Alex Sprogis

compress, embed, filter, sample, loop

These are the common forces that drive our digital culture and continue to blur our distinctions of property ownership today. The project reinterprets 1,000 years of parliamentary legislation on common land as these basic forces to question whether common land can once again become a productive part of twenty-first century London.

Historically, common land existed as a public resource pool for common use; as a source of firewood, grazing land, turf and peat. Our ‘right of common’ today is caught in the politics of digital culture; self-evident particularly within the music industry where online file sharing or creative commons licensing reflect an ongoing tension between interests of public domain and 'all rights reserved' ownership.

By using alternative generative tools available in music software, Wormwood Scrubs common in West London is transformed into an augmented resource landscape of intensive agriculture, productive woodland and biofuel energy storage in constant flux between states of matter. What was ‘common’ in name only is now a physical manifestation of the combined forces of digital commonality, whose musical qualities are choreographed in film and sound as a walk through the landscape.