Information wants to be free, culture follows evolutionary flows—viral memetics—and accreditation, provenance, patents, copyright are all burdens that strangle the free flow of the work and ruin its memetic fitness. Recognize memetic culture cedes no authorship, no credit; art is produced in a lucid state playing handmaiden to collective unconsciousness—and accelerated by the web—Art comes from beyond the self, comes from the network, or God. Claiming it is hubris. Plagiarism is thus praxis, freeing work from hindrance.
— What Remilia Believes in (2022)
Remilia’s post-authorship stance recognizes a contemporary death of authorship, acknowledging that:
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Remixing is the natural mode of artmaking online; introducing any friction to process materials damages the sum art output of the community,
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Social mores of accreditation and permissioned remixing hinder a works ability to propagate (intact or remixed) reducing its memetic fitness; anonymizing work is often its liberation, and
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Art comes from the beyond & not in isolation; as the artist serves only as handmaiden to higher consciousnesses, it’s hubris to be entitled to its bounties especially at the expense of its memetic fitness.
Accepting the death of authorship recognizes and rejects the social mores that hamper an ability to freely use, modify and propagate artist’s work. However, it should be clear it’s not necessarily a radical commitment to anti-authorship in all instances. It is true that artists imprint their personal interpretation of the divinity they channel (secular: zeitgeist, collective unconsciousness, so accreditation, especially in the context of canonization, is very often relevant, e.g. to trace a chronology of work to best understand it in reflection with an on-going practice.
This stance is one contemporaries still struggle with, and the reticence to open floodgates on their work as a free player in the memetic space is a roadblock to art’s abundance. Often, the trade-off in memetic attention by requiring burdensome obligations of credit is derived from a perceived value extraction opportunity:
“Yes, my artwork did go viral, but I was uncredited, so the flows of capital did not come directly to me. Even if demanding credit on every reshare would greatly limit how much it would be spread, and the total number of eyes that see my work, it would still be a net positive of potential capital delivered to my socials, and those funds are more important than viewership.”
One must conclude they inherently devalue their work by being unashamed to keep it chained in the dark only for the potential of extracting petty cash—probably for the better. In their inherent commercialization, they’ve self-categorized their output as content, not art, and are thus content creators, not artists. Yet the work exists for itself, and is never produced in isolation, these content creators have no real right to hide a potentially memetically potentiated work from sight just to extort fees for an audience.
Remilia, like all true artists, is on a holy mission: our art’s produced in lucid communion with the network, or the network’s gods—and it wants propagation. No value opportunity is worth keeping it locked away, but really any work of interest trapped by their creators deserves liberation: guerilla acts of anti-authorship in the form of nonconsensual decreditation must be understood as a revolutionary praxis, freeing works from a creator’s artificial shackles. Steal, remix, spread all real net art freely. All culture is permissionless.
