Lessig’s book on Remix was just released. Like his previous books, the emphasis is on the future of intellectual property. Unlike his other books, Lessig appears to focus on the act of “rip, mix and burn” that he often used to discuss different aspects of online culture. In “Remix” this act is the critical framework to discuss the future of creativity.
People heavily invested in the fine arts might find the use of the term “art” misleading, though. Lessig appears to use the term in broad terms to refer to creative acts that are becoming more common due to the spread of Remix principles.
I’m looking forward to this book making the rounds in networked culture. I hope it proves itself to be Lessig’s most popular publication of them all. Sadly, he claims that it will be his last on the issue:
This is (I expect) the last book I’ll write in this field. Dedicated to Lyman Ray Patterson and Jack Valenti, it pushes three ideas — (1) that this war on our kids has got to stop, (2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and (3) that a new form of business (what I call the “hybrid”) will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.
I wrote this book last year. Many of the themes were described in 18 minutes in my TED talk. I am very eager to have it out.
Note: This text was originally published on Vague Terrain, Digital Dub Issue, August 08. It is reposted here with minor edits, and an additional quote by Bunne Lee, to clarify the history of dub in Jamaica.
Abstract: This text outlines the foundation of dub as a musical movement that found its way from Jamaica to other parts of the world, in particular NY and Bristol. Upon looking at history, it can be argued that dub and other musical genres that it has influenced have constantly thrived on the threshold of culture, feeding the center. In support of this argument the essay links the influence of dub to the theories of Homi Bhabha and Hardt & Negri. Dub is also linked to Remix as a discourse of global production.
Remix Theory has a new section called Music Playlist, in which you can listen to music I’ve selected from Last.fm. Please feel free to listen to my growing music selection, and to also send me feedback as well as suggestions.
Image note: My partner, Annie, swiftly caught Gilberto Gil’s concert song list as this one was about to be thrown by one of the roadies at the end of the show.
I attended Gilberto Gil’s concert at the 4th & B in San Diego this past Monday. The turnout was quite impressive. I did not take my digital camera as I thought the audience was not allowed to take footage, but upon arriving, I noticed cameras everywhere; people were not hiding them and were using them freely, from cell-phones to small digital video-cams.
I later learned when reading an article in the Union Tribune that Gil actually promotes the recording of his concerts by the audience for later upload to video websites such as Youtube. Gil embraces new technologies as a way to communicate and spread his message, which as Brazil’s Minister of Culture includes a sense of responsibility for Brazil’s music history. It seems that Gil is fully in tune with Remix Culture.
Image taken by Annie Mendoza
He delivered a two hour strong set which included original material as well as covers. The songs that stood out are three of perhaps the most recognizable songs in the world: “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, “Girl from Ipanema” by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and “Something” by the Beatles. He did a little twist on these songs to show the complexity of current global culture. “Three Little Birds” was played in Bossa Nova Style, “Girl from Ipanema” in Reggae, and “Something” was a fusion of both music genres.
Image taken by Annie Mendoza
Below are a number of links to Gilberto Gil’s concert in San Diego, so you can judge for yourself what a great performer Brazil’s Minister of Culture is.
This text is a theoretical excerpt from one of my chapters on the role of Remix in Art. It outlines how the theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on authorship are relevant to New Media, particularly their link to the interrelation of the user and the maker/developer in terms of sampling (a vital element of Remix as discourse). While the text does place a certain emphasis on art, the propositions extend to various areas of culture. It was previously presented as a lecture for ICAM at UCSD on April 6, 2005: http://navasse.net/icam/icam110_spring05_schedule.html
Remix is Meta
The act of remixing (which I refer to in terms of discourse as Remix) developed as a meta-action. Its specificity in the second half of the twentieth century can best be understood when realizing that the strategies by artists throughout the first half of the twentieth century had to be assimilated to then be recycled as part of the postmodern condition in the second half—a time when remix proper developed in music. The acts of collage, photomontage and the eventual development of mixed media had to be assimilated, not only by the visual arts, but also mainstream media for the concept of remixing to become viable in culture. Remix’s dependency on sampling questioned the role of the individual as genius and sole creator, who would “express himself.” Sampling, then, allows for the death of the author; therefore, it is no coincidence that around the time when remixes began to be produced, during the sixties and seventies, authorship—as discourse—was entertained by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, respectively. For them, “writing” in the sense that Rousseau would promote the expressive power of the individual no longer was possible. Sampling allows for the postmodern condition (which some consider to be part of modernism) to come through. To this aspect of sampling we will turn to in the next section. What follows is an outline of Barthes’s and Foucault’s respective theories which were conversant with contemporary art practice, during the period when both authors developed their theories, as it will become evident throughout my argument, their ideas are quite relevant to media culture.
The Role of Author and the Viewer
In his essay, “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes questions the concept of authorship. For him it is the text that speaks to the reader. He writes, “A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into relations of dialogue, parody and contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”[1] With this statement he summarizes his argument that we should treat the text not as something coming from a specific person, but as something that takes life according to how the reader interprets the writing as a collage of diverse sources. For Barthes, it is the reader who holds the real potential to make discourse productive. He looks at specific authors, like Proust, Mallarme and Valery as authors who “Restore the place of the reader.”[2] The author ceases to matter for Barthes because only in this way can the text be set free, for to have “an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”[3] Barthes wants the reader to overthrow the myth of the author as “genius” as it has been promoted since the renaissance. For Barthes, the text’s unity is not in its origin but its destination. And only the reader can define that. It is the reader who completes it.
Michel Foucault also questions the role of the author in contemporary culture, but unlike Barthes, who only pointed out the necessity to shift our cultural attention from the author to the reader, Foucault concludes that even though the death of the author as a great individual has been claimed, the notions supporting such claim actually have only renegotiated the privilege in authorship.[4] To prove this Foucault examines two notions supporting contemporary discourse. The first is the concept of the work, which includes everything an author has written, and the second is the notion of writing, which during Foucault’s time and even in our times pretends to function autonomously. Foucault goes on to claim that this is not so and sets out to prove his point by explaining the definition of his own term “The author function.” Foucault considers the author function to provide a way of controlling discourse. This actually is not too different from how Barthes considers the idea of authorship being a way of limiting the possibilities of the text. The Author Function is a classificatory function.[5] It is not universal, although such discourse could be presented as such. The author function is not created by a single individual but rather it is a complex web of power shifts that leads up to the construct of the author.[6] The author function becomes clear when Foucault explains it in relation to Marx and Freud, two “authors” who created discourses following their names, Marxism and Freudianism (or psychoanalysis). Foucault reasons that these two authors developed concepts that were reevaluated by later generations. Such discourses can be changed which is not necessarily true for the field of the natural sciences, whenever one refers back to the origin of the argument to question it, as he explains, “A study of Galileo’s works could alter our knowledge of the history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas a re-examination of the books of Freud and Marx can transform our understanding of psychoanalysis or Marxism.[7]
In other words, discourse as developed by an author can be changed. While Foucault went further than Barthes and explained the power dynamics supporting the author, he also agrees with Barthes that one day the author, or the “author function” for him, will disappear: “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions.”[8] One can notice hope in Foucault’s final statement for a time when a more democratic model would be at play; this has been a pronounced interest of artists and media researchers, and has provided fuel for the historical and neo-avant-garde to stay active since the beginnings of modernism. Barthes and Foucault’s reflections on authorship were already being put into action in their own time with Conceptual and Minimal art practices, which relied largely on appropriation and allegory to derive critical commentary. The notion of authorship which they examined can now be assessed, especially in relation to new media practice, which is largely dependent on the “reader” or user, as the participants are commonly called. This particular dynamic is actually an extension of sampling, which started during the early days of modernism with photography and music.
Sampling allows for the death of the author and the author function to take effect once we enter late capitalism, because “writing” is no longer seen as something truly original, but as a complex act of resampling and reinterpreting material previously introduced, which is obviously not innovative but expected in new media. Acts of appropriation are also acts of sampling: acts of citing pre-existing text or cultural products. (Let us extend the term “text” here to the visual arts and media at large.) This is the reason why citations are so necessary in academic writing, and certainly is something that is closely monitored in other areas of culture, like the music industry, where sampling is carefully controlled by way of copyright law. So, writing in the sense before the enlightenment no longer takes place. Instead, the careful choices of preexisting material made by authors in all fields are revered. Our most obvious example is the work of Duchamp (which I’ve cited in my definition of Remix[9] ), who understood this so well that he decided to simply choose readymades as opposed to trying to create art from scratch; he understood the new level of writing, or creating that was at hand in modernism, which entered a stage of meta—of constant reference, relying on the cultural cache of pre-existing material.
So writing’s and art’s true power is selectivity, and this comes forth today in sampling, a privileged symptom of the postmodern. The selectivity found in the death of the author and the author function as defined above is what makes the notion of interactivity easily assimilated because of sampling. For example, once cut/copy and paste is assimilated not only as a feature for the user to write her own texts, but also to reblog pre-existing material, the user then becomes more of an editor (a remixer) of material, by reblogging under a new context, as a new composition that allegorizes its sources. This possibility of selecting and editing to develop a specific theme according to personal interests plays a key role in how the art viewer, or new media user will relate to the person who produced the object of interaction. This shift, while redefining the concept of creativity and originality also develops new challenges for the media producer.
[1] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” The History of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 299-314.
[5] Ibid, 305-307 .
[6] Ibid, 308-09.
[7] Ibid, 312.
[8] Ibid, 314.
[9] See: “Remix Defined,” Remix Theory < https://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3>.
“Stereo,” Christian Marclay’s first solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, surveys “concepts of doubling and echoes” across the American artist’s career. Since the mid-1970s, Marclay has uniquely navigated the visual and sonic realms, exploring the materiality of equipment like the gramophone, turntables and record through processes that foreground what the artist calls the “unwanted sounds” of the mediums: the clicks, pops, scratches and deterioration that hold “expressive power” in themselves. In the past decade, Marclay has extended his position as cultural archivist with acclaimed installations like Video Quartet (2001) and Crossfire (2007), respectively comprising sequences of musical performance and gunshots assembled from dozens of feature-films.
Consisting of twenty-five works — the majority of them two-dimensional — “Stereo” offers a timely retrospective of a side of Marclay’s practice not always given due attention relative to his video and audio-based work. For Yin and Yang (1983), from his Recycled Records (1980-1986) series, Marclay cuts and reassembles two records according to the yin-yang design, rendering an unplayable product that also signifies turntable culture’s collage ethos. This approach can also be observed in paper works like Untitled (1984) and Double Tuba (1992), both of which find the artist producing fanciful modifications to instruments and equipment through paper collage. Seen within the broader scope of Marclay’s body of work, these objects offer examples of how visual art can provide conceptual space to reimagine sound and sound technology. — Tyler Coburn
Looking for material on Remix Culture, I recently ran into this two hour lecture by DJ Spooky at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Spooky beat juggles history to argue his position on sampling. From the Phonograph to the Jamaican Sound System, one gets a good sense of the potential creativity that Spooky and other promoters of Remix Culture believe in. Some of the questions at the end are quite interesting, and challenging. Definitely worth the 100 minutes of your time.
The following is a set of links I prepared for one of my classes on film and video language. I repost them here for later use, and to share with the online community. The list is not by any means exhaustive, and is not linear in any way. The top links are mashups and the bottom links are early hip hop and rock videos. They were chosen in part because of the different approaches to video making, this was necessary for the class, because the students need to understand how music video language evolved throughout the eighties and nineties on to today.
Some of the videos also show early traces of sampling, for example, Trans Europe Express was sampled by Afrika Bambaataa for Planet Rock. Also, the remix of Tour de France juxtaposed with the early version shows how electronic music has evolved while acknowledging the important paradigms set by early electrofunk compositions. The now well known mashups of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes, Madonna and the Sex Pistols, as well as Michael Jackson, Britney Spears the White Stripes and Rick James are some of the most successful remixes in this genre. Part of me admittedly rejects them for their popularity, but the creativity that has gone into the audio remix as well as the video editing have to be noted, because they have at this point set a standard in Remix Culture.
Popular music has a long history of aural innovators, from Brian Wilson and his downward spiral to Phil Spector’s wall of sound. They are often romanticized as shadowy knob-twiddling visionaries who through mixing boards and miles of cable added new worlds to stereophonic sound. Reggae music, with an admittedly limited rhythm structure, has been propelled forward by it’s own pioneers, with Lee “Scratch” Perry and the Mad Professor holding top rank. In their own unique ways, both have created indelible catalogs of hit reggae albums, sonic experiments, and plenty of wicked bass heavy dub, traditionally the instrumental B-side or “version” of a popular song spliced and diced into a teeth-rattling art form all its own.
The two are from different generations and continents, yet both Professor and Perry walk the same twisted line. Both are passionate for electronics (Professor built his own mixing board as a teenager while Perry pushed four track recorders beyond comprehension), both built their own record company from the ground up (Ariwa / Black Ark), and both have produced music for a surprising range of artists including Massive Attack, U-Roy and the
Orb (Professor) to The Skatalites, The Clash and the Beastie Boys (Perry).
One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.
How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?
It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.
I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art†and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.
