PRIFYSG O L BAN GOR / B AN G OR UNIV E R SITY
Creative Commons and Appropriation: Implicit Collaboration in Digital
Works
Skains, R.L.
Publications
DOI:
10.3390/publications4010007
Published: 22/03/2016
Cyswllt i'r cyhoeddiad / Link to publication
Dyfyniad o'r fersiwn a gyhoeddwyd / Citation for published version (APA):
Skains, R. L. (2016). Creative Commons and Appropriation: Implicit Collaboration in Digital
Works. Publications, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/publications4010007
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25. Aug. 2022
Publications 2016, 4, x; doi:10.3390/ www.mdpi.com/journal/publications
Article
Creative Commons and Appropriation: Implicit
Collaboration in Digital Works
R. Lyle Skains
School of Creative Studies & Media, Bangor University, John Phillips Hall, College Road, Bangor, Gwynedd
LL57 2DG, UK; r.l.skains@bangor.ac.uk; Tel.: +44-124-838-8497
Academic Editor: Craig Smith
Received: 28 January 2016; Accepted: 16 March 2016; Published: date
Abstract: Appropriation is a common practice in art and literature; electronic literature in
particular lends itself readily to appropriation and collaboration, due to its multimodal and
born-digital nature. This paper presents practice-based research examining the effects of digital
appropriation on two works of digital fiction (a hyperfiction and an interactive fiction),
demonstrating how it alters the creative writer’s typical process, as well as the resulting narrative
itself. This practice of appropriation results in “implicit collaboration” between the digital creative
writer and those whose work is appropriated, an arguable form of shared authorship. Questions
regarding the ethics of this practice, including copyright concerns and authorship, are discussed.
Keywords: appropriation; digital fiction; practice-based research; electronic literature; implicit
collaboration; authorship; creative writing; internet gift economy; ethics
1. Introduction
Appropriation is a readily acknowledged practice in the arts, particularly the visual arts, where
it contributes to continued discourse and response; as Voyce notes, “(t)he history of the twentieth-
and twenty-first-century avant-garde is a history of plundering, transforming, excavating,
cataloguing, splicing, and sharing the creative output of others” [1] (p. 408). In literature,
appropriation is frequently a gray area between inspiration and plagiarism; electronic literature,
however, with its frequent merging of the visual and literary arts (among others), its engagement in
the free-sharing culture of the internet, and its use of easily duplicated and re-applied digital
resources, lends itself more readily toward collaboration and appropriation. As I have found in my
own work, and this paper will show, appropriation alters both the writer’s process and the final
narrative, resulting in an implicit collaboration between writer/artist and those whose work is
appropriated.
I use the term “implicit collaboration” here, as opposed to the more familiar appropriation, for
several reasons. Appropriation is a recognized practice in most media, perhaps most used in visual
arts, but certainly utilized in film and literature [2,3]. Barefoot refers to Joseph Cornell’s
appropriation of found footage as “recycling”, which at the very least puts a positive spin on the
process, that of making use of materials which would otherwise be thrown away. Ken Goldsmith
echoes Foucault, Barthes, Genette, and Benjamin in asking “...isn't all cultural material shared, with
new works built upon preexisting ones, whether acknowledged or not?...What is the difference
between appropriation and collage?” [3] (p. 110), while espousing the benefits of “uncreative
writing” in terms of artistic inspiration and discourse.
The term appropriation, however, along with other terms such as assemblage, remix, sample,
and collage, fails to connote the authorship of the “sampled” artists whose work is incorporated.
Other, more negative terms, such as plagiarism or Jenkins’s “textual poachers” [4], have clear
connotations of unethical, even illegal, actions. Artists refer to their intertextual processes using
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various more innocuous terms: Mark Amerika’s “surf-sample-manipulate” [5], for example, is
grounded in the actual activity of seeking material, appropriating elements of found art, and
re-purposing it to create new art. Ken Goldsmith’s description of what he terms “uncreative
writing” is almost self-effacing, and in fact ironic given that he describes his process of using only
found material in his writing as having “as many decisions, moral quandaries, linguistic preferences,
and philosophical dilemmas as there are in an original or collaged work” [3] (p. 119). Spinuzzi’s
“compound mediation” is nearly mechanical, describing a process of “bring[ing] together texts from
multiple sources...in order to create new texts, a process often involving breakdown, reallocation of
resources, creation of new hybrid genres, and shifts in power” [6] (p. 382) which removes the
authors of these texts almost entirely.
My purpose in choosing the term “implicit collaboration” is to acknowledge both this active
process of appropriation, but also the inspirational effects of collaborating with other artists, both
within and without the genre in which I am actively working. The appropriated works (I should say
“consciously appropriated”, to differentiate them from Genette’s cultural and literary palimpsests [7])
are works that have been placed in the commons for the express purposes of such appropriation.
The use of Creative Commons or similar licensing denotes an attitude of sharing and co-creation,
which “serves to broaden the consumption of (creative) commodities through space and time,
cementing their position in popular culture” [8] (p. 468). As the majority of works with such licenses
carry an “attribution” caveat (works can be used and re-distributed only if proper attribution is
given), it is clear that the creators want their contributions to be acknowledged, their authorship
explicitly recognized. This “giving away” of resources (though in a digital environment, resources
are duplicated, never lost) in a digital gift economy results in increased capital in the form of status
[8,9].
Implicit collaboration occurs in overlapping spaces of Internet gift economies: exhibition space
and collaborative space. Currah identifies the first as a space for user-generated content on display
(YouTube, Flickr), and the second as group production projects such as Wikipedia and Source
Forge [8] (p. 478). By sampling works offered in exhibition spaces, recombining them and offering
them up to further derivatives, a creative, collaborative gift economy is created. With it, questions
and concerns arise with regard to attribution, copyright, monetarization, and the increasingly
nebulous notion of authorship.
Of course, these collaborations are not as explicit as a demarcation of co-authorship would
denote. As I explore in this paper, the creation of these “compound mediations” [6] involves surfing
for materials, sampling elements that inform or inspire my work, and manipulating them for
incorporation into a new piece. It could be argued that this is no more a collaborative process than
that of workers on an assembly line: workers farther down the line may have to adjust their activities
according to deviations committed by previous workers, but overall the process is not an equally
partnered activity. As I will show, however, found art and subsequent appropriation of that art in a
new work have the potential for profound influence. The inclusion of found art and that inclusion’s
effect upon the creative process combine in a collaboration between artists, made implicit because
the original artists have no explicit authorship role in the creation of the new piece.
2. Materials and Methods
This paper is the result of practice-based research into the effects of digital composition on the
writer’s practice and the final narrative structures, a creative experiment designed to answer
questions about the process and results of the practice itself: “it involves the identification of
research questions and problems, but the research methods, contexts and outputs then involve a
significant focus on creative practice” [10] (p. 48). While composition research is often designed to
expose cognitive writing processes to observing researchers, it is difficult to make internal, often
subconscious, creative decisions explicit for the purposes of studying how writers write. Unlike
post-textual analysis, in practice-based research, the practitioner-researcher is able to examine these
usually implicit and unreported processes, making them explicit; these insights can then be further
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expanded into further practice-based research, or used as the foundation for ethnographic
composition studies of artists at work.
Graeme Sullivan outlines several types of practice-based research, depending on the specific
area of interest and effect, including theoretical, dialectical, conceptual, and contextual [10]. The research
presented here aligns foremost with the conceptual framework of practice-based research, in that the
creative undertaking is an attempt to understand the artefacts themselves. The digital fictions
discussed in this paper were conceived and composed for the express research purpose of answering
questions about the effects of digital composition on practice and narrative. As such, I engaged in
ethnomethodological [11,12] observation of my writing activities, maintaining notes, journal entries,
comments on drafts, and other relevant, observable paratexts to the composition, in order to “make
continual sense to (myself) of what (I was) doing” [12] (p. 324). I was then able to interpret these
notes and paratexts, placing them within the context of composition cognition [13], and to conduct
post-textual, media-specific analysis [14] of the narratives that resulted. In this manner, the various
strengths of practice-based research, ethnomethodology, cognitive process, and post-textual analysis
are combined into a robust method of evaluating the activities of the practitioner/researcher, and the
resulting discussion is presented here. (The details of my particular method are more thoroughly
outlined elsewhere [15,16].
A key component in practice-based research is the aspect of serendipity as defined by Makri and
Blandford [17,18]: “a process of making a mental connection that has the potential to lead to a valuable
outcome, projecting the value of the outcome and taking actions to exploit the connection, leading to a
valuable outcome” [18] (p. 2, emphasis original). For any researcher, serendipity is likely to occur
during the research process, as the confluence of this newly generated data and the expertise
required to recognize its significance is the crux of knowledge generation. The notion of serendipity
can be applied to artists at work to better understand how ideas are generated, new genres are
created, plot twists are incorporated, language is defamiliarized, and more. By its very nature,
serendipity cannot be accounted for in the design of practice-based research; nonetheless it plays a
key role in aiding the practitioner-researcher to recognize significant activities, particularly cognitive
activities that are not otherwise obvious to external observers, as it did in the research described in
this paper. The central question of this research project was to examine the process of digital writing;
appropriation was not initially considered as an area of interest, yet the creative process yielded
significant serendipitous insights.
The purpose of the overarching research project was to offer insight into the creative practice of
writing fiction for digital media. As a published fiction author, I had an established prose writing
practice; as a researcher, I was interested in how changing this established practice from prose to
digital fiction would affect my creative process and the narratives that emerged. Using the methods
described above, I designed a creative experiment: to write a narrative realised in both prose and
digital forms. As I wrote the narrative, I maintained documentation of the process in the form of
drafts, source code, revision notes, and in situ observations of the work-in-progress. Once the
creative project was completed, I was able to apply media-specific post-textual analysis to the
narrative artefacts (a prose novella and a digital novel), and ethnomethodological analysis of the
notes created during the project. The digital novel, Færwhile: A Journey through a Space of Time, is
available at [19]. The results of the analysis as pertain to the more specific research question of how
digital appropriation affects the author and narrative are presented here.
3. Results
The following sections will examine two of my creative texts, “Awake the Mighty Dread”
(interactive fiction) [20] and “Streams Slipping in the Dark” (hyperfiction) [21], presenting an insight
into their composition through the use of implicit collaboration with other artists, as well as analysis
of the narrative effects of these “found” resources on the final artifacts.
3.1. Process and Narrative Effects
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“Awake the Mighty Dread” and “Streams Slipping in the Dark” are pieces written as part of a
larger work; the project as a whole is an examination of multimodal creativity. In order to map out
the chaos that is so often a writer‘s process, I begin with Flower and Hayes’ 1981 composition model [13]
(shown in Figure 1). This hierarchical model acknowledges the fluid (and often chaotic) mental
processes of writing, as it accounts for the author/creator‘s shifts in, out, and through planning,
writing, and rewriting phases at any given point in the process.
Figure 1. Flower and Hayes' Cognitive Process Model (“A Cognitive Process Theory” p. 370) (used with permission).
The model is not a perfect one, as it is so self-contained to the particular text currently
underway, and does not account for external influences such as interruptions, long-term breaks in
the creation process, or simultaneous work on other texts. It is also notable that this cognitive
process model does not in the first instance incorporate multimodal forms of creation, focusing
exclusively on written composition. It may seem inappropriate to apply this model to the
synaesthetic process of creating digital fiction in what Andy Campbell calls a “liquid canvas” [22],
but incorporating Flower and Hayes’ 1984 Multiple Representation Thesis [23] offers a more fluid
aspect. This thesis poses that “(w)riters at work represent their current meaning to themselves in a
variety of symbolic ways”, which includes multiple modes such as imagery, prose, sound,
movement, as well as rhetorical devices such as metaphor, schemas, and abstractions [23] (p. 129).
Expanding the model to include not just written prose but all modes within the current text permits
examination of a multimodal creative process.
For the purposes of this paper, I am primarily interested in the white-space between planning
and translation. This gap is where implicit collaboration has a role, as it is where “surfing” for
materials enters the process. During the planning process, I envision the text; this generally involves
drafting print-only versions of the text, storyboarding, and concept mapping, though not necessarily
all of these stages occur for every project. For multimodal projects, another box could be added in
this white space: seeking resources (Amerika’s “sampling” [5]). As the following sections on use of
images and use of source code explore, explicitly exposing myself to and actively seeking others” art
to appropriate during this point in the process has a direct effect on the translation of the project at
hand.
3.1.1. Use of Found Images in Hyperfiction
“Streams Slipping in the Dark” [21] is a hyperfiction created through the use of html and
Javascript. The story follows several characters as they make their separate ways through a fairyland