Kingdom of Piracy
Curatorial statement by Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch and Yukiko Shikata
published at Ars Electronica 2002
The Kingdom of Piracy is everywhere: on the fringes and in the mainstream high-tech
economies, from Asia to Eastern Europe to the data havens of Sealand and hackers' garages
in Silicon Valley. The digital commons is bathing in millions of MP3s and an endless supply
of warez. Codes for appropriation, cut-and-paste, replication, sampling and remixing have long
been established as artistic practice. challenges artists, writers and practitioners to use
these techniques to question, contribute to, analyse and otherwise address this growing Kingdom.
It also asks them to become intimately involved in the processes of the Kingdom itself, a place in
which all productions are part of an innately collaborative, derivative and intimately interconnected
environment of intellectual 'properties'.
Sailing in the Pirate Sea of Art
Published 31 July 2022 by Lee Tzu Tung
The crypto commons movement was born underground and was able to share its ethical foundations
with a vast mass of people around the world: the Crypto Commons movement……
I believe that the crypto-commons movement has a clear mission: to shape and
defend the techno-political evolution of computing platforms outside the logics of ownership.
The new conditions of anonymous collective ownership of decentralized information architectures
force us to understand a new ethical meaning of computational democracy.