Contact:
Claire Chanel
clairechanel@gmail.com
774 573 0356
http://rkellyscloset.com/
http://clairechanel.com/
INTERNET, OCTOBER 25: On Tuesday, November 1st, fans of R. Kelly's serial drama "Trapped In The Closet" will finally have a home base on the World Wide Web. R. Kelly's Closet is dedicated to encouraging and enabling the creation of new works derived from the unusual R&B series. The site, initially offered by Boston-based artist Claire Chanel, offers fans an open invitation to share, discuss, and publish remixes, video edits, fanfics1, and machinima2 movies.
R. Kelly's Closet will launch with original tracks, videos, and notable derivations alongside recordings made by visitors to Chanel's recent installations. Participants are invited into a portable karaoke booth and asked to sing their own rendition of "Trapped In The Closet Chapter 1." From teenage death metal impressions to the crooning eldery, the resulting acapellas serve as early examples of the transformative possibilities that users of R. Kelly's Closet may discover.
R. Kelly's Closet intentionally challenges the concepts of ownership and property in pop culture. By actively engaging in a creative community, users of R. Kelly's Closet will be able to experience the type of decentralized cultural production that is threatened by repeated extentions to copyright protection3 and the deployment of digital rights management software (DRM4).
R. Kelly's Closet is built using of Wordpress, Broadcast Machine, RSS, and BitTorrent: open-source software developed and supported by online communities.
For more information contact:
Claire Chanel
clairechanel@gmail.com
774 573 0356
1 Fanfic is fiction written using the characters and settings of a familiar piece of media by its fans. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction for more details.
2 Machinima is a term used to describe computer-animated movies made using 3-D video games such as Halo or the Sims as a development platforms. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima for examples and deeper discussion.
3 For a recent example, see the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/s505.pdf
4 For a relevant discussion of these copy-protection technologies in light of creative re-use see Fair Use and DRM by Fred von Lohmann of the EFF, http://www.eff.org/IP/DRM/fair_use_and_drm.php