The songs of birds have been studied in terms of memetics, and Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus refer to bird songs in terms of the artist as a marker of territory, even when that artist is a bird. One of their points is that “art is not the privilege of human beings” (317).

If art can be a non-human activity, why is it that only humans mark certain artifacts as “intellectual property”? Deleuze and Guattari, in the same conversation state:

The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. (316)

Would this make someone who marks someone else’s art with their own mark (“This is my intellectual property”, “This is my watermark on a video I did not make”) an artist him or herself?

We’ll leave that complicated question aside for the moment and ask another complicated question. If making art and tools (artifacts) is a pre-human activity, then is copyright unique to humans? It would seem so at least at first glance. Copyright is a recent invention. Apes generally share their tool making skills with each other, or more accurately, they copy each other. Birds copy each others’ songs, and even modify them.

Some birds are so good at copying, that they become a medium in itself—and not just a medium, but a recording and playback device.

Embedding has been disabled on the video I wanted to use (BBC Worldwide: Attenborough – Lyre Bird) by the BBC—another marking of territory.

EDIT by biz-marquis de sade: found an embeddable version.

The question I then ask, is the human animal also not another record/edit/playback device? If ”[p]roperty is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard”, then where does this leave us in terms of promoting the free recording/editing/playing back of artifacts and tools?
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I use the concert situation as a place for research, like a “social studio” to try things out. Also the conversations that I might have with the audience and other musicians are very important to me to try to find out what it was that actually happened.

In a somewhat related note, Deleuze and Guattari also say “Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their own posters” (317). This has interesting implications for the experimental musician. I came across a video of Mattin yesterday in which he plays 10 minutes of white noise while staring at the audience, followed by an interrogation of the audience as to why they clapped. It seemed his point was to challenge the the division of audience and performer. As he says in an interview:

Although in this video, he seems to be very confrontational. It would seem that the marking of territory is inevitable, even when tearing up your own poster. Is he inviting people to participate in his own territory or not? I’m not sure.

EDIT: This essay by Mattin, “oh I love freedom! but what is it?” from his site may shed more light on this.