Just say no: Negativland's no Business.

A high stakes civil war rages on your laptop; it pits the ever-expanding proprietary commercial music industry empire against the file sharing, grass-roots freedom fighters who transform old sounds into new ideas. It is a war between intellectual property and fair use, proprietary code and open source, and appropriation and clearance rights. In their recent multimedia project No Business (2005), the audio collage art collective Negativland toys with these central contradictions of transnational capital in the digital age.

A multi-platformed, anticorporate, pro-democratic media manifesto, No Business provides an operations manual to rip, burn, mash, recycle, and intervene into mass culture. It is a twenty-first century communist manifesto for public domain, sampling, reuse, and audio collage; the fifty-six page essay, audio compact disc (CD), 5 x 11 inch die-cut outer sleeve art, and Gimme the Mermaid digital video disc (DVD) present a sly, subversive, and brilliant polemic against proprietary corporate culture.

Negativland camouflages their radical politics with fun, satire, and myriad popular culture references ranging from Ethel Merman to the Beatles to Rosie O'Donnell. Their artistic practice is oblique rather than agit-prop, asymtopic rather than topical. Every image and sound on No Business is resolutely illegal--a kind of audio-visual sit-in against the transnational media corporations (TMCs). In the last fifteen years, the TMCs have shifted out of production and into global distribution across platforms, an economics depending less on original productions and more on the control of copyright and intellectual property. The TMCs recycle and remix their own intellectual property, reaping enormous financial gains as they reduce the high risks of production.

As the outer sleeve proclaims, "no elements original to Negativland were used to make these recordings." In other words, everything on the CD is illegal--not one of the tracks is copyright cleared. This illegality and marginality contributes to Negativland's outlaw status in the world of cultural production, a position that has often dumped their highly conceptual and often political artwork into the realm of the novelty category in record stores and pranksterism in the art world.

No Business is not exactly an easy-listening CD to enjoy while chopping carrots for the evening's pilaf. Instead, it functions more like a conceptual art piece for headphones--it is a form of portable audio art more often found in museum installations with large high-end speakers than on CDs. It mines the interstitial zones between popular culture, activism, music, and complex art. No Business is no cute mash-up combining incongruous tracks for ironic effect. Under the cover of a zany, seemingly tangential cacophony lurks a compelling, logical, and surprisingly deductive argument to liberate the public domain from corporate colonization. It advocates multiple weaponry: file sharing, Internet, computers, stealing music, law, creativity, and grassroots defiance.

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A hybrid between an artists' collective, a punk rock band, and a satirical performance art team, Negativland's subversive antics have helped to define interventionist art in the last two decades. They coined the term "culture jammer" in 1984; they provoked an infamous copyright lawsuit in 1991 when Island Records sued them for sampling U2 and remixing it with outtakes from a swearing Casey Kasem. Filmmaker Craig Baldwin's 1995 rollicking collage documentary film, Sonic Outlaws, recently released on DVD, unpacks the case and provides one of the best entrees into the radical insurgency of Negativland for the uninitiated. They have wrangled in legal scares and skirmishes with the Recording Industry Association of America, Pepsi, Geffen Records, and Phillip Glass. Their densely collaged, weekly, live improvisational KPFA radio show, Over the Edge, has aired since 1981. In 2004, Negativland collaborated with Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org) to develop a sampling license as an alternative to existing copyright laws. They were instrumental in instituting the "no use in advertising" clause into the Creative Commons sampling license.

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Negativland's unique aesthetic, a caffeinated version of Prairie Home Companion on shuffle mode, forges combustive sonic landscapes out of tangents, interceptions, and juxtapositions in such CDs as Escape from Noise (1987), Helter Stupid (1989), U2 (1991), and Dispepsi (1997). Drawing on the long traditions of Dada's juxtapositions of the everyday for political intervention and heirs to the kind of intricate sonic mindscapes produced by Orson Welles and Firesign Theater, Negativland exorcises the inane sounds of popular music and audio culture. They ransack and then shred popular culture to make arguments about artistic freedom. Besides records, they have produced fine art, videos, books, and live performances from appropriated sound, image, and text.

Designed in bright yellow and black, the No Business sleeve evokes warning zone colors or police tape, an allusion to the dangerous trespass they advocate. The visual iconography catalogs the trickster and boundary-crossing gods and goddesses with spliced and collaged entities from mythology to consumer culture: minotaur, unicorn, Medusa, sphinx, centaur, wolf-man, Batman, Smokey the Bear, the Little Mermaid, Elsie the Cow, Frankenstein, and Mickey Mouse.

Unlike most postmodern art practice, Negativland eschews a distanced irony and instead advances a political argument to promote action and intervention. Some commentators have linked their art practice with postmodernism's mixing of high and low culture, its collaged aesthetic, and its mix of genres. However, Negativland, unlike much postmodern art practice, veers away from an exploration of surface through distanced irony and attempts to mobilize its listeners to free the culture that surrounds them.

More political in terms of intervention into mass culture and more conceptual in terms of moving beyond surface into abstraction, Negativland actually operates much more in the realm of rational argumentation than is immediately apparent from the wild graphics and aggressive sound recompositions. The images and sounds in the No Business project are assembled not as surface manifestations of a bankrupt commercial culture, but instead as available archival evidence to be reorganized into new arguments and explanatory models to change the listener's own conceptual grids. It is an art that aims to shift the spectator's conceptual models and reframe the world of popular culture as evidence to be deployed in new arguments--a very ambitious and risky undertaking.

Intriguingly, the CD functions as Cliff Notes, illustrating and explaining the free culture arguments in the essay in the liner notes booklet, "Two Relationship to a Cultural Public Domain." Negativland advances two worlds at war. The first--and clearly most dangerous--adheres to the idea that all cultural work is proprietary and requires financial compensation, a position identified with the five TMCs that control most of the music industry. The second--and for Negativland, the most creative and democratic--engages a culture that is endlessly reproducing, redistributing, and remaking itself in free and open creative exchange.

Negativland contends that digital technology has rendered copyright as an outmoded legal form. Self-ownership and free exchange may be the future of music on the Internet--a new frontier of possibilities. The booklet refutes the music industry's standard argument that file sharing eats market shares, pointing out the effects of decline in long-form album production, Clear Channel, and consumer migrations to DVD and gaming. The music industry attempts to control the Internet, but its open, sharing, decentralized technology of easy exchange subverts control. Negativland asserts the Internet's library-like structure and its sharing and spreading of ideas that reverse the one-way communication of other mass media. This argument has a long history in radical communications theory, from Bertolt Brecht through the twentieth century, but it is worth revisiting and reemphasizing as a call to arms. Most importantly, they advocate for free and open access, as well as a legal redefinition of fair use to include transformative use.

The home computer functions as "the ultimate collage and appropriation box," a tool for creative recycling with free access for free expression. Outdated copyright restrictions constitute prior restraints, a censoring of creative practice inhibiting social commentary, satire, and criticism. Negativland agitates for an expansion of fair use and public domain to dispose of commercially biased laws. The essay argues for a politics and aesthetics of transformation and recomposition--"the logical and inalienable right of artists"--to "enlarge all of our brains in a less intellectually constructed environment."

The eight soundscapes on the CD counter the serious arguments of "Two Relations" with a wryly ribald and irreverently gutsy sound design--another strategy to make the same argument about fair use, but with a more inductive, wacky tactic. The multi-track process of layering sound resembles film soundtracks with their multiple layers, a form of recomposition that works to create arguments imbedded in dense soundscapes that envelope the listener. It plunders virtually every mass media genre--film noir, musicals, commercials, award shows--with disconcerting aural juxtapositions and ju-jitsu editing.

"Old is New" creates an eerie, horror film-like environment by layering and pitch-shifting voices from the Beatles track "Because" into a Greek chorus, a sort of opening anthem for collage as a central feature of the collective aesthetic legacy. The title cut, "No Business," features Merman's 1954 ode to the entertainment industry, "There's No Business Like Show Business," recut to say "There's No Business Like Stealing." And in "Favorite Things," from The Sound of Music (1965, by Robert Wise), Julie Andrews chortles that her favorite things are dog bites, nose cream and bee stings--a sound prank that works as a metaphor--perhaps for Negativland's modus operandi, the art of inversion and subversion.

The almost ten-minute long "Downloading" is the political tour de force of the CD. It interrupts and intercepts President/CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Michael Green's anti-file sharing and anti-downloading speech from a Grammy Awards broadcast with layers of sound dissonance from British Broadcasting News, National Public Radio, Elton John, and others. Green's choice phrases, like "downloading," "worldwide theft and indifference," "rip, rip, rip," and "entire music food chain" are repeated, tweaked, and morphed with a slew of voices from the opposition. "Downloading" disturbs the seamlessness of music industry propaganda with debate and disjunctures, hijacking space for more utopian discourse by inserting gaps and fissures into smooth corporatized soundscapes. They replace the monologue of transnational capital with a dialectic of struggle, epitomized in the production of sound jump cuts and gaps, in the ideas of file sharing, now a central battleground.

Ten to fifteen years ago, corporations were suing a variety of visual and audio artists (including Negativland) for copyright infringement. It was an era when the object itself was the point of contention and artists pilloried by court cases could gain fame. In fact, Negativland has often joked that they are the band not with a hit record, but with a hit lawsuit. Now, the TMCs have moved their attention away from the object, and to the networks of circulation like downloading, peer-to-peer, and encryption--a historical shift that No Business brilliantly recognizes and engages.

No Business also includes a video called Gimme the Mermaid, rendered at night on Disney's own computers. The piece features elaborate and beautiful digital compositing and visual layering that echoes the almost baroque layers of audio. In it, a male voice replaces the mermaid's. The No Business project also includes an anti-copyright Whoopee cushion in case, after imbibing in the booklet and CD, you still need to be convinced that copyright strangles creativity.

Negativland's artistic strategy for more than two decades has been to problematize the readability of popular culture through conceptual art, always mining the liminal zones between pop culture, art, and politics. It is a process of endless unsettling rather than categorization, where the bits and pieces in the endless mass culture surround reassemble into new arguments.

One problem with this somewhat wild west cowboy tactic is that despite the populism inherent in Negativland's idea of collage as democratizing creativity, it is a rather United States-centric, white male world of technological utopianism, music industry insider jokes, and civil libertarianism. At the "Collage as Cultural Practice" symposium at the University of Iowa in March 2005, Negativland's charismatic, articulate, and funny Mark Hosler recounted the group's saga to a packed house comprised of mostly under thirty, white males.

Collage practice has largely shifted into the digital, with mash ups and cut ups flooding the Internet in a variety of viral marketing forms that appear daily on our e-mail forwards. And with this shift to the Internet and new technologies has come a regendering of collage as a form of ribald, adolescent male fun where President George W. Bush's speeches are cut up, but political analysis of war and empire are absent; this is evidenced by the fact that the majority of people at the collage conference were white and male. The world of hacking and manipulating digital technologies is, unfortunately, generally male.

Beyond the U.S. file sharing and music sampling scene, however, collage looks quite different. A variety of postcolonial visual and media artists such as Ximena Cuevas (Mexico), Peter Forgacs (Hungary), Richard Fung (Trinidad/Canada), and Leandro Katz (Argentina/U.S.), and digital media collectives such as Sarai in India, have shifted the vectors of collage toward linking the national imaginary, social struggle, and gender with more international vectors. Bhangra remixers like Bally Sagoo, Asian Dub Foundation, and A.R. Rahman have deployed recomposition of sound and music to link the East with the West in a critique of imperialism that infiltrates clubs and embodies politics in pleasure and danceable beats.

One wonders where the creative and political potential of Negativland might go if they shifted their vectors away from the U.S., popular culture, and male technogeeks, to a larger conversation--and intervention--with the world of empire, war, gender, and race. A hint of what these new coordinates might yield for a truly radical, more transnational engagement with the world occurred at the Deep Wireless Festival, a celebration of Radio Art, in Toronto, Canada, in May 2005. Negativland performed a live radio show that boldly took on the discomfiting question of East and West fundamentalism, and used sound of an Arab woman discussing Islam in Canada--a daring intervention during a time of war, border policing, and racism.

However, perhaps Negativland understands how to unsettle suburban white male file sharers through insider humor about the record industry, a way to materialize the vast power of the TMCs for those who want music on demand and not a Marxist political economy. Whatever their fan base, they have taken up one of the most radical positions on fair use. On the other hand, their defense of creativity and free expression veers uneasily toward a civil libertarianism and rugged individualism disengaged from other significant social struggles or economic analyses. Unfortunately, their argument can end up implying that what matters is having fraternity boy fun alone on your iPod.

No Business's idealism about the unique radical potentialities of the Internet as a democratic rejection of top down communications is not quite historically grounded and reads like hyperbole rather than a careful analysis of the complexities of digitality. They err on the side of optimism and hope, which is perhaps their own way of disengaging from the immobilizing politics of inertia and despair. One could argue that Negativland deploys hope and fun as a form of performance art, functioning almost like shamans to exorcise corporatized thinking about intellectual property from listeners.

One can perhaps forgive the hyperbole in the context of Negativland's quest to reach a wider audience that may not be interested in the scholarly research on the contradictory political economies and ecologies of new technologies. Virtually every new media technology to appear in the twentieth century has been imagined as a radical liberation of the masses by intellectuals, artists, engineers, and entrepreneurs alike. Brecht wrote an influential essay seeing the potential of radio as a two-way form of communication in the 1920s, the Film and Photo League saw film as a way to mobilize workers in the 1930s, and early portapack video activists in the 1970s argued for a new radical empowerment through media. (1)

But these critiques are not arguments against the complexity of Negativland's conceptual artwork. The artistic power of No Business resides in how it obliquely opens up a space to crosswire cultural practice, creativity, and politics, a space shrinking daily.

No Business exemplifies a form of radical cultural practice occupying the liminal zones between proprietary and open source, arguments and tangents, analog and digital, and political polemics and multi-layered mass culture humor. Plundering the psychic and political unconscious of mass culture, No Business propels the reader and listener to refuse and refute culture as property--and to make something new out of the old. (2)

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. She is author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000) and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie (forthcoming in 2007). She is also co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willet, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964); Russell Campbell, Cinema Strikes Back: Radical Filmmaking in the United States 1930-1942 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982); Deedee Halleck, Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002).

2. An earlier, abbreviated version of this essay was published on www.mediachannel.org.