I Hear Voices (2008)

This audio collage is constructed by myself from live radio transmissions from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, from a record, How To Speak Hip, released in 1959, a cut up of George W. Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address, the soundtrack to a Walt Disney Cartoon, a record; “MENSTRUATION: Second of Four Recordings for Parents” from 1951, an audio recording of Dr Timothy Leary, President Harry Truman’s radio message to the American people following the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima from August 9, 1945, a recording of Noam Chomsky interviewed by Ray Suarez for Talk of the Nation, January 20, 1999, and a dentist’s drill.

The recording attempts to create a satirical portrait of the United States from the perspectives of global politics and state sponsored violence, sexuality and reproduction and the counter-culture (which is really part of the culture itself). At the same time it tries to unnerve and irritate the listener by its materiality, with audio samples fading in and out of each other. This attempts to provoke an hallucinogenic effect for the listener that produces confusion while also producing new combinations of words and phrases.

In a single phrase; “Avoid Lower Manhattan!”

This piece is influenced, and makes homage to musique contréte. Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that is made in part from acousmatic sound. In addition to sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, it may use other sources of sound such as electronic synthesizers or sounds recorded from nature. Also, compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on. Originally contrasted with "pure" elektronische Musik (based solely on the production and manipulation of electronically produced sounds rather than recorded sounds), the theoretical basis of musique concrète as a compositional practice was developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the early 1940s

 (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concrete)

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: The ‘Two Cultures’ in Remix

Just published in Authorship Vol. 2 No. 2 (2013) is a piece by me, Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: The ‘Two Cultures’ in Remix

Abstract

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818) is the starting point for this reading of remix in relation to authorship and its implications for creative work. The monster in Frankenstein has no single author, or father, and is damned by his mixed parentage as much as by his inability to recreate himself. Alone, he falls into the waste as a product of the divide between poetry and science. The ‘two cultures’ coined by C. P. Snow (1956) address this same divide and lament its dominance in mid twentieth-century intellectual life. But contemporary remix culture that relies on digital media closes this gap as poets now write code and artists are technicians. In my close reading of five remixes I show that origin is no longer relevant in the mixed material realization of processes that are performed or ‘re-authored’ in reception. In these remixes the creator reinterprets by changing the context of remixed elements in the works. The result is textual hybrids that are remixed further in reception.

HTML PDF

And from the Editors:

This issue contains a very interesting special topics section on "Remix
in Authorship" which is guest-edited by Nelleke Moser of VU University
Amsterdam, and which comes out of a seminar held there exactly two years
ago today. The issue also includes an article on periodical culture in
1920s Argentina by Geraldine Rogers, and our very first review.

If you or someone you know might be interested in reviewing, or if you
have a book for review, please contact
journalmanager.authorship@ugent.be. Lisa Walters of UGent will be
handling our correspondence on reviewing.

As always, my particular thanks go to Jasper Schelstraete for carrying
out the technical duties associated with an online journal; to Gert
Buelens for serving as our chief editor; to everyone who graciously
agreed to peer review these articles; and especially to our contributors
and guest editor.

We are always looking for new, quality submissions; please pass the word
to anyone with relevant material! We will continue to publish twice
yearly; our next issue, which will include some of the keynotes from
UGent's Reconfiguring Authorship conference last fall, will likely be
out in a few more months.

 

Remix and Resistance in the Work of William S. Burroughs

Remix and Resistance in the Work of William S. Burroughs from jim on Vimeo.

Short excerpt from the film The Source (1999)

Artistic Expressions and Copyright: The theory and practice of remix culture

Short Course
7 April kl. 13:00 - kl. 16:00 in HUMlab
Carl-Erik Engqvist, Jim Barrett

Background and Theoretical Perspectives


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.

Initially copyright law applied to only the copying of books. Over time other uses such as translations and derivative works were made subject to copyright. Copyright now covers a wide range of works, including maps, sheet music, dramatic works, paintings, photographs, architectural drawings, sound recordings, motion pictures and computer programs.

The British Statute of Anne 1709, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Today copyright laws are partially standardized through international and regional agreements such as the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. Although there are consistencies among nations' copyright laws, each jurisdiction has separate and distinct laws and regulations covering copyright. National copyright laws on licensing, transfer and assignment of copyright still vary greatly between countries and copyrighted works are licensed on a territorial basis. Some jurisdictions also recognize moral rights of creators, such as the right to be credited for the work.

Remix deals with the discursive, the meanings of the remix exists in relation to a dialogic referent. When we see a video such as Star Trek; The Sexed Generation



This fan-create video can be interpreted both in relation to the original work (Star Trek: The Next Generation), and what is evoked by the remix. The changes between what the scene, word, sound or image 'meant' in the original context and in the remix can be partially explained by the Kuleshov effect;

Lev Kuleshov edited together a short film in which a shot of the expressionless face of Tsarist matinee idol Ivan Mozzhukhin was alternated with various other shots (a plate of soup, a girl, a little girl's coffin). The film was shown to an audience who believed that the expression on Mozzhukhin's face was different each time he appeared, depending on whether he was "looking at" the plate of soup, the girl, or the coffin, showing an expression of hunger, desire or grief respectively. Actually the footage of Mozzhukhin was the same shot repeated over and over again. Vsevolod Pudovkin (who later claimed to have been the co-creator of the experiment) described in 1929 how the audience "raved about the acting.... the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead child, and noted the lust with which he observed the woman. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same."


Kuleshov used the experiment to indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of film editing. The implication is that viewers brought their own emotional reactions to this sequence of images, and then moreover attributed those reactions to the actor, investing his impassive face with their own feelings.

Remix is discursive, where signs, symbols, motifs, characters, settings, images, sounds, expressions, phrases, and so on are manipulated, removed from their 'original' contexts (if there is such a thing) and reconfigured according to the contexts of a remix. Other examples of remix and radically different contexts include the genre of remix film trailers, where The Shinning becomes a feel-good family comedy and Mary Poppins a suspense thriller.

Today, the material and aesthetic remix is an established form of cultural production. While legal action and artistic endeavour push remix to new heights of sublimity and farce, the massive growth of what Lawrence Lessig calls the “read/write” culture continues unabated as a source of music, visual and literary arts. Recent examples include Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) as a work of remix literature, and MIA’s Paper Planes (2007), which uses the riff from The Clash’s song ‘Straight To Hell’. The works of the 2010 Art Remix exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts also contain many examples of remix in the visual arts.

Remix is an important part of digital culture, as this video illustrates,



As a result of the extent to which remix has developed in relation to digital technologies, it has become a popular topic in theoretical and academic contexts as well. This interest has resulted in debates concerning how we should understand remix in a wide variety of practices and genres. For example, Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear explain,

“Remix means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends. In this sense, remix is as old as human cultures, and human cultures are themselves products of remixing.

Since the late 1980s, however—originating with highly contrived forms of music remix by dancehall DJs—remix practices have been greatly amplified in scope and sophistication by recent developments in digital technologies. These make it possible for home-based digital practitioners to produce polished remixes across a range of media and cultural forms. This has in turn strengthened remix culture, encouraging seemingly endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique, and the like, and raised questions of legal, educational, and cultural import.”

– Abstract from Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2008, September). Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(1), 22–33. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.52.1.3

Remix can be divided into the aesthetic and the formal; a remix through references or a remix of materials. Remix as both a theoretical field and practical concept is discussed on the excellent blog Remix Theory by Eduado Navas, as well as in the work of Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), and in documentary films such as Good Copy Bad Copy (2007). As I have already mentioned, the work of Harvard University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is well-known in relation to remix culture, and to Lessig’s name we should add Henry Jenkins as a source of valuable writing on the topic.

The advent of new ways to legally frame and claim copyright, such as the Creative Commons (CC) Licence options, has given new scope to the practice of remix. Combining CC licensing with online archives, such as the Internet Archive or the Freesound Project, provide remix artists with the raw materials for their work. To say anything about the digital tools that are available for remixing here would not do justice to the topic. The number of digital tools available for remixing audio, image and text today is huge.

Finally, we should be wary of making assumptions about what is happening to culture as it operates under digital regimes of production. It is not enough to say that the avant garde no longer exists, that art is dead or that we are all authors now. I believe we should consider the words of Jörgen Schäffer and Peter Gendolla who wrote recently in Reading (in) the Net

If we approach computer-controlled processes in the context of industrial production from the producer’s point of view, we could argue that manual work has been replaced by industrial work and automation technologies. This can also be observed in the arts: Whereas the Cubists and Dadaists had to work with paper, scissors and paste, contemporary artists trust in fast word processing, communications, image editing, graphics, animation and motion tracking software. Tristan Tzara’s instruction how to make a Dadaist poem or Burroughs’ cut-up poetics—to name only two examples—have turned into cut-and-paste or “StorySprawl” tools, and Mail Art is being succeeded by web logs and wikis. From the point of view of a reader, spectator or listener, we could argue that these tools demand a much higher grade of activity than the coughing, snorting and hawking which John Cage activated in his famous composition 4’33”. As regards the work of art, it seems as if the individual piece with beginning, middle and end had actually vanished from the scene or—to put it more mildly—had been transformed into an open and recursive process between producers, programs, and readers/spectators/listeners.

Some Links

http://www.soulsphincter.com/search/label/Remix

http://www.soulvlog.com/search/label/Remix

http://remixtheory.net/

http://www.soulsphincter.com/2007/11/beyond-intellectual-property-from-file.html

http://www.stealthisfilm.com/Part2/

Remix and Literature


The Cut Ups (1961) William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Anthony Blanch

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing.

The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.

It is important to remember that Surrealism began as a literary movement. During the First World War, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic methods with soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques Vaché to whom I owe the most."

During a Dadaist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage, which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures. Prior to this event, the technique had been published in an issue of 391 with in the poem by Tzara, dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love under the sub-title, TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Exquisite Corpse is a surrealist word game that can be described as proto-remix, as while it does not re-work exisiting examples of language, it does manipulate the gramatical forms of language. Exquisite Corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. Like the OULIPO, Exuisite Corpse introduces both chance and rules into the composition of language. There is now an Exquisite Corpse app for the iPhone.

Burroughs cited T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land (1922) and John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, which incorporated newspaper clippings, as early examples of the cut ups he popularized.

Gil J. Wolman developed cut-up techniques as part of his lettrist practice in the early 1950s.

Also in the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. The book Minutes to Go resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose. South African poet Sinclair Beiles also used this technique and co-authored Minutes To Go. A chapter on the cut-ups from Minutes to Go is available here as a PDF. Other works on the cut-up by Burroughs can be found here.

Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the famous Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."[2] Burroughs also further developed the "fold-in" technique. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form. Apart from this publication, at the time, another important outlet for, the then radical technique, was Jeff Nuttall's publications entitled "My Own Mag"

Argentine writer Julio Cortázar often used cut ups in his 1963 novel Hopscotch.

Since the 1990s, Jeff Noon uses a similar remixing technique in his writing based on practices prevalent in Dub music. He expanded upon this with his Cobralingus system, which breaks down a piece of writing, going as far as turning individual words into anagrams, then melding the results into a narrative.

The Internet and Literary Remix




The Grafik Dynamo is an example of language remix for the Internet. Random visual and written elements are combined in the familiar comic strip format, which blend them together in a three part narrative sequence that is often funny or ironic.

The Postmodern Generator: communications from elsewhere, is a website that scripts the composition of so-called postmodern texts. It is described on the site as "a parody of the postmodern school of academic writing written by Andrew C. Bulhak, using a system for generating random text". By refreshing the web page a net text is generated each time. The essays are produced from a formal grammar defined by a recursive transition network. It was mentioned by Biologist Richard Dawkins in his article Postmodernism Disrobed for the scientific journal Nature and in his book A Devil's Chaplain. This installation of the Generator has delivered 4933206 essays since 25/Feb/2000 18:43:09 PST, when it became operational.

Cutup machines are online programs that rearange texts according to the sequences they have been programmed with. This is a cut-up machine that works in similar ways to "those used by Burroughs in his own work. Basically it works along similar principles to photo-montage, create an new image of words out of whatever was put in."

A nifty little text cutter-upper for all those would-be Burroughs out there.

Fanzines
Fanzines are another form of literary remix with texts produced from cutting up other texts, rearranging them, often involving glue. A fanzine (blend of fan and magazine or -zine) is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest. The term was coined in an October 1940 science fiction fanzine by Russ Chauvenet and first popularized within science fiction fandom, from whom it was adopted by others.

Typically, publishers, editors and contributors of articles or illustrations to fanzines receive no financial compensation. Fanzines are traditionally circulated free of charge, or for a nominal cost to defray postage or production expenses. Copies are often offered in exchange for similar publications, or for contributions of art, articles, or letters of comment (LoCs), which are then published.

A few fanzines have evolved into professional publications (sometimes known as "prozines"), and many professional writers were first published in fanzines; some continue to contribute to them after establishing a professional reputation. The term fanzine is sometimes confused with "fan magazine", but the latter term most often refers to commercially-produced publications for (rather than by) fans.


Touch and Go, a classic of the fanzine format

Fan Fiction
Fan fiction (alternately referred to as fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a broadly-defined term for fan labor regarding stories about characters (or simply fictional characters) or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator. Works of fan fiction are rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher; also, they are almost never professionally published. Fan fiction, therefore, is defined by being both related to its subject's canonical fictional universe and simultaneously existing outside the canon of that universe. Most fan fiction writers assume that their work is read primarily by other fans, and therefore tend to presume that their readers have knowledge of the canon universe (created by a professional writer) in which their works are based.

In relation to remix, fan fiction takes elements from one work and reworks them into new and sometimes very different contexts. Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters of the same sex.



Fan fiction works are often character-centric, where a well known character is altered according to the genre or expanded ideas of the appropriating author. In this way fan fiction works with discourse, using established elements, such as character sexuality, to either counteract or comment on themes and images across a wider spectrum than may have been evoked by the original work.

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed
In this remixed narrative Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.

Written examples of fan fiction can be found on MuggleNet (Harry Potter), FanFiction.net (General), Trekfanfiction (Star Trek), and Whispered Words (Slash Fiction).

The Tools

Gathering Tools
http://www.downthemall.net/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/fast-video-download-with-searc/
http://www.doom9.org/
http://www.download-finished.com/

Sources
This is a short list of sites on the Internet where you can find Creative Commons and other open copyleft materials that can be remixed:

Sound
http://www.opsound.org/
http://soundcloud.com/
http://www.archive.org/details/audio
http://www.ubu.com/sound/
http://freemusicarchive.org/
http://sounds.bl.uk/
http://library.open.ac.uk/find/images/

Film
http://www.archive.org/details/movies
http://www.youtube.com/
http://www.ubu.com/film
http://library.open.ac.uk/find/images/
http://video.google.com/
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Print
http://www.ubu.com/papers/
http://www.archive.org/details/texts
http://www.scribd.com/

3D Models
http://www.turbosquid.com/
http://secondlife.com/

Samples
http://free-loops.com/
http://www.freesound.org/
http://bit.ly/fZsZOZ
http://www.ubu.com/outsiders/365/2007/199.shtml
http://bit.ly/ea60e2

Images
http://www.picsearch.com/
http://www.cvma.ac.uk/index.html
http://images.google.com/hosted/life
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.morguefile.com/
http://www.everystockphoto.com/

These are some of the tools you can use for remixing and manipulating sound.

Remixing Sound
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://ubuntustudio.org/
http://www.steinberg.net/en/products/cubase/cubase6_start.html
http://www.avid.com/us/products/family/pro-tools
http://www.adobe.com/se/products/soundbooth/?sdid=GPQKN&
http://www.apple.com/logicstudio/
http://ardour.org/

Sound Machines
http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/terminatorx

Image Manipulation
http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.lunapic.com/editor/
http://www.picnik.com/

Word and Text manipulation work with few tools. Once you have written text you can record it, animate it or publish it.

Word and Text
http://www.openoffice.org/

Art Copyright and Remix

The remix is now an established form of cultural production. While legal action and artistic endeavour push remix to new heights of sublimity and farce, the massive growth of what Lawrence Lessig calls the "read/write" culture continues unabated as a source of music, visual and literary arts. Recent examples include Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) as a work of remix literature, and MIA's Paper Planes (2007), which uses the riff from The Clash's song 'Straight To Hell'. The works of the 2010 Art Remix exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts also contain many examples of remix in the visual arts.

Remix is an important part of digital culture. As a result of the extent remix has developed in relation to digital technologies, it has become a popular topic in theoretical and academic contexts as well. This interest has resulted in debates concerning how we should understand remix in a wide variety of practices and genres. For example, Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear describe,

"Remix means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends. In this sense, remix is as old as human cultures, and human cultures are themselves products of remixing. Since the late 1980s, however—originating with highly contrived forms of music remix by dancehall DJs—remix practices have been greatly amplified in scope and sophistication by recent developments in digital technologies. These make it possible for home-based digital practitioners to produce polished remixes across a range of media and cultural forms. This has in turn strengthened remix culture, encouraging seemingly endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique, and the like, and raised questions of legal, educational, and cultural import."

- Abstract from Knobel, M., & Lankshear, C. (2008, September). Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(1), 22–33. doi: 10.1598/JAAL.52.1.3

Remix as both a theoretical field and practical concept is discussed on the excellent blog Remix Theory by Eduado Navas, as well as in the work of Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), and in documentary films such as Good Copy Bad Copy (2007). As I have already mentioned, the work of Harvard University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is well-known in relation to remix culture, and to Lessig's name we should add Henry Jenkins as a source of valuable writing on the topic.

The advent of new ways to legally frame and claim copyright, such as the Creative Commons (CC) Licence options, has given new scope to the practice of remix. Combining CC licensing with online archives, such as the Internet Archive or the Freesound Project, provide remix artists with the raw materials for their work. To say anything about the digital tools that are available for remixing here would not do justice to the topic. The number of digital tools available for remixing audio, image and text today is huge.

Which leads me to the motivation for this short post on a huge topic. Next Thursday 7 April between 13:00-16:00, HUMlab will be hosting a short course entitled Artistic Expressions and Copyright: The theory and practice of remix culture, which will first look at the origins of remix in the arts, then some contemporary examples, and finally some of the tools available to remix in various media on your own. If you are interested or experienced in remix I would like to invite you to spend a few hours with Carl-Erik and myself making and breaking culture as it is meant to be......(follow the course title link for registration).

The notes for this short course are available here.

Wikileaks as (Matrix) Breaker

Wikileaks as Matrix Breaker from jim on Vimeo.

Julian 'Breaker' Assange

In prison cell I sadly sit,
A d__d crest-fallen chappie!
And own to you I feel a bit-
A little bit - unhappy!


It really ain't the place nor time
To reel off rhyming diction -
But yet we'll write a final rhyme
Whilst waiting cru-ci-fixion!


No matter what "end" they decide -
Quick-lime or "b'iling ile," sir?
We'll do our best when crucified
To finish off in style, sir!

Butchered to make a Dutchman's Holiday by Harry Breaker Morant (1902)

Discourse and the Vampire Slayer

Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed

"The author's design for a character is a design for discourse. Thus the author's discourse about a character is a discourse about discourse. It is orientated towards the hero as if toward a discourse and is therefore dialogically addressed to him [sic]. By the very construction of the novel [remix] the author speaks not about a character, but with him [sic]. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics p63.

Video Description
In this remixed narrative Edward Cullen from the Twilight Series meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer at Sunnydale High. It’s an example of transformative storytelling serving as a pro-feminist visual critique of Edward’s character and generally creepy behavior. Seen through Buffy’s eyes, some of the more sexist gender roles and patriarchal Hollywood themes embedded in the Twilight saga are exposed in hilarious ways. Ultimately this remix is about more than a decisive showdown between the slayer and the sparkly vampire. It also doubles as a metaphor for the ongoing battle between two opposing visions of gender roles in the 21ist century.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto

In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The films central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.

View the entire movie here

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

Order HERE.

Great Remixes of 2008

Tony "Baloney" Blair sings "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash

Remix: A Scenario on Kurtz

This is draft post I stumbled on this morning. I tidied it up a bit (sort of) and here it is, in the half light of day:

Ok, Consider this. I would like to try to follow a particle, an idea, an image through a sequence of narrative manifestations as remix. Lets take the figure of the lone rebel lost in the other, the man who knows morals but is immoral:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

T.S Eliot made references to Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1899) in his poem The Hollow Men. A central theme of both works is the morality that goes with (or is absent in) power. In Heart of Darkness power is contrasted with what is alluded to as the biblically constructed Agapē (IPA: /ˈægəpiː/[1]) (Gk. αγάπη):

We talked of everything," he said, quite transported at the recollection.
"I forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour.
"Everything! Everything, of love, too."
"Ah, he talked to you of love!," I said, much amused.
"It isn't what you think," he cried almost passionately. "It was general. He made me see things--things." (Heart of Darkness)

Kurtz, as we all know, 'lives' on:



T.S Eliot published The Hollow Men in 1925. In this video from Apocalypse Now Redux (2001), in a scene deleted from the original cut (1979), Kurtz (Marlon Brando) reads the first stanza of Eliot's poem. The themes of The Hollow Men are well known but can be summarized for the purposes of my narrative trace with a paragraph from Jeff Willard:

A full, line-by-line annotation of Mr. Eliot's poem is painfully tedious and, I believe, robs the poem of its intended final effect. The reader feels an overall mood of disgust laced with pity for these men, who, upon realizing their imminent damnation, make one final lunge at salvation. But the impetus of their effort is not a thirst after salvation for salvation's sake, but rather a fear of damnation. However, a general understanding of some of the more important allusions and the progression of the poem lends a great deal to the enjoyment of this masterpiece. Literary Allusion in "the Hollow Men" By Jeff Willard

Now we fast foward to The Proposition (2005) a film written by Australian cultural icon Nick Cave. In The Proposition three brothers are pitted against one another in the unforgiving space of the colonial Australian outback in 1880s. One brother, Charlie Burns, must find and kill his older brother Arthur if the younger brother, 16year old Mikey is to be spared execution. Arthur is the Kurtz of The Proposition having gone into the interior, befriended the natives and committed several acts of extreme violence. Arthur has taken on the near spiritual dimensions of Mista Kurtz:

Jellon Lamb: [speaking about Arthur Burns] "We are white men, Sir, not beasts. Oh, he sits up there in those melancholy hills; some say he sleeps in caves like a beast, slumbers deep like the Kraken. The Blacks say that he is a spirit. The Troopers will never catch him. Common force is meaningless, Mr. Murphy, as he squats up there on his impregnable perch. So I wait, Mr. Murphy. I wait.

Charlie has three opportunities to kill Arthur. The morality of the situation, institutional power over life and death, blood being thicker than water, the value of life and the power relations of colonialism are all themes in The Proposition.

The questions raised by The Hollow Men, the cavity left by the morally bereft, are answered in a soliloquy by Arthur to his brother, who has been sent to murder him by the allegedly moral forces of frontier establishment (the police):

Arthur Burns: Love. Love is the key. Love and family. For what are night and day, the sun, the moon, the stars without love, and those you love around you? What could be more hollow than to die alone, unloved?

Between the publication of Heart of Darkness (1899) and The Proposition (2005) 106 years pass. There are many other texts that take up the themes of humanity interconnected, the power of some over others and the morality of dominion (see The Heart of Redness by Zakes Mda) and I think there of course will be more. The transmission of the narrative image of Mista Kurtz through the 106 years is not just intertextual as it develops and changes, takes on a life of its own. The questions raised by Kurtz/Arthur remain the same. A textuality that moves beyond the page or screen needs to be constructed for us to account for the life and legend of Kurtz remaining so powerful now in the 21st Century. This textuality I am tempted to call Remix.

Images Of The World And The Inscription Of War

Images Of The World And The Inscription Of War (1989)
Film by Harun Farocki (b. 1944)
Download and Stream at UBUWEB

In 1944, an Allied aircraft took topographic photographs of Auschwitz during a routine surveillance operation for power plants, munitions factories, chemical plants, and any other industrial complexes that could potentially serve as bombing targets that, in the military's myopic search for these high collateral targets that would cripple the German war machine, failed to recognize that they had actually taken an aerial survey of the layout of the Auschwitz concentration camp - an explicitly detailed, but mentally unregistered discovery for which the implicit meaning would not be realized until decades later, long after the tragic reality of the Nazi death camps had been exposed. It is this assignment of significance to the act of visual observation that underlies Harun Farocki's thoughtful, understated, and engaging exposition on the interconnection - and at times, disjunction - between cognition and recognition in Images of the World and the Inscription of War.

Prefaced by a humorous anecdote on 19th century architect, Albrecht Meydenbauer whose near death experience while making physical measurements for a cathedral project, combined with an interest in the visual reproduction capability of a still camera, led to the development of photogrammetry (which provided for the accurate, graphically scalable, two-dimensional, measurable image of the studied object), the film illustrates, not only the inherent correlation between production and technology, but also the conceptual introduction of quantifying images measured from a distance into discrete elements that can be uniquely identified or accurately reproduced remotely into scale models and detailed simulations.

From this logical trajectory, Farocki cites another point of reference in a French government campaign during the 1960s to dispatch conscripted soldiers to Algeria in order to photograph native women for the issuance of identity cards in the occupied colony - a process that required the women to remove their veil in public, contrary to traditional custom. Having spent much of their public lives obscured behind a veil, the question then arises if an identity card that captures these women in full, unobstructed gaze can accurately reflect their distinctive characteristics to the point of recognition? Would an officer tasked to verify identity find semblance between these unveiled photographs and the women physically presented before him? Unable to find specific, isolated features within the human face that remains unaltered through the years, these photographic images can only serve as a referential document of physical attributes, and not a record of truth - of the actual reality. Farocki illustrates this recursive cycle of distanced, "safe" action and estranged surveillance operating under the vacuum of social (and cultural) responsibility (a familiar preoccupation in the filmmaker's oeuvre that is also evident in the equally provocative essay, War at a Distance) through repeated references of the Auschwitz, Algeria, and Meydenbauer paradigms, as well as the film's thematic use of the German word aufklärung - a term that alternately means enlightenment and flight reconnaissance - that reflect the technological quest to define empirical, universally identifiable data that can remotely identify (or characterize the essence of) an image. It is this passive, alienated act of seeing that is ultimately rejected in a publication's symbolic call to action, "The reality must begin", in reaction to Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler's revelation of the concentration camps - an active resistance that is punctuated by the October 7, 1944 uprising by Sonderkommandos (prisoners who were tasked to operate the gas chambers and crematoria) at Auschwitz that succeeded in the disabling of a death apparatus - a heroic act of conscious and formidable human engagement.

Much more from Forocki (really worth looking at...excellent stuff)

Black Technology

"Perry is also a kind of Caribbean techgnostic, deploying his almost supernatural imagination within the technological context of the modern recording studio. With its soundboards, mics, effects processors, and multiple-track tape manipulations, the studio is clearly a kind of musical machine. However passionate and spontaneous pop songs may sound on the radio, the music itself is as much a product of engineering as of performance. Despite their crude equipment, reggae producers like Perry, King Tubby, and Bunny Lee became artists in their own right—especially when it came to dub, the instrumental offshoot of reggae concocted entirely in the studio."

Nice long text on the genius of Scratch on Remix Theory.

Paper Planes/Straight to Hell

Paper Planes by M.I.A

Using a sample from The Clash's Straight to Hell, M.I.A's Paper Planes was censored when it was performed by the artist in September on the Dave Letterman Show. The gunshots were removed by CBS management. This is the original video that MTV won't show.

Free TV and the Monkees

At the moment the Swedish public television station SVT is running an advertising campaign about how it is politically and economically independent and therefore 'Free'. I am not sure it is as simple as that (i.e. the people pay therefore we can say anything), but I agree there is an integrity to the public broadcaster in Sweden that is important. However, I have encountered similar levels of 'Independence' in other state run media services in other countries that while they do not favor individual concerns such as business' they do follow national agendas and conform to concepts of 'common sense'- which leads me to my next topic.



The soundtrack to one of the ads being run by SVT is Circle Sky by the Monkees from 1968. Not only is it a great tune, it comes from one of the most surreal psychedelic films produced in the 1960's. An underground classic that rates with other psychadelic films produced which involved Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Roger Corman; Wild Angels, The Trip, Psych-Out,

Head (1968) begins (without any opening credits) at the dedication of a bridge. After a politician struggles with constant feedback with his microphone as he tries to give a speech, the Monkees suddenly interrupt the ceremony by running through the assembled officials, to the sound of various horns and sirens. The rest of the film is essentially plotless, a seemingly stream of consciousness stringing-together of musical numbers, satire of various film genres, elements of psychedelia, and references to topical issues such as the Vietnam War. Trailers for the film summarized it as a "most extraordinary adventure, western, comedy, love story, mystery, drama, musical, documentary satire." Some film critics[citation needed] now consider the film to be an allegorical deconstruction of the Monkees' experiences as pawns of the Hollywood starmaking machine that, like their real-life story itself, contains some sinister truths lurking underneath what appears to be a colorful, entrancing facade. Wikipedia

I watched Head many times as a young student in Australia in the late 1980s (along with Easy Rider and a lot of Al Pacino films), as we had a cheap VHS copy of it someone had bought in some closing down video rental. Thinking about it now it was a cut-up or remix and looking at the imdb it seems to have been constructed as such:

The movie's origin was in Ojai, California, where the foursome [the monkees], Bob Rafelson, and Jack Nicholson spent a weekend in a resort motel verbally tossing story ideas into a tape recorder. This became the script for this film.

The SVT campaign today is getting a lot of attention based on its criticism of other media outlets and their ownership structures. However, Head is a strange source for a state broadcaster to appropriate material from, as it depicts a lifestyle that, shall we say, is not really legal in Sweden today. I wonder if the perceived freedom of the 1960's (and the now wealthy demographic that can remember that time) is the target for Circle Sky, "We were free and we can be free again....with SVT." To get some idea of 'where Im coming from..man' here is the theatrical trailer for Head from 1968:

Welcome to the Virus

I am revisiting Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's excellent work Remediation: Understanding New Media from 1999 to try and develop some perspective and depth to my use of Remix for digital literature. While reading through Remediation (which must be considered a foundational text in the areas of digital media, literacy, narrative studies, and game studies) I came across references to the Emergency Broadcast Network (Bolter and Grusin, 42). A memory awoke and I thought there must be stuff by EBM on Youtube now...and yes, I was so happy to see there is. I first encountered the EBN in the late 1990s with videos shown at anarchist occasions in Sydney. According to the Wikipedia the EBN were:

Emergency Broadcast Network is the name of a multimedia performance group formed in 1991 that took its name from the Emergency Broadcast System. The founders were Rhode Island School of Design graduates Joshua Pearson, Gardner Post and Brian Kane (author of the Vujak VJ software). Kane left EBN in 1992.

Josh Pearson [more vids from link], EBN's charismatic front man and principal performance artist, was also EBN's music composer and main video editor. The music and video editing techniques he personally developed and refined have been hugely influential on a generation of advertising and music video editors.

The first EBN video project was a muscial remix of the Gulf War, created in 1991 as the war was still ongoing. The VHS tape of the remix project, which contained the George H.W. Bush "We Rock You" cover, became a viral underground hit, and was distributed widely by fans as bootleg copies. In the summer of 1991, EBN traveled with the first Lollapalooza tour, distributing tapes and showing their videos on a modified station wagon with TVs on the roof. The group also became well known for their media sculptures and stage props which were created by Gardner Post.



The EBN Live Team included DJ Ron O'Donnell, video artist/technologist Greg Deocampo (founder of CoSA, and founding CTO of IFILM.com), artist/designer Tracy Brown and technologist Mark Marinello.

As remix and mashup artists the EBN set the standard that many have followed since. Many of the EBN projects have been hosted by the Guerilla News Network, another media arts collective working with remix and social action on the fringes of Intellectual Property.

The Speed of 24

Over the weekend I have been reading Interface://Culture - The World Wide Web as Political Resource and Aesthetic Form (so far a great introduction to the subject that would suit a mid to uppper level undergrad course as a text, the Introduction is online). One of the essays in Interface://Culture is A Hard Day's Work: Reflections of the Interfacing and Transmedialization and Speed of 24 by Bo Kampmann Walther. The article argues that "the television series itself is structured according to a logic of games, which revolves around speed - speed could even be considered the the main character or "I" of 24." (205) In light of this idea the video 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot: Jack Bauer saves the world with AOL 3.0. is a brilliant manipulation of the concepts of speed used in 24. The question being, could it work if Jack was relying on a dial-up modem and 0.1 Ghz? For me it also provoked ideas about Fan Fiction and remix and the proximity between the two forms. Here is the video:

Communique from Oil 21

Today I am taking in the Oil 21 workshop Beyond Intellectual Property: From File Sharing to Distributed Archive at Umeå Art Academy. Some very interesting things are being discussed. The 'leaders' of the workshop are Sebastian Lutgert, and Jan Gerber from Berlin. They created in the first six months of this year the Oxdb film data base and search engine. As an excercise in intergrated visualization of information the Oxdb is a nice piece of work. It pulls in information from online torrent downloads of films. The Oxdb does not offer any sort fo downloads but rather it shows what is in circualtion at any time from what people are downloding. The films are then arranged in stll time lines with director, location, production, and more displayed. There are short samples from the films but no more than 30 seconds. As a research archive the Oxdb has a huge potentail for use.
We are now watching the Danish documentry Good Copy Bad Copy (2007) It is of course online and free for all.

Remixed TV News

'Special Report' by Bryan Boyce


Using footage from CNN and ABC news reports, Boyce possesses American news anchors with the spirits of old-time sci-fi who speak the virtues of electronic hypnosis and rule through fear. From 1999. A classic! See also:
http://www.dangeroussquid.com,
http://illegal-art.org,
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$artist

Video Remix Getting Attention in Australian Election

A remix star has been unearthed in the Australian election:

Hugh Atkin, 23, a law student at Sydney University, has scored a big hit on the internet with his clip that depicts Kevin Rudd as a Chairman Mao figure in a video styled on Chinese propaganda films. SMH

Youtube is being used by all the major parties in the campaign for the election due on November 27th. An election was called yesterday in Denmark and Lisbeth Klastrup has blogged that she will posting on the use of video network sites in the election (only a few weeks away on November 13...the Danes are fast!!).

More from the Australia Remix Front at the Youtube site of Hugh.