Karen Karnak

Introduction
Karen Karnak is an invented multiple-use name nom-de-plume which has been made available for the purposes of examining the ways in which multiple authors function within the Mediawiki environment and specifically to create an Open content film which will be shown in the 2009 and 2010 Hamilton Underground Film Festival.. The author Karen Karnak does not refer to a real person but to a space which can be occupied and altered at will by any number of individuals. In the space of time in which you contribute to the work of the artist Karen Karnak you, along with the other contributors, will become the collection of works which define the personality of Karen Karnak. Karen, as an assumed author, is a close associate of other multiple-use names which have been created in the past and which, similarly, allow several authors to create one artist’s work. The name Karen Karnak is of course a reference to the great pyramid at Karnak in Egypt and to the Hyperborean nexus at Carnac in France.
In 2006 Emit Snake-Beings (actual name, changed by deed-pole in 1993) used the nom-de-plume Brian Karnak for a series of radio shows broadcast on the Hamilton based Community Radio open access channel. The weekly show, which ran until 2008, comprising a one hour multi-layered sound sculpture which allowed a departure from the usual coherence of radio broadcast personalities through its use of multiple sound sources and simultaneous overlaying of voices and sounds. The name Karen Karnak is a combination of Brian’s interests melded with that of Karen Eliot; a multiple-use name artist which emerged in 1985 and functions ;
to create a situation for which no one in particular is responsible and to practically examine western philosophical notions of identity, individuality, originality, value and truth.
The ‘multi-voiced’ nature of sound and visual art is a theme around which this research project has been created. The technique of using a multi-user nom-de-plume, such as Karen Karnak, also explores the concept of disparate media acting through a perceived agent of coherence; such is one of the functions of authorship.
it does not refer, purely and simply , to an actual individual insofar as it simultaneously gives rise to a variety of egos and to a series of subjective positions that individuals of any class can come to occupy.
History
Originally created for the Hamilton Underground Film Festival, New Zealand
The audio-visual virtual author Karen Karnak is based on the potential of widely distributed users to collaborate on a project which is free from many of the constraints usually enforced upon the individual artist. Using a MediaWiki environment as a starting point, Karen Karnak has begun to ‘write herself into existence’ using a process of open-source multi-authorship; small steps towards a fully automated audio-visual practice which is aimed at challenging the traditional values of originality, authority and ownership usually associated with the author/artist. Foucault’s theory of the author-function, in which the author is a series of functions rather than a physical being, describes a process in which the author operates to create a coherent singular voice from the “plurality of egos” which inhabits a work (Michel Foucault, The Author function, 1977, p. 130). In Foucaultean terms the virtual author, Karen Karnak, is a complex mass of writhing alliances and contradictions; potentials characteristic of a user generated content which blurs the distinction between author and audience. The function of the author which Karen Karnak inhabits stands as a metaphor for the enforced coherency which is imposed on a work by its reader, combined with the paradox of the Romantic notions of the artist as a complex and conflict-filled subject. represents the polyphonic or multi-voiced dialogue between Karen Karnak and the worked media. Just like in the film Being John Malkovich, each collaborator can temporarily occupy the constructed personality of visual artist Karen Karnak for expression of their own agenda. For the purpose of this project you will all be Karen Karnak. All work will be registered through the Creative Commons License under the name Karen Karnak.

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