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“Thats MINE” She yelped, “No DADA said I could take it” he replied.

3 May, 2008

In the world of internet everything is so interconnected and shared there is less of a feeling of ownership over ones work. It all began with what we now believe to be a simple process Microsoft Word and its famous “Copy and Paste” strategy. Since then we have been able to forward onto e-mails or save onto our computers information we appreciate or may some day wish to look back on. However, this eventually developed and people began seeing its application in plagiarism.

Is this necessarily a bad thing?

Well for one thing, cinema has been doing it for years. recreating older films with the latest technology allows us to appreciate an old story with a new effect. I liken this process to that of natures process of producing honey. The bee takes pollen from surrounding flowers and creates something new and natural from it.

What if I told you the last sentence I just wrote about bees is actually from philosopher Arne Naess who talks about ‘Deep Ecology’. Would that REALLY matter. I am taking a comment way out of the sphere it was originally created for and creating something new from it.

If we look back at the Dada movement there is a clear emphasis on affect rather than the mode of production and a complete absence of this ‘turf war’ attitude of who created what.

Dadaism, if you are unaware, can be understood by looking at artist such as Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Francis Picabia, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

Some important elements of Dada art include the rejection of the dominant modes of distribution and valorization of cultural artefacts, the elevation of the importance of audience response to and interaction with the art object or event, interdisciplinary and anti-disciplinarity, the abstract use of language and sound as material, an embrace of randomness as an aspect of artistic practice, the use of diverse ‘at-hand’ media and found objects, and the representation of the human body as man/machine hybrid or grotesque deformity rather than as idealized beauty.

Through understanding dadaism we are introduced to a more artistic approach to creating electronic writings, images, or movies. It places the attention- where it is deserved- at the end rather than at the production.

In a Kantian sense, To will an end, means to will all necessary means to its attainment.

This teleological stance should be applied to our current electronic culture, if we are to get anywhere in a creative sense we might as well get there together.

To conclude:

Tristan Tzara famously described the recipe for a Dadaist poem in the July/August 1920 issue of Littérature as follows:

TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM:
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article in the newspaper of the length you wish to give your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out carefully all the words that make up the article and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Then remove each cutting one after the other in the order in which they emerge from the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
You will now become ‘an infinitely original writer with a charming sensitivity, although still misunderstood by the common people (Tzara, 2006b).

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