13 Factoids
by Louis Scantlebury
- You are born a plagiarist - a knock-off of your father, the imitation of your brother. Your features have been altered to avoid copyright laws. Darker hair, rounder face. Are you more or less attractive? It’s too early to say, you are only four years old.
- You learn to plagiarise at school. You forge a letter about your cold and sign your mum’s name to get out of P.E. Every maths homework is copied. In your history exam, you rewrite example essays. You misquote Martin Luther King, but you know these scribbles can’t be fact-checked. The botched quote resonates with the examiner. I’ve never heard that one before. She takes the quote with her. She quotes it to her friends, and they quote it to their friends.
- Your brother is kicked out of university for plagiarism. He’s caught by Turn-it-in, the submission portal that detects how unoriginal your essay is. Years later, you go to the same university to do the same course, and Turn-it-in tells you that your essays are on average 15 percent stolen.
- Your brother is 7 years older than you. You use him as a yardstick for your future. When he started balding, you worried about your own hair. You project your ambitions onto him. This goes something like: brother has failed to achieve X. I have also failed to achieve X. Is 7 years enough for me to succeed at X by the time I’m his age? You do this to famous people. You scroll through their Wikipedia page and plan your future around their past, hoping to become their sequel.
- The Body of Theseus: all the cells in your body replenish after around 7 years. The optimistic spin on this is that you have become someone new and can free yourself from out-dated baggage. But what if you don’t? Then you are committing self-plagiarism, repeating old mistakes in new ways.
- Your brother says fuck it, he’s going Turkey for a hair transplant. They’ll pluck hairs from the back of his head and use them to fill in the bald patches at the front. The dead follicles will then learn to imitate the alive ones. His hairline will be born anew - or a knock-off, depending on how well the operation goes.
- A painter whose name you can't remember once said that he only uses reference photos that are at least 7 years old. He said he couldn’t rely on the effect of newer images - they’d age in a way that he couldn’t control. After 7 years, the meaning of an image stabilises. It becomes more of an image, or purely an image.
- For these notes, you wanted to include this factoid: William Borroughs copied the entire text of 'The Great Gatsby' on his typewriter because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel. You’ve been spreading this factoid for years. But you’ve just searched it, and it was actually Hunter S Thompson, not Burroughs, who did this. Their names have been mixed up in your head. You also learnt this week that the primary definition of factoid is not ‘small piece of information’ but ‘an unreliable piece of information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact’.
- Memories as factoids: When you remember an event from your past, you are actually recalling whatever you previously remembered. E.g. Your 7th recollection is a memory of your 6th recollection. The more you remember, the more factoids you produce.
- Stories as factoids: Consider a traumatic event in your life. Consider it as you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone seven years later, for the hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. A few components enter into this change. One is the process of adjustment for the audience over time. You find out which part of the story works, which parts to embellish, which parts to cut. You fashion it. Your reasons for telling it are to be entertaining, to garner sympathy, to be liked. It bears no resemblance to the original event. This is true for a story told at a party, and it’s true for stories told in books, in songs, in films.
- The acting teacher Lee Strasberg gave this advice: when invoking traumatic memories to generate tears for a dramatic scene, only use material which is at least 7 years old. A fresh memory might overwhelm the actor. The actor will cry, but not with the precision needed for a dynamic scene, and the audience won’t buy it. The emotion will be real, but it won’t look real.
- Another factoid: While he was an art student in New York, Cory Arcangel would go to comedy clubs and perform old Seinfeld bits as if it were his own material. You thought you’d read this online, but you can’t find it anywhere.
- The best way to avoid copyright infringement is to wait a hundred years. Or plagiarise discreetly at your school talent show. Another good way is to label your work parody or fan fiction. Four billion words of Harry Potter fan fiction have been written. Most of it is erotic, all of it is free. None of the writers make money, they steal for the joy of it. A writer whose name you can't remember once said: all fiction is fan fiction.
Editors' Notes
by Joseph Bradley Hill, Hannah Machover & Louis Scantlebury
The Artwork and its Double
Should broken artworks be remade, restored or left as they are? At what point does an artwork’s authenticity get thrown into question? See: The Ship of Theseus, Trigger’s Broom, The Salvage Art Institute. Are artworks improved by these processes? Could natural decay be your best editor?
Edgar Allan Poe argues that marginalia is the best playground for generating ideas. What is marginalia’s impact on its neighbouring text? Does it improve, distract or create a new work? See: Tom Phillips’ ‘A Humument’.
What rights does a translator have over their translation? How far must you alter someone’s sentence to make it your own? How many different ways can you write it? Is 99 the limit? Or 195? If one of these sentences tells the real story, are the rest of them counterfeits?
Mimicry & Copyright
When you reference someone, how far away can you put the credit? Can you hide it up Mount Chileo?
If you handed your artwork into Turn-It-In, what would be your plagiarism score? How might you push that score higher? & is it still plagiarism if you do it by accident?
Mum suddenly sounds brummie when the builder calls, but how long can she maintain the illusion? Is someone else’s voice more approachable? Tonight, Matthew, I am…
Self-Plagiarism and Repetition
Is it possible to tell a true story? Storytelling is inherently insincere. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Consider it as you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone seven years later, for the hundredth time. It’s not the same thing. A few components enter into this change. One is the process of adjustment for the audience over time. You find out which part of the story works, which parts to embellish, which parts to cut. You fashion it. Your reasons for telling it are to be entertaining, to garner sympathy, to be liked. It bears no resemblance to the original event. This is true for a story told at a party, and it’s true for stories told in books, in songs, in films.
What anecdote do you tell on autopilot? You are a comedian with one routine. Is all this self-repetition a coping mechanism? See ‘staircase wit’: when the perfect remark comes to mind just after you leave a social interaction. You replay the line in your head for the rest of the day, imagining what could’ve been. It’s all downhill that way…
Collaborative Plagiarism
Who starts a football chant? Who writes them, who edits, who conducts? Who decides when the performance is over? When will these become part of the folk song canon?
The ball has crossed the line, but how can I know it’s a goal if no one else is celebrating? As an audience, we collaborate to create the aura of an event. We copy each other's behaviour to understand what we are watching.
We spectate artworks in the same way. We borrow each other's enthusiasm and pass it on. We honour objects through reproduction and circulation, and in this way we build the artwork’s pedestal. Sometimes we get it wrong.
The Mandela Effect is a mass worldbuilding exercise. Who was the first to misremember Mandela’s death? No one can claim ownership of this false memory - it’s everyone’s false memory. Like a folktale, the memory has no origin but spreads regardless. This process is the same for conspiracy theories, in which people share their paranoias to collectively remap the world. Ideas are repurposed, altered, combined. Together they build epic tapestries of reality.
