in italiano

NEGATIVLAND
http://www.negativland.com/

« As artists, our work involves displacing and displaying bites of publicly available, publicly influential material because it peppers our personal environment and affects our consciousness. In our society, the media which surrounds us is as available, and as valid a subject for art, as nature itself. »

The experimental music collective Negativland started its official recordings in 1979-80, developing a tecnique of audio collaging and surrealistic appropriation of found sounds and samples. Since then Negativland released a dozen LPs, several singles, a video and a book about the legal case started against them by a widely known pop music group's label for copyright infringment ("Fair Use: The Story Of The Letter U And The Numeral 2").

Negativland's activities range from the production of ironic and absurd music and radio shows, to a critical account of the status of copyright in our contemporary, business-driven societies. In spite of all the heavy attempts by entertainment industry to widen centralized control over intellectual property, plagiarism and appropriation should not only be considered as possible, but rather as unavoidable, productive and ultimately fair.

Negland have been also between the first ones to use the term "culture jamming", which has later become a widely used label for extreme and ironical subversion of pop culture as it's shaped and sold by mass culture industry.