""Who owns the words?” asks a disembodied voice throughout much of William Burroughs’s work. For that matter, who owns the music and the rest of our cultural output? The answer may be that we all do, although we don’t yet know it. Reality can't be copyrighted. Living as we do in an unbearably manufactured world, we yearn for the “real,” or semblances of the real, and many artists want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication. This may take the form of autobiographical frissons or captured moments, which in their seeming un-rehearsedness possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter. Thus, an artistic movement, organic and as yet unstated, is taking shape, characterized by deliberate unartiness, seemingly unprocessed or unprofessional “raw” material, randomness, spontaneity, and serendipity. Artists that work in a variety of media are exploring questions of "truth," provenance, appropriation, and quotation, and arguing for emancipation from genre constraints. This roundtable discussion seeks to articulate the ars poetica of a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists who are incorporating larger and larger chunks of “reality” in their work." - Graham Sergeant