Dreamwriters
Accompanying text to my graduation show to fly through the mouths of men
University of Applied Arts Vienna
23.6 - 5.7.2023
In 1878, French Romantic writer and politician Victor Hugo addressed the International Literary Congress, giving the opening speech. Sketching out his ideas about authors' rights and the public domain as well as their entanglement with his beliefs in the principles of freedom and emancipation, he initiated a political process that would ultimately lead to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works. Adopted in 1886, it is the first international treaty providing authors with the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms. It is still active today, having been incorporated into TRIPS; the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. The WTO, the World Trade Organization is an intergovernmental organization that regulates and facilitates international trade, though has been repeatedly accused of being a central institution of global neoliberal politics. Its four-building-headquarter is in Geneva. Since a dispute over safeguard tariffs with China in 2011, the U.S. has blocked the WTO’s Appellate Body, effectively rendering it unable to act.
On 24 December 2019 in China, the Shenzhen Nanshan People’s Court heard the case of Shenzhen Tencent Computer System Co., Ltd. vs. Shanghai Yingxun Technology Co., Ltd. The plaintiff Tencent has independently developed a set of data and algorithm-based intelligent writing assistance system called Dreamwriter to meet the needs of large-scale and personalized content businesses. On August 20, 2018, Tencent first published a financial report on the Tencent Securities website and noted at the end that: “This article was automatically written by Tencent’s robot Dreamwriter”. The Defendant in this case, Shanghai Yingxun, without Tencent’s permission and authorization, reprinted the article on its website on the day it was published. Following, the Plaintiff sued Shanghai Yingxun Company to the Court on the grounds of copyright infringement and unfair competition. In its ruling, the Shenzhen Nanshan District People’s Court recognised the human creator’s selection and arrangement involved in producing the relevant output and decided that the output generated by Dreamwriter satisfied the requirements for written works and therefore was protectable under the Copyright Law of China. The Court ordered the defendant to compensate the plaintiff for economic losses of ¥1500, making it the first case judicially confirming that AI-generated outputs can be granted copyright protection in China.
Chinese playing card makers, whether they be based on mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or even Macau, have a reputation for imitation and replication fused with innovation which has produced perhaps the widest variety of joker playing card designs of any single part of the world. In 2012, amateur game card collector Matt Probert published his collection of Chinese Jokers on the homepage The World of Playing Cards. It contains multiple Chinese designs, ranging from clear counterfeits of classical western designs to inspired variations to original Chinese designs. Designs copied in whole or part from Western classic designs are chiefly limited to the more prolific, later American, British and Belgian classic designs by the US Playing Card Company, Waddington’s, Cartamundi but also encompass designs by Consolidated-Dougherty, Arrco, Hoyle, Brepols, Biermans and Ducale. Often Joker cards are marked by a star.
A couple years before his speech, Hugo lived in exile on the island Guernesey due to his conflict with Napoleon III. His writing room at the time, he called the chambre de verre, a heavily decorated room with part of its floor being an ellipse of glass, through which one could see to the floor below. There, he wrote L’Homme Qui Rit, a novel about a man who is mutilated by the aristocracy to wear a permanent smile. A still image of the filmic adaption of this book, showing Conrad Veith as the movies main character Gwynplaine, later inspired the design of the Batman Joker.
As a trickster figure, the Joker is a figure of fluid identity, a shapeshifter and unstable container. Throughout history, the Joker appears as a jester, a fool, in the commedia dell’arte as Arlecchino, as Hanswurst in German Stegreifkomödie, as the arch enemy of Batman, as a playing card or recently a Prepaid Online MasterCard® by Novum Bank Limited. He defies clear classification.
In his book Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman examines how we have moved away from a heavy and solid, hardware-focused modernity to a light and liquid, software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.
