I argue that sometimes a group can author a work of art without the work being either co-authored or multiply-authored. Sometimes the group, itself, is an author, rather than any of its members alone or together. I argue that when a group is an author like this, it has mental properties that no individual member of the group possesses. For example, we can consider the groups that authored digital remixes based on a film titled #INTRODUCTIONS created by the artists LaBeouf, (...) Rönkkö & Turner. YouTubers posted their digital remixes online, and the question is: Who authored those remixes? I contend that many digital remixes are authored by groups that are capable of cognition. (shrink)

Investigation of a puzzle concerning complete yet authorless artworks.

Filmmaking is one of the most complexly layered forms of artistic production. It is a deeply interactive process, socially, culturally, and technologically. Yet the bulk of popular and academic discussion of filmmaking continues to attribute creative authorship of films to directors. Texts refer to “a Scorsese film,” not a film by “Scorsese et al.” We argue that this kind of attribution of sole creative responsibility to film directors is a misapprehension of filmmaking processes, based in part on dubious individualist assumptions (...) about creative minds. Such a misapprehension is effacing the public value that a more inclusive and accurate understanding of filmmaking offers. By “public value” we mean the potential to enhance social and cultural well-being, particularly in working lives and collaborative undertakings in the screen industries. Better understanding of the systemic and social nature of creativity in filmmaking can potentially help in democratising aesthetics, which we consider a clear public good. (shrink)

Timbre is simultaneously one of the most powerfully immersive and one of the most ungraspable properties of music and musical aesthetics. And yet there is no critical idiom to assess timbre. There are not even adequate words to describe it, nor is there a definition that is more precise than one ex negativo: timbre is “the difference between two tones with the same pitch and volume”. The synonym “tone colour” is synesthetically muddled: it is a visual metaphor used to describe (...) an auditory phenomenon. This paper analyses the double dualism that pervades the musicological and critical assessment of tone colour. First, timbre is either considered in an idealist way as the expression of the inexpressible, or in a materialist way as the manipulation of sound waves and instruments. Second, there is disagreement as to whether timbre does or does not signify anything more specific than this “incommunicable”. Timbral dualism, however, separates matters that are – and cannot be but – inseparably entwined. Timbre is both an unstable object and an ungraspable Thing: in fact it resides in the space between those opposites. A theory of timbre, therefore, has to be inclusive rather than dualist: timbre bridges the gap between material origins and immaterial effects, between the ontology and the phenomenology of music. In this sense timbre epitomises the idealism/materialism debates in music epistemology. I argue that an inclusive theory of timbre would have to be based on vibration and vitality. Timbre is a vibration of sound waves crossing over from instruments to our listening bodies; a vibrating theory of timbre can cross over from ontology to phenomenology. The aesthetic experience of timbre is active and participatory : hearing timbre is interacting with musical epistemology itself. (shrink)

How can artists create works of computer art or Internet art in which audience members become genuine artists and collaborate with the original artists on the self-same work that they began? To answer this question, this essay will reflect on the work of philosophers who focus on questions concerning art completion and the ontology of computer art. This essay will also reflect on the artistic work of the trio LaBeouf, Rönkkö & Turner, whose artwork can serve as a model for (...) creating collaborative, digital art. (shrink)