Image and text source: masternewmedia.org

This is an absolutely great cultural marketing initiative, spreading valuable passages from some of the best classical writings in remixes and mashups completely created by users. Penguin Books has in fact made available a good number of audio recordings containing the voices of some popular actors reading through classical passages. Users can freely download the recordings and remix them with music and sounds in any way they like.

The results are nothing short of astonishing.

In my personal view this has got to be one of the best ways to get exposure to the classics for today’s youth. Not only. It is my personal conviction and experience that by listening to the spoken word when associated to repetitive and not dominant music patterns the human brain can memorize and remember those words much more effectively.

Don’t think so? Give it a try:

http://www.penguinremixed.co.uk/site/

Image source: http://www.markamerika.com/ica/
Text source: http://www.uni-erfurt.de/kommunikationswissenschaft

Date: uncertain

What does it mean to be a net artist? Is it a life? A style? A practice? One way to think about the growing con/fusion of net art and net lit is as a continually emergent dialogue. You see someone’s web site in Brazil and send them an email from a vacation spot in Hawaii telling them how much you admire their work — and a dialogue is born. This dialogue branches into more emails, web sites, symposiums and exhibitions. Soon, you have an instantaneously delivered multi-linear thread of narrative-potential being practiced as a form of social networking. Is this the story? Is it conceptual? Literary? Performative? What happens when the conversants agree to let the dialogues go public? Is this an activist recording or archiving of an ultra-contemporary art scene that defies categorization? Who owns it? Who buys it? Perhaps it’s a kind of creative mindshare.

I email Eugene Thacker because I am interested in what he is doing. I ask him if would like to engage in a net.dialogue, somewhere between net.lit and net.art but without all of the didactic propaganda associated with both of those terms. He writes back from New York saying he’s game and so we start sending emails back and forth and soon I put the data into an automated editing environment I call “Mark Amerika’s Brain While It Listens to MP3 Jukebox Recordings and Interacts With Whatever Software He Happens To Have Opened Up On His Screen.”

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Birth of a Nation, Film still. Source: about.com

Text source: Colostate.edu

CCCC 2006

Latterrell defined her role in the panel by explaining her presentation is a collage and sampling of other voices so it is about remix as much as it is a remix. “Remix” is a modern metaphor for revision. She colored this point with examples of customized sneakers, the tuxedo t shirt, the tangelo, sprite remix, and my personal favorite, labradoodles. She then paired a quote by Emerson on quotation and originality with a remix of President Bush’s State of the Union address that reversed his intended meanings. The collage of images and quotes continues with animation of Office Space meets Super Friends in which Superman, Green Lantern, Batman and Robin talk about memos and office procedures in what Latterell called a “classic mash up” or sampling. Next she showed DJ Spooky’s “Rebirth of a Nation” which spoofed D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation by showing clansmen almost dancing to the technorhythms from both soundtrack and visual beats. Sampling, Latterell asserts, implies breakdown. Then she quoted Johndan Johnson-Eilola from his book, Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work where he asserts breakdown and further discussion as the essence of remix. Latterell concluded with the idea that Lawrence Lessig asserted at last year’s conference—everything in life is remix.
James Porter, “Forget Plagiarism, Teach Filesharing and Fair Use”

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William Burroughs by Jenny Long
Image source: theartark.com
Text Source: UbuWeb

At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. Andr Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this pointhad no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

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