During Fall of 2015, I taught two classes in The School of Visual Arts at Penn State, in which students explored creative practice in time based media. Art 316 focused on video art, and Art 415 focused on integrating media to develop experimental works that explored principles of remix, beginning with sound, moving on to the time-based media. The final project for both classes was to evaluate and re-edit selected work produced throughout the term, and organize it into a cohesive body of work. This means that the projects did not need to be organized chronologically.

I share compilations by some of my students below. First are selections from Art 316 followed by selections from Art 415.  I believe all of the students in class grew quite a bit in the process of exploring the aesthetics of contemporary time-based media in image, sound, and text.

Art 316:

Video Project Reel 2015 from Dolan Kutzman on Vimeo.

Art 316  assignments begin with stop motion with no sound. The reason for this is so that students can focus on the image editing process. Eventually, students move on to explore video and sound in relation to text. Some students used music which they composed themselves, others chose pre-existing tracks.  What was crucial when using pre-existing sound was that it did not overpower the video footage, but that it developed a balance that allowed for autonomy of the videos as works of their own.

John Guilyard, Video Project, Fall 2015

In Art 316 students explored concepts of sequential media, meaning the concept of movement with different forms of digital visual presentation, such as still graphics, animation, typography and video. The influence of film language across various media disciplines was discussed at length and explored with a hands-on-approach to produce video projects.

Eden Yung, Video Projects, Fall 2015

Students explored concepts of motion in art, film and video. Issues of design practice in time based media in general were covered. Students  gained a theoretical and practical understanding of sequential movement.

Brendan Rogers, Video Projects, Fall 2015

Art 415 consisted of an interdisciplinary approach to  the production of  art and media design. Its conceptual  platform is the act of remixing as initially understood in music, which is increasingly influential across media in terms of remix culture. Students were introduced to the basic principles of remix with a hands-on approach in order to develop independently driven projects.

Mike O’Halloran ART 415 Reel from Mike O’H on Vimeo.

The starting point of class, in terms of hands-on production, consisted of mixing and remixing music with different software. Students then applied their initial knowledge and methodology to image/time-based media and text.

Art 415 Final Project from Kelsie Netzer on Vimeo.

The class consisted of three major projects, each building on the skills, history and theory students learned throughout the term. The class was designed to enable students to acquire a methodology that will eventually help them develop an ambitious vision of their own practice, and complement the eventual production of a thesis and/or portfolio in their respective discipline.

Transmedia Project: Revised from Christine D’Emidio on Vimeo.

Julianne Weinman, Video Projects, Fall 2015

During the Fall Semester of 2015 I am teaching principles of remix for image music and text for Art 415: Integrating Media in the School of Visual Arts (SoVA), Penn State. The students went through eight weeks of sound experimentation that led to three versions of a composition of their own. The students worked with pre-existing samples, ambient sounds they recorded, as well as melodies they developed on their own. The assignments leading up to their first major project were developed based on a conversational approach, meaning that I would provide weekly guidelines for experimental projects based on what they produced for each week. This process led to the development of the three basic forms of remix: the extended, the selective and the reflexive. I share their work below in an order that encapsulates their overall approach. The first and last pieces by D’Emidio and Weinman explore melody over rhythm, while the second and third by O’Halloran and Netzer focus more on ambient noise as abstract melodic rhythm. The students veered to these approaches on their own. I look forward to what they will now produce with image and text.

Christine D’Emidio, Project 1, Extended, Selective, Reflexive Remixes

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The following text was published in August of 2015 in the publication Seismographic Sounds: Visions of a New World, which accompanies a traveling exhibition with the same title.  More information can be found at http://norient.com/en/events/seismographic-sounds/

The book can be ordered at: http://norient.com/stories/book/

I would like to thank Theresa Beyer and Thomas Burkhalter for the opportunity to share an update on my definitions of Remix. This text is a short version of a much longer essay to be released in the future.

Download a PDF version of this text.

Remix/ Archive
Im/material Regeneration
Remix is at play in all areas of contemporary culture. Text, image and sound become easily accessible data that can be re-combined at will. Remix in music consisted of the reinterpretation of pre-existing songs by way of sampling. Today the copying/sampling of not just sound but all material from infinite sources challenges the «spectacular aura» of the pre-recorded original in order to claim autonomy.

By Eduardo Navas

Cultural production has entered a stage in which archived digital material can potentially be used at will; just like people combine words to create sentences, in contemporary times, people with the use of digital tools are able to create unique works made with splices of other pre-recorded materials. Due to the ubiquitous action of cut/copy & paste, output is at an ever-increasing speed. This process is possible because what is digitally produced in art and music, for instance, becomes part of an archive, particularly a database. The archived material begins to function like building blocks, optimized to be infinitely combined. This state of affairs is actually at play in all areas of culture, and consequently is redefining the way we perceive the world and how we function as part of it. The implications of this in terms of how we think of creativity and its relation to the industry built around authorship are important to consider for a concrete understanding of the type of global culture we are becoming. Read the rest of this entry »

Video: This video segment is from the early part of DJ Raph’s set at the Iwalewahaus’s opening event for the art exhibition Mashup The Archive.

I was invited to participate in a panel discussion for the Exhibition Mashup the Archive at the Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth. The opening reception took place on May 30, 2015. It was an amazing night. There were three DJs who performed: DJ Raph from Nairobi, who is also an artist and remixed songs from the Iwalewahaus’s sound and music archive, DJ Zhao from Berlin, and musician Spoek Mathambo from South Africa. Their sets were amazing and the sound was so loud that the microphone of the iPhone I used to record excerpts of the performances does no justice to the energy of the party. People danced into the early morning.In this post I share videos of their respective sets, which took place in the order the DJs are listed.

I want to thank Sam Hopkins,  Nadine Siegert, and Ulf Vierke for inviting me to participate in the events. I was fortunate to participate in a panel with Beatrice Ferrara, Nina Huber, and Mark Nash. It was a real pleasure to engage in a debate with them on what it means to mashup an archive of African Art. I will be sharing images of the exhibit along with a brief critical reflection in a separate post.

Video: DJ Zhao working the crowd at the Iwalewahaus’s opening for the exhibition Mashup the Archive.

Video: Spoek Mathambo working the crowd at the opening reception of Mashup the Archive.

Image: Nike Swoosh installation in front of the Palmer Museum at Penn State.

Pau Figueres,Visiting Scholar in the School of Visual Arts (SoVA) at Penn State, installed a Nike swoosh composed of rocks in front of the Palmer Museum. It was a pleasure to host him and work with him in his research on remix and anti-consumerism during his Spring 2015 residency. A brief article of his installation and research was featured on the SoVA website. I quote part of it below:

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During spring 2015, SoVA hosted Pau Figueres, a visiting scholar/artist from Bilbao, Spain. Pau was working on a project, Remix and Sampling of Mass Media and Advertising in Visual Art: Aesthetics and the Problematics of Anti-Consumerism Critique, with New Media faculty member Eduardo Navas. While here, as part of his research, Pau staged a temporary ‘intervention’ of an ephemeral art piece in the form of the iconic Nike ‘swoosh’ that was placed in the Palmer Museum of Art plaza. His temporary installation brought to mind the malleability of the power of the commercial icon—an inference about how pebbles are eroded from river flow, yet the stones also shape the course of the river.

[…]

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Figure 1: Screenshot of Pau Figueres’s online project “The Revolution will be Sponsored“

During the 2015 Spring academic term, I am hosting in the School of Visual Arts at Penn State, Visiting Scholar Pau Figueres, who is an artist and Ph.D. candidate from Bilbao, Spain. His research focuses on anti-consumerism and concepts of recyclability.

Upon arriving at Penn State Figueres began to produce a diverse set of works on branding that he should be making public in the future. As part of his activities he also developed an online resource, “The Revolution will be Sponsored,” on which he shares the work of artists who focus on, and/or use or critique corporate brands. The online entries in effect have turned out to be an artistic curation, meaning its more of an art project, itself.

Figueres’s methodology includes implementing principles of remix in his analysis, which is the reason why he is doing research under my guidance. I look forward to the results of his ongoing investigation.  In the mean time, one can reflect on his current online project, which in effect exposes how art and commerce are much closer than ever.

Figure 1: Detail of Minima Moralia Redux Remixes 51 – 55. First set of entries part of the second part of Minima Moralia Redux.

Read the entire entry at Remix Data

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.

Read the entire entry at Remix Data

Figure 1: Eduardo Navas,  #Subaltern, 2010 tweet rewritten as a poem, February 2015

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Selected Poems in D3 Force Layout
2010:
#Nature || #Opinions || #Fatty || #Subaltern || #Migrants
2012:
#Modules || #Nano_specs || #Standards
2013:
#Abundance || #Plastic || #Universals || #Predominance

__________

During the month of January and February of 2015, I began to consider how to reconfigure selected tweets of  my @poemita twitter account as poems. The first outcome of this process was three sets of image-layouts of selected poems from the years 2010-2013 which I called “Poem Portraits.” They are available on the main @Poemita project page:

Poem Portraits 2010
Poem Portraits 2012
Poem Portraits 2013

Simultaneously, I had been working with D3 to develop a force layout for visualizations of selected entries from my project Minima Moralia Redux (This set of visualizations will be discussed in a separate entry). Such layout is designed mainly to show the relevance of words within each  of Adorno’s aphoristic essays.  At one point in this process, it occurred to me that I could use D3 force layouts not only for research based visualizations, but as an actual medium to rewrite poems. Hence, I repurposed D3 features to develop a set of poems as shown in figures 1 – 4.

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Figure 1: “Do You Want Fries with that?” by  Ian Stevenson

The following is an interview conducted for the exhibition Pictoplasma: White Noise, curated by Lars Denicke and Peter Thaler, which took place at La Casa Encendida, Madrid Spain from May 23, to September 8, 2013. I was asked questions on how remix functions in art practice,  if there is a difference between remix and sampling, among other issues that the concept of remixing raises with digital and non-digital forms of production. This interview was released as part of a print publication that complemented the exhibit, but it was not made available online. I am now making it public because my answers raise issues that I have not discussed in other texts or interviews.   I thank Lars and Peter for their interest in my views on the subject of remix.

———–

Pictoplasma – Remix is what we all do now: cut/copy and paste. You have defined remix culture as the creative exchange of information made possible by digital technologies. Can one only speak of remix in cultural production if it is digital? Or if digital is not a prerequisite, how are analogue remixes embedded into digital culture? What is the difference between remixing and quoting or referencing?

E. Navas – First it should be noted that the concept of remixing is specific to contemporary times. Not everything is a remix – this is hard for me to say given that I was a DJ for almost 15 years (and would love to make such an overreaching claim), but it is precisely because I DJed for so long that I know that remixing is a very specific act. Having said that, the principles of remixing, or remix as discourse, have become important across culture, and this is why remix culture is so popular today, especially when discussing creativity as endorsed by Creative Commons.

When looking back in history you will notice that as a concept for daily creativity, remix was not that popular until remixing became a driving force in music, particularly in disco and hip hop. This means that the concept of remix is popular today not because anyone in particular decided to talk about it to promote some sort of organized movement, but rather because culture as a whole began to use the term to describe the type of creative production that is possible with contemporary technology. The reality is that remix is synonymous with the digital because it was the digital that made the concrete act of taking actual samples from recordings to then manipulate them into something new, while leaving the sampled source intact. This was not the case with collages, which were created by cutting out from images or photographs to create new compositions. In collages the”‘sampled” material was destroyed because it was cut out, but with digital technology, the sampled source is left intact, this was done before in photography, of course, starting in the 19th century. When you take a photograph you are sampling from real life, but the subject of your photograph remains untouched. People at this time, however, did not think about this as an act of sampling, but of recording. But in fact early photography was sampling from real life.

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A Modular Framework: Beyond Tautological History
Essay written for the exhibition A Modular Framework
CCESV, El Salvador
November 9 –December 17, 2010.
by Eduardo Navas

Note: This essay was written for the exhibition A Modular Framework, which took place at the Cultural Center of Spain in El Salvador, November 9 – December 17, 2010. The catalog was never published due to limitation of funds. I considered publishing this essay in art journals focused on Latin American Art, but the response by some was that it was either too specific and could not fit their specific theme at the moment, or that it read too much like an exhibition catalog essay which would not sit well outside of the context for which it was originally written. It has been nearly five years since I wrote the text, and I have decided to release it online, as part of my general research shared on Remix Theory. I am doing this because I believe that it is fair for the artists who participated in the exhibition to have access to the writing I produced. I also think that what I write in terms of critical theory and postcolonial studies may be of interest to people invested in Latin American Art.

Some of the issues raised in terms of the history of new media and Latin America may have changed since I wrote the essay in 2010. I leave it unchanged because I don’t see the point in updating the cultural context given that the exhibit was curated to reflect on the issues at play in 2010. Below is an excerpt. The full text can be downloaded in PDF format.

___________

A Modular Framework is an exhibition that brings together artists from Latin America, or artists who have ties to Latin America, and have been producing new media work since at least the mid-nineties, when new media and digital art began to take shape. Most of the works included in the exhibition are recent, and were chosen as examples of diverse and rigorous art practices. The artists, themselves, while they crossover into art practice at large, are pioneers in digital and new media art in their own countries and for this reason they were invited to participate in the exhibition.

A Modular Framework is the first of its kind in the Central American Region, and as such its purpose is to better acquaint the local culture with new media and digital art practice. At the same time, the exhibit is designed as a marking point, as a fragmentary modular assessment of the rich production of new media art by a specific set of artists who share similarities in their approach to the medium of digital art as a proper practice. The works included comment in one way or another on interconnectivity and possibilities of communication by exploring diverse interests in politics and aesthetics.  This diverse activity is the result of a long process of art production that is intertwined with global culture.  For this reason, before examining each of the selections, it is necessary to briefly outline the relation of new media and digital art practice in contemporary art history.

The Context of New Media and Digital Art
The type of work produced in new media and digital art is often linked by art and media historians to an interdisciplinary practice defined by the interest to move outside of the gallery as previously explored during the seventies with site-specific art, and especially conceptual and performance art.  Of these three, conceptualism has been more often presented as a predecessor of new media and digital art practice.   During the nineties, the Internet was viewed by emerging artists, who had online access, as a space in which to present work outside of not only the gallery but also their immediate locality.   Such developments have influenced how new media works are currently presented as objects of art in a physical space.  The works included in A Modular Framework reflect on this process, from different starting points.

Download the full text in PDF format.