I consider this video as well as Mcintosh’s mashups of video and sound. According to the basic definition of a mashup, which is to juxtapose two elements as they normally appear in order to create something new, one is able to notice the independence of image and sound while also recognizing how well they come together to create a cohesive yet disjunctive narrative that questions the very definition of propaganda.
During the recent Open Video Conference (OVC), from October 1 – 2, 2010 the video “Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in ‘Right Wing Radio Duck'” was screened by Jonathan McIntosh, who runs the blog Rebelious Pixels. The video so far has received 388,801 views and counting. Also listen to a Glenn Beck response.
Here is the excerpt from McIntosh’s website:
This is a re-imagined Donald Duck cartoon remix constructed from dozens of classic Walt Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.
I’m very happy to be collaborating with Mette Birk, Mark O’ Cúlár, Owen Gallagher, Eli Horwatt, Martin Leduc, and Tara Zepel on a chapter contribution for Networked Book.
ABSTRACT: The text on video remixing contributed to Networked Book is the result of an ongoing collaboration that started in January 2010, when Owen Gallagher invited Mette Birk, Mark O’ Cúlár, Martin Leduc, and Eduardo Navas to join a ‘Remix Theory and Praxis’ online seminar. In April, Navas invited Tara Zepell to join the group.
The text explores concepts of remixing not only in content and form, but also in process. The aim of the collaboration is to evaluate how the creative process functions as a type of remix itself in a period when production keeps moving toward a collective approach in all facets of culture. The emphasis on video remixing is the result of a collaborative rewriting activity among the contributors, who each wrote independent paragraphs that went through constant revisions once combined as a single text. Video was selected as the subject of analysis because members have a common interest in time-based media, and also because video remixing is at the forefront of media production. One of the group goals is that the text becomes a statement of what video could be as a reflective form of the networked culture that is developing at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The text is in constant revision and readers are encouraged to join in its writing.
Download a high resolution version of Diagram in PDF format
This text was originally published on June 25, 2007 in Vague Terrain Journal as a contribution to the issue titled Sample Culture. It was revised in November 2009 and subsequently published as a chapter contribution in Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan (Ed.) Mashup Cultures, 2010, ISBN: 978-3-7091-0095-0, Springer Wien/New York published in May 2010.
It is here republished with permission from the publisher and is requested that it be cited appropriately. This online publication is different from the print version in that it is missing images that help illustrate the theory of Remix that I propose. I do encourage readers to consider looking at the actual publication as it offers an important collection of texts on mashups.
I would like to thank Greg J. Smith for giving me the opportunity to publish my initial ideas in Vague Terrain, and Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss for inviting me to revise them as a contribution to his book publication.
This version brings together much of my previous writing. Individuals who have read texts such as The Bond of Repetition and Representation, as well as Turbulence: Remixes and Bonus Beats will find that many of my definitions and theories of Remix are repeated in this text. I found this necessary to make sense of a fourth term which I introduce: the Regenerative Remix. Those who have read the previous version of this text may like to skip pre-existing parts, and go directly to the section titled “The Regenerative Remix.” However, all sections have been revised for clarity, so I encourage readers to at least browse through previously written material.
An important change has been made to this text. In the original version I argued that Reflexive Mashups were not remixes. In 2007 I did not know what Reflexive Mashups could be if they were not remixes in the traditional sense, but after consideration and rewriting, I developed the concept of the Regenerative Remix. To learn more about this change in my definition of Remix as a form of discourse I invite readers to consider my revised argument. I also introduce a chart (above) which helps explain how Remix moves across culture. I also include an entirely new conclusion which will clarify my earlier position on software mashups.
A note on formatting: The text below is set up in simple text form. This means that italics and other conventions found in print publications are missing. If you would like to read a print ready version, please download a PDF file.
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Introduction
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, sampling is practiced in new media culture when any software users including creative industry professionals as well as average consumers apply cut/copy & paste in diverse software applications; for professionals this could mean 3-D modeling software like Maya (used to develop animations in films like Spiderman or Lord of the Rings); [1] and for average persons it could mean Microsoft Word, often used to write texts like this one. Cut/copy & paste which is, in essence, a common form of sampling, is a vital new media feature in the development of Remix. In Web 2.0 applications cut/copy & paste is a necessary element to develop mashups; yet the cultural model of mashups is not limited to software, but spans across media.
Mashups actually have roots in sampling principles that became apparent and popular in music around the seventies with the growing popularity of music remixes in disco and hip hop culture, and even though mashups are founded on principles initially explored in music they are not straight forward remixes if we think of remixes as allegories. This is important to entertain because, at first, Remix appears to extend repetition of content and form in media in terms of mass escapism; the argument in this paper, however, is that when mashups move beyond basic remix principles, a constructive rupture develops that shows possibilities for new forms of cultural production that question standard commercial practice.
My most recent text “Remix: The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability” is published in the CSPA Quarterly. The journal is the print publication for The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, a non-profit that supports artists and organizations; it enables them to be ecologically and economically sustainable while maintaining artistic excellence. My text is not yet available online but I hope to have it released in a few months. I do share an excerpt at the end of this message. In the mean time, I encourage you to purchase a copy of the CSPA Quarterly, which focuses on works made with found materials.
Here is the issue release statement:
In this issue, we’re working against the stereotypes of the form, and attempting to broaden its term. As always, we’re exploring our chosen theme across disciplines and were delighted to include sculpture, visual art, theater, public art, and media art in the following pages. Instead of asking for work based on waste materials, we asked for work built from objects that already exist.
Excerpt from my text, “Remix: The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability”, page 13:
Remix and Sustainability
Within immaterial production (music and other arts dependent on forms of communication) recycling of existing material becomes an aesthetic with real repercussions. As stated in the introduction, Remix expands across culture from music to ecology: from immaterial pleasure to material responsibility. It is a binder that informs the awareness of the interrelation of one’s beliefs and actions in culture.
Once an idea or content becomes calculable, measurable as an actual thing produced, intellectual property becomes a pivotal issue: who owns the material and how should such material be re-used if it is to be recycled? Thus the result is that we live in a time where information is privileged and immaterial pleasure has become the prime commodity, as the global economy has assimilated a fourth layer of global production, which agriculture, industrial production, and the service industry support. Information plays a prime role in defining the other layers of production. As the emerging market it dictates how the others are represented. This shift places a certain stress on the sustainability of intellectual production, since ideas, its prime real estate, become more precious than ever before. Immaterial production is at the forefront of a global market that thrives on the low-cost of information production and outsourcing of repetitive labor in computing and networked services such as telemarketing, and social media to different areas around the world.
Note: Medialab Prado has released online the video documentation of my presentation of “Remix, The Bond of Repetition and Representation” for Interactivos during the summer of 2008. The presentation emphasizes the concept of Visual Play, which was the thematic for the workshops sessions in that year. A different version of the text was later published at the end of the same year by Telefónica, and is available online, through Remix theory as post 361. The introduction is in Spanish, but the text presentation itself is in English. The video is also downloadable with a Spanish voiceover translation. Much of the material presented has also become parts of various texts also available on Remix Theory. Abstract of the text follows below as published on Medialab’s website:
This text, “Remix: The bond of Repetition and Representation,” entertains the historical importance of Remix in culture at large. It places particular importance on how the image is constantly appropriated in the visual arts as well as other areas of mass culture with unprecedented efficiency. This is done to understand the dialectics at play within Remix, itself and to further understand the principles behind concepts such as “Visual Play” in the emerging network culture. As it becomes clear in the following essay, in order for remix culture to come about, certain dynamics had to be in place, and these were first explored in music, around the contention of representation and repetition. This essay defines the concept of Remix in relation to these two terms, and then moves on to examine its role in media and art. There are three Remix definitions introduced in this essay: The Extended, The Selective and the Reflexive Remixes. These definitions are outlined historically and examined in various areas of culture including the visual arts, pop culture as well as game culture. The essay ends with a critical reflection on what one can do with an awareness of Remix as a dialectical manifestation.
Lawrence Lessig recently gave a talk about what the left can learn from the right when it comes to sharing and remixing content. Much of the material will be familiar to people who have read Lessig’s books; still, his own position is explained: he considers himself on the left but repeatedly looks to the right, as it is people on this camp that appear to be interested in supporting remix culture.
Note: The following is an interview about a book that’s coming out on the history of the vocoder. Quite interesting. My only observation is that the interviewer casually links early Hip Hop with pop culture and this is missed by the interviewee. Historians know that early Hip Hop was also an avant-garde movement, though with different preocupations of previous groups who may have deliberately linked themselves with the nineteenth century concept. Still worth the listen/reading.
If you’ve listened to pop music in the past 40 years, you’ve probably heard more than a few songs with a robotic sound. That’s thanks to the vocoder, a device invented by Bell Labs, the research division of AT&T. Though the vocoder has found its way into music, the machine was never intended for that function. Rather, it was developed to decrease the cost of long-distance calls and has taken on numerous other uses since.
Music journalist Dave Tompkins has written a book about the vocoder and its unlikely history. It’s called How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II to Hip-Hop.
Tompkins says the machine played a significant role in World War II. After the U.S. government discovered that Winston Churchill’s conversations with Franklin D. Roosevelt were being intercepted and deciphered by the Germans, it decided to invest in speech-encoding technology. So the National Defense Research Committee commissioned Bell Labs in 1942 to develop a machine — and Bell Labs delivered.
The vocoder wasn’t without its flaws. Intelligibility of speech sometimes proved a problem, but Tompkins says pitch control was a bigger concern.
“They didn’t mind world leaders sounding like robots, just as long as they didn’t sound like chipmunks,” he says. “Eisenhower did not want to sound like a chipmunk.”
Note: I’m very happy to announce the release of a book publication titled Mashup Cultures in which I contribute a text titled “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture.” The text was previously released on Vague Terrain in June 2007, and has been revised and extended by over 15 pages for the book publication.I introduce a series of new terms along with a diagram, which I will be making available online in the near future.
Mashup Cultures, Sonvilla-Weiss. Stefan (Ed.), Springeren: This volume brings together cutting-edge thinkers and scholars together with young researchers and students, proposing a colourful spectrum of media-theoretical, -practical and -educational approaches to current creative practices and techniques of production and consumption on and off the web. Along with the exploration of some of the emerging social media concepts, the book unveils some of the key drivers leading to participatory engagement of the User.
Mashup Cultures presents a broader view of the effects and consequences of current remix practices and the recombination of existing digital cultural content. The complexity of this book, which appears on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the international MA study program ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building, also by necessity seeks to familiarize the reader with a profound glossary and vocabulary of Web 2.0 cultural techniques.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
• Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Introduction: Mashups, Remix Practices and the Recombination of Existing Digital Content
• Axel Bruns: Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and Produsage
• Brenda Castro: The Virtual Art Garden: A Case Study of User-centered Design for Improving Interaction in Distant Learning Communities of Art Students
• Doris Gassert: “You met me at a very strange time in my life.” Fight Club and the Moving Image on the Verge of ‘Going Digital’
• David Gauntlett: Creativity, Participation and Connectedness: An Interview with David Gauntlett
• Mizuko Ito: Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes
• Henry Jenkins: Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies: Remixing Moby Dick
• Owen Kelly: Sexton Blake & the Virtual Culture of Rosario: A Biji
• Torsten Meyer: On the Database Principle: Knowledge and Delusion
• Eduardo Navas: Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture
• Christina Schwalbe: Change of Media, Change of Scholarship, Change of University: Transition from the Graphosphere to a Digital Mediosphere
• Noora Sopula & Joni Leimu: A Classroom 2.0 Experiment
• Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Communication Techniques, Practices and Strategies of Generation “Web n+1?
• Wey-Han Tan: Playing (with) Educational Games – Integrated Game Design and Second Order Gaming
• Tere Vadén interviewed by Juha Varto: Tepidity of the Majority and Participatory Creativity
