VJam Theory (collective writings on realtime visual performance) presents the major concerns of practitioners and theorists of realtime media under the categories of performance, performer and interactors, audiences and participators. The volume is experimental in its attempt to produce a collective theoretical text with a focus on a new criticality based on practitioner/artist theory in which artist/practitioners utilise theoretical models to debate their practices. For more information visit www.vjtheory.net
Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky is a multitasker. He is known for his music productions, as well as his art and film projects. He also has been writing about art and culture for many years. In the last few years, Miller has worked with Trojan Records to develop compilations about Reggae and Dub with a critical yet playful take on the complexities of Jamaica. Most recently, he edited Sound Unbound for MIT Press, a book which comprises a set of texts about the influence of sound in media and culture at large. In the following interview, DJ Spooky, discusses his current projects in a global context, and motivates us to move beyond basic binaries onto a more productive and creative state.
Eduardo Navas: In your most recent Recording Project “Creation Rebel” as well as “DJ Spooky Presents In Fine Style 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!” you write short historical essays about the culture of Reggae, Dub and the Big Sound System. You are also very careful to present your position as a cultural insider, given that you used to visit Jamaica as a kid; and you also state that you were approached by Trojan Records, rather than the other way around, which would otherwise place you, regardless of ethnicity, in a position of “explorer” or Neo-colonial. Based on all this can you explain how you see colonial ideology at play in Jamaica today?
DJ Spooky: The situation Jamaica faces today is part of a global cycle of hyper capitalism – even the Cayman Islands used to be part of Jamaica… anyway, yeah, the whole system is based on production models that privilege the “developed” economies over the “developing” ones. From Mugabe in Zimbabwe to Thabo Mbeki in South Africa, Kim Jong Il in North Korea, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Ahmadinejad in Iran, people in “developing” economies are faced with rulers just as flawed as anything the U.S. can summon up with people like Bush or Reagan. I tend to think that everything is connected. My Trojan records project is an exploration of the archives of one of my favorite record labels during a time of intense political upheaval. But it’s also about showing how people make music out of their circumstances.
*particle group* is a collective consisting of Principal Investigators Ricardo Dominguez and Diane Ludin, as well as Principal Researchers Nina Waisman (Interactive Sound Installation design)and Amy Sara Carroll, with a number of others flowing in and out. The collective draws from the hard and social sciences to develop installations that are critically engaged with the politics of science and its market. Their aim with the installation “Particles of Interest” is to shed light on the lack of regulation of nanoparticles in consumer goods. In the following interview the *particle group* shares its views on the current state of nanotechnology production, as well as a possible future that we may all be facing, in which nanomachines just might make difficult decisions for us.
[Eduardo Navas]: How does collaboration take place within the *particle group*? You describe members’ roles as Investigators and Researchers. Could you explain how these terms are relevant to each collaborator’s contribution to the project?
[*particle group*]: We mimic the structure of a research and development model for a university laboratory. By laboratory we mean a group of individuals who pursue conceptual investigations determined by a chronology of work that the Investigators have determined. Here, though, it should be noted that already we morph the template as Principal Investigators become Principle Investigators, homonymically signalling our investments in science’s narrative “engines of creation,” the aesthetic/ized practices and/or “naturalized” conceptualisms inherent in research, investigation, discovery and data transfer within scientific communities’ “normalized” articulations of self.
Generally the researchers participate from the beginning stages of materializing/performing/manifesting the work that the collective *particle group* eventually presents in counter/public spheres as varied as the art museum, the mall, and/or the scientific meeting. Researchers work in tandem with Investigators to develop their interpretations of the subject matter under investigation, augmentation, and/or erasure. So each time we are invited (or invite ourselves) to stage an iteration of our research, we meet and discuss via Skype or email what our intentions should be for the “performance.” To date we have had a different crew of researchers for each presentation so inherent in particle group’s particularization and particle-ization is a revolving/open door policy toward creative maelstroming. This project was produced in large part by Calit2, and so it made aesthetic sense to us to approach the project as would-be art(is)cientists and to stage a series of p(our)-us epistemologies (on the testbeds of these strange viroids of art and science) and not to see the gesture of art and science as two bunkers at war — but as possible thought-scapes of concern under the sign of “nano-ethics and nano-constructions.” Each one as blind as the other, each one helping the other over the rocking shoals of Particle Capitalism(s).
The installations “SPECFLIC 2.6” by Adriene Jenik, and “Particles of Interest” by *particle group*, on view at the gallery@calit2 from August 6 to October 2, 2008, ask the viewer to consider a not-so-distant future in which we will be intimately connected in networks not only through our computers, but also via nanoparticles in and on our very own bodies. Both projects respond to the pervasive mediation of information that is redefining human understanding of the self, as well as the concept of history, knowledge, and the politics of culture.
Information access to networked archives of books and other forms of publication previously only available in print is becoming the main form of research as well as entertainment. Access to music and video via one’s computer and phone as well as other hybrid devices has come to redefine human experience of media. From the iPhone to the Kindle, visual interfaces are making information access not only efficient in terms of time and money, but also in terms of spectacle. Accessibility usually consists of a combination of animation, video, image and text, informed in large part by the language of film and the literary novel.
So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine buy zovirax crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
Interactivos?’08-Madrid promoted Vision-play as a point of entry to reflect on how interactivity is redefining aesthetics in art particularly invested in emerging technologies. The Medialab-Prado website presented the two week work intensive series of events as a “workshop [that] aims to use open hardware and open code tools to create prototypes for exploring image technologies and mechanisms of perception.”[1]
To provide a rigorous contextual ground following this premise as a frame of reference for artists and collaborators, the Medialab organized a two day long conference in which artists presented their projects and scholars and writers presented papers focused on the ongoing changes of the image (vision-play) in contemporary art production. On the first day Marta Morales presented “Caída del juego: lo inaparente en la imagen” (Fall of the Game: The Inapparent in the Image), a text in which she explored the void of experience leaning towards the sublime in the work of Giacommeti; she examined his work from drawings to sculptures. I followed with “The Bond of Repetition and Representation,” in which I outlined previously introduced definitions of Remix and their links to the ongoing play between repetition and representation in digital media. Nadine Wanono then discussed her research on Visual Anthropology in “The Camera and The Perspective, as Tool and Metaphor.” In her talk she questioned the supposed objectivity of perspective, both formally and conceptually, when anthropologists study non-western cultures. Wanono’s presentation consisted of selected research she performed in Mali, West Africa, where she spent many years with the Dogon people. And the evening ended with Domingo Sarrey who presented “Cuadrats 40 años después” (Quadrats, 40 Years Later). Sarrey took the evening when he made many Spaniards in the audience aware about art and computer science explorations that took place in Madrid during the sixties. Sarrey was one of the first artists in Madrid to use the computer to develop drawings during that time period. (more…)
This text is a theoretical excerpt from one of my chapters on the role of Remix in Art. It outlines how the theories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on authorship are relevant to New Media, particularly their link to the interrelation of the user and the maker/developer in terms of sampling (a vital element of Remix as discourse). While the text does place a certain emphasis on art, the propositions extend to various areas of culture. It was previously presented as a lecture for ICAM at UCSD on April 6, 2005: http://navasse.net/icam/icam110_spring05_schedule.html
Remix is Meta
The act of remixing (which I refer to in terms of discourse as Remix) developed as a meta-action. Its specificity in the second half of the twentieth century can best be understood when realizing that the strategies by artists throughout the first half of the twentieth century had to be assimilated to then be recycled as part of the postmodern condition in the second half—a time when remix proper developed in music. The acts of collage, photomontage and the eventual development of mixed media had to be assimilated, not only by the visual arts, but also mainstream media for the concept of remixing to become viable in culture. Remix’s dependency on sampling questioned the role of the individual as genius and sole creator, who would “express himself.” Sampling, then, allows for the death of the author; therefore, it is no coincidence that around the time when remixes began to be produced, during the sixties and seventies, authorship—as discourse—was entertained by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, respectively. For them, “writing” in the sense that Rousseau would promote the expressive power of the individual no longer was possible. Sampling allows for the postmodern condition (which some consider to be part of modernism) to come through. To this aspect of sampling we will turn to in the next section. What follows is an outline of Barthes’s and Foucault’s respective theories which were conversant with contemporary art practice, during the period when both authors developed their theories, as it will become evident throughout my argument, their ideas are quite relevant to media culture.
The Role of Author and the Viewer
In his essay, “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes questions the concept of authorship. For him it is the text that speaks to the reader. He writes, “A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into relations of dialogue, parody and contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.”[1] With this statement he summarizes his argument that we should treat the text not as something coming from a specific person, but as something that takes life according to how the reader interprets the writing as a collage of diverse sources. For Barthes, it is the reader who holds the real potential to make discourse productive. He looks at specific authors, like Proust, Mallarme and Valery as authors who “Restore the place of the reader.”[2] The author ceases to matter for Barthes because only in this way can the text be set free, for to have “an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”[3] Barthes wants the reader to overthrow the myth of the author as “genius” as it has been promoted since the renaissance. For Barthes, the text’s unity is not in its origin but its destination. And only the reader can define that. It is the reader who completes it.
Michel Foucault also questions the role of the author in contemporary culture, but unlike Barthes, who only pointed out the necessity to shift our cultural attention from the author to the reader, Foucault concludes that even though the death of the author as a great individual has been claimed, the notions supporting such claim actually have only renegotiated the privilege in authorship.[4] To prove this Foucault examines two notions supporting contemporary discourse. The first is the concept of the work, which includes everything an author has written, and the second is the notion of writing, which during Foucault’s time and even in our times pretends to function autonomously. Foucault goes on to claim that this is not so and sets out to prove his point by explaining the definition of his own term “The author function.” Foucault considers the author function to provide a way of controlling discourse. This actually is not too different from how Barthes considers the idea of authorship being a way of limiting the possibilities of the text. The Author Function is a classificatory function.[5] It is not universal, although such discourse could be presented as such. The author function is not created by a single individual but rather it is a complex web of power shifts that leads up to the construct of the author.[6] The author function becomes clear when Foucault explains it in relation to Marx and Freud, two “authors” who created discourses following their names, Marxism and Freudianism (or psychoanalysis). Foucault reasons that these two authors developed concepts that were reevaluated by later generations. Such discourses can be changed which is not necessarily true for the field of the natural sciences, whenever one refers back to the origin of the argument to question it, as he explains, “A study of Galileo’s works could alter our knowledge of the history, but not the science, of mechanics; whereas a re-examination of the books of Freud and Marx can transform our understanding of psychoanalysis or Marxism.[7]
In other words, discourse as developed by an author can be changed. While Foucault went further than Barthes and explained the power dynamics supporting the author, he also agrees with Barthes that one day the author, or the “author function” for him, will disappear: “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions.”[8] One can notice hope in Foucault’s final statement for a time when a more democratic model would be at play; this has been a pronounced interest of artists and media researchers, and has provided fuel for the historical and neo-avant-garde to stay active since the beginnings of modernism. Barthes and Foucault’s reflections on authorship were already being put into action in their own time with Conceptual and Minimal art practices, which relied largely on appropriation and allegory to derive critical commentary. The notion of authorship which they examined can now be assessed, especially in relation to new media practice, which is largely dependent on the “reader” or user, as the participants are commonly called. This particular dynamic is actually an extension of sampling, which started during the early days of modernism with photography and music.
Sampling allows for the death of the author and the author function to take effect once we enter late capitalism, because “writing” is no longer seen as something truly original, but as a complex act of resampling and reinterpreting material previously introduced, which is obviously not innovative but expected in new media. Acts of appropriation are also acts of sampling: acts of citing pre-existing text or cultural products. (Let us extend the term “text” here to the visual arts and media at large.) This is the reason why citations are so necessary in academic writing, and certainly is something that is closely monitored in other areas of culture, like the music industry, where sampling is carefully controlled by way of copyright law. So, writing in the sense before the enlightenment no longer takes place. Instead, the careful choices of preexisting material made by authors in all fields are revered. Our most obvious example is the work of Duchamp (which I’ve cited in my definition of Remix[9] ), who understood this so well that he decided to simply choose readymades as opposed to trying to create art from scratch; he understood the new level of writing, or creating that was at hand in modernism, which entered a stage of meta—of constant reference, relying on the cultural cache of pre-existing material.
So writing’s and art’s true power is selectivity, and this comes forth today in sampling, a privileged symptom of the postmodern. The selectivity found in the death of the author and the author function as defined above is what makes the notion of interactivity easily assimilated because of sampling. For example, once cut/copy and paste is assimilated not only as a feature for the user to write her own texts, but also to reblog pre-existing material, the user then becomes more of an editor (a remixer) of material, by reblogging under a new context, as a new composition that allegorizes its sources. This possibility of selecting and editing to develop a specific theme according to personal interests plays a key role in how the art viewer, or new media user will relate to the person who produced the object of interaction. This shift, while redefining the concept of creativity and originality also develops new challenges for the media producer.
[1] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image Music Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” The History of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 299-314.
[5] Ibid, 305-307 .
[6] Ibid, 308-09.
[7] Ibid, 312.
[8] Ibid, 314.
[9] See: “Remix Defined,” Remix Theory < https://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3>.
The condition that marks the post-digital age may be the condition for error. In the condition where machinic systems seek the unforeseen and the emergent, there is also a possibility for the unforeseen error to slip into existence. This condition can be seen in the emerging tradition of artists using error as a creative tool. In his paper “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Music,” Kim Cascone points to the way in which composers, using digital means, exploit the inadequacies of a particular compositional or performative technology (Cascone 13). Cascone cites composers such as Ryoji Ikeda who create minimalist electronic compositions using media as both their form and theme. In these compositions, the errors, imperfections, and limitations of the particular compositional media are the central constituting elements of the piece. In addition to music, this glitch aesthetic is also exploited in the visual arts. Artists such as Tony Scott set up situations in which errors are able to emerge and be exploited in the art making process. In these types of work the artist’s role is to allow a glitch or an error to arise in a specific system, then to reconfigure and exploit the generative qualities of the unforeseen error.
The following is an interview published for the exhibition “Exposure” A Video Installation, Pre-9/11, at gallery@calit2.net, on view from April 10 to June 6, 2008. In this interview Sester’s views on Surveillance expose how elements of appropriation vital to Remix are at play in culture publicly, and which since 2001, have redefined privacy for the average person. This interview was originally published in conjunction with the text “Exposure” Pre-9/11.
Marie Sester is an artist born in France, currently living in Los Angeles. She was trained as an architect, but soon after receiving her degree realized that her real interest was in understanding the role of architecture as discourse in culture and politics. She found art an ideal space to develop her interdisciplinary projects. Sester sees her art practice as an ongoing process partly defined by a person’s desire to visualize certain things, while making others invisible. Throughout the 1990s, Sester explored how surveillance redefined our understanding of reality. In the following interview Marie Sester generously shares the story behind her three-channel installation, “Exposure,” explaining how her role as an artist allowed her access to information which she could not obtain today due to the security measures put in place after 9/11.
[Eduardo Navas]: You explain that you are interested in the concepts of transparency, visibility and access. Can you explain how these came to shape your project “Exposure” and your interest in surveillance?
[Marie Sester]: The situation that became a reality in the U.S. after 9/11 had been developing in Europe for some time. Bombing attacks were part of my reality in France, hijacking planes and taking passengers as hostages was something we lived with day to day. This was often done to ask for money, or demand for political prisoners to be released. Such unfortunate events were not part of U.S. reality.
Terrorism was already present in Europe. There were many individuals from small groups using what today we call terrorist strategies; it was at this time that surveillance devices were introduced. I was intrigued by this shift, which was a bit disturbing. As surveillance technology started to be introduced at the airport, it became normal to have one’s luggage X-ray scanned. It became common to find scanners at the airport, as well as government buildings like City Hall. The unexpected beauty of surveillance technology fascinated me.
Suddenly, there was a new form of presence and reality defined by these new devices. And I wanted to work with the images they produced. I had already been working with pre-made objects and images for some time. At that time I forged and assembled the notions of transparency, visibility and access and they are still the basis of my work. (more…)
Looking for material on Remix Culture, I recently ran into this two hour lecture by DJ Spooky at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Spooky beat juggles history to argue his position on sampling. From the Phonograph to the Jamaican Sound System, one gets a good sense of the potential creativity that Spooky and other promoters of Remix Culture believe in. Some of the questions at the end are quite interesting, and challenging. Definitely worth the 100 minutes of your time.
