P-Prompt: I don't want to ask for permission
In 1999, Nicolas Malevé organised with Constant {insert link bio or glossary} the event Copy.Cult which discussed various aspects of the culture of the copy. It sparked the beginning of many interventions, activities, and reflections on authorship and ownership that have been defining moments for the commitment of Constant to Free Culture. Asking him, many years later, to revisit and rearticulate some of that history in the form of a prompt, was clearly asking for trouble. In the conversations that followed, we discussed the issue of appropriation, and how sometimes asking for permission might not be desirable. Nicolas wrote us that “This conversation raised anew the relation between licences and art, and in particular the relation to the thorn notion of art’s autonomy. This might seem strange because it didn’t bother me one bit for more than 25 years”. Finally, Nicolas contributed with a first labyrinthine map that sets out to reflect the tentative process (precarious and rather partial) to make sense of this question today.
