An intricate network of graffiti art covers alleys, the sides of buildings, billboard, and walls to create a mixed textual reality that is multiply signed and authored in an overlapping array of colorful, fat writing and images. Political missives protesting the arrival of the digerati into the poor, largely Latino neighborhood take up wall space between shops and buildings. In the margins other authors leave their marks, comments, and dire warnings. Something new is always overlapping old text until eventually it is covered or recreated. Paint wars are fought over turf, literal and symbolic, and access, ownership, and accountability are at stake.
Problems can also occur when representation exceeds itself.
When the potential for reproduction and multiplicity exists so readily, important points of negotiation can be erased. For example, experiences of gender and race online can become consolidated and reconstituted in ways that reinforce Cartesian understandings of subjectivity and knowledge. While new forms can create modes for hybrid, oppositional consciousness to emerge, often it is at the expense of still other voices and visions. Recognizing the collective nature of authorship and the contingent nature of knowledge is perhaps a first step in attempting to fashion a new politics of culture, creativity and ownership. Also important is consciously positioning oneself against hegemonizing tendencies embedded in modern concepts of authorship and copyright.