Traceable Shares and Corporate Law

A healthy system of shareholder voting is crucial for any regime of corporate law. The proper allocation of governance power is subject to debate, of course, but the fitness of the underlying mechanism used to stuff the ballot boxes should concern everyone. Proponents of shareholder power, for instance, cannot argue for greater control if the legitimacy of the resulting tallies is suspect. And those who advocate for board deference do so on the bedrock of authority that reliable shareholder elections supposedly confer. Unfortunately, our trust in the corporate franchise was forged during an era that predates modern complexities in the way that stock ownership is now tracked and traded. We do not trace shares, and any clear-eyed look at the conferral of voting rights via back-end stock clearing practices is unsettling. Evidence of the various entanglements crops up from time to time—in the form of questionable voting outcomes or disputes about standing for shareholder lawsuits—but the underlying problems are systemic, not episodic. Our stock clearing system is a kludge. This is an important moment for corporate law, however, because new technology is approaching a state where clearing and settlement systems may soon support traceable shares. The rise of distributed ledgers and blockchain technology is poised to allow for specific share identification and precise records of share provenance. This may sound like an uninteresting technical sideshow, but as this Article will argue, the impact of traceable shares on corporate law will be profound. It will change the structure of shareholder lawsuits, alter the allocation of corporate governance rights, and require lawmakers to rethink fundamental principles of shareholder responsibility for corporate misdeeds

Everyday Cinema: The Films of Marc Lafia

Everyday Cinema presents the films (eight features and numerous shorts, computational, and installation films) of Marc Lafia. In his many films (including Exploding Oedipus; Love and Art; Confessions of an Image; Revolution of Everyday Life; Paradise; Hi, How Are You Guest 10497; and 27) Lafia probes what it is to construct an image, to forge systems of representation, to see and represent ourselves. His work has been defined as a cinema of emergence, a cinema of the event, in which the very act of ubiquitous recording creates something new. Everyday Cinema is comprised of two parts, the first an in-depth look at his films and installations, project by project, providing background on how they came about, Lafia’s process and ideas. The second part features selected interviews and over two hundred film stills wherein Lafia puts forward a new sense of the possibility of the cinema. As we all relentlessly record ourselves and are recorded, we become part of the cinematic fabric of life, part of a spectacle of which we are both constituent and constitutive. This is what Lafia sets out to capture and examine

The self-conscious artist and the politics of art : from institutional critique to underground cinema

The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Online Media Piracy: Convergence, Culture, and the Problem of Media Change

This thesis proposes that there is a symbiotic relationship between the emergence of online media piracy and the industrial, economic and legal changes that have shaped contemporary popular media in the early 21st century. The Internet is at the heart of most recent transformations of the popular media environment, such as the emergence of video-on-demand formats for film and television consumption and the impact this has had on the nature of those media forms. This thesis discusses the powerful role played by online media piracy in shaping these developments, both through changing the expectations of consumers, and the options that are available for distributors of media content. As well as exploring the diverse forms and practices of online media piracy today, this thesis also explores theories of media change, considering how we might understand such piracy as a force underpinning media change, and how the changes it has helped shape might be placed in a broader historical context. To that end, the history and impact of online media piracy are considered alongside other examples, such as the arrival of video recording devices and the expansion of cable television in the 1980s and 90s, and the significance of international trade deals impacting access to media via “geoblocking” and other techniques of access management. Finally, this thesis also examines debates around copyright, and the potential political significance of piracy as a tool for accessing media and culture, viewing online media piracy as a crucial practice appearing at a nexus of industrial and popular interests, tied to technological, economic and legal developments, and to changing consumer behavior and expectations

Digital demos: Exploring communicative rationality on Reddit

Centring around the 2016 American election, this thesis explores how Reddit and its subreddits actualize Habermas’ notion of the public sphere and communicative rationality. It compares and contrasts two of the largest and most popular political subreddits, /r/Politics and /r/The_Donald, to analyze how political groups contextualize political issues, and the discourse that manifests regarding them. The purpose is not to study all the ways in which individuals use Reddit to discuss general politics, but the ways in which consensus and majority opinions are reached and perpetuated through these subreddits. This thesis seeks to examine the extent to which political discussion on the social news aggregate website Reddit facilitates the conditions of a public sphere, and fosters democratic communicative characteristics

Queering boundaries: visual Activism and representations of sexuality in the work of contemporary South African artists

Zanele Muholi, a photographer and visual activist, and Sabelo Mlangeni, a photographer, explore the different ways of representing gender, particularly transgenderism, and sexuality, particularly homosexuality, in their photography. Muholi and Mlangeni document the daily lives and lived realities of people who are black and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) in South Africa. African sexuality remains a contested subject that is difficult to discuss in light of the controversies it provokes due to colonial attitudes toward African bodies. In this instance, colonial attitudes toward African sexuality have exoticised African bodies. Moreover, hyper-sexuality is ascribed to bodies that are black and male, whilst fetishising and objectifying black female bodies. Furthermore, representations of homoeroticism in Africa transgress and challenge dominant ideologies of sexuality and gender in an African context. In this sense, Muholi and Mlangeni directly address tension and resistance between individual and community. Such tensions are found within and between categories of African-ness, whereby homosexuality and transgenderism are regarded as being ‘un-African’ and an import from the West. For example, Muholi represents the existence of homosexuality and transgenderism in her photography in order to subvert the notion that homosexuality is ‘un-African’, attempting to complicate the conceptions of identity, gender and sexuality in South Africa. Muholi’s photography is used as a vehicle for her ‘visual activism’, which purports to create socio-political awareness surrounding homophobia, transgenderism, and epistemic injustice in South Africa. The visual imagery of these two artists investigates the boundaries that are set by various social, political and cultural constructs. These boundaries inform existing social, political and cultural attitudes toward homosexuality and transgenderism, and these homophobic and transphobic attitudes result in crimes committed against homosexual and transgender individuals, such as hate crimes, which includes ‘curative/corrective’ rape, the prevalence of which is rising at an alarming rate. Muholi’s photography and visual activism seek to create visibility in order to raise public awareness of hate crimes, victimisation, alienation and stigmatisation that homosexual and transgender South Africans, specifically those individuals living in township areas, face on a daily basis. These two artists represent sexuality as a site of contestation and, as such, heteronormative traditions, hegemonic social structures, and cultural conventions are transgressed and contested in their photography

The self-conscious artist and the politics of art: from institutional critique to underground cinema

The current debates about political art or aesthetic politics do not take the politics of art into account. How can artists address social politics when the politics of art remain opaque? Artists situated critically within the museum self-consciously acknowledge the institutional frame and their own complicity with it. Artists’ compromised role within the institution of art obscures their radically opposed values. Institutions are conservative hierarchies that aim to augment and consolidate their authority. How can works of art be liberating when the institutional conditions within which they are exhibited are exclusive, compromised and exploitive? Despite their purported neutrality, art institutions instrumentalise art politically and ideologically. Institutional mediation defines the work of art in the terms of its own ideology, controlling the legitimate discourse on value and meaning in art. In a society where everything is instrumentalised and heteronomously defined, autonomous art performs a social critique. Yet how is it possible to make autonomous works of art when they are instantly recuperated by commercial and ideological interests? At a certain point, my own art practice could no longer sustain these contradictions. This thesis researches the possibilities for a sustainable and uncompromised art practice. If art is the critical alternative to society then it must function critically and alternatively. Artistic ambition is not just a matter of aesthetic objectives or professional anxiety; it is particularly a matter of the values that artists affirm through their practice. Art can define its own terms of production and the burden of responsibility falls on artists. The Exploding Cinema Collective has survived independently for twenty years, testifying to this principle. Autonomy is a valuable tool in the critique of heteronomy, but artists must assert it. The concept of the autonomy of art must be replaced with the concept of the autonomy of the artist

Prolegomenon on Pornography

Debates about pornography have always included arguments about its “effects.” Now we can gauge the effects of specifically computerized pornography. These novel effects include scientific research showing that digitalized pornography affects the brain and nervous system in harmful ways that no centerfold ever could. Accessing pornography online makes interactive and directive engagement with it possible, so that the consumer is no longer limited to staring at a two-dimensional representation of a stranger in the nude. The action now is more adventurous. The consumer’s involvement is more intimate and directive. What he does lies somewhere between looking at a centerfold and actually having sex. But where in between? How shall this nether-act be described and morally evaluated? For a married man, is masturbating while in conversation with and directing the like act of a web-cam equipped cheerleader adulterous? If it is not, it is at least an act of spousal infidelity. But which act? What exactly should this sort of betrayal be called? How should our culture and our law judge a woman who divorces her spouse for his regular resort to such outlets