I read a Wall Street Journal article on Sunday July 20, titled “How to Control your Fears in a Fearsome Market.” The article by Jason Zweig was accompanied with the above image by artist Heath Hnegargner. The image is quite small online, but the WSJ’s print edition shows a much larger reproduction.
There are a few things that intrigue me about the image. First, there is no reference to Edvard Munch’s original work, The Scream. This could be because Munch’s work may be so ingrained in people’s minds that a citation of the original is no longer necessary.
Second, Hnegargner appropriates Munch’s image in the name of that which many consider the opposite of nature: modernity and its current aftermath in the global economic market. In the image above, the appropriated figure covers his ears in despair not because nature is screaming (as the original image is contextualized based on Munch’s writings), but because the world market is screaming. Such is the power of appropriation. Below is a reproduction of Munch’s painting, from 1893.
Remix Theory has a new section called Music Playlist, in which you can listen to music I’ve selected from Last.fm. Please feel free to listen to my growing music selection, and to also send me feedback as well as suggestions.
Image note: My partner, Annie, swiftly caught Gilberto Gil’s concert song list as this one was about to be thrown by one of the roadies at the end of the show.
I attended Gilberto Gil’s concert at the 4th & B in San Diego this past Monday. The turnout was quite impressive. I did not take my digital camera as I thought the audience was not allowed to take footage, but upon arriving, I noticed cameras everywhere; people were not hiding them and were using them freely, from cell-phones to small digital video-cams.
I later learned when reading an article in the Union Tribune that Gil actually promotes the recording of his concerts by the audience for later upload to video websites such as Youtube. Gil embraces new technologies as a way to communicate and spread his message, which as Brazil’s Minister of Culture includes a sense of responsibility for Brazil’s music history. It seems that Gil is fully in tune with Remix Culture.
Image taken by Annie Mendoza
He delivered a two hour strong set which included original material as well as covers. The songs that stood out are three of perhaps the most recognizable songs in the world: “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley, “Girl from Ipanema” by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and “Something” by the Beatles. He did a little twist on these songs to show the complexity of current global culture. “Three Little Birds” was played in Bossa Nova Style, “Girl from Ipanema” in Reggae, and “Something” was a fusion of both music genres.
Image taken by Annie Mendoza
Below are a number of links to Gilberto Gil’s concert in San Diego, so you can judge for yourself what a great performer Brazil’s Minister of Culture is.
Note: Diary of a Star was part of the exhibition “My [public] Space” in Amsterdam, from May 23 to June 21, 2008. The premise behind the exhibition in part follows the line of thought originally developed for Diary of a Star. Thanks to Petra Heck for including my work in the show.
Full text of exhibition follows below. Source: nimk.nl
May 16, 2008
With Twitter, a new application in Web 2.0, all you have to do is push a button to send a message to all the people you have promoted to your social network. The idea is that you indicate where you are, so that you can be ‘followed’ physically or mentally. The question is what need we have for a service like that. Do we really want to make everything public, known “and traceable”.
Andy Warhol was doing it already in the 1970s: showing and sharing as many insignificant details as possible. His magazine Interview was full of transcriptions of inane conversations; every telephone call was important enough to tape or write up. The desire ? and the means ? to be visible everywhere at all times was invented by Warhol in the same decade. With the arrival of Web 2.0 the internet makes this possible for everybody, not just for superstars like Edie Sedgwick, who in Warhol’s Screentest films doesn’t do much more than smoke, chatter and sneeze: nothing special. Forty years later there are suddenly millions of people watching television programs like Big Brother, in which people off the street are filmed sleeping, eating and talking about not much in particular.
With the advent of Web 2.0 powerful media are no longer necessary for realizing a relative ?15 minutes of fame?. Bloggers (webloggers) report every detail of their lives in an online diary that anybody can call up and read on their computer. The difference between an online blog and an old-fashioned diary is that online the content is being revealed for an unknown audience. The dividing line between private and public gets blurred. The text can be rather personal, while still functioning in the public domain. Since bloggers are implicitly aware of this, the information can be regarded as being tainted. The dichotomy between public and private that so interested Andy Warhol becomes visible here.*
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…)
More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”
Wesch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” at 4 p.m. on Monday, June 23, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the Library of Congress’ James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C.
Sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, the event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required. The lecture will be available at a later date as a webcast at www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/.
CONGRESS is considering a major reform of copyright law intended to solve the problem of “orphan works” — those works whose owner cannot be found. This “reform” would be an amazingly onerous and inefficient change, which would unfairly and unnecessarily burden copyright holders with little return to the public.
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>.
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.
The following is a set of links I prepared for one of my classes on film and video language. I repost them here for later use, and to share with the online community. The list is not by any means exhaustive, and is not linear in any way. The top links are mashups and the bottom links are early hip hop and rock videos. They were chosen in part because of the different approaches to video making, this was necessary for the class, because the students need to understand how music video language evolved throughout the eighties and nineties on to today.
Some of the videos also show early traces of sampling, for example, Trans Europe Express was sampled by Afrika Bambaataa for Planet Rock. Also, the remix of Tour de France juxtaposed with the early version shows how electronic music has evolved while acknowledging the important paradigms set by early electrofunk compositions. The now well known mashups of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes, Madonna and the Sex Pistols, as well as Michael Jackson, Britney Spears the White Stripes and Rick James are some of the most successful remixes in this genre. Part of me admittedly rejects them for their popularity, but the creativity that has gone into the audio remix as well as the video editing have to be noted, because they have at this point set a standard in Remix Culture.
