plagiarist

Sainsbury, 7-11.org, and gatt.org disrupted the transparent culture of the symbolic economy of signs and identity in the Net by disrupting the smooth cycle of production and delivery of intellectual product. However, an interesting appropriation of corporate identity that made no pretense of masquerading as a mirror of an existing corporate site was that of plagiarist.org [19], hosted by electronic artist Amy Alexander. In Plagiarist's ACQUISITIONS installation, the site attempted to take a tongue-in-cheek investigation into the ubiquity of corporate takeovers by appending the prefixes of over twenty-seven corporate names to the domain of plagiarist, an example being dupont.plagiarist.org. This work differed in its lack of pretense, clearly announcing its intention as an aesthetically based spoof on opening pages the plagiarist site, but the homogenous milieu of corporate identity was still disrupted. Subsequently legal agents of DuPont Corporation contacted CalArts (Alexander's institution), and faxed a complaint of over twenty-two pages in length, which obviously constituted the threat of a SLAPP suit. Within the FAX, DuPont failed to include a formal complaint, but did include unrelated material from another website where a "person described as a 'plagiarist'" [20] was criticized for the production of anti-Semitic death threats. CalArts then requested the proper documentation for the possible action, to which the DuPont lawyers responded that "they would get back with them". Such action by 'big capital' against clearly parodic works not only shows the need for the maintenance of the homogeneity of signs in corporate (commodity) E-culture, underscoring the unacceptability for any form of ambiguity in such a milieu.