Text and image source: Ubu Web
A video documentary combining exhibition footage of the Situationist International exhibitions with film footage of the 1968 Paris student uprising, and graffiti and slogans based on the ideas of Guy Debord (one of the foremost spokesmen of the Situationist International movement). Also includes commentary by leading art critics Greil Marcus, Thomas Levine, and artists Malcolm Mac Laren and Jamie Reid. Branka Bogdanov, Director and producer. NTSC-VHS 22 min. 1989Â
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.
Performance is so many things: the synchronized sounds of a symphony; actions with words in a play; steps and turns in a dance; words from a pulpit. Performance art, too, is variable, perhaps too multifarious to define, even with semicolons. At traditional performances with traditional support materials, from symphonies with program notes to theatre productions with playbills, performance acts as replay, a repeat of an event, a memorization of a string of notes or a set of lines, a reformulation of a tested formula. Then there are those performances that vary, that respond to the moment, that unfold through the implementation of chance or improvisation or, more and more, digitization. With the insertion of new technologies into performance, the question arises – do actions result from numbers? What indeed is the connection between the physical and the digital? Does the digital component determine the performance, or do actions generate a numeric pattern, which then underlies the piece’s structure?
After great comments and good conversations, i want to take a second stab at explaining the shift i was asking for wrt copyright and remix. My argument is that we stop thinking of remix as production, but as active consumption. Remix happens as a bi-product of consumption. What we’re remixing is culture and the active consumption of culture is part of identity development and living as a social creature in society.
Think about clothing consumption. Few people buy all of the items on the mannequin. You buy different pieces and mix and mash them. You might even decide to alter them by adding patches, by dying them, by cutting them up. You make the clothing yours. And then you share your consumption with the world by parading on the streets. In this way, you make the clothing tell your story. (tx Kevin Bjorke)
Standing quietly behind his chrome-encased digital turn tables, Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, affably channels the virtues of communism into the auditory world of music creation. As do many in DJ culture, Miller composes by sampling and remixing previously existing songs and images into an audio-visual collage all his own—essentially a de-privatization of the sonic landscape. But rather than adding drum lines to borrowed melodies and claiming the product as his own (see Diddy’s “I’ll Be Missing Youâ€), Miller completely reworks his source material into a creation entirely of his own making.
During the heyday of debates on post-modern, at least one critic in America noticed the connection between post-modern pastiche and computerization. In his book After the Great Divide (1986), Andreas Huyssen writes: “All modern and avantgardist techniques, forms and images are now stored for instant recall in the computerized memory banks of our culture. But the same memory also stores all of pre-modernist art as well as the genres, codes, and image worlds of popular cultures and modern mass culture.” [1] His analysis is accurate – except that these “computerized memory banks” did not really became commonplace for another fifteen years. Only when the Web absorbed enough of the media archives it became this universal cultural memory bank accessible to all cultural producers. But even for the professionals, the ability to easily integrate multiple media sources within the same project – multiple layers of video, scanned still images, animation, graphics, and typography – only came towards the end of the 1990s.
A big thanks to Gabriela Perez del Pulgar for taking, summarizing and revising the notes for publication. A very special thanks to Belen Gache and Gustavo Romano who organized the seminar.
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Resumen del taller
“El remix es un segundo mix de algo pre-existente, y el material que es mixeado por segunda vez necesita ser reconocido, de lo contrario, la obra podrÃa ser entendida erróneamente como algo nuevo, se volverÃa plagio.Sin una historia, el remix no puede ser Remix.â€
–EDUARDO NAVAS
Eduardo Navas, artista, historiador y escritor especializado en nuevos medios, compartió en este taller las lÃneas de investigación que actualmente realiza en torno al fenómeno de Remix Culture o Cultura Remix, presentando tanto sus propios trabajos como los de otros artistas y analizando los de los asistentes con el fin de reflexionar sobre la producción artÃstica ligada a los nuevos medios y las implicaciones del remix en la cultura contemporánea.
Abstract Digital art has expanded, challenged, and even redefined notions of public art and supported the concept of a networked commons. The nature of agency within online, networked “systems†and “communities†is crucial to these developments. Electronic networks enable exchange and collectivist strategies that can question existing structures of power and governance. Networks are public spaces that offer enhanced possibilities of interventions into the social world and of archiving and filtering these interventions over time in an ongoing process. Networked activism and tactical response as well as artistic practice that merges physical and virtual space and augments physical sites and existing architectures are among the practices that are important to the impact of digital public art on governance.
Abstract When the mobile phone was first introduced into Italy, it was considered an arrogant and vulgar technology used only by those at the top of society. Today, however, the mobile phone is used across all Italian social classes and is considered highly fashionable. This transformation in perceptions of this technology — and, therefore, its uses — can usefully be understood as, simultaneously, the democratization of the mobile telephone. One of the most important factors that made this technology more acceptable in Italian society was its redesign as a material object, undertaken in response to the actual needs and practices of users. Once individual users found their own identities and desires reflected in the mobile telephone, they were far more likely to incorporate this technology into their personal ecologies. Even though mobile telephones are very much the product of large industrial organizations, this case also demonstrates the contribution of users to design of the technological environment that then in turn governs their own behaviors.
JANNE VANHANEN: “Neuro-transmit me these empty sounds” — Chicks On Speed: “Panasonic Rip-off”.
The above caption is from a track built on an existing Pan(a)sonic piece. The Chix are probably referring to the “empty” quality of the sounds Pan(a)sonic music consists of: sine waves, test tones, crackles & claps arranged in a strict rhythmic grid. Your question made me think of the possibility of empty sounds, especially as I’ve recently been listening to German composer Ekkehard Ehlers’ “…plays Robert Johnson” and “…plays Albert Ayler” where he tackles the question of reference in digital music. The pieces don’t “play” their referents in the sense of having samples of their recorded work included, but try to refer to them on a more abstract level.
Ehlers states in The Wire (issue 212) that “‘Reference’ is a basic structure in digital music” and it seems he tries to subvert this referentiality. Can non-referential, “empty” sounds be produced in the context of referring machines (turntables, samplers, computers)? Of course this technology makes the concept of acousmatic music possible in the first place, “neuro-transmitting” sounds to listeners without the gesturality of a performer or awareness of the sound source.
