WHAT COMES AFTER REMIX?

  • media in all forms exhibit remix
  • remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups
  • if post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s (and beyond)
  • 2000s remix cultures, “Networked Politics”, cultures on the Web: political remix videos, anime music videos AMVs, machinima, alternative news, infrastructure hacks cd86f2
  • By 1987, “DJs started to ask other DJs for remixes” and the treatment of the original material became much more ‘aggressive’ - (extensive? violent? disrespectful? further from the original intention?)
  • in the realm of commercial music remixing is officially accepted, but in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing
  • “appropriation.” The term was first used to refer to certain New York-based post-modern artists of the early 1980s who re-worked older photographic images
  • “remixing” suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which “appropriation” does not have (eg simply placing the urinal in another cultural context)
  • ‘quoting’ refers inserting some fragments from old text(s) into the new ones - a precedent for sampling
  • ‘with sampling technology, the practices of montage and collage that were always central to twentieth century culture, became industrialized’
  • musical samples are often arranged in loops
  • the nature of sound allows musicians to mix pre-existent sounds in a variety of ways, from clearly differentiating and contrasting individual samples (thus following the traditional modernist aesthetics of montage/collage), to mixing them into an organic and coherent whole
  • if modernist collage always involved a “clash” of element, electronic and software collage also allows for “blend.”
  • electronic musicians now often conceive their works beforehand as something that will be remixed, sampled, taken apart and modified
  • electronic editing equipment such as switcher, keyer, paintbox, and image store made remixing and sampling a common practice in video production towards the end of the 1980s
  • software tools such as Photoshop (1989) and After Effects (1993) had the same effect on the fields of graphic design, motion graphics, commercial illustration and photography
  • hypertext
  • the web redefined electronic document as a mix of other documents
  • will we get tired of remix from existing works and will it be possible to then create new aesthetics
  • everyone is everyone else
  1. http://netpublics.annenberg.edu/