Rasmus Fleischer

Piratbyrån, as a collective of artists, has been invited to the Manifesta bienalle next summer to contribute with a combination of a performance, an installation and a manifesto. It could be seen as a next step after our 2007 performance "Four Shreddings and a Funeral" (www.piratbyran.org/walpurgis).
My plan for the residency would be to work on preparations for this Manifesta manifesto, in relation to my own ongoing academic research about music and media history, as well as to the ongoing controversies around online piracy and the Swedish case around the indexing service The Pirate Bay (which we make a part of the Manifesta performance).

In Vienna, I would also give a series of talks around topics like digitalization of music, the history of notation and the genealogy of the copyfight from the 19th into the 21st century.

I partook in the artist-in-residency program at the kind invitation of Transforming Freedom. It was a very fruitful time, which I largely dedicated to working on the theoretical side of my ongoing Ph.D. project. Thus I have been connecting perspectives from media theory, performance studies and political economy, while trying to apply them on music and the question of its status in the age of its increasing reproducibility. For this, Vienna and quartier21 was a very stimulating environment.
I have also, together with other members of my Swedish group Piratbyrån (The Bureau for Piracy) prepared for our contribution to the Manifesta biennale, which will take place this summer in Bozen/Bolzano. (Our collective contribution will consist of a performative bus trip, an installation and a statement.)
During February, I was arranging three events together with Transforming Freedom in the newly opened Raum D of the quartier21. The first was a lecture about "How to own music", presenting themes from my own empirical research and a historical background to the collapse of copyright law. The second event was a screening of "Steal This Film, part II", followed by a discussion.
The third event was presented as a "live-video-theater" and was an attempt to re-mediate some of the internal conversations within Piratbyrån, with other participants taking part from Sweden in real-time via video-conferencing. It tried to examine the theatrical status of contemporary conflicts around file-sharing, while also being an opening event for the previously mentioned project for Manifesta. (This was made by changing the logotype of the huge file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, from a ship to a bus, in real time as part of the performance at Raum D.) This event was technologically co-produced by monochrom.
During the middle of my residency, I briefly visited Berlin to take part in a panel at the Transmediale festival, an engagement for which Transforming Freedom had also acted as intermediaries.

Apart from all this, the meetings with other artists-in-residence as well as with the people of quartier21's different groups, Vienna’s lively art climate in general, as well as the amazing white studio room has of course also contributed to make my two residency months incredibly rewarding.