By Ashley Davies In this presentation I aim to discuss the theme of digital media authorship and whether it should be considered as a form of copyrighting

This piece of work is a poster and is easily recognizable as a parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous ‘Last Supper’ painting

He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and maybe even the most diversely talented person ever to have lived Da Vinci created this painting towards the end of the 15 th Century and it represents the scene as narrated in the Gospel of John 13:21

Mona Lisa Vitruvian Man

The company that digitally enhanced this picture is an eBay business called Elite Posters They produce officially licensed out of print posters and are based in Essex

Jedi Last Supper

Simpsons Last Supper You can find more examples at: suddenly-last-supper.html

This piece was originally a painting and was later made into a poster The software which was used to redesign this poster is Photoshop, which is the current market leader for image manipulation software This poster was probably pretty easy to edit as all the new artist has done is add more images on top of the original piece. For example Elite Posters has added stereotypical iconography which you’d usually expect to find in a pub or club. Things like cigarettes, drinks, a dart board, poker chips etc... have been incorporated into the painting

I think that Elite Posters made the image in this format because it simply would’ve been too time consuming and too difficult to add these small and often subtle images on to such an old piece of work by hand Also, by doing the alterations in this format, the poster looks glossier and the objects which have been added to the painting don’t look that out of place so makes the mise-en-scene and composition look consistent and natural

I chose this piece of work because I think it’s very interesting visually and conceptually I think the aim of the poster is probably to provoke some sort of a reaction from people You could argue that in many ways this poster doesn’t work as certain people may dispute that the poster is distasteful I actually think the poster works as a controversial piece as often religion is what divides cultures and is the origin of many disputes, so to be able to make fun of religion brings it into a more modern era and gives it a more relaxed demeanor The thing that I like most about this piece is the intertextuality that it contains. As mentioned earlier Elite Posters have inserted some of Da Vinci’s other work into the poster but the insertion that I like the most is the self portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci himself

Some may say that by including a picture of the original artist in the new piece of work, Elite Posters are in fact sharing credit for the poster so not accepting 100 percent ownership

It is pretty difficult to establish who has authorship over this piece of work. Just because a piece of work is changed slightly does this then make it a new piece of work so the property of the new creator or do the rights still belong to the original creator? Some people may argue that the rights of this work still belong to Da Vinci as he was its original creator However, other people may argue that the rights of the new piece should belong to Elite Posters as they’ve made pretty obvious alterations which some would say make the work a completely different piece from the original In my opinion the rights for this poster should belong to Elite Posters. I think this because they have given the piece a very different set of ideologies If two pieces of work generate such different emotions from the audience then I think they can’t possibly portray the same thing. This would then mean that the poster is actually a completely different piece of work from the painting You could also go as far as saying that Da Vinci himself was guilty of authorship as the last Supper Painting is simply a representation of a scene from the bible. What Da Vinci painted is open to different interpretations Elite Posters could argue that all they’ve done is created a similar picture from the same scene

Digital copyright is not actually a legal or official copyright term because new technologies are progressing so quickly that the copyright legislation is simply not able to keep pace with the developments concerning digital media authorship So you could argue that nothing is made from scratch anymore and really everything is shared and pretty much all forms of art, media etc… come from some sort of collaboration

In conclusion, I don’t believe that the use of digital imaging software affects the creativity or authorship of this poster as it has very different morals and connotations to the original painting so, as I’ve previously mentioned, it could be considered as an entirely different piece of work. The changes made in the poster yields completely different results, reactions and emotions from the audience so I think that Elite Posters have been just as creative in recreating this poster as Da Vinci was in originally creating his Last Supper painting