I had a very productive and inspiring chat with Master printer Paul Laidler from the West England University. He had done a talk at Camberwell that dealt with the grey area of artistic ownership and collaboration between artist and printer, and I figured he would have interesting thoughts on my project Whispers, so I invited him for a chat.

The first issue I brought up with him was the issue of copyrights. Am I infringing on anyone’s copyright when I have someone copy another persons object? Paul reckoned it might not be such as an issue as long as it wasn’t 1) reproduced in multiples and 2) sold publicly. The very interesting question also arises whether the copy of a copy of an object would still be seen as a copy of the original and whether it could infringe any rights…

Paul tipped me to look into the Pluralist Theory and System Based Art. His first question in our conversation was: “What instructions do you give people and how are you asking it?” He suggested I would try to act almost as a machine to avoid any bias and make the experiment as ‘clean’ as possible.

Other topics we talked about were:
– creative commons
– Open source (production)
– Mediation (this was a big topic during my interaction design course at HKU)

Paul’s main comment was that in this case the craftsmanship wasn’t in the intuition of crafting an object but rather the designing of a system.