternative practices – can serve as a framing device for theorising tactical practices of digital culture. Revisiting critical discourses on mētis here serves as a framework for arguing that digital practices can simultaneously exist within and without (i.e., against) capital, and as such can become a viable oppositional stance that derives its power from precisely the contradictions that also delineate its limits of criticality. My discussion is linked to theories of appropriation, biopower, the multitude, and cognitive capitalism; my arguments are supported by reference to a series of examples in the form of experimental media art works which, as I argue, inhabit the critical potential of digital mētic action.