Toronto Star: Using disconnection to invent meaning

Toronto Star: Using disconnection to invent meaning
The madness to his method: Graham Rawle cut and pasted words from more than 1,000 women’s magazines to create Woman’s World.
Ryan Bigge Special to the Star

Using 40,000 text fragments from women’s magazines, British artist Graham Rawle challenges the conventions of the novel

Intellectual property, a term that barely existed 35 years ago, along with peer-to-peer file-sharing have become flashpoints in the debate around the nature of ideas and innovations in the 21st century. Time magazine’s selection of “You” (a reference to the people behind user-generated content on the Internet) as their Person of the Year (2006) may be viewed as the tipping point of Internet participation. Blogs and podcasting are challenging traditional media and information-delivery models. Time magazine’s decision to spotlight the participatory Internet leaves little doubt that the issue has moved from the edges of cyberspace into the mainstream. But in order to create new works, artists need to build upon works from the past. And according to representatives from the Canadian publishing, music, television and film industries, Canada is far too lenient when it comes to protecting the intellectual property of its artists.