plagiarist.org (1998 – ???)
Back in 1998, the world was awash with how the Internet was going to destroy authorship. How could cultural production possibly survive if there was no original? Clearly, all creative work had ceased to exist after the emergence of the VCR, the photocopy machine… and photography. Er didn’t they? While easy reproduction undoubtedly changes things, historically, authorship seems to have survived these crises. Still, there are some who will try to get away with just what everyone fears… Enter Plagiarist.
Plagiarist.org was initially a site for Plagiarist to post his/her efforts at ripping off other people’s works without being detected. For example, there was the Plagiarist Manifesto. Or the Plagiarist Acquisitions project, in which Plagiarist tried to “take over” twenty-seven very large corporations. (Oops, apparently some of their lawyers weren’t all that amused…) Plagiarist.org then expanded into other sorts of projects involving other people’s data, like Interview Yourself, which emerged as a forum for net artists to get themselves the attention they deserved when art critics were too busy to do it for them. Plagiarist.org gradually came to serve as a home page for Amy’s projects, until 2007 when she set up the first version of this site. As a result, it’s organically grown into a mess. Many of the projects no longer work and have been permanently removed. But if you dig through you can still find several of the old gremlins lurking toward the bottom.
