On the basis of filmed interviews Cornelia Sollfrank explores the frontiers of peer-to-peer production and distribution. Artistic research project commissioned by the Post-Media Lab, Leuphana University.

Artists and creative producers play a central role in the discourses on copyright and intellectual property; at the same time, artists’ voices are rarely heard. Usually, it is representatives of collecting societies or media corporations and other legal experts who claim the authority to speak on their behalf – in order to argue for stricter copyright laws.

GWYDH aims to counterbalance this misrepresentation of contemporary artistic and cultural production. Using the interview format, the project collects and presents statements from artists whose practice reflects complex copyright-critical attitudes. However, the artists included in the project no longer work on the assumption of artists’ privileged status, but rather consider themselves to be part of social movements for open access and free culture – unlike appropriation artists, for example, who have claimed, and still do, to be “superusers” deserving special rights and copyright exceptions for their appropriative practice.

The artistic practices introduced in GWYDH involve the development of forms of authorship and work concepts that are able to elude the dictatorship of private property in the realm of culture and clear the space between life and art to become a habitat for all.