Image capture, July 11, 2009, http://hulu.com

The following text was originally published during the month of August, 2009 as part of Drain‘s Cold issue.  The journal is a refereed online journal published bi-annually.  The text is republished in full on Remix Theory with permission.  Drain’s copyright agreement allows for 25% of the essay to be reblogged or reposted on other sites with proper citation and linkage to the journal at http://www.drainmag.com/.  I ask that their agreement be respected by the online community.

In 1964 Marshal McLuhan published his essay “Media Hot and Cold,” in one of his most influential books, Understanding Media.[1] The essay considers the concepts of hot and cold as metaphors to define how people before and during the sixties related to the ongoing development of media, not only in Canada and the United States but also throughout the world.[2] Since the sixties, the terms hot and cold have become constant points of reference in media studies. However, these principles, as defined by McLuhan, have changed since he first introduced them. What follows is a reflection on such changes during the development of media in 2009.

McLuhan is quick to note that media is defined according to context. His essay begins with a citation of “The Rise of the Waltz” by Curt Sachsk, which he uses to explain the social construction behind hot and cold media. He argues that the Waltz during the eighteenth century was considered hot, and that this fact might be overlooked by people who lived in the century of Jazz (McLuhan’s own time period). Even though McLuhan does not follow up on this observation, his implicit statement is that how hot and cold are perceived in the twentieth century is different from the eighteenth. Because of this implication, his essay is best read historically. This interpretation makes the reader aware of how considering a particular medium as hot or cold is a social act, informed by the politics of culture. McLuhan’s first example demonstrates that, while media may become hot or cold, or be hot at one time and cold at another, according to context, the terms, themselves, are not questioned, but rather taken as monolithic points of reference. To make sense of this point, McLuhan’s concepts must be defined.

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Image and text source: Mashable

Note: Here is an interesting list of resources for remixing already produced material for personal blogs and websites.

Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers’ eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix.

Read the entire list at Mashable.

Note: Here is the official launch of a collaborative project I have been part of for about two years and finally sees the light of day.  Official release follows:

PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE WORD

WE INVITE YOU TO PARTICIPATE . comment, revise, translate, submit a chapter
http://networkedbook.org

Two years in the making, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) is now open for comments, revisions, and translations. You may also submit a chapter for consideration.

Please register and then Read | Write:

THE IMMEDIATED NOW: NETWORK CULTURE AND THE POETICS OF REALITY
Kazys Varnelis
http://varnelis.networkedbook.org

LIFETRACING: THE TRACES OF A NETWORKED LIFE
Anne Helmond
http://helmond.networkedbook.org

STORAGE IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORKED ART
Jason Freeman
http://freeman.networkedbook.org

DATA UNDERMINING: THE WORK OF NETWORKED ART IN AN AGE OF IMPERCEPTIBILITY
Anna Munster
http://munster.networkedbook.org

ART IN THE AGE OF DATAFLOW: NARRATIVE, AUTHORSHIP, AND INDETERMINACY
Patrick Lichty
http://lichty.networkedbook.org

TAGS: active, aethetics, aggregators, authenticity, authorship, BEN FRY, BEN RUBIN, BURAK ARIKAN, collaborative, communication, data, data mining, digital traces, distributed, DIY, EDUARDO NAVAS, everyday life, flow, GOLAN LEVIN, identity, improvisation, Internet, JANET CARDIFF, JASON FREEMAN, JODI.ORG, JONATHAN HARRIS, latency, lifelogging, lifetracing, MANIK, mapping, MARK HANSEN, MARTIN WATTENBERG, MAX NEUHAUS, Mechanical Turk, mediation, memory, music, narrative, NastyNets, NATHANIEL STERN, net art, network, NICK KNOUF, nonlinear, OLIVER LARIC, participation, performative, persistance, PETER TRAUB, platform, postmodernism, presentational, privacy, prosumer, prosurfer, ranking, realism, reality, real-time, relational, remix, representation, research, RYBN, SCARLET ELECTRIC, SCOTT KILDALL, search engine, self, self-exposure, SHIFTSPACE.ORG, social networks, software, sousveillance, STEVE LAMBERT, storage, surveillance, tactical media, telepresence, THE HUB, THEY RULE, TrackMeNot, transmission, TV, user-generated, visualization, web 2.0, webcam, widget, Wikipedia Art, YES MEN

BACKGROUND

“Networked” proposes that a history or critique of interactive and/or participatory art must itself be interactive and/or participatory; that the technologies used to create a work suggest new forms a “book” might take.

In 2008, Turbulence.org and its project partners — NewMediaFix, Telic Arts Exchange, and Freewaves – issued an international, open call for chapter proposals. We invited contributions that critically and creatively rethink how networked art is categorized, analyzed, legitimized — and by whom — as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve.

Our international committee consisted of: Steve Dietz (Northern Lights, MN) :: Martha Gabriel (net artist, Brazil) :: Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures, The Netherlands) :: Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute for Technology, MA) :: Anne Bray (LA Freewaves, LA) :: Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange, LA) :: Jo-Anne Green (NRPA, MA) :: Eduardo Navas (newmediaFIX) :: Helen Thorington (NRPA, NY)

Built by Matthew Belanger (our hero!), http://networkedbook.org is powered by WordPress, CommentPress and BuddyPress.

Networked was made possible with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (United States). Thank you.

We are deeply grateful to Eduardo Navas for his commitment to both this project and past collaborations with Turbulence.org.

Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington
jo at turbulence dot org
newradio at turbulence dot org

Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter aren’t just revolutions in online social media. They’re the vanguard of a cultural movement. Illustration: Christoph Niemann

Image source: Wired

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

Read the entire article at Wired

Image source: The New Mexico Independent

Written for Interactiva Biennale 2009

The following text was written for Interactiva 09 Biennale, which takes place the month of May and June of 2009.  Other texts written for the biennale can be found at the Interactiva site.

NOTE: I have written a text in which I discuss Twitter in social activism, something which is not included in this text. Please see “After Iran’s Twitter Revolution: Egypt.”

In March of 2005 I wrote “The Blogger as Producer.”[1]  The essay proposed blogging as a potentially critical platform for the online writer.  It was written specifically with a focus on the well-known text, “The Author as Producer,” by Walter Benjamin, who viewed the critical writer active during the 1920’s and 30’s with a promising constructive position in culture. [2]

In 2005 blogging was increasing in popularity, and in my view, some of the elements entertained by Benjamin appeared to resonate in online culture.  During the first half of the twentieth century, Benjamin considered the newspaper an important cultural development that affected literature and writing because newspaper readers attained certain agency as consumers of an increasingly popular medium.  During this time period, the evaluation of letters to editors was important for newspapers to develop a consistent audience.  In 2005, it was the blogosphere that had the media’s attention.  In this time period, people who wrote their opinions on blogs could be evaluated with unprecedented efficiency. [3]
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Just got notice from Zemos 98 of their new book, Codigo Fuente: La Remezcla, which brings together a range of articles on Remix in culture and media.  The book is in Spanish.  I look forward to reading it and highlight some of the essays.  Kudos to Zemos 98.

Image and text source: Free Software Magazine

Originally published August 15, 2005

The free culture movement is growing, from its inception in the free software movement to the relatively recent establishment of Creative Commons. Across the world, localised teams are adapting CC licenses to their particular legal systems. Record labels, indie film studios and well over 10 million web pages are using CC licenses. Are we on an inexorable ascendency? Well, not quite. In this article I will show that we still have a lot of issues to iron out.

But first, I want to illustrate my personal experience with Creative Commons. Remix Reading is an artistic project that I lead, based in Reading, UK. Our aim is to get artists (working with music, video, images and text) to come together and share their work, be inspired by each other’s work, and ultimately to create “remixes”. All material on the web site is released under a Creative Commons license, as is all work performed or exhibited at events we organise locally. Our main focus is bringing Creative Commons to local, non-geeky people.

Read the entire article at Free Software Magazine

“The Warhol Che,” artist and year unknown, an example of the image’s ubiquity.

Image source: NYTimes

Che Guevara got some attention at the beginning of 2009 with Steven Soderberg’s film Che, starring Benicio del Toro. More recently, Che is the subject of a book titled, Che’s Afterlife, by Michael Casey. The book is reviewed by the New York Times as a detailed account of Che’s famous image taken by Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, known professionally as Korda. The story goes that Korda took the photograph during a funeral in Cuba. Korda’s creativity was not only in knowing when to take the photograph, which is for what most photographers are praised, but also in knowing how to crop it. To quote directly from the New York Times:

“By radically cropping the shot, snipping out a palm tree and the profile of another man, Korda gave the portrait an ageless quality, divorced from the specifics of time and place.”

This divorce is what Walter Benjamin noted in the first half of the twenty century in his well-known essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” An essay that many cultural critics have cited and will probably cite, because Benjamin foresaw many of the elements that today inform media culture in all areas of reproduction. (more…)

Massive Attack’s Grant Marshall and Robert Del Naja

Image source: The Guardian Music Blog

One of the anxieties often cited by those who guard intellectual property is how artists who sample ultimately steal from those who created the “original” material, therefore taking away potential revenue from the original source.  Another common argument is that the original source runs the danger of going unrecognized by those who enjoy the material composed of samples. Even if sampling artists may pay royalties, it is often argued by those who believe in creating things with their bare hands that artists who sample are simply unoriginal. Yet, as the article “What is your sampling Epiphany,” by Simon Reynolds entertains, at the moment, the republishing of material as a set of recordings sampled by well-known music studio artists has the potential of becoming a common trend–not to mention a major form of revenue for record companies.

We have reached a state in the consumption of post-production when those who have developed a career based on other artists’ samples have become the ones who support renewed sales of the originating sources in the form of reissues. This is the case with Massive Attack’s Protected Massive Samples. Now, it appears remix culture is coming full circle. The implications of this trend might further complicate copyright law in the near future. This trend is worth keeping in sight.

The article by Reynolds ends with a very compelling citation of Virilio, which was actually forwarded to me by my colleague, Greg Smith. It reads more like an aphorism that exposes that dialectics of culture:

The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the “sample stain.”

Image source: The Blemish

The above image is from a link that is no longer available. It was a mashup video of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Forest Gump. Friends who have seen Benjamin Button said that the film reminded them of Forest Gump. After viewing the movie, myself, and doing some research, I learned that the screenplay was written by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord. Eric Roth also wrote Forest Gump. And here is when things began to fall into place.

I realized that Roth was very much following his own Gump template to develop Benjamin Button. Both main characters in the films are different from average people. Forest is just a little bit off in his relation to the world (he is close to being mentally retarded), while Benjamin is aging backwards. Their “disabilities” make them special and allows both characters to turn ordinary moments into extraordinary events.

The similarities are numerous. For instance, both characters cannot walk in their early years, but eventually learn, and decide to go out and experience the world. Both characters have a love interest that somehow never is fully realized except for a brief moment in life. For Benjamin this is possible when he is able to live a somewhat normal life with the love of his life, but he has to leave her because he is aging backwards. For Forest the reason is move elusive. The film takes place in the sixties, and Forest’s love interest, while she was intimate with him, was not ready for a long term commitment. The list of similarities goes on.

When I received the link to the mashup of Forest Gump and Benjamin Button, titled “The Curious Case of Forest Gump and Time Wasters,” all of the similarities described above and many more were mentioned. The video mashup presented Forest Gump on the top half of the screen and Benjamin Button on the bottom. The editing made the remix feel as though, if one were to watch both films simultaneously, they would almost match frame by frame. This, of course, was a deliberate trick in the mashup editing, but nevertheless it showed the limited originality of Benjamin Button.

After viewing “The Curious Case of Forest Gump and Time Wasters” I quickly realized that it was Eric Roth who was in fact remixing himself. But then I realized that Benjamin Button does not even qualify as a remix because in a remix one must know that it is a remix. Roth blatantly presents Benjammin Button as something new, and thereby shortchanges his own merit as a content producer.

NOTE: The day after I wrote the above commentary, I found the site, gigglesugar, which links to the video under a different title: “The Curious Case of Forest Gump/Benjamin Button.”