Pirated software hard drive on display as art
Don’t try that excuse when the RIAA visit
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
A New York gallery is displaying a piece of “art” that consists of a one-terabyte portable hard drive chock-full of pirated code.
Manuel Palou’s “5 Million Dollars 1 Terabyte”, currently on display at the Art 404 gallery in New York, consists of a single drive placed on a plinth, containing stolen code from Adobe, Nintendo, and others. Pedantically speaking - given its name - the drive actually contains 1,016GB of data, and the estimated cost of the data is just $4,971,760.
Very pretty, but is it art?
According to the drive's manifest, the largest chunk of purloined data comes from a 137GB Nintendo DS ROM collection, along with 130GB of PC games from 1979-2001 and 124GB from the artist’s music collection. The most valuable data is a collection of ebooks from 2003-2011, a 133GB haul which the artist claims has a value of $300,000.
The piece is on sale, with the price set at the retail cost of the hard drive, presumably as a statement on the mirage of value applied to data by media companies in an interconnected, synergistic universe where the information superhighway creates cultural ghettos by offloading data at spurious values to reinforce global business hegemony ... or some such.
The gallery told El Reg that there are no buyers interested in the piece as yet, but we know there’s one born every minute, and with the current hard-drive shortage beginning to bite, there may yet be someone willing to splash out on this objet d’art. ®
COMMENTS
*sigh*
time was when "art" was a craft that took 100's of hours/days/months, maybe even a lifetime to produce, perfect, hone etc.
now any poncey wuckfit with box frame glasses and an 'ironic' flat cap can put a mass produced bit of plastic on a pedastool, tag it with a metaphysical idea, and the self adulating masses come crawling.
dat make hulk angry! hulk smash!
f'instance. that massive stack of mecharno outside the olympic stadium with the viewing platform. why didn't they build some massive statues of olypians running, jumping, climbing trees (to quote Mr Izzard). i dunno. something inspiring, something that relates to what that area is?
instead we get something that could on a lesser scale be stolen from the entrance of any commercial estate across the country. nice one.
But we dare not critisize, for it is art, and we dare not be seen as uncultured. twunts.
Time to update excuse list....
time to cross out "I'm making remote backups - its a public service" and replace it with "I'm creating art dammit".
Very much Art
Art of rubbing up the RIAAA , MPAA et al. Wow, I like the audacity and your middle para about "interconnected superhighway ........ percieved value.... some such."
I think you can add some more value (millions) to it by multiplying and 130 Gig odd size of music files which have deprived thousands of artists of their livelihood, their dependants and countless generations of their royalties. ( 1 song = 2 million dollars- per the last court judgement). Also add the millions of dollars in "lost" value to the RIAA and MPAA mafia execs of their cocaine lifestyles monies. Multiply all of it by a factor of four for the negative trickle down effect it has had in the USA economy.
Art indeed.
My offer for the used HDD ! $50. Worth every penny.
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