Background illustration by Lilli Carré.

The role of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

In this installment we hear from Yoonjee Koh. Yoonjee Koh is the Director of Intermediate Architecture Studios and full time faculty member at The Boston Architectural College. 

Copies negotiate fine lines of invention and imitation, creation and repetition. Between blurred interstices of the original and the replicated across Wikipedia-ed sources, Instagram-ed images, and YouTube-d footage, the copy in the current digital turn seeks to become our primary generator and mode of informational consumption. For every material that is copied re-surfaces to be recognized by the present. With increasing proliferation of copies and copy-making platforms, the shifting identity of today’s copy and its effect on framing new perspectives expands definitive notions of the copyright.

Let’s take the case of Instagram, one of the most widely used social media platforms whose primary mode of operation relies on the method of copying and re-copying. In Instagram’s systematic posts and re-posts of posts, replication is a mode of production. Yet the series of hashtags and attribution to the pulled source, may not be the “original” post, probing the question: does the original hold its right? Or, does the copy also hold its right in the act of reproduction? If so, how does the copyright of the copy engage with an unruly tangle of genealogical memories?

The rupture of the digital copy harbors new territory to propose alternate perspectives in reframing dialogue of authorship and ownership, beyond displacement and difference to recognize the productive capabilities of the copied and its oftentimes messy repercussion in attributing credit. Hillel Schwartz’s The Culture of the Copy explains, “an object uncopied is under perpetual siege, valued less for itself than for the struggle to prevent its being copied…It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality”. Similarly, as Walter Benjamin explains in his too often quoted “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” authenticity is found in the power of the multiples. The more that is reproduced, the more original uniqueness is cherished with value. True, the copy makes the original emerge; yet, in the “exuberant world of copies,” is it worth recognizing the generative power that a copy drives, especially in the fine lines of the inspired, the inspirited, the affected? What about the precedent of the precedent of the precedent?

The more that is reproduced, the more original uniqueness is cherished with value.

Perhaps it is too much to track the reverberations of every copy. Perhaps the generative multiples that process the reproduction cannot all in fact be recognized. As taking a photo of an artwork, posting it to Instagram, and re-posting the photograph loses a ‘unique’ aspect of the previous construct by each reproduction, perhaps each copy holds an originality to its replicated self. As evident in the Harvard GSD’s 10th edition of Platform, Live Feed, the replacement of each image reveals “a world in which distortion, simulation, and manipulation are often indistinguishable from their opposite.” The question of the ‘again’ implies a previous version that exists in its own context. Can we say that the previous context is an ‘original’ without having objectively surveyed the entire history of materials produced? Isn’t our recognition of the ‘original’ merely a recognition, made by subjective determination followed by collective agreement?

The discipline of Architecture is not immune to the unruly tangle of multiples. A recent debate on intellectual rights focuses on the Harvard GSD’s 2018 James Templeton Kelley Prize winning work, which allegedly intentionally copied preceding work, including that of Miles Gertler, a Princeton graduate from 2012. Gertler’s work was not properly cited or annotated in the replicated drawings, pointing towards a fowl case of plagiarism. Yet, we are called to ask if our focus is on intellectual originality, or the rights associated with authoring a piece of work identified as “original”. In other words, had Gertler’s work been cited and referenced as part of a process that meant to identify the effects of replication and multiplication, would this controversial debate reveal different perspectives that allow us to think through divergent relationships between authorship and ownership? 

Perhaps it is too much to track the reverberations of every copy. Perhaps the generative multiples that process the reproduction cannot all in fact be recognized. 

If the traditional notion of the original is a former recognition of “the one,” a form of territorialized authority, perhaps the proliferation of the digital copy calls to re-think the singular notion of the original. In blurred boundaries of the inspired, the half-copied, and slightly-copied, the copyright may need to go beyond its black and white distinction to recognize a gradient of ownerships and authorships that share multiple credits to varying degrees. Sounds like a mess. If not an easy way to disregard the highly held original, in what way can we ascertain that a first was truly a first? A discovery is only deemed as such when a collective that share the same context determine that the discovered was the first to be recognized in a common localized context. Second discoveries, copied originals, and repeated firsts are perhaps less of an anomaly than we’d like to consider.