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.
My Essay “Machine Learning and Remix: Self-Training Selectivity in Digital Practice” has been published in the anthology Studies in the Arts, edited by Thomas Gartmann and Michaela Schäuble. The essay was initially written in 2019, and I am very happy to finally see the publication released. I thank the editors and peer reviewers for their generous feedback during the long peer review process. You can find a direct link to my essay as part of the publication’s website.
In this essay, I focus on the emerging role of machine learning as an integral part of the elements of selectivity and remix in art and music. I first discuss how selectivity forms part of communication, to then consider its increasing importance in creativity. I then evaluate how machine learning is implemented by artists for the production of works in ways that revisit questions of authorship as an individual and collective practice in terms of metacreativity – a delegation of workmanship from humans to automation. In closing, emerging artificial intelligence’s agency is reflected upon as the paradigm of metacreativity continues to be established.
My book Art, Media Design, and Postproduction: Open Guidelines on Appropriation and Remix (Routledge 2018) is now available on hardback, paperback, and ebook. I want to thank the entire team at Routledge for making the publication process an energetic and positive experience. This book is the result of my long term engagement with remix in terms of theory and practice as both scholar and practitioner. Below is the backcover description along with reviews by Jay David Bolter, DJ Spooky, and David J. Gunkel. I give more specific thanks in the book to many people that helped me along the way. I hope the book will be of interest to everyone who finds remixing an important and vital form of creative expression for global communication. Photos documenting the moment I received my personal copies are available on my Twitter feed.
From the back cover:
Art, Media Design, and Postproduction: Open Guidelines on Appropriation and Remix offers a set of guidelines for art and design studio-based projects. The creative application of appropriation and remix are now common across creative disciplines due to the ongoing recycling and repurposing of content and form. Consequently basic elements which were previously exclusive to postproduction for editing image, sound and text, are now part of daily communication. This in turn pushes artists and designers to reconsider their creative methodologies.
Author Eduardo Navas divides his book into three parts: Media Production, Metaproduction, and Postproduction. The chapters that comprise the three parts each include an introduction, goals for guidelines of a studio-based project, which are complemented with an explanation of relevant history, as well as examples and case studies. Each set of guidelines is open-ended, enabling the reader to repurpose the instructional material according to their own methodologies and choice of medium. Navas also provides theoretical context to encourage critical reflection on the effects of remix in the production of art and design.
Art, Media Design, and Postproduction: Open Guidelines on Appropriation and Remix is the first book of guidelines to take into account the historical, theoretical, and practical context of remix as an interdisciplinary act. It is an essential read for those interested in remix studies and appropriation in art, design and media.
Reviews
“Art, Media Design, and Postproduction is the perfect synthesis of practice and theory. It provides sensible guidelines and engaging exercises in the aesthetics of remix and appropriation. It also offers a sophisticated framework for appreciating the history and theory of remix. An indispensable text for every theorist, artist, or designer interested in this key aspect of contemporary media culture.” -Jay David Bolter, Georgia Institute of Technology
“This collection of writings on the immensity of remixing, sampling, collage and the other recombinant arts is sly, fresh, and relentlessly engaging. It reaffirms the resiliency of the artistic imagination in an era of digital overload. Read it as a guide for the perennially optimistic in a very cynical and dark time.” -Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
“In this ground-breaking book, Eduardo Navas puts Remix Theory to work, providing readers with a practical guide to thinking remix by doing remix. He expertly stages innovative engagements with content creation practices that are designed not just to be read but to be used and reused in new and revealing ways.” -David J. Gunkel, Northern Illinois University
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.
“Rhetoric and Remix: Reflections on Adorno’s Minima Moralia” was published as part of The Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, Volume 7, Issue 2/3. I want to thank David Beard and Lisa Horton for including my work in a special issue focusing on remix. The essays comprised in the volume are written by important scholars who often focus on remix. I am honored to be part of this collection. Below are the first few paragraphs of my essay. You may download the actual document from the journal’s website. I also make it available on Remix Theory for download.
Rhetoric broken down to its most basic element can be called “the art of speaking well.”[1] In terms of contemporary times, it could be rewritten as “the art of remixing well,” given that we are able to extend our views using pre-existing material almost in real time using different media formats. Remix [and rhetoric] is the use of all media for communication by way of appropriation, repurposing, copying and mimicking.
Scott Church explains that the process of selection in remix is rhetorical because the remixer chooses a sample over another.[2] This is an act of selectivity that is vital to contemporary forms of production, whether they be highly acclaimed works of art, or a basic e-mail message that includes pasted content that a person may want to share with another person. My remix of Minima Moralia, which I titled Minima Moralia Redux, from this standpoint is a rhetorical work that, by way of appropriation, updates Adorno’s book as an online project.[3]
Minima Moralia Redux functions as both a work of art and a data analytics research project, which enables me and I hope can help others in understanding how individuals develop works that appear to be autonomous and credited to a single person, but which in reality are only possible because many people are willing to share ideas and resources. It is my hope that we can eventually move past ideas of single authorial works to more open approaches that do justice to the way culture is actually produced in terms of collective knowledge exchange. For this reason, the following focuses on how I appropriate and remix Adorno’s work. I do not discuss his critical position in detail, although I do mention it to contextualize the remix process.
I posted Minima Moralia’s Redux’s first entry on October 16, 2011. The goal, at the time, was to write an entry every week until the 153 aphorisms comprising Adorno’s book were remixed. The initial goal was to finish the project within three years, but as things developed, it became evident that it would take much longer to finish. As I did research on Adorno, I inevitably developed related interests and ideas that took me in other directions, and led to different projects and publications. For this reason, at the time of this writing (2017) I am about half way through Adorno’s 153 aphorisms, and it is not clear when I will eventually finish remixing his book. But for now I can reflect on how the project started, where it stands, and how what I have produced can be reconsidered in terms of remix and rhetoric.
[1] This is a direct quote by the Roman rhetorician Quintillian which was previously quoted in an essay that discusses the relation of rhetoric and remix at length, see Scott H. Church, “A Rhetoric of Remix,” The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, eds. Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, xtine Burrough (New York: Routledge, 2014), 43.
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.
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.
Image: Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy, “Grid Sequence Me and The Sea is a Smooth Space,” 2013, Three Channel Projection Dimensions variable, Flashpoint Gallery, Washington D.C., Photographs by Brandon Webster
The following essay was published in Joelle Dietrick’s and Owen Mundy’s art catalog survey of their ongoing art collaboration titled Packet Switching, published at the end of 2014. A PDF of the actual catalog is available for download. I want to thank Joelle and Owen for inviting me to write about their work, which, as the essay should make evident, I consider an important contribution to contemporary media art practice.
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Joelle Dietrick’s and Owen Mundy’s ongoing body of work titled Packet Switching focuses on the relation among information exchange, architecture, and social issues. They examine and appropriate the action of data transfer across networks to show the major implications that these three cultural elements have at large. Packet Switching, in technical terms, is straight-forward; it is designed to be practical, to transfer information over a network, broken into small pieces at point A then to be sent to point B, where it is put back together. Each packet does not necessarily take the same route, and may even go through different cities around the world before it gets to its final destination. The technology that makes this possible was first introduced as a strategic tactic by the U.S. Government to win The Cold War.
Throughout the 1950s and 60s the relation between the military and research universities was the foundation of our contemporary networked culture.[1] Packet switching was used to send information from and to various centers across the United States. Such a decentralized system of intelligence was developed in case of a Soviet Attack. The network used for this information exchange eventually became the foundation of the Internet.[2] It is evident that delivering information from point A to point B was politically motivated, and in this sense its cultural implementation was pre-defined by the struggle for global power.
Figure 1: selected shots from Capote (left) and In Cold Blood (right).
Interdisciplinary Digital Media Studio is a class in the IDS program in The School of Visual Arts (SoVA) at Penn State in which students are introduced to methodologies and conceptual approaches of media design. For the class, I taught them how to research and develop design presentations with the implementation of data analytics for moving images and texts.
One of the assignments consisted in analyzing the films Capote (2005) directed by Bennett Miller and In Cold Blood (1967) directed by Richard Brooks in relation to their corresponding books, Capote by Gerald Clarke and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. We viewed the films in class, and read, both, the novel and the biography. The class then analyzed the respective books by doing word searches, analysis of specific passages, and creative approaches by the respective authors, to then evaluate those searches in relation to the films. For the films I provided montage visualizations, which are selected screen shots representative of all the scenes (figures 2 and 3).
Figure 1: The five most repeated words from 2010-2013. The words and lines above show their recurrence in relation to each other throughout the corpus. See analysis of this and other charts below.
Poemita began in 2010. It means little poem in Spanish. The basic premise was to experiment with tweets as new forms of writing. I eventually decided to use it as a resource (think of it as data mulch) for various projects. Some of the tweets are being repurposed as short narratives, which I have not released. Poemita was actually preceded by writing I developed for my video [Re]Cuts, a project influenced by William Burroughs’s cut-up method. I am in the process of producing a second video that uses actual tweets from Poemita.
I worked on Poemita on and off, sometimes not posting for months at a time. In fact, I don’t have a single post for the year 2011. But during the month of August 2014, I realized that Poemita has been a project that is closely related to my ongoing remix of Theodor Adorno’s work in Minima Moralia Redux. It could be thought of as a negative version of that project (I am using the term “negative” here in dialectical terms). To allude to this relation, I inverted the color scheme for the word cloud visualizations of Poemita to be the opposite of Minima Moralia Redux’s. Poemita takes the concept of the aphorism as Adorno practiced it and tries to make the most of each tweet. Most of the postings are well under 140 characters, and they all try to reflect critically on different aspects of life and culture. I try to do this creatively, and write content that may appear difficult to understand, but ultimately may not even make sense; the aim is to create the possibility for the reader to see things that would not be possible otherwise. In short it is an experiment in creative writing, and this is why the project was titled Poemita.
I may not be able to post consistently, but I will certainly be posting tweets more regularly then before. And I will eventually be repurposing the tweets in different ways to explore how context and presentation along with selectivity are ultimately major elements in the creative act. This will become clear as I release the tweets in different formats in the future. This, in essence, is a way of remixing data.
To reflect on where this project is going, I decided to analyze it as I would other texts to understand how it is constructed, and to evaluate the type of patterns that may be at play in my online writing. What follows, then, is a set of studies of the tweets for the years 2010, 2012 and 2013. I will be releasing analysis of 2014 later, after the year is over.
First, it is worth looking at word clouds for the three years:
Figure 2: Word cloud of tweets for 2010
Figure 3: Word cloud for tweets of 2012
Figure 4: Word cloud for tweets of 2013
Figure 5: Word cloud of tweets from 2010-2013.
We can note the top four or five words for each cloud for the respective years of 2010, 2012, and 2013 and consider how they eventually become part of the larger cloud for all of the years of 2010-2013. The number of occurrences could be accounted for yearly, but for the current purpose of this analysis, it should be sufficient to evaluate the number of words in the largest cloud for all three years (figure 5).
In the cloud above (figure 5), then, there are a total of a 1,712 words and 863 unique words. The most used words besides articles and prepositions appear much larger. These words appear the following number of times in the actual body of the text:
The word trend chart at the top of this page (figure 1) shows how these words relate to each other in terms of writing sequence. If you were to choose a particular node, you would be taken to the actual text and shown how the word appears in its context. The tool I used to this word analysis is Voyant. Seeing the words in a diagram provides a visual idea of how they relate to each other within the actual writing.
This gives a sense of repetition, and may even allude to certain interests in terms of content and ideas within the corpus of the text, but it does not provide a clear sense of how the words actually function, or under what context they recur. For this, the way the words are used in actual sentences can be mapped. In the following word trees, the top five words (in order of times repeated), Time, Thought, Sound, Space, and Thoughts are linked to all the phrases that follow them:
Figure 6: The word “time” linked to the phrases that come after it. Click on the image to view a larger file.
Figure 7: The word “thought” linked to the phrases that come after it. Click on the image to view a larger file.
Figure 8: The word “sound” linked to the phrases that come after it. Click on the image to view a larger file.
Figure 8: The word “space” linked to the phrases that come after it. Click on the image to view a larger file.
Figure 9: The word “thoughts” linked to the phrases that come after it. Click on the image to view a larger file.
The word trees above show how each of the words are implemented to create particular statements. At this point, it is possible to make certain assessments. Let’s take the word “thoughts” (figure 9). We can see that three out of five times it comes at the end of the sentences. We can also note that the exception to this is a reflective statement: “thoughts of grandeur.” Let’s take a look at the word “thought” (figure 7) and we can notice that it is part of a much more complex set of phrases. Two times, the word is part of the branching recurrences “Improvisation fills one with…” and “the very thought of…” But notice that in the last one thought is also followed by a period.
Finally, we can consider the words that come before these words. Let’s take the word “thought” for a brief example. For this we can use voyant:
At this point we can get a full sense of how the word recurs and how it functions each time it appears. This approach puts me in the position to evaluate what similarities and differences their implementation may share in order to evaluate particular tendencies I may have in my writing.
We could go on and examine the other top words in the same way, but this is enough to make my point. It becomes evident that how the word “thought” and its plural “thoughts” are used has much variation in the creative approach in terms of twitting. At least, I, as the actual writer, become aware of the way that I tend to relate to the singular and plural instantiation. This in the end is a reflective exercise that enables me to be critically engaged in understanding my own tendencies as a writer. I plan to use this analytic approach to further the possibilities of writing tweets that can offer a lot more content just under 140 characters.
One of the issues that I assess in all this is the role of repetition. One may think that repetitive occurrences are bad for creativity, but in practice, it is through repetition that we come to improve our craft and technique in any medium. In terms of how words are used or repeated, with analytical exercises like this one, a writer can come to understand how certain words recur and under what context, to then decide if to implement them differently or omit them altogether in future writing.
I certainly was not thinking that I would use these words the most when I began writing in 2010. They appear to recur and I’m not sure why, but the point is that now I can use this awareness to improve my own creative process.
This analysis can get very detailed, obviously, but this should be enough at this point. This is just a brief sample of how I am data-mining my own writing to also develop other projects by remixing the content. I will also be mining twitter postings to evaluate how what I learn in this focused project may or may not appear to be at play in the way online communities communicate.
