The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities was published in March, 2021. In order to highlight our third anthology on remix studies and support interdisciplinary research on remix as a form of creative production and communication, xtine burrough, Owen Gallagher, and I decided to organize a series of dialogues via Zoom. The first dialogue took place on May 5, 2021. It featured scholars, artists, and designers: Anne Burdick, David J. Gunkel, Virginia Kuhn, and Paul D. Miller AKA DJ Spooky. A video recording of the event is archived and available for viewing.
Our second dialogue is taking place on September 23 and will feature scholars, artists, and designers: Aram Sinnreich, Maggie Clifford, Fernanda Rosa, Scott Church, and Michael Collins who are brought together to continue our ongoing discussions on remix as a creative variable at play across culture. Registration for this free event is free via Zoom.
Information about The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and our previous two publications can be found at remixstudies.com
We are planning three more remix studies events for Fall 2021 and Spring of 2022.
The following is a transcript of an interview which took place in Bern, Switzerland on November 11, 2017. I want to thank Hannes Liechti and Theresa Beyer for their interest in asking me questions about remix.What follows is an excerpt. The complete interview can be accessed on Norient’s website
Key sentence 1/8 on Cultural Production from the Regenerative Culture Series by Eduardo Navas, 2016:
Cultural production has entered a stage in which archived digital material can potentially be used at will.
[Hannes Liechti]: Eduardo, just to start with: what is a remix?
[Eduardo Navas]: Remixes are specific forms of expression using pre-existing sources (sound, image, text) to develop work that may be considered derivative while also gaining autonomy.
[HL]: That means that remix is much more than the well known musical remix?
[EN]: The musical remix is a very direct and concrete form of the remix. Actually, it is the initial definition of the remix. But principles of remix had been at play in culture long before the musical remix and practices of sampling occured. As computers were introduced to the home, these principles became part of the vernacular of everyone’s lives.
[HL]: What’s the importance of sampling for culture?
[EN]: Sampling makes transparent what had been going on for many many decades, if not hundreds of years in terms of communication: we take ideas, even phrases and reposition and repurpose them in new forms. With sampling we had the ability to take an actual thing and reproduce it just as it was produced before. Sampling made evident that remixing is actually a thing we constantly do. In a way, sampling is a node of the world that allows us to keep track of creativity in ways that were not possible before.
[HL]: But what’s the difference between sampling and remixing then?
[EN]: Sampling makes a remix more efficient but it doesn’t lead necessarily to remixing. Sampling is more or less open-ended: we can use it for different things. Some art work could be developed based on samples but maybe it’s not necessarily a straightforward remix, although you would have those same principles at play once we start to realize how remixing works.
Cover concept by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher and xtine burrough
Cover image: DJHughman
xtine burrough, Owen Gallagher, I are very happy to share the news that Keywords in Remix Studies is now available. It was released on November 28, 2017 in both hard copy, paperback as well as ebook. We thank our colleagues who contributed rigorous chapters to a second anthology on remix studies. We hope the remix community finds the book of interest as a contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of remix as a creative and critical form of cultural production. The book is available among major sellers. The easiest way to buy it is on Amazon or directly from Routledge. Below is the abstract plus the table of contents.
Keywords in Remix Studies consists of twenty-four chapters authored by researchers who share interests in remix studies and remix culture throughout the arts and humanities. The essays reflect on the critical, historical and theoretical lineage of remix to the technological production that makes contemporary forms of communication and creativity possible. Remix enjoys international attention as it continues to become a paradigm of reference across many disciplines, due in part to its interdisciplinary nature as an unexpectedly fragmented approach and method useful in various fields to expand specific research interests. The focus on a specific keyword for each essay enables contributors to expose culture and society’s inconclusive relation with the creative process, and questions assumptions about authorship, plagiarism and originality. Keywords in Remix Studies is a resource for scholars, including researchers, practitioners, lecturers and students, interested in some or all aspects of remix studies. It can be a reference manual and introductory resource, as well as a teaching tool across the humanities and social sciences.
Cover concept by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher and xtine burrough
Cover image: DJHughman
I have not posted for many months, the reason being that I have been working on several writing projects. One of them will be released very soon. The cover for Keywords in Remix Studies, to be published by Routledge later this year, has been released. I am so happy to have been able to collaborate once again with xtine burrough and Owen Gallagher. I hope everyone finds the book of relevance in terms of remix as a creative field. Below is a brief description.
Keywords in Remix Studies consists of twenty-four chapters authored by researchers who share interests in remix studies and remix culture throughout the arts and humanities. The essays reflect on the critical, historical and theoretical lineage of remix to the technological production that makes contemporary forms of communication and creativity possible. Remix enjoys international attention as it continues to become a paradigm of reference across many disciplines, due in part to its interdisciplinary nature as an unexpectedly fragmented approach and method useful in various fields to expand specific research interests. The focus on a specific keyword for each essay enables contributors to expose culture and society’s inconclusive relation with the creative process, and questions assumptions about authorship, plagiarism and originality. Keywords in Remix Studies is a resource for scholars, including researchers, practitioners, lecturers and students, interested in some or all aspects of remix studies. It can be a reference manual and introductory resource, as well as a teaching tool across the humanities and social sciences.
Figure 1: View of prints 1 and 2 from the “Regenerative Culture Series” at the Palmer Museum, Penn State
During the Fall of 2016, I participated in the group exhibition “Expanded Practice” at the Palmer Museum, Penn State. The exhibit took place between October 18 and December 11. I showed a series of prints titled “Regenerative Culture Series.” The actual set consists of eight prints. I decided to show six of eight because this made sense for the space. All of the prints can be viewed on their respective webpage available on my site.
Figure 2: Side view of prints 1 and 2 of “Regenerative Culture Series” at the Palmer Museum, Penn State
Here is the description of the print series (from the project’s website):
The prints consist of images taken from the web using Google. The images were chosen because they include text that corresponds with a word that is part of a sentence, which in turn is part of a theoretical essay. Some images are altruistic compositions, while others are advertisements and logos among other things.
A specific word or group of words are highlighted in the text of each image in order to create a sentence, which can be read when viewing each composite from left to right. Each of the sentences forming the eight composites are taken from my 2015 essay “Regenerative Culture,” which is a critical reflection on network culture.
The composites are designed to present a tension that opens both image and text for a critical reading of the slippage of meaning in the flow of networked production.
Figure 3: Image 3 through 6 of “Regenerative Culture Series” at the Palmer Museum, Penn State
I was very happy to be part of the exhibit, which, in my view, showed the diverse practice taking place across the different programs in the School of Visual Arts. An article on the collegian published some opinions by the faculty.
Figure 4: Side view of Image 3 through 6 of “Regenerative Culture Series” at the Palmer Museum, Penn State
Figure 5: “Mobile Communication”
Sentence: We can communicate with anyone and experience content using a mobile device while walking, riding a train, or flying in an airplane.
I am very happy to share news about my book Spate: A Navigational Theory of Networks. Published by The Institute of Network Cultures (INC). The book is free for download; a print copy can also be ordered online.
Spate: a Navigational Theory of Networks is a critical and theoretical reflection on networked communication, developed with repurposed tweets (@poemita) posted between 2010 and 2014. The original tweets, which were written as critical commentary about online communication and information exchange, have been rewritten from different points of view to develop five chapters. The five chapters function as an anti-story about multiple perceptions within a decentralized network.
I want to thank the Geert Lovink, Miriam Rasch, Leonieke van Dipten, and Léna Robin at The Institute of Network Cultures for supporting the realization of Spate.
«Information is not knowledge». (Albert Einstein). Linkedin maps data visualization. Picture: Luc Legay/Flickr. (see Norient for context)
Regenerative Knowledge was written between June and October 2015. It was published on Norient in five parts between March and June 2016. I want to thank Thomas Burkhalter and Theresa Beyer for editing the essay and making it available on Norient’s academic journal. In this essay I update the definitions of remix with an emphasis on the regenerative remix. I argue that constant updating is becoming ubiquitous, which is much more evident a year after the essay was written. A short version titled “Im/material Regeneration” was published in print as part of Seismographic Sounds in 2015.
Cultural production has entered a stage in which archived digital material can potentially be used at will;[1] just like people combine words to create sentences (just like this sentence is written with a word-processing application), in contemporary times, people with the use of digital tools are able to create unique works made with splices of other pre-recorded materials, with the ubiquitous action of cut/copy & paste, and output them at an ever-increasing speed.[2] This is possible because what is digitally produced in art and music, for instance, once it becomes part of an archive, particularly a database, begins to function more like building blocks, optimized to be combined infinitely.[3] This state of affairs is actually at play in all areas of culture, and consequently is redefining the way we perceive the world and how we function as part of it. The implications of this in terms of how we think of creativity and its relation to the industry built around authorship are important to consider for a concrete understanding of the type of global culture we are becoming.
In what follows, I evaluate situations and social variables that are important for a critical reflection on how elements flow and are assembled according to diverse needs for expression of ideas and informational exchange. I begin by elaborating on what I previously defined as the regenerative remix,[4] which is specific to the time of networked media, to then relate it to speech in terms of sound and textual communication. I then provide examples that make evident the future trends already manifested in our times. Because digital media consists in large part in optimizing the manipulation of experience-based material that before mechanical reproduction went unrecorded, the aim of this analysis, in effect, is to evaluate how ephemerality is redefined when image, sound, and text are digitally produced and reproduced, and efficiently archived in databases in order to be used for diverse purposes. In other words, what happens when what in the past was only ephemeral is turned into an immaterial exchangeable element, and most often than not some type of commodity? To begin in what follows I analyze how the regenerative remix functions as a type of bridge to a future in which constant updates and pervasive connectivity will become ubiquitous in all aspects of life.
[1] This is a reasonable proposition as long as the person has access to the material. Some archives are evidently password protected. The person has to be also in a position to exert such an act, and this is linked to economics and class that define the person’s reality. I am not able to go into this issue in this text as its focus is on how sampling is functioning in terms of regeneration.
[2] This is already evident in the fact that the time it takes to produce just about any cultural apparatus has been shortened exponentially since the industrial revolution. Futurist Alvin Toffler makes a case with his term “The 800th Lifetime.” The much criticized Ray Kurzweil, who currently is affiliated with Google, also makes a case for exponential growth, arguing that Moore’s Law will be superseded in 2020, and we will enter a new paradigm of innovation. See, Alvin Toffler, “The 800th Lifetime,” Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1970), 9-10. Ray Kurtzweil, “Ray Kurzweil Announced Singularity University,” Ted Talks, Last updated February 2009: https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_announces_singularity_university#t-188322.
[3] My use of the term “building blocks” is influenced by the work of Manuel De Landa, who discusses language in relation to biology and geology. I refer to his work throughout this essay. See Manuel De Landa“Linguistic History: 1000 – 1700 A.D.,” A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 183 – 190.
[4] Eduardo Navas, “Remix[ing] Theory,” Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (New York: Springer, 2012), 101-108.
“Keywords: A Remix of Culture and Society” is an online project which takes all of the terms that Raymond Williams published in his book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford, 1976), and provides the top search results on Google. The principle behind this project is to evaluate how the terms Williams considered important in order to understand culture and society in the middle of the twentieth century currently flow on the Web.
Minima Moralia Redux, a selective remix of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, enters a second phase in 2015. This was not foreseen when I began the project back in 2011, because the work is not only a work of art, but also research on data analytics, as well as a critical reflection on networked culture.
The first part of Minima Moralia Redux (entries one to fifty), consisted of updating Theodor Adorno’s aphorisms–that is to remix them as contemporary reflections of the way global society and culture is engaging with emerging technology. When I finished the first section, I realized that the project’s aesthetics were changing. This was for a few reasons. In terms of research, the first section provided more than enough data for me to data-mine Adorno’s approach to writing; therefore, I came to see no need in following this methodology. I plan to make my findings about this aspect public in a formal paper in the future.
A Modular Framework: Beyond Tautological History
Essay written for the exhibition A Modular Framework
CCESV, El Salvador
November 9 –December 17, 2010.
by Eduardo Navas
Note: This essay was written for the exhibition A Modular Framework, which took place at the Cultural Center of Spain in El Salvador, November 9 – December 17, 2010. The catalog was never published due to limitation of funds. I considered publishing this essay in art journals focused on Latin American Art, but the response by some was that it was either too specific and could not fit their specific theme at the moment, or that it read too much like an exhibition catalog essay which would not sit well outside of the context for which it was originally written. It has been nearly five years since I wrote the text, and I have decided to release it online, as part of my general research shared on Remix Theory. I am doing this because I believe that it is fair for the artists who participated in the exhibition to have access to the writing I produced. I also think that what I write in terms of critical theory and postcolonial studies may be of interest to people invested in Latin American Art.
Some of the issues raised in terms of the history of new media and Latin America may have changed since I wrote the essay in 2010. I leave it unchanged because I don’t see the point in updating the cultural context given that the exhibit was curated to reflect on the issues at play in 2010. Below is an excerpt. The full text can be downloaded in PDF format.
___________
A Modular Framework is an exhibition that brings together artists from Latin America, or artists who have ties to Latin America, and have been producing new media work since at least the mid-nineties, when new media and digital art began to take shape. Most of the works included in the exhibition are recent, and were chosen as examples of diverse and rigorous art practices. The artists, themselves, while they crossover into art practice at large, are pioneers in digital and new media art in their own countries and for this reason they were invited to participate in the exhibition.
A Modular Framework is the first of its kind in the Central American Region, and as such its purpose is to better acquaint the local culture with new media and digital art practice. At the same time, the exhibit is designed as a marking point, as a fragmentary modular assessment of the rich production of new media art by a specific set of artists who share similarities in their approach to the medium of digital art as a proper practice. The works included comment in one way or another on interconnectivity and possibilities of communication by exploring diverse interests in politics and aesthetics. This diverse activity is the result of a long process of art production that is intertwined with global culture. For this reason, before examining each of the selections, it is necessary to briefly outline the relation of new media and digital art practice in contemporary art history.
The Context of New Media and Digital Art
The type of work produced in new media and digital art is often linked by art and media historians to an interdisciplinary practice defined by the interest to move outside of the gallery as previously explored during the seventies with site-specific art, and especially conceptual and performance art. Of these three, conceptualism has been more often presented as a predecessor of new media and digital art practice. During the nineties, the Internet was viewed by emerging artists, who had online access, as a space in which to present work outside of not only the gallery but also their immediate locality. Such developments have influenced how new media works are currently presented as objects of art in a physical space. The works included in A Modular Framework reflect on this process, from different starting points.
