war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music

clipped from roychristopher.com Since postmodernism as a mode of thinking and of theory-building is so beleaguered by misconception, misuse, and general ambiguity, this is an attempt to use DJ culture as a concrete example of the postmodern condition in the overlap of music and commerce. Twenty or so years ago, the Hip-hop DJ emerged as a vigilante on this landscape of music as commodity. While remixing and recontextualizing the product, he decentralized the power of the record company. DJs break the code. They reorganize the power structure in the world of sound. The product is no longer the be-all, end-all, but just another piece of the new story. This is what the DJ in Hip-hop does when he combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create entirely new compositions. The music represents a future without a past.

Hey DJ – Web 2.0 and remix culture

clipped from www.jonathanboutelle.com Web 2.0 is not blogs and blogging. But mass quantities of user generated content (both on commercial sites like amazon and blogs alike) set the stage for Web 2.0 by providing a moral pretext for remixing. If the value of the content is created by we the people, then we the people should be able to take that content back and build new things with it. The heart of Web 2.0 is about being able to remix and integrate without a negotiation, without permission even. It’s about being able to take an rss feed or an open API or data scraped from an XHTML website and grab that data, jam it together with another data source of the same kind, and build something new. Web 2.0 is about sampling, about mixing, about mash-ups. The web 2.0 hacker takes APIs and uses them the way a DJ uses albums, recombining disparate (already valuable) material into something fresh and new.

DJ Spooky Raps About Remixing

clipped from www.wired.com I think so many issues right now around sampling and digital media in general are kind of at a crossroads…. I I sample all sorts of stuff. The strategy, of course, is to make it unrecognizable. That means sampling has to be a kind of shredder — the equivalent of when you throw away your credit card bill and put it through. I throw away certain recorded sounds and shred them so they are unrecognizable in the same way you would trace someone’s credit identity. They do come after you for both cases. Take for example James Joyce. He would take motifs from posters in the city streets when he was walking and have a notepad and write them down, and they would appear in his book. He would sample stuff from advertising, from other authors, from magazine articles. To me, with hip-hop and electronic music, you are looking at sound as a kind of theater, where samples are almost like voices that you can take from a script….

Foucault’s Fault

clipped from digitalphilosophy.wordpress.com But don’t get confused by this romantic description of the philosophical work: if someone is recognized as a philosopher only by the new concepts that he has introduced into the philosophical discourse [D&G], and if new and original are nothing but an illusion [Barthes], then philosophy is not the art of creating concepts but rather the art of rebranding preexisting concepts. The philosopher doesn’t have much choice but to refurbish and rebrand old concepts and present them as original ones. This is a tough situation: if you don’t quote you are accused of plagiarism and of the hubris of being original; if you quote (explicitly – by referring to philosophers; implicitly – by reusing known concepts) you’re accused of not being original, hence – not a philosopher. The game is, therefore, to quote all along your thesis until that point where you bring up your own rebranded (yet necessarily preexisting) concept – that which you present and pretend to be your own.

The Death of the Author; the Birth of the Voice

clipped from digitalphilosophy.wordpress.com “Given that the human history of ideas, progress, art, etc. is the history of remix, i.e. the unexpected association of different, seemingly unrelated memes, should “remix” be classified as an authentic voice or an unauthentic one?” In “The Death of the Author” (1967) Barthes states that “the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original”. Any text, therefore, be it an “original” or a “remix” is deemed to be the reincarnation of older texts. Let’s forget, than, the illusion of authenticity [, or of truth, or of reality etc.] – there’s no such thing. “We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original”. Here’s an excerpt from Barthes:

DJ Spooky’s Remix Simulacrum – “Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own”, DJ Spooky

clipped from digitalphilosophy.wordpress.com It can refer to the pessimistic Baudrillardian Integral Reality theory, in which anything is a simulacrum, a fake, including our “self”, our voice. [OR] It can be understood as an optimistic, web2.0 share-all style, in which the right to remix and to appropriate others’ voices goes mainstream.

WHAT COMES AFTER REMIX? by Lev Manovich

clipped from remixtheory.net It is a truism today that we live in a “remix culture.” Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas – music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food – are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well. Remixing originally had a precise and a narrow meaning that gradually became diffused. Although precedents of remixing can be found earlier, it was the introduction of multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With each element of a song – vocals, drums, etc. – available for separate manipulation, it became possible to “re-mix” the song: change the volume of some tracks or substitute new tracks for the old ounces. Gradually the term became more and more broad, today referring to any reworking of already existing cultural work(s).

the remix and the exquisite corpse

clipped from www.networkedcollab.org The whole notion of the remix as it relates to participation is very post-modern and very American. “The older American folk culture was built on borrowings from folk culture; the new convergence culture will be built on borrowings from various media conglomerates” (Convergence, 137).� Like Umberto Eco comments, it’s all been done before: “…no film can be experienced with fresh eyes; all are read against other movies.� In such a world ‘cult has become the normal way of enjoying movies’” (Convergence, 98).��

File Sharing & Meaning

clipped from copyriot.se A kopimist Walpurgis ritual, and a letter from Bill Drummond File-sharing has a potential to create meaning, community and context – a bigger potential than most other forms of reproduction. We want to keep talking about how that potential can be realized in the best manner possible, how cultural circulation can be organized and how the unleashed forces of the open archives can be used for more than stacking a pile of objects we care less and less about. /…/ The files are already downloaded. The files are already uploaded. They’ve been going up and down and in and out in abundance. Instead of discussion how the forces of winter are going to sell snow to Eskimos, we want to talk about how to extract meaning from this abundance.

Copyriot Pt.2

clipped from copyriot.se MRM/metaphoric mode: Defining the network. Here is one very short history of copyright, roughly periodized as three layers of design: Between 1800 and 1950, roughly speaking, copying and use was two physically separated functions. Printing presses were relatively few, and was not needed in order to read the books or perform the scores which were printed. After the world wars, enforcement became more complicated as the means of reproduction entered the private homes. New machines, like the tape recorder, integrated both copying and use in one device. But still, these were two separate functions: You could listen to a tape without producing a new copy of it. Not so with the digital. To use digital information always means to copy it.