Name: Cease & Desist* (Original TIFF 3740x23622 157.4MB) Artist: Diddo Description: Texture made from personally received Cease & Desist letters Dimensions: 3740x23622 157.353.464 bytes

Artist Statement:

Cease & Desist: The Luxury of Law

We are constantly bombarded with messaging. Our public spaces have been transformed into mind-warping galleries of corporate, political and social communication — images and words designed to create value and influence thought. These are ideas with an agenda. They are also “intellectual property”. We are free to adopt these ideas but are forbidden to adapt them to question their agendas.

Intellectual property rights were developed to stimulate creativity. This legal reification process turns ideas into property and grants the creator legal ownership. This generates economic incentive from, and protection for, the intellectual goods created. IP laws are therefore two parted: the goal and the incentive. The goal is to stimulate creativity and the incentive offers economic protection and advantage.

Over time the IP has been distorted by economic interests. The laws have devolved into a pay-to-play corporate defence system that system actively represses free thought, forbidding critique and discussion. IP has become completely antithetical to its intended purpose. As this continues creativity will be reserved only for those who can afford it.

The ‘Cease & Desist’ project is a commentary on this phenomenon. The objects, created from personally received Cease & Desist letters, are a 'performance piece' that plays out between the theoretical ideal of IP rights and the distorted forces of its practice. The goal is to create an open discussion, within IP law, examine how it acts within society and shapes or misshapes culture, in general. ‘Cease & Desist’ seeks to find the hidden boundaries of IP’s legal expression, to uncover the line where property ends, and where creativity and free thought begin.

For more information please visit: https://diddo.art