Image: Preliminary cover design and logo for upcoming book by Ludmil Trenkov.
I am very happy to announce that my book Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling is scheduled to be published later on this year, by Springer Wien New York Press. If all goes according to schedule, it should be available no later than this Fall. The book offers an in-depth analysis on Remix as a form of discourse. To get a sense of what to expect, you can read my previously published text, “Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture,” also available through Springer: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r7r28443320k6012/. You can read my online version as well, though I encourage you to support the publishing company by downloading the official version.
I will offer more information about the book in the near future, such as the table of content, and excerpts from the text. For now I wanted to share the promotional abstract:
Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling is an analysis of Remix in art, music, and new media. Navas argues that Remix, as a form of discourse, affects culture in ways that go beyond the basic recombination of material. His investigation locates the roots of Remix in early forms of mechanical reproduction, in seven stages, beginning in the nineteenth century with the development of the photo camera and the phonograph, leading to contemporary remix culture. This book places particular emphasis on the rise of Remix in music during the 1970s and ‘80s in relation to art and media at the beginning of the twenty-first Century. Navas argues that Remix is a type of binder, a cultural glue—a virus—that informs and supports contemporary culture.
Minima Moralia Redux is a selective remix by Eduardo Navas of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Starting on October 16, 2011, an entry a week will be rewritten until the 153 aphorisms of Minima Moralia become part of the blog.
Theodor Adorno’s aphorisms are carefully analyzed and reinterpreted in order to explore the principles of the selective remix, often found in music and video. The selective remix consists of adding to or subtracting material from a pre-existing source.
Minima Moralia Redux is the result of a long term post-doctoral analysis in cultural analytics performed for The Department of Information Science and Media Studies http://www.uib.no/infomedia/en at the University of Bergen, Norway, in collaboration with Software Studies Lab http://lab.softwarestudies.com/ at the University of California, San Diego.
Paul Ramirez-Jonaz, “Another Day” (2003), video installation, image courtesy of the artist.
This essay, made available here in English and Spanish, was written for the exhibition Transitio _MX 03, which took place in Mexico City in October 2009.The text was published in December 2010 in Errata, a Colombian journal dedicated to art and culture.The text explores the concept of non-places (which is the foundation of my curation for Transitio), as a recurrent and pervasive cultural variable not only in Latin America but other parts of the world.
Above and below are images of the works curated in the exhibition, complemented with excerpts from the text.
Sabrina Raaf, “Translator II: Grower, 2004-2006,” Robot and Installation, image courtesy of the artist.
excerpt:
The works included in “Autonomies of Disagreement” were selected to reflect on glocality versus locality in Latin-American production in relation to the concept of non-place. Glocality is commonly defined with the saying, “act local, think global.” With this concept as a cultural foundation, my curatorial approach was developed to support what I consider a key element of Transitio_MX 2009’s theme of “Autonomies of Disagreement”, as evaluated in the Festival Statement, which is to keep in mind the relevance of geopolitical differences that shape the use of appropriation and technology in artistic practices.
Carlos Rosas, “GPS Pallet Series: (Coordinate) Paintings/ I Think I Got IKEA’d Project, Bulls on Parade: Protest Remixes y Step and Repeat Cycles: Live/ Networked Installation y Remixed Sessions,” Installation.
Excerpt:
The term non-place is applied here after the theory of supermodernity introduced in 1992 by Marc Augé in his book Non-places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Augé views non-places as areas of transition, such as airports, conditioned with a familiarity that is homogeneous. He also extends his concept to spaces that need not be visited, but named, or referenced through pervasive images. He argues that people eventually become familiar with such places by mere reference.
Owen Mundy y Joel Dietrick, “Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art,” Wall Projection, real time animation.
Excerpt:
Auge’s premise was revisited in 2002 by Hans Ibelings in Supermodernism, Architecture in the Age of Globalization. Ibelings views the homogeneity of tourism initially examined by Augé to be best expressed in the spectacular architecture of Las Vegas, which metaphorically speaking, names or cites a place. In other words, Las Vegas is architectural simulacra of other places in the world.
Vicky Funari y Sergio de la Torre, Maquilápolis, video, 2006, Documentary Film.
Excerpt:
The Internet also has non-places of its own. Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook and all other major portals and social networking sites help users navigate online spaces with interfaces that, like the airport, can be considered places of transition, of constant flow and change. Users in turn feel more comfortable with the material that is accessed because individuals are often allowed and even encouraged to customize their interfaces with bookmarks and various forms of tagging for ongoing access. Latin American art production is informed by such developments as well as the physical mobility of people from different countries.
The art projects I selected for Transitio_MX, in varying degrees, are informed by the current stage of networked culture; they also expose contradictions of global trends of migration. Given this focus, not all the artists are “Latin American” but rather their work has an intimacy with issues that are relevant to Latin America as a concept that moves across borders as a collective of complexities that are difficult to define. This approach opens up a space to discuss how cultural identification today is even more multi-layered than before, which is why the selected projects share questions on how locality and glocality are terms that may be interchangeable according to a person’s particular position in both class and culture–closely defined by education and accessibility to technology. “Glocality,” as the ability to function locally with a global awareness, is a term that only a certain number of people, unfortunately, are able to contemplate at the moment. This obviously needs to change, and the works chosen for Transitio_MX aim to demystify this elitism. Glocals are people invested in the actual production of a global culture at an informational level—the most important level in which meaning is currently produced and controlled. The artists participating in Transitio_MX are part of this small, selected group, and as such have to be conscious of their practice as a critical tool that can ultimately endorse the global system.
Within this critical framework, Another Day (three monitors) 2003, by Paul Ramírez-Jonas (Honduras/ United States) depersonalizes and universalizes the ongoing travel that takes place around the world, by making the sun the traveler. The video Maquilápolis 2006, by Vicky Funari (United States) and Sergio De La Torre (Mexico/United States) aims to expose the contradictions at play in the global economy on how goods are produced with unfair labor laws. Translator II: Grower, 2004-06, by Sabrina Raaf (United States) exposes the tension, or discord of dislocation that can be superceded if the migrating subject is willing to come to terms with the displacement of the body by way of mechanical labor. I THINK I GOT IKEA’D: Finish Fetish and other projects, by Carlos Rosas (Chile/United States) expose how location can become abstracted in terms of painting or sound, while still providing a sense of concreteness by mere citation of concepts. And Anemophilous Formula for Computer Art, by Owen Mundy (United States) and Joelle Dietrick (United States), literally takes apart the concept of non-place, by recontextualizing a paper-wall image of a national park located at an airport lobby.
I contributed an essay on my project Traceblog to the book publication Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design, edited by Xtine Burrough. I want to thank Xtine for the opportunity to share my ideas. Below are excerpts from my chapter contribution, which is titled after the actual online project as “Traceblog.” After the excerpts you will find the table of contents, which, in my view, includes an impressive list of contemporary new media artists. Excerpts from my chapter contribution:
[…] Traceblog was developed in reaction to one of my previous projects titled Diary of a Star (2004-07), a blog that appropriated entries from The Andy Warhol Diaries. As exciting as Diary of a Star was for me to produce, it consumed more time than I expected because entries had to be carefully written and took much longer to compose than average blog posts. Soon after I finished the Warhol project I began to think about the changes that had taken place with the shift to Web 2.0, and how blogging had changed since 2004. I realized that keeping track of people’s surfing activity had become an important element for private, public, and state organizations to data-mine patterns of communication and consumption online. The term “social media” began to be used more often when discussing the growth of early networks such as Orkut, and Friendster around 2004, the period when I began to develop Diary of a Star.
I evaluated the changes in online activity since 2004 and decided to develop Traceblog to reflect on the new stage that global culture was entering in 2008, during which millions of people around the world willingly shared information about themselves online, via social networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and Myspace, as well as YouTube, not to mention thousands of blogs, which by such time were conventional tools of communication for average Internet users. The result of the social media frenzy is an attitude of sharing that is ubiquitous in 2010, the time of this writing.
[…] Traceblog is a direct result of my ongoing practice as artist and media researcher. It makes the most of the default state of works of art in new media practice as informational forms, not defined by physical presentation. Traceblog and similar online works function in a state of flux defined by the growing archive and its relation to the ever-present: the now.
ImagePlot is a free software tool that visualizes collections of images and video of any size. (The largest set we tried so was: 1,074,790 one megabyte images).
ImagePlot works on Mac, Windows, and Lunix.
Max visualization resolution: 2.5 GB (2,684,354,560 grayscale pixels, or 671,088,640 RGB pixels).
ImagePlot was developed by the Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com) with support from the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA).
Along with the program, we also distribute a number of articles by Lev Manovich, Jeremy Douglass and Tara Zepel that address methodologies for exploring large visual cultural data sets, and discuss our digital humanities projects which use ImagePlot. (The articles can be also downloaded directly from softwarestudies.com.)
Visualizations created with ImagePlot have been shown in science centers, art and design museums, and art galleries, including Graphic Design Museum (Breda, Netherlands), Gwangju Design Biennale (Korea), and The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art.
ImagePlot software was developed as part of our Cultural Analytics research program.
Everything is a Remix is a four part web-film series directed and produced by Kirby Ferguson. It has been about a year since the first segment (above) was released. Since then, Ferguson has released parts two and three. The fourth and final installment is scheduled to be released this Fall of 2011, and I look forward to viewing it.
When I viewed part one, I really liked it, and thought that the title, while it may sound polemical to some degree (in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way), somewhat falls along the lines of how I view and have been discussing Remix as a form of discourse during the past few years. However, once I viewed the other two segments, I realized that the way some of the material is presented begins to water down the very foundation of the term “remix.”
For this reason, while I do like very much Ferguson’s series, and often share it as a reference with anyone who wants to get a sense of Remix as a form of discourse, I find the need to write down some of the issues that may be overseen in Ferguson’s series.
This oversight perhaps may be in part because short films cannot possibly cover in-depth analysis as a series of texts or a book would. On the other hand, it may be inevitably tempting to make an ever-expanding megamix about culture and media with a generalization that one cannot fully embrace (though in the spirit of remixing can truly like and admire). With both of these possibilities in mind, I briefly share my views on this series.
The main issue about remixes that comes up, even in the first video, is that there is no explanation of the relation between material sampling and cultural citation. as I previously explained in Regressive and Reflexive Mashups, there is a difference between a Medley and a Megamix: the former is played by a band, while the latter is composed in the studio usually by a DJ producer, who understands how to manipulate breaks on the turntables.
What this means is that a remix in the strict sense of its foundational definition has to be materially grounded on a citation that can be quantified, in other words, measured. This is one of the reasons why DJ producers quickly ran into trouble with copyright law: a lawyer could play a sample from a Hip Hop song, in direct juxtaposition with the originating source of the sample and make evident on purely material grounds that the sample was an act of plagiarism.
But this is not exactly what happened with Led Zeppelin. What happened with Zeppelin, as the example given in Ferguson’s first segment, was straight forward plagiarism within the tradition of covers and knock-offs. Two terms that are also mentioned in the first segment as forms of “legal remixes.” What these forms of recycling content do share with remixes is intertextual citation–the embedding of ideas by way of direct or even indirect reference, which often is not materially grounded, but rather made possible through well calculated emulation.
The best example of intertextual citation in the postmodern sense would be Quentin Tarantino’s films, which are also mentioned at the end of the credits of part two. Tarantino does not sample directly from the films he references in his own work, but rather recreates the scenes or shots to develop his own narratives. This allows him to claim autonomy of the material, much in the way that Zeppelin (in my view unfairly) can still keep their credibility, perhaps on the ground of reproducing material in a unique way that is their own–even if they failed to cite the sources from which they blatantly stole.
In other words, because, both, Tarantino and Zeppelin don’t materially take, but rather emulate with great precision, their productions are not remixes by definition, but rather informed by principles of Remix as a form of discourse. Their actions are cultural citations. These details are missed, unfortunately, in the first three parts of the series by Ferguson.
Now, as it is already obvious above, I do extend the concept of remix as Remix (with a capital “R”) to pretty much all the areas of culture that Ferguson mentions in his series, including the Apple computer. But when I do this, it is to emphasize that we are functioning under a paradigm ruled by acts of material appropriation and recyclability.
The attitude of remix made possible with the technology first introduced earlier in photo-collage and tape loops and eventually music samplers, has now become an attitude, an aesthetic that informs the way cultural material is produced. But this does not mean that “everything is a remix.” This may appear to be so, but as much as I myself would like this to be the case, it is not. What one could say is that “everything is intertextual,” which is closer to the tradition of sharing ideas in conceptual and material form, prior to the time of modernism. Historically all the material covered by Ferguson is certainly relevant in terms of recyclability, but it does not validate the catch-all statement “everything is a remix.”
Understandably, “everything is intertextual” (which could also be contested if one gets really picky) is not as catchy as “everything is a remix.” To go viral, one must use what is in vogue and quickly understood. Intertextuality had its time in the postmodern period. Now, it appears that remix is the catch all phrase.
And why is it important to point out such nuances that in the end a person enjoying Ferguson’s short films may find too nit-picky? Because if we actually take the time to differentiate the referencing of ideas in conceptual and material form (ideas, and actual products reused) then copyright law may actually be changed. If we keep referencing intellectual production in general fashion as Ferguson’s work unfortunately does, we will not be able to change laws on intellectual property. It is for this reason, only, why I write this entry, because I find that the film series could benefit from understanding the important differences between material samplings and cultural citations.
I should add a note to explain that my concern here is not academic by any means, even though I make a living by working with research institutions. I have been invested in remix culture long before the very term was coined. Before investing myself professionally as a media researcher and artist, I was a DJ for over fifteen years. And for this reason, as much as I would like everything to be a remix, I have to admit that this is not the case. To be blunt, from the point of view of cultural critics who are wary of hegemony, “Everything is a Remix” can be understood as a flip-on-the-script of diversity, paradoxically, to become a totalitarian statement–that anyone who is invested in difference is compelled to resist. I say this understanding that Ferguson probably does not mean it this way, which is why I do share his work as much as I can. Kudos to Ferguson.
Note: I met Elisa Kreisinger during a panel presentation at the OVC in 2010. I find her work to be quite interesting for various reasons which are explored in the following interview by Vicki Calahan.
My initial foray as NAMAC blogger can be seen as a parallel text or a continuation of the conversation initiated by Patricia Zimmerman’s fine posting the other day, Film Studies as Social Media 2.0, or the New Media Ecosystems of Virtual Cinephilia. In this instance I want to look specifically at one context within the emergent forms of digital scholarship known as “remix.” I have been fortunate the last two years as a visiting scholar at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy to focus my praxis based undergraduate seminars around this topic with assorted permutations.
Written on March 18, 2004
Second Draft: April, 2004
Note: Andy: Meta-dandy is part of the online artwork titled Diary of a Star, which consists of selected reblogs of Andy Warhol Diaries. I developed the project between February 28, 2004 and December 31, 2007. This text has been available online as a PDF file since March 18, 2004. I re-release it on Remix Theory to make it part of my text archive. For a PDF copy, click here. For more information on Diary of a star in relation to Remix, see my previous entry Completion of Diary of a Star.
Andy: Meta-dandy while theoretically driven is also a piece of creative writing (thus, it provides footnotes and a bibliography). The reasons why I combined creative and academic writing can best be understood when reading the project’s context page. I also chose not to revise it–even though I am aware of how I could improve it based on what I have learned since 2004. Individuals who may have read my previous research will notice that this text is in large part an early exploration of my interest in remix, even though I don’t focus on the term, or use it directly.
The text compares Andy Warhol to Baudelaire’s Flaneur (as dandies) in order to explore the definition of art in modernism and postmodernism. “Andy: Meta-dandy” explains the philosophy that led to the development of Diary of a Star.
———–
Baudelaire’s Flaneur is the quintessential character of modernity. Being lost in the crowd enjoying anonymity is what the nineteenth century Flaneur is best known for. Andy Warhol may very well be the most famous flaneur of the twentieth century. He was known for taking daily walks in the city streets every morning, with copies of his Interview magazine under his arm, ready to give them to people who recognized him.[1] Unlike the flaneur, however, Andy loved attention.[2] He always wanted to become a star. He achieved this by immersing himself in a crowd. That such a crowd would be the rich and famous complicates this analogy. Yet, he paradoxically managed to keep a sense of anonymity when he “used the limelight in order to hide in it.”[3] To give credit to the Modern Man of the twentieth century, this was an inevitable transition. Craving attention was and still is one of the greatest desires in modernity, especially as media culture became more established after the 1950s. So Warhol was the new and improved flaneur. Today he is the icon of a man-machine who cranked works out of a factory, which later turned into an office.[4] A flaneur who constantly searched for ways to separate himself from the creative process. And like the new improved man of modernity, he not only embraced media, but mastered it to create some of the most important artworks of his time.
Like the flaneur, we know things about Andy but all based on surface, all based on public interactions and records. Andy in many ways is still a mystery, a persona that becomes a desirable object of appropriation when we find a need to step out of our selves and explore the unknown, to go to places where we dare not go. Today, recalling this persona is most appealing when navigating the World Wide Web. Indeed, the flaneur has been referenced by new media theory to better understand the dynamics of anonymity when exploring the internet.[5]
Written for the MEIAC, Badajoz, Spain, March of 2010, for the exhibition Re/appropriations, organized by Gustavo Romano. The exhibition was launched in December 2009. The text is released online with permission.
The exhibition Re/Appropriations, curated by Gustavo Romano, proposes that artists in networked culture find their creative potential in the appropriation, selection, and combination of pre-existing material on a meta-level—that of the re, or more specifically, Remix as a form of discourse. To this effect, Romano recontextualizes the artist as a “redirector of information,” rather than a creator. This premise as the entry point for creative production at the beginning of the twenty-first century leads to a recurring question often posed on the popular awareness of Remix: “Remixing, as an act of combining material has been around for a long time, one could argue since symbolic language was conceived; so, what is so different about the elements of Remix explored during the first decades of the twenty-first century that make them unique from those in the past?”[1]
Escrito para el MEIAC, Badajoz, España, marzo de 2010, para la exposición Re/approriaciones organizada por Gustavo Romano, lanzada en Diciembre del 2009. Publicada en red con permiso.
La exposición Re/apropiaciones, comisariada por Gustavo Romano, propone que los artistas de la cultura en la red encuentran su potencial creativo en la apropiación, la selección y la combinación de material preexistente y lo hacen en un meta-nivel: el del “re”, o, más concretamente, el del remix [remezcla] como forma de discurso. Con este fin, Romano recontextualiza al artista como un “redireccionador de información” más que como un creador. Tomar esta premisa como punto de partida para la producción creativa en los inicios del siglo xxi nos conduce a una pregunta recurrente que se nos plantea con frecuencia acerca de la conciencia popular del remix: “La remezcla, en tanto que acto de combinación de material, lleva existiendo ya mucho tiempo, podría afirmarse que desde que se concibió el lenguaje simbólico; por tanto, ¿qué tienen de peculiar los elementos del remix que se han explorado durante las primeras décadas del siglo xxi que tanto los distingue de aquellos que se dieron en el pasado?”[1] (more…)
