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…)
Note: Cybernetics and its popularization under the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) never went away. Now the possibility of Artificial Intelligence promoted under the term “singularity” appears will become a reality in less than fifty years in large part because of its promise for the efficiency, balance, and cohesion of culture. The real incentive is, of course, global economics.
On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I’ve Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.
On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.
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?
This is a snippet from my review of Form + Code. You can read the entire text on Vodule.
Excerpt:
Form and Code in Design, Art and Architecture, as the book’s cover proposes, is a “guide to computational aesthetics.” As such it lives up to its promise, which one must accept with the understanding that the authors selected projects that are, in their view, representative of larger movements.
Form + Code, co-authored by Casey Reas, Chandler McWilliams, and Lust, released in the Fall of 2010, gives equal attention to textual as well as visual language. This could not be accomplished without the careful treatment of image and text as complementary forms of communication. For this reason it makes sense that Lust, a design studio based in The Hague, is given equal credit as co-author.
In fact, the book’s innovation largely lies on its design, which, at first glance, may appear to be that of a small coffee table publication. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes evident that Form + Code exudes expertise from practitioners who do not profess to be interested in making theoretical or historical propositions, but instead want to share their knowledge on how to be creative in computing and the arts. The book’s honesty is its strength. However, such honesty narrows somewhat the book’s potential to become a definite reference for computational aesthetics. Before I get to the latter, I must emphasize the former.
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).
I recently wrote about the use of social media for real change in Egypt. I explained in that entry that it is up to people to use social media critically–to appropriate it for issues that go beyond entertainment. As I also explained in that entry as well as a text I released online previously, titled After the Blogger as Producer, the problem with micro-blogging (and Twitter) is that it encourages its users to write in a way that is not viable for critical thinking.
Surely enough, the New York Times on February 20, 2011 published the story, Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter, in which Verne Kopytoff explains that the new generation is no longer using blogs as much, but mainly Twitter and Facebook to communicate and share things of interest buy augmentin online with their friends. Some of these users don’t event write, but simply share photos or brief statements, casually.
It appears that we have entered a stage in which people are quite aware of the different ways in which social media can be used. Evidence of this is Tweet4Action, an artwork by Les Liens Invisibles, recently released and supported by Turbulence.org. The art project was developed as critical commentary on the use of social media in revolutions. Art usually fuels and spearheads change, but this artwork, unfortunately, lags. It may be due to a certain degree of sarcasm that one may sense, which in this case can be read as a weakness of the work. Tweet4Action does not make one question the role of social media. It makes me say, “so, and…”
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.
“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.
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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.
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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.
Image: Composite image of four YouTube video remixes. From top left to bottom right appear thumbnail montages of Charleston — Original Al & Leon Style!!, Charles Style, Charleston Mirror, and Charleston Mix. Larger images of the montages with proper explanation are included below as part of this introduction to my initial research on viral videos.
What follows is a brief introduction of my preliminary interest on video remixes and how I plan to use cultural analytics to evaluate their evolution on YouTube. My current research consists of various elements, some which I will not introduce at length today, but will only mention to contextualize the use of video grid montage as an analytical tool.
Note: What better way to begin the new year than to point out the ongoing development of convergence. The NYTimes survey by David Carr revisits developments I noted two years ago: On Content and Form: 2009 Forecast and Further Reflections on Content and Form; both posts are comments on articles also published on the NYTimes. It looks like the multipurpose tablet (iPad and its growing competitors) may well become the new fetish through which information will be accessed in mashup form, as Carr proposes.
For years, those of us who toiled in the backwater of media reporting — covering people who cover other people — were left to trace the slow-motion decline of mainstream media and the inconsequential pratfalls of nascent digital efforts.
Click through a few years and suddenly the media landscape looks profoundly altered and punished, like a place where a serious earthquake was followed by a tsunami. News about the news business, once a rare commodity, now comes out of a fire hose, with many days bringing yet another shift in old paradigms.
Two-year-old Web sites are worth more than 50-year-old magazines, storied newspapers are now owned by their lenders, cable news has been upended by partisan shouters, social media now preoccupies attention that used to be owned by mainstream producers, and that television screen in the family den is just one of the numerous screens people are staring at.
So let’s stipulate that the sky is falling and will continue to do so. Rather than look back at the creative destruction that has taken place, I thought it would be worthwhile to click on the future. Here, in no particular order — because the way forward is paved with chaos — are some of the developments you and I will be talking about in the coming year.
