What is the future for art and ideas in an age when practically anything can be copied, pasted, downloaded, sampled, and re-imagined?

LIVE from the NYPL and WIRED Magazine kick off the Spring 2009 season with a spirited discussion of the emerging remix culture.

Our guides through this new world--who will take us from Jefferson's Bible to Andre the Giant to Wikipedia--will be Lawrence Lessig, author of Remix, founder of Creative Commons, and one of the leading legal scholars on intellectual property issues in the Internet age; acclaimed street artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic Obama "HOPE" poster was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery; and cultural historian Steven Johnson, whose new book, The Invention of Air, argues that remix culture has deep roots in the Enlightenment and among the American founding fathers. 

Shepard Fairey - Shepard Fairey shot to national fame as the graphic artist behind a 2008 iconic poster of Barack Obama, a portrait labeled simply "HOPE" and in a style that could be described as Andy Warhol meets Socialist Realism. Fairey, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992, was already well known among graffiti artists and fans, thanks to one of Fairey's early works of "guerilla" art, an impromptu stencil design based on an ad for Andre the Giant, a professional wrestler. Fairey made stickers of the image in the late '80s, along with the scrawl "Andre the Giant has a posse," and the image went viral, spreading far and wide through urban America, on street signs, billboards and walls. He later adapted the image and added the word "obey." Mixing left-wing politics with "appropriated" images and bold graphic design, Fairey now works as a fine artist and advertising designer, with a gallery in Los Angeles and business ventures that dip into publishing, fashion and urban sports (skateboarding). Supporters call what he does appropriation art, but detractors call it plagiarism, and Fairey's success has put him in the middle of a legal and artistic debate about who owns what when it comes to images in the public. With permission from the staff of Obama's presidential campaign, Fairey began distributing the "HOPE" image in January of 2008. A year later, with Obama in the White House, Fairey's poster was officially displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Around the same time the Associated Press declared Shepard's poster was based on a 2006 photo taken by the AP's Manny Garcia and they should get credit and compensation. Fairey filed a pre-emptive lawsuit against the AP, arguing he didn't owe them. Fairey has appeared in the documentary films Andre the Giant Has a Posse (by Helen Stickler, first distributed in 1997) and Bomb It! (2007), and his work has been documented in the book Supply and Demand.
Paul Holdengraber - Paul Holdengraber is the director of Public Programs - newly created and now known as "LIVE from the NYPL" - for the Research Libraries of the New York Public Library. At the NYPL, his stated goal is to make the lions roar.
Steven Johnson - Steven Johnson is the author of the US bestsellers Mind Wide Open and Emergence. His most recent book is The Invention of Air. Johnson's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He also writes for Discover magazine and Wired.com, and was co-founder of the award-winning websites FEED and Plastic.com. He teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and also hosts a weblog at www.stevenberlinjohnson.com.
Lawrence Lessig - Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. For much of his career, he has focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. Recognized for arguing against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online, he is CEO of the Creative Commons project, and he has been a columnist for Wired, Red Herring, and The Industry Standard.