We eventually managed to find a theme for our art piece, which has now turned into a pirate boat. It might sound cheesy and common-place (and probably is), but we have brought the concept to a whole new level with an innovative conception of piracy. We are a collective of individuals artists, each with their own particularities, and – although we all adopted a different approach to it – we are all pirates, in our own way. Whether we are pirate by necessity or by choice, it does not matter much. In the end, we are all the same. Whether we are straightforward outlaws, rejecting the rules just because they are described as rules; cheerful gay pirates, pretending to be different just because we are different; DIY pirates, hacking reality into what we think it should be; rainbow pirates, following our dreams without any regards for reality; intellectual pirates, exploring the boundaries of law & society in order to understand how to bypass its rules, or, digital pirates, navigating through the international waters of the cyberspace with the goal of destroying the copyright regime which wrongly defines them as pirates – we are all doing what we need to do, regardless of what the others tell us to do.

Underlying the concept of the Fusion Ball is the metaphor of a pirate boat (or, rather, a pirate ball): a vessel for artists to express their individual personality, a means for different personalities to act together as a team. Inspired from the idea of “piracy” (which, in the digital world, is essentially regarded as copyright infringement), the Fusion Ball represents an attempt to transpose this concept into the physical world. The idea is grounded on a relatively simple analogy: if digital pirates are those who steal the digital copies of a work, physical pirates are those who steal an actual physical work.