ABSTRACT
“Remix
culture is a term employed by Lawrence `lessig to
describe a society which allows and encourages
derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default,
permissive of efforts to improve upon, change,
integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright
holders” L.Lessig (via wikipedia)
It has become a cliché to announce that we live in
remix culture. Yes, we do. But is it possible to go
beyond this simple statement of fact?. Can we
distinguish between different kinds of remix
aesthetics? What is the relationship between our
remixes made with electronic and computer tools and
such earlier forms as collage and montage? What are the
similarities and differences between audio remixes and
visual remixes?
PROMETHEUS
In
his forward to ‘Counterculture through the
Ages’ a book written by Ken Goffman, a.k.a.
R.U.Sirius, the co-founder of MONDO 2000 the American
magazine that defined the digital culture of the early
nineties. Timothy Leary makes the striking connection
between the modern day ‘Hacker’ and that of
the fire snatching Prometheus.
Hacking quite simply put, is the force to go about
something with a personal agenda – This image
radically challenges our impression of Hacking as
something mystic and profane, exclusive to computer
programmers playing with digits from within their dark
dense network of modem cables, and alternatively
suggests a way of interacting with media, the
environment and people, on an everyday level. In fact
anybody who is aware of the media environment we occupy
and how this effects and directs us, and who counter
attacks this in a personal manner, ‘wrestles with
technology, techniques, connections and ideas out of
the hands of the elite’ and liberates them for
the whole of society can be called entitled ‘A
Hacker’.
Thus, Prometheus stole fire (and with it technology and
science) from the God Zeus and offered it to humanity.
And Heraclites never stepped in the same stream
twice...
20th
CENTURY PIRATES
‘Every
important sector of big media today - film, music,
radio, and cable TV - was born of a kind of
piracy’
The
Hollywood film industry was built by fleeing pirates.
Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to
California in the early 20th century in part to escape
controls that film patents granted the inventor Thomas
Edison.
California was remote enough from Edison's reach that
filmmakers like Fox and Paramount could move there and,
without fear of the law, pirate his inventions.
Hollywood grew quickly, and enforcement of federal law
eventually spread west. But because patents granted
their holders a truly "limited" monopoly of just 17
years (at that time), the patents had expired by the
time enough federal marshals appeared. A new industry
had been founded, in part from the piracy of Edison's
creative property.
Hollywood craved the attention and with a considerable
profit margin, the manufacture and delivery of motion
pictures and photography also changed. Coinciding with,
what Walter Benjamin has coined ‘ The work of art
in the age of mechanical age of reproduction’? It
was in the essay of the same name, in 1935 that
Benjamin wrestled with many of the ideas still
prevalent around the notion of the reproduction and its
position within society.
Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction undermines
traditional ideas of originality, because it overwhelms
the ”aura” of the original work. The aura
decays and the distance between the work and the
audience shrinks allowing art to be absorbed into
everyday life instead of being fenced off in a museum
or gallery.
In reaction to this ‘Crisis in Art’ as
Benjamin put it, Romantisicism flourished, Artists
associated with this movement conceived of the ritual
of art for arts sake. Art that was disconnected from
all of daily life and devoid of any social function.
More intense and overt challenges to this concept of an
artistic ‘mainstream’ were founded by
gestures throughout art, poetry, writing, and film in
the form of Dada.
Dada celebrated the death of the original genius and
danced on its grave.
Dada
was born in Zurich around the year 1910 and was
essentially a polemical assault on the accepted notions
of a mediocre bourgeois society. Irrationality and
provocation were the main thrusts of this attack.
‘The Dadaists’ approach to cinema and
literature focused on perverting the logical and
coherent concepts of narrative.
The
‘Situationists’ took the pop culture that
surrounded them and remixed it to include a critique of
the dominant culture.
D’TOURNEMENT
The
closest English translation of d’tournement falls
somewhere between diversion and subversion. Another
translation might be un-turning or de-turning - where
culture is turned back on itself, against itself.
D’tournement is a plagiaristic act that, like a
martial-arts move, shifts the strength and weight of
the dominant culture against itself with some fancy
linguistic and intellectual footwork. Debord insisted
that a ‘Dadaist-type negation’ must be
deployed against the
language of the dominant culture. He claimed that it is
impossible to get rid of a world without getting rid of
the language that conceals and protects it, without
laying bare its true nature. The Situationist’s
believed that the truths revealed by
d’tournement, the lifting of ‘the
ideological veils that cover reality,’ were
central to its revolutionary project. Echoing the
Situationist and Dadaist spirit of engagement, Derrida
argued that deconstruction doesn’t want to
‘remain enclosed in
purely speculative, theoretical, academic
discourses.’ It wants to ‘aspire to
something more consequential, to change things,’
he argues, ‘Deconstruction can’t really be
understood in the abstract because it is first and
foremost an activity. Nor should it be considered
simply textual vandalism, for the word
‘deconstruction’ is a close linguistic
cousin of the word ‘analysis,’ rather than
‘destruction’, the origins of the word
‘analysis’ means ‘to undo’.
9
RUE GIT LE COER
In
Paris, September 1959, both Burroughs and Gysin were in
residence at 9 Rue Git le Coeur (the famous “Beat
Hotel”). It was there that Brion Gysin, while
mounting some drawings, accidentally sliced through a
pile of old New York Herald Tribunes, which he was
using to protect his table. He observed that where a
strip of text had been cut away, the print on the next
page linked up and could be read across, combining
different stories from other pages. Later Gysin showed
the discovery to Burroughs. Having himself recently
completed the avant-garde novel The Naked Lunch,
Burroughs pronounced the technique a project for
“disastrous success.”
Burroughs stated, "I felt I had been working towards
the same goal … any narrative passage or any
passage of poetic images is subject to any number of
variations, all of which may be interesting and valid
in their own right … cut-ups establish new
connections between images."
Burroughs’ own literary work was in a naturally
fragmented state, he felt that ‘anyone with a
pair of scissors could become a poet,’ echoing
the sentiments of Lautremont, who said that
‘poetry should be made by all.’
This technique is not without its precedents. In 1897,
Stephane Mallarme’s poem “Un coup de des
jamais n’aborlira le hazard” (A throw of
the dice can never abolish chance) distributed the
individual words across 21 pages scattered and
disjointed with the occasional blank page, giving
“structure” an equal compositional value to
content. Also, Guillaume Apollinaire in
“Calligrammes” (1914) composed poems into
typographical layout shapes. Dadaist Tristan
Tzara’s random poetry from the 1920s bears a
remarkable similarity to the cut-up technique in that
he had cut-out phrases and words that he produced from
a hat and read in random order. However if there were a
patron saint of experimental poetry, it would be
Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651-1689), who wrote the
“variable poem” “The Kiss of
Love.” Only the first and last words of any line
are to be kept, along with any one of the thirteen in
between, thus maintaining meter and giving millions of
possible combinations (Kuhlmann was burned at the stake
by the Lutheran patriarch of Moscow for his chiliastic
beliefs).
"The
cut-up method treats words as the painter treats his
paints, raw materials with rules and reasons of its
own."
Burroughs
and Gysin’s individual and collaborative efforts
in these areas have extended into a vast range of media
aside from literature such as tape cut-ups and more
significantly, the technique was transferred to cinema.
DESERT
OF THE REAL
‘Everywhere
the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have
gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the
spontaneous until there is no distinction between real
life and stagecraft.’
Virtually
no system today is built from scratch on first
principles.
In
the ‘Desert of the real’ Baudillard asserts
mirages outnumber oases and are more alluring to the
thirsty eye. Moreover, he argues, signs that once
pointed toward distant realities now refer only to
themselves. Disneyland’s main Street. U.S.A.
which depicts the sort of idyllic, turn of the century
‘burg that exists only in Norman Rockwell
paintings and MGM back-lots, is a text book example of
‘self referential simulation’ a painstaking
replica of something that never was. Whilst
contemplating the decomposition of culturally-defined
reality “These would be the successive phases of
the image” writes Baudillard. “The image is
the reflection of a basic reality; it bears no relation
to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure
simulacrum.’
RADICAL POLITICS
‘
We believe we live in the ‘age of
information’ that there has been an information
explosion, an information revolution. While in a
certain narrow sense this is the case, in many
important ways just the opposite is true. We also live
at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge
that humans have always possessed about who we are and
where we live seems beyond our reach. An
unenlightenment. An age of missing information.’
Stuart Ewan, a critic of consumer culture argues for a
radical rethink on the poilitics of visual literacy.
‘ `We live at a time when the image has become
the predominant mode of public address, eclipsing all
forms in the structuring of meaning’ he continues
‘ yet little in our education prepares us to make
sense of the rhetoric, historical development or social
implications of the image within our lives.’
Perhaps the answer lies in the ‘semilological
guerrilla warfare’ as once imagined by Umberto
Eco. ‘ The receiver of the message seems to have
a residual freedom: the freedom to control the message
and its multiple possibilities of interpretation’
he adds ‘ one medium can be employed to
communicate a series of opinions from another
medium… The universe of Technological
Communication would then be patrolled by groups of
communications gorillas, who would restore a critical
dimension to passive reception’.
BRING THE NOISE
‘The studio for the culture jammer is the world
at large’
To
Culture Jam - to bring noise into the signal, as it
passes from transmitter to receiver, encouraging
idiosyncratic, unintended interpretations. Refusing the
role as passive bystander, and renewing the notion of
public discourse.
Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters Magazine and author of
Culture Jam, uses the term ‘Jolt’ to
describe, ‘any technical event’ that
interrupts the flow of sound or thought or imagery; a
shift in camera angle, a gun shot, a cut to commercial.
A jolt forces your mind to pump for meaning”.
Lasn thinks ‘Jolts’ trigger our biological
programming.
‘ The behavioural psychologist Ivan Pavlov was
among the first to try and understand this. Any
stimulus change… any jolt… release hormones
that trigger the biologically encoded fight on fight
response, vestigial from a time when survival depended
on being alert to anything in the environment that
happened at faster than normal or ‘natural’
speed. The response was designed to keep us from being
eaten by cave bears. It was not designed to keep us
glued to our television sets.’
We regularly deal with high levels of stimulation and
fast paced linear content. The younger generation are
at most effect by this.
‘Kids are developing skills through the process
of socialisation to deal with the information explosion
and a traditional notion of ‘attention’ may
not be one of them. They are diagnosed with having
Attention Deficit disorder, as if there is a calculated
amount of attention necessary..’
‘What if ADD isn’t a disorder at all, but
an evolutionary adaptation to the culture? What if the
ability to deal with high levels if stimulation and
fast paced, nonlinear content is actually providing
these children with a way to cope with the next level
of information explosion?’
MEDIA
MIXERS
This
elastic category which includes Jamming, Mashing,
Hacking, Slashing, Remixing, DIY, Subvertising, and
appropriation, is in itself difficult to define in any
one word. Spans the works of the Russian Samisdat
(underground publishing in defiance of official
censorship), the anti – fascist photomontages of
John Heartfield; Situationist d’tournement
(defined by Greil Marcus, in Lipstick Traces, as
‘ the theft of aesthetic artefacts from their
contexts and their diversion into contexts of ones own
device”), the “cut up” collage
technique proposed by William Burroughs in
‘Electronic Revolution’ (“The control
of the mass media depends on laying down lines of
association… Cut/up techniques could swamp the
mass media with total illusion”), the
‘Plunderphonics’ attitude towards the
remixing of pre-recorded sounds by the American artist
John Oswald, Vikki Bennett (People Like Us) and her
avant garde cut up approach to audio and video content,
The ‘relational aesthetics’ cited by
Borriaud present within contemporary art, including the
work of such artists as Eric Doeringer, Nancy Drew,
Phillipe Parreno, Douglas Gordon, Liam Gillick, Vanessa
Beecroft and Jim Lambie and the rise of video artists
and VJ’s representing and miss –
representing footage from mainstream source.
DO
OR DIY
“Usually,
all I need is tracing paper and a good light. I
can’t understand
why I was never an Abstract Expressionist, because with
my shaking hand I would have been a
natural.”
-Andy
Warhol
Artists
have continually challenged concepts of originality and
authorship. In the process, they have internalized the
use of pre-existing material, weaving it into the
fabric of contemporary art making. Now a new generation
of borrowers freely take or copy from popular culture
(including art history) for a variety of expressive
reasons. Appropriation has thus grown from an isolated
movement associated with artists like Sherrie Levine
and Richard Prince and Jeff Koons who rose to
prominence in the ’80s to a paradigm of art
making.
In a cut ’n paste, information-based culture
where sharing is becoming an ideal (think
Wikipedia.org) and intellectual ownership is being
questioned, what chances of survival have the practices
of those artists mentioned above realistically got?
A few notes on fair use and copyright law. To quote the
Brennan Center report, “Copyright law gives
authors, artists, and musicians—or the companies
they work for—the 'exclusive right' to reproduce,
distribute, and perform their works, or to allow
others, usually for a fee, to do so. But fair use is an
exception to this monopoly control. It allows anyone to
copy, publish, or distribute parts—sometimes even
all—of a copyrighted work without permission, for
purposes such as commentary, news reporting, education,
or scholarship.”
Recently, many artists have followed the leads of
Levine, Prince, and Jeff Koons in challenging fair use
and copyright law.
Nancy Drew, a New York-based artist who shows at
Roebling Hall, makes renditions of classic paintings by
Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Clyfford
Still, and Barnett Newman, but personalizes their
familiar compositions with glitter, felt, flocking, and
slightly altered color schemes.
Eric Doeringer rips off designs by well-known artists
such as Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Takashi Murakami,
and Elizabeth Peyton and sells them for cheap on the
sidewalks of the Chelsea gallery district. Calling his
copies Bootlegs, Doeringer appropriates the business
model seen on Canal Street, where vendors sell fake
luxury brand handbags and watches just blocks away from
SoHo, where the real things sell for much, much more.
Jim Lambie often rips his findings from music culture
and translates these findings into visual statements,
often directly referencing particular albums and LP
imagery –
In a recent exhibition ‘The Byrds’ Lambie,
recreated a set of giant ceramic birds, enlargements of
models He had bought in junk stores over the past
years. The fact that the ceramic birds where actually
made in Mexico by Mexican craftsman made this spectacle
even more intriguing.
Fair use protects all of these artists from copyright
owners in different ways.
Because Drew only imitates certain styles without
copying specific works, her practice is safe from
allegations of copyright infringement. Styles cannot be
copyrighted, only specific works can. In the case of
Doeringer, by calling his pieces Bootlegs, he can argue
that there is no chance of confusing his copies with
the originals.
Artists these days aren’t borrowing from existing
works to profit from them, which the law was trying to
protect against. Intrinsic to the strategy of
‘appropriating’ practiced by the artists
mentioned above is a critique of creativity. But it is
also homage to the original and an attempt to create
something new from it.
PLUNDERPHONICS
The
distinction between sound producers and sound
reproducers is easily blurred, and has been a
conceivable area of musical pursuit at least since John
Cage's use of radios in the Forties. One such pioneer
in this area of sound reproducing is John Oswald.
"Plunderphonics"
- is a term originally coined by John Oswald at the
Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in Toronto in
1985. It has since been applied to any music made by
taking one or more existing audio recordings and
altering them in some way to make a new composition.
There is no attempt to disguise the fact that the
sounds making up the composition have been "borrowed"
in this way, and sometimes the sounds may be taken from
very familiar sources.
The process of Sampling other sources is found in
various genres (notably hip-hop), although in
plunderphonic works the sampled material is often the
only sound used. These samples are usually uncleared,
and sometimes result in legal action being taken due to
copyright infringement (some plunderphonic artists use
their work to protest about what they consider to be
overly-restrictive copyright laws.
‘Some
of you, current and potential samplerists, are perhaps
curious about the extent to which you can legally
borrow from the ingredients of other people's sonic
manifestations. Is a musical property properly private,
and if so, when and how does one trespass upon it? Like
myself, you may covet something similar to a particular
chord played and recorded singularly well by the
strings of the estimable Eastman Rochester Orchestra on
a long-deleted Mercury Living Presence LP of Charles
Ives' Symphony, itself rampant in unauthorized
procurements. Or imagine how invigorating a few
retrograde Pygmy (no slur on primitivism intended)
chants would sound in the quasi-funk section of your
emulator concerto. Or perhaps you would simply like to
transfer an octave of hiccups from the stock sound
library disk of a Mirage to the spring-loaded tape
catapults of your Melotron’.
Musical
instruments produce sounds. Composers produce music.
Musical instruments reproduce music. Tape recorders,
radios, disc players, etc., reproduce sound. Many sound
artists have long considered the tape recorder a
musical instrument capable of more than the faithful
hi-fidelity role of traditionally, manufactured
presets. A device such as a wind-up music box produces
sound and reproduces music. A phonograph in the hands
of a hip hop/scratch artist who plays a record like an
electronic washboard with a phonographic needle as a
plectrum, produces sounds which are unique and not
reproduced - the record player becomes a musical
instrument. A sampler, in essence a recording,
transforming instrument, is simultaneously a
documenting device and a creative device, in effect
reducing a distinction manifested by copyright.
PEOPLE
LIKE US
"all one has to do is hit the right notes at the right
time and the thing plays itself." – J.S.Bach
Aided
by the increasingly broad-minded approach to music
events programming taken by major arts venues, internet
free radio and the growing popularity of festivals such
as Sonar and All Tomorrow's Parties, sound artists are
pushing the boundaries of what music can do, and
melding it with technology and art.
People Like Us is one such outfit. The brainchild of
Vicki Bennett. UK sound artist.Vicki refers to her
process as 'collage’ and her works often consist
of a splicing together from an incredibly diverse array
of samples - classroom recordings and national anthems,
obscure jazz loops and the likes of Tammy Wynette
People like us addresses the many individuals involved
with sound and sampling exploration. After decades of
being the passive recipients of music in packages,
individuals now have the means to assemble their own
choices, to separate pleasures from the filler. Home
editing systems and laptops are enabling a new
generation of sound artists with the means to dubbing a
variety of sounds from around the world, or at least
from the breadth of their record collections, making
compilations of a diversity unavailable from the music
industry, with its circumscribed stables of artists,
and an ever more pervasive policy of only supplying the
common denominator.
The inspiration for her performing name People Like Us
came when Vicki listened to an album by Negativland in
the late Eighties. Hip hop, which had been raiding
samples for a good 10 years by then, was also an
inspiration but Vicki was more interested in
post-industrial groups and the 1989 John Oswald album
Plunderphonic, the title of which was appropriated to
describe the act of cutting music from diverse sources
and pasting it together in striking ways. The 'mash-up'
craze of recent years is a direct descendant of this
(see kid606, shitmat, venetian snares)
FLIPPING
In
Definition the term “flipping” is to sample
and manipulate a pre-existing piece of music and result
in something original and unique which lends new beauty
to the old, and in which the old offers a striking
context to the new.
MADONNA
REMIX PROJECT
Way
back in 1976, ninety nine years after Edison went into
the record business, the U.S. Copyright Act was revised
to protect sound recordings in that country for the
first time. Before this, only written music was
considered eligible for protection. Forms of music that
were not intelligible to the human eye were deemed
ineligible. The traditional attitude was that
recordings were not artistic creations, "but mere uses
or applications of creative works in the form of
physical objects."
The
present law assimilates sound recordings to musical,
literary, or dramatic works, This categorization is
outdated. It is time to protect sound recordings as a
separate category of subject matter. In addition, the
law should specify that the protection of a sound
recording is totally independent of what is recorded.
It is irrelevant whether what is recorded is a work
which is protected by copyright or is in the public
domain. For example, bird sounds do not constitute
subject matter protected by copyright because such
sounds are not works. But a sound recording of the same
bird sounds would be protected as falling within the
new category of copyright subject matter suggested in
this recommendation.
The
Madonna remix project began in mid-April 2003 when the
well-known recording artist Madonna surreptitiously
released some so-called 'spoof' MP3 files of the tracks
from her forthcoming CD American Life onto the
'illegal' peer-to-peer music filetrading services.
While the filenames of these spoofed files indicated
that they were tracks from American Life, when played
back all they contained were brief recordings of
Madonna's voice, including one in which she angrily
asked downloader’s
'What
the f--- do you think you're doing?'
Her apparent intention -- to deliver a rebuke to those
of her fans who might be trying to obtain pre-release
copies of the tracks from the Internet without paying
for them. However, the results leading from this act
soon followed what in retrospect might have been a
predictable trajectory...
HACKERS
HAVE FIELD DAY WITH MADONNA DECOY
LOS
ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Anyone who thinks they
can control the Internet received an object lesson
during the past week.
‘It
all started when Madonna literally lent her voice to a
popular antipiracy technique. Warner Music Group had
audio files purporting to be her new songs uploaded
onto peer-to-peer file-sharing services. Anyone who
downloaded the decoys, however, heard nothing but the
pop star swearing at them.’
This
story was released through Reuters and appeared on
Yahoo News and other major online news services on 27
April 2003. Some observers thought Madonna was smart to
fight piracy with its own tools. Others perceived a
thrown gauntlet -- hackers soon defaced Madonna's Web
site with an equally profane retort along with several
downloadable files of the then-unreleased songs. A
third group saw a creative opportunity. "What the f---
do you think you're doing," Madonna's now-infamous
phrase, has turned up in dozens of remixes, cutups and
mashups. The London-based iriXx, made her own remix of
the original Madonna MP3 Soon the independent music
site DMusic.com began hosting a competition for the
best Madonna-based track, with the first prize being a
"boycott-riaa" T-shirt and stickers.
"Madonna was trying to put one over on the kids ... and
they in turn wanted to let her know that she's not in
as much control as she thinks she is..."
''By
remixing her warning and putting it to a
headache-inducing techno beat, I am both ridiculing its
content as well as attempting to demonstrate that any
creation or utterance put forward into the public
sphere necessarily becomes grist for the mill of future
creators, no matter what the original intention of the
author [and that is as it should be]. Make it illegal
if you want but these critiques will still circulate in
the underground and on the Net. Using her own words to
make this point is 'signifying' in the [Henry Louis]
Gatesian sense, and should be seen as a way to level
the playing field and make oppositional voices heard'
John
Von Seegem - Digital cut up lounge
Rosemary
Coombe wrote about something similar in The Cultural
Life Of Intellectual Properties [1998], which is to be
highly recommended to all...
‘Messages conveyed by quickly circulating
evanescent signifiers on a multitude of shifting
surfaces cannot be effectively countered with written
treatises that lie on library and bookstore shelves. As
Koenig's Joe Camel examples showed, criticism that
deploys the protected symbol is inevitably stronger and
more effective than written references to it... Writing
or lecturing about the obnoxious use of cartoon imagery
to entice children into a health-destroying habit
simply does not have the same punch as a parody of the
trademarked cartoon character itself...’
RELATIONAL
ART
‘the artist as a facilitator rather than a
‘maker’, a DJ rather than a
performer’
The
world we live in today is one that actually offers us
much more choice to resist, rebel and construct our own
community than ever before. Since the mid-1990s
‘relational aesthetics’ has become an
increasingly popular term for a series of practices
identified in contemporary art by French curator
Nicolas Bourriaud, Bourriaud’s conception of
practice is located in postmodernist developments that
span back at least to the mid-1950s and which found
widespread expression in the conceptual practices of
the later 1960s and early 1970s. Bourriaud regards art
to be a form of information exchanged between
audiences. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences
access to power, the means to change the world.
Bourriaud believes that for an artist to intervene in
the economy in a practical sense might allow for him /
her to do something functional, to actually make a
difference. Bourriaud, therefore, stresses the
importance of utility, asking artists to put effects to
work rather than simply remain with the safe realms of
a critique of representation.
This call has numerous precedents in cybernetic and
socially engaged practices of the early 1970s. In the
United Kingdom this was particularly important to
critics such as Richard Cork, who curated a number of
exhibitions and conferences on the theme of art for
society at the end of the 1970s. Socially engaged
practice continued to find a great deal of support in
Scotland in the later 1980s and early 1990s,
particularly among artist-inititives such as
Transmission, which in the later 1980s was dominated by
the free-university model, and from the Scotia Nostra
graduates of Glasgow School of Art’s Department
of Environmental Art. Bourriaud, for this reason, cites
Douglas Gordon as a key player in the international
development of relational aesthetics in the 1990s. This
kind of work could still be seen in prominent
exhibitions such as Transmission’s Never Been in
a Riot (1998) - a culture-jamming show put together to
celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the May 1968
uprisings - and The Modern Institute’s project
with Rirkrit Tiravanija, Community Cinema for a Quiet
Intersection (Against Oldenburg), as part of
Glasgow’s City of Architecture festival in
September 1999.
POST
DIGITAL
What was referred in post-modern times as quoting,
appropriation, and pastiche no longer needs any special
name. Now this is simply the basic logic of cultural
production: download images, code, shapes, scripts,
etc.; modify them, and then paste the new works online
- send them into circulation.
People
Like Us has extended the plunderphonic ideal to video,
during her live shows, Vicki complements the audio
collage with a visual one, projecting spliced-together
'found images' on to a screen behind her mixing desk.
These images are collected by plundering the resources
of freely available online video archives such as the
UBU WEB
The
Prelinger Archives, the film collection belonging to
the archivist Rick Prelinger. Anne McGuire used similar
techniques in her 1992 film ‘Strain Andromeda
The’. With permission, McGuire reversed The
Andromeda Strain shot by shot so that everything
unfolded in reverse order, although with each scene
running in normal time with comprehensible dialogue.
“24
Hour Psycho,” by Douglas Gordon also manipulates
and makes direct reference to the original bearing the
same name.
"24
Hour Psycho, as I see it, is not simply a work of
appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation...
it wasn't a straightforward case of abduction. The
original work is a masterpiece in its own right, and
I've always loved to watch it. ... I wanted to maintain
the authorship of Hitchcock so that when an audience
would see my 24 Hour Psycho they would think much more
about Hitchcock and much less, or not at all, about
me...”
An alternative presentation of re-interperating
original footage, is also evident within the new work
of video artist Michael Gondry – ‘Be Kind,
Rewind’ Gondry’s latest directing success
is a film about a man who becomes accidentally
magnetized while trying to sabotage a power plant. His
magnetic field erases all the tapes in the video store
where his best friend works. To save the store, the duo
have to re-enact and re-film every movie that its
single loyal customer, an elderly woman, rents. Within
the movie Gondry recreates bootlegs of ‘back to
the future’ ‘ the lion king’ and many
others.
OneSmallStep:
A MySpace LuvStory is a project developed for Concept
Trucking, it is an unfolding automated jam - a
conscious sampling and randomized regurgitation of
media artefacts common to "social networking" sites
such as MySpace.com. OneSmallStep provides a context
for the exploration of identity, desire, fantasy and
fetish in an eternally habitual loop of voyeuristic
consumption, spectacular regurgitation, virtual
intimacy and identity production/consumption.
OneSmallStep
runs continuously while randomly remixing content from
a database that is periodically updated.
The
International Remix festival San Fransisco
The
program was developed in collaboration with Yahoo!
Research Berkeley and the Institute for Next Generation
Internet at San Francisco State University. And more
recently screened at Edinburgh Castle (April 24th 2006)
KinoTek, International Remix reinvigorates essential
ideas about modern media production and use through the
lens of technology. The program allows Festival Web
site visitors to reedit, repurpose, remix and mash up
an array of clips from selected Festival films. Remixes
are then posted back to the site for others to view and
enjoy.
The
program pays homage to a lineage of cut-and-paste
sensibilities that pervade modern media aesthetics,
echoing many experiments in cut-up artistic practice
such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov's film
tests and Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's Dadaist use of
ready-mades and absurd juxtapositions. These early
experiments helped pave the way for the powerful
artistic concept known as montage, which itself has
been repurposed and remixed over the years through
contemporary practices such as pastiche aesthetics,
collage and mashups, which, in turn, owe a huge debt to
the breakout of hip-hop turntablism in the early 1970s.
In GLITCHBROWSER
Tony Scott, Dimtre Lima, and Iman Morandi allow us to
reconstruct the image contents of browserspace with
their recently released Glitchbrowser. Glitchbrowser
returns all images on a site with aberrated versions.
Lovely discolourations, dislocations, pixellations and
colour bands infect the original image and in
invariably beautify content through this intentional
corruption.
Although glitch seems a word that people would always
have found useful, it is first recorded in English in
1962 in the writing of John Glenn: “Another term
we adopted to describe some of our problems was
‘glitch.’ ” Glenn then gives the
technical sense of the word the astronauts had adopted:
“Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in
voltage in an electrical current.” It is easy to
see why the astronauts, who were engaged in a highly
technical endeavour, might have generalized a term from
electronics to cover other technical problems. Since
then glitch has passed beyond technical use and now
covers a wide variety of malfunctions and
mishaps.’
via dictionary.com
THE
REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE DIGITISED
"The
public domain is like a vast national park without a
guard to stop wanton looting, without a guide for the
lost traveller, and in fact, without clearly defined
roads or even borders to stop the helpless visitor from
being sued for trespass by private abutting
owners."
As
the history of film, music, radio, and cable TV
suggest, even if some piracy is plainly wrong, not all
piracy is. Or at least, not in the sense that the term
is increasingly being used today. Many kinds of piracy
are useful and productive, either to create new content
or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our
tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all
piracy.
Moreover, much of the sharing - which is referred to by
many as piracy - is motivated by a new way of spreading
content made possible by changes in the technology of
distribution. Thus, consistent with the tradition that
gave us Hollywood, radio, the music industry, and cable
TV, the question we should be asking about file-sharing
is how best to preserve its benefits while minimizing
(to the extent possible) the wrongful harm it causes
artists.
Think Internet: What was referred in post-modern times
as quoting, appropriation, and pastiche no longer needs
any special name. Now this is simply the basic logic of
cultural production: download images, code, shapes,
scripts, etc.; modify them, and then paste the new
works online - send them into circulation.
SAMPLE
VERSUS THE WHOLE WORK
If
we are indeed living in a remix culture does it still
make sense to create whole works if these works will be
taken apart and turned into samples by others anyway?
Indeed, why painstakingly adjust separate tracks of
final cut movies or After Effects composition getting
it just right if the public will open source them into
their individual tracks for their own use using some
free software? Of course, the answer is yes: we still
need art. We still want to say something about the
world and our lives in it; we still need our own mirror
standing in the middle of a dirty road, as Stendahl
called art in the nineteenth century. Yet we also need
to accept that for others our work will be just a set
of samples, or maybe just one sample.
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