I love RiP and I love the fact that it doesn’t follow standard narrative lines for documentary – if one wants that one should go rent an NFB documentary from the 1990s, or watch a PBS TV doc on line.

I also have problems with RiP, the most glaringly of which is unsurprisingly overlooked in this critique. So, I think what I should do is duel it out with Lawrence at Art Threat. In the next couple of days, I’ll write my response to the critique above and post it on Art Threat. We’ll see where that takes the conversation….

First of all, congrats on the success of the film so far. I can’t imagine it always being pleasant to be in the public eye and hence subject to criticism, and so I’m glad you’ve embraced the ethos of your film to comment here.

In the version of RiP! that I watched in its entirety yesterday, chapter 12 reviewed in some detail the American push for control over copyright law globally as well as the spread of patents to include living organisms. In my review, I noted that “there are parts of RiP! that, at the very least, are informative” which would certainly include this chapter.

However, you’ve made a film that spends most of its time discussing an artist, Girl Talk, as well as those who freely avail themselves of music online. The primary focus is on copyright law as it pertains to art. It seems a major oversight of the film — and this has not gone unnoticed by mainstream reviewers at the National Post or the Toronto Star — that it failed to discuss how art will get made if people don’t pay for it in some way or another. I don’t expect the film to have all the answers, but I do think it should have addressed the issue, as well as acknowledge the freedom of the filmmakers to make such a film at all, thanks to the taxpayers of Canada.

Personally, I think that since Bell, Telus and numerous other Internet and mobile providers are making such a fortune out of people’s desire to obtain and share art online, that if we truly are going to move to a totally free culture, then those companies should find some way of giving some of their profits to artists.

Wondering if you had a chance to see the movie, or if having it broken into chapters distracted you, since these are really the driving themes of the film and are all addressed in a fair amount of detail…

It all makes sense now. Art in the twenty-first century can seldom be seperated from an obsession with the image. The image, thanks to the invention of photography and then film, has evolved in to an obsession with the self: as image quickly enters our private lives via television and internet, it becomes more and more difficult at how to preserve the essence of the self and resist the imposition of an identity.

Having fun at a rave is not resistance, nor does it lead to freedom. A diffusion of access points to downloads and collaboration on projects of this sort does not lead to catharsis. Art is historically collaborative; the process of humans engaging with one another – breathing, smelling, and touchin one another – cannot be achieved online.

Similarily a diffusion of sexuality does not mean that individual sexual minorities are liberated; instead more ambiguity means less rights for everyone involved. We may all eat ethnic food and enjoy ethnic dance, but continue to complain that crime is the fault of migrant beings. Women are “free” but “god” forbid we consider how many go home from their career jobs to fall in to the trap of cooking, cleaning, and breast-feeding. Sounds to me like oppression is not disappearing, and I doubt that free downloads is going to solve the problem. Bets anyone?