Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats

Cloning Aura. Art in the Age of Copycats is an essay that explores the close relation between practices of appropriation and the questioning of authorship, from the avantgardes to Post-Internet, going through Postmodernism, 70s-80s subcultural movements, net.art and the Surfing Club generation. Written in Italian, the essay is made of thousands of text quotations mined from hundreds of papers, glued together in a sort of “crazy quilt” that nonetheless holds a linear narrative. The writing technique employed is usually referred to as patch-writing, here used to speak about appropriation through an act of appropriation, and to make a statement about the information overload era we have come to inhabit. Chiara Moioli is an artist and researcher.