Reuse Case: Unsolicited Collaboration

In the course of a longterm project on book piracy, two artist researchers visit several pirate book markets. Leaving the markets with a big bag full of pirate copies, they start to compare the pirated versions with the official copies. It seems the pirates not only took control over the objects, but also the content: in one of the pirate copies (an autobiographical novel by a well-known journalist and TV presenter), somebody has borrowed the official author's voice to sneak in two more fictionalized chapters about the author's life without asking for authorization from the author or publisher. The extra chapters are good enough to pass undetected by a reader. Should this act of infiltrating the author's voice be seen as a critique of normalized concept of individual authorship as something proprietary and stable? Is this an unsolicited collaboration proposing authorship as dialogical and participative? What is the motivation behind inhabiting someone elses voice? There is no cultural capital, nor financial gain, since the pirate author remains anonymous. Buyers don't want to read a chapter by an anonymous author, when they buy a book, say from a well known author. After all, local friends were extremely surprised and slightly unsettled to see altered books. How many modified books have they been reading over the years?