Written for the MEIAC, Badajoz, Spain, March of 2010, for the exhibition Re/appropriations, organized by Gustavo Romano. The exhibition was launched in December 2009. The text is released online with permission.
The exhibition Re/Appropriations, curated by Gustavo Romano, proposes that artists in networked culture find their creative potential in the appropriation, selection, and combination of pre-existing material on a meta-level—that of the re, or more specifically, Remix as a form of discourse. To this effect, Romano recontextualizes the artist as a “redirector of information,” rather than a creator. This premise as the entry point for creative production at the beginning of the twenty-first century leads to a recurring question often posed on the popular awareness of Remix: “Remixing, as an act of combining material has been around for a long time, one could argue since symbolic language was conceived; so, what is so different about the elements of Remix explored during the first decades of the twenty-first century that make them unique from those in the past?”[1]
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] Read the rest of this entry »
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?
Note: The following is an excerpt of a concise summary of the history and theory of Remix:
How have artists critically appropriated the concept of copyright in their works? In this course we will take a closer look at remix culture from the perspectives of text, image and music, and how different artists over considerable time have related to the idea of using already copyrighted materials. We will also investigate some of the different software programs that have, and are, important in the process of creating contemporary remix culture.
Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression. In most jurisdictions copyright arises upon fixation and does not need to be registered. Copyright owners have the exclusive statutory right to exercise control over copying and other exploitation of the works for a specific period of time, after which the work is said to enter the public domain. Uses covered under limitations and exceptions to copyright, such as fair use, do not require permission from the copyright owner. All other uses require permission. Copyright owners can license or permanently transfer or assign their exclusive rights to others.
Owen Gallagher has written an excellent summary of Remix Cinema. A conference which took place at St. Anthony College in Oxford. Along with Mette Birk, Owen represented the collective Remix Theory & Praxis, of which I am also a member. Make sure to visit the brand new [re]mix:network.org where you will find Owen’s complete report. An excerpt follows below:
The Remix Cinema Workshop, organised by the Oxford Internet Institute, took place in the beautfiful period setting of St. Anthony’s College in Oxford last weekend. A cohort of remix enthusiasts descended upon the infamous university town to collectively contribute to what turned out to be a very successful and fascinating exploration of remix cinema and the issues surrounding this developing practice.
The keynote speaker was Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss of Aalto University, Helsinki, who edited the 2010 publication, ‘Mash-Up Cultures’ to which our very own Eduardo Navas contributed a chapter. Sonvilla-Weiss delivered a talk entitled ‘From Soft Cinema to Collaborative Movie Making in the Cloud’, influenced heavily by Lev Manovich and with particular reference to Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ illustrating the concept of non-linear narrative and the potential for infinite variability of meaning once the separate elements of a text have been submitted to a database. The main proposal was the notion that if all video content and editing practices were migrated to the cloud, that is from the desktop to the browser window, then questions of authorship and ownership of content would potentially fade into the background.
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.
