OPEN WIDE: Experiments in Authorial Anxiety

This workshop will hopefully make you anxious. Artists and designers are invited to explore contemporary panics surrounding copyright from a psychological perspective.

Why don't more artists embrace open licenses? And how do we experience copyleft's risky 'opening wide'?

I will introduce my research into the anxieties provoked by open licensing and copyleft, and their threat to the imagined integrity of the author. We will look briefly at the historical context of this anxiety, in copyright's misleading notion of autonomous creation. We will then have a chance to reflect upon how we as artists approach the problem of authorship, in a series of exercises that will explore the dilemmas and fears we face in the struggle for a more open culture.