John Egenes: The Folk Process
John Egenes is a musician from Port Chalmers by way of Santa Fe and Los Angeles. He teaches Digital Music culture. As a fashion designer, he dressed Naomi Campbell. In this talk he discusses the cultural impact of the ‘the folk process’, looking at how releasing your intellectual property into the world and opening it up to be ‘borrowed’ by others is just the beginning of the iterative process shape trends, culture and and the commercial world.
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ABOUT John Egenes
“John Egenes is an Executant Lecturer in Contemporary Music MMus (Otago), PGDipMus (Otago), BA (CSF) and a versatile session player and multi-instrumentalist.
He plays electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, mandola and mandocello, pedal steel and lap steel, dobro and Weissenborn lap guitars, accordion and keyboards, bass, fiddle, and even Theremin and musical saw.
He has had a lifelong love of horses and is known among Amercian equine enthusiasts for having ridden his horse, Gizmo, across the United States, from the Pacific coast of California to the Atlantic Ocean in Virginia on an odyssey that took seven months and covered more than 4,000 miles. Along with his love of horses, he’s also a Master saddlemaker, composes music for upper level dressage freestyles, and spends evening hours studying the stars through his telescope.
Now living in Dunedin, New Zealand, he has become a sought-after session player for Kiwi artists like: The Sami Sisters, Hannah Howes, Bob McNeill, Tim Guy, Lauren Thomson, Tami Neilson, The Verlaines, The Bats, and others and has found an enthusiastic camaraderie among the local musicians here.
He has immersed himself in the study of digital communal culture and its effects upon music and other intellectual content, and in his work, ‘The Stone Soup Sessions’ John has managed to bring together a group of his musical pals from all over the world, using what he calls the ’21st century folk process’ that is spawned by our new digital culture.
John challenges the copyright and anti-piracy legislation. “In the fashion world people are too busy being on to the next thing to worry about copyright”. He proposes that ‘transformational imitation’ where by we improve on existing products could be a more productive way for society and business to look at the concept of intellectual property.”
The VIDEO
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