Image: Playing Jeff, a mashup from Bunk Magazine and Mad Hatter’s Review special issue.

Note: The following text was written for the peer review journal Dichtung Digital, issue 2010, 40.  To read the complete material, please visit http://www.dichtung-digital.de/en. Direct link: http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2010/navas/navas.htm

Abstract:
This essay examines the complexity of contemporary electronic literary practice. It evaluates how electronic literature borrows from, and also influences, the reception of the textual message in other forms of communication that efficiently combine image, sound and text as binary data, as information that is compiled in any format of choice with the use of the computer. The text aims to assess what it means to write in literary fashion in a time when crossing over from one creative field to another is ubiquitous and transparent in cultural production. To accomplish this, I relate electronic literature to the concept of intertextuality as defined by Fredric Jameson in postmodernism, and assess the complexity of writing not only with words, but also with other forms of communication, particularly video. I also discuss Roland Barthes’s principles of digital and analogical code to recontextualize intertextuality in electronic writing as a practice part of new media. Moreover, I discuss a few examples of electronic literature in relation to mass media logo production, and relate them to the concept of remix. The act of remixing has played an important role in the definition of literature in electronic media. All this leads to a recurring question that is relevant in all arts: how does originality and its relationship to authorship take effect in a time when the death of the author is often cited due to the growing amount of collaboration taking place in networked culture?

To read the full text visit http://dichtung-digital.mewi.unibas.ch/. Direct link: http://dichtung-digital.mewi.unibas.ch/2010/navas/navas.htm

Note: The following is an excerpt of a concise summary of the history and theory of Remix:

How have artists critically appropriated the concept of copyright in their works? In this course we will take a closer look at remix culture from the perspectives of text, image and music, and how different artists over considerable time have related to the idea of using already copyrighted materials. We will also investigate some of the different software programs that have, and are, important in the process of creating contemporary remix culture.

Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression. In most jurisdictions copyright arises upon fixation and does not need to be registered. Copyright owners have the exclusive statutory right to exercise control over copying and other exploitation of the works for a specific period of time, after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Uses covered under limitations and exceptions to copyright, such as fair use, do not require permission from the copyright owner. All other uses require permission. Copyright owners can license or permanently transfer or assign their exclusive rights to others.

Read the complete entry at Augmented Reality

Owen Gallagher has written an excellent summary of  Remix Cinema.  A conference which took place at St. Anthony College in Oxford.  Along with Mette Birk, Owen represented the collective Remix Theory & Praxis, of which I am also a member.  Make sure to visit the brand new [re]mix:network.org where you will find Owen’s complete report.  An excerpt follows below:

The Remix Cinema Workshop, organised by the Oxford Internet Institute, took place in the beautfiful period setting of St. Anthony’s College in Oxford last weekend. A cohort of remix enthusiasts descended upon the infamous university town to collectively contribute to what turned out to be a very successful and fascinating exploration of remix cinema and the issues surrounding this developing practice.

The keynote speaker was Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss of Aalto University, Helsinki, who edited the 2010 publication, ‘Mash-Up Cultures’ to which our very own Eduardo Navas contributed a chapter. Sonvilla-Weiss delivered a talk entitled ‘From Soft Cinema to Collaborative Movie Making in the Cloud’, influenced heavily by Lev Manovich and with particular reference to Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ illustrating the concept of non-linear narrative and the potential for infinite variability of meaning once the separate elements of a text have been submitted to a database. The main proposal was the notion that if all video content and editing practices were migrated to the cloud, that is from the desktop to the browser window, then questions of authorship and ownership of content would potentially fade into the background.

Read the complete report at re]mix:network.org

Image: Jeremy Douglass (front) analyzes manga comic pages.

The Software Studies lab has had a busy week.  Three publications are currently available, as listed below.

Article:Jeremy Douglass, William Huber, Lev Manovich. “Understanding scanlation: how to read one million fan-translated manga pages.” Forthcoming in Image and Narrative, Spring 2011. [pdf 3 MB].

An article on Cultural Analytics, titled “Graphing Culture” by James Williford, appears in the March/April 2011 issue of Humanities, the official magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

And Tara Zepel published her essay “Cultural Analytics at Work: The 2008 U.S. Presidential Online Video Ads” in the edited book Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube – new INC publication.

Note: This text reflects on Egypt’s revolution to reconsider the role of social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, in real life changes.

This text is also available on The Levantine Review and Vodule.com

A peaceful revolution against a regime that had been in power for 29 years sounds impossible until one evaluates the events that led to the fleeing of former President Hosni Mubarak out of Egypt on Friday, February 11. The Egyptian people were able to organize with the use of social media; it was Facebook that rose to the occasion. Needless to say that what happened in Egypt is undoubtedly of historical importance.

About a year ago Wael Ghonim, a thirty-something Google executive decided to create a Facebook group “We Are All Khalid Said,” named after a young man who was killed by the Egyptian police.[1] The Facebook group reached hundreds of thousands, and Ghonim used it to educate people about their rights as citizens. More recently, a youth group known as April 6 was inspired by the events in Tunisia; along with supporters of Mohamed ElBaradei (a nobel prize winner who is active in revitalizing the politics of Egypt), with whom Ghonim also collaborates, they decided to turn the Police Day Protest (which previously was linked to British suppression), scheduled for January 25, into something much bigger. Ghonim announced the event on Facebook, and about 100,000 people signed up.[2] The rest, needless to say, is history–Tahrir Square was filled with thousands of people, and they never left until Mubarak stepped down from office.

(more…)

COMPLETE TEXT

“The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability” was published in the CSPA Quarterly, Spring 2010 Issue.  My text is available online according to a Creative Commons License adopted by the CSPA Journal. The content may be copied, distributed, and displayed as long as proper credit is given to the CSPA and the individual author(s), and as long as these contents are used by others for noncommercial purposes only.  Any derivative works that result from these contents must also be shared alike.

The journal is the print publication for The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, a non-profit that supports artists and organizations in the process of becoming ecologically and economically sustainable while maintaining artistic excellence.

Editor statement for Spring 2010 issue:

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.

———-

Abstract: “Remix: The Ethics of Modular Complexity in Sustainability” evaluates sustainability in networked culture.  It considers how the flow of information in terms of immaterial production and its relation to knowledge play a role in a fourth economic layer supported by the growing ubiquity of globalization.  It revisits and expands, yet again, on my interest in Jacques Attali’s concepts of noise and music to propose a critical position fully embedded in pervasive connectivity.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This text was written as a testing ground for my growing interest in the concepts of volume and module, as explored in vodule.com.  Consequently, this text uses the term modular complexity, but does not define it.  I consider this text as part of my process to develop a precise definition of modular complexity in social and cultural terms.  The interests that inform this text are also relevant to my current research on Remix and Cultural Analytics.  Future writings will make clear the interrelation of all these ongoing projects.

This online version contains minor edits made in order to clarify the argument.

———–

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, sustainability can be read with a double meaning: to be self-supportive while socially conscious. This is because specialized fields (and individuals who work in these fields) need to be aware of their interconnectivity if they are to subsist in global culture. Sustainability is relevant in the arts and media according to the interrelation of material and intellectual production, given that such relation supports specialized fields. Sustainability, when linked to social consciousness, modifies how the recycling of material becomes relevant in culture at large. One could promote a philosophy of sustainability, which embodies critical awareness of the politics of intellectual and material property with real consequences in daily life. This is relevant in all areas of culture, even when one may produce strictly in the realm of aesthetics, and other specialized spaces that appear distanced from politics and economy.

The double signification of sustainability also shares principles of recycling with Remix as a form of discourse.  This is because Remix expands across culture from music to ecology: from immaterial pleasure to material responsibility.  The act of remixing has become common due to the rise of information exchange dependent on cut/copy and paste, which is an act of sampling data in all forms.  It enables individuals to apply the attitude of recombining in the realms of aesthetics and material reality, albeit with different results.  To be able to critically understand how such attitude functions in the symbolic and the material is the very challenge of sustainability.

(more…)

Image source: Open Reflections

Janneke Adema has taken the time to analyze selected texts available on Remix Theory.  She connects my theories of Remix to the future of the book.  Adema also discusses the theories of Lev Manovich in terms of Remixability.

Here are excerpts of the articles:

New Visions for the Book II: Remix
http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/
new-visions-for-the-book-ii-remix/

In the first part of New Visions for the Book, I described how the concept of the book is being used as a strategic power tool to argue for a certain knowledge system. I tried to show how within this discourse certain essentialist notions—such as authorship, stability, and authority—still hold a lot of prestige and are hard to discard. In the subsequent parts of New Visions for the Book I therefore want to take a few expeditions outside the world of the scholarly book to look at the way other disciplines and other media have struggled with or have come to terms with the above mentioned notions. I want to start with looking at the concept of remix, engaged with mostly in music and art theory but increasingly a concept applied to describe and analyse culture at large. Here I want to focus on two thinkers who have extensively theorized remix: Eduardo Navas and Lev Manovich. After taking an in depth look at Navas work on remix first, I will explore Manovich’s thoughts on the subject in the next post, contrasting it with Navas’s ideas. Finally, I will explore what the consequences of their thoughts and their analysis of remix are for the scholarly book, the knowledge order it stands for and the concepts it reifies.

(more…)

Image: Main Entrance of Cinemateca Brasileira.

I visited Sao Paulo Brazil on November 17th, to participate in a panel discussion for Brazilian Digital Culture 2010, organized by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. I was invited to discuss the relationship of transmedia and Remix along with Maurício Mota (Os Alquimistas), and moderator Newton Cannito (Secretary for the Audiovisual/Ministry of Culture).  What follows is not so much a summary of the panel discussion, but rather a reflection on my views on transmedia and Remix, after evaluating my participation.  But first, I will begin by giving some general impressions of the day I spent in Sao Paulo.

(more…)

The following are videos from a performance that took place on November 11, 2010 at the Cultural Center of Spain in El Salvador, for the Exhibition, A Modular Framework.

Brian Mackern performs his remix of the film, the Stalker by Tarkovsky

Arcangel Constantini remixes noises and video games live for the audience

Antonio Mendoza remixes pop media image and sound

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.

See more at http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/remixes