I saw a tweet from Laurence Lessig this morning pointing me at a YouTube video by Julian Sanchez (’Normative‘) in which he discusses developments in remix culture… and it got me thinking:
I was never much of a believer in Gen X’s “postmodern eclecticism”, but I do understand that as cultural history marches on there’s increasing opportunity to be a culture miner rather than a ‘brave new voice’. How could it be different?
But also, I don’t think anyone involved in these remixes believes they are creating art - they’re doing it to communicate with their mates (and, due to the distribution mechanism, everyone else in the world). I’m sure they’re not under any illusion that this is an important and vital new form of ‘high’ culture. But equally, that’s not to say that someone won’t come along and use the technique to create something truly important and precious.
And the third point I’d like to make is that the people who do this clearly have a huge love and appreciation for the source artifacts - if it were easy and visible to do so, I can’t imagine they wouldn’t part with some cash to uphold the legacy of the culture they are appropriating. Unfortunately, a) it’s pretty much impossible to find out who owns what and b) owners generally still charge ludicrous sums for reuse.
There are behaviours and models waiting to emerge here, but I think it’s still very unclear whether the healthy ones will reach the light…
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It seems to me that the imitations (subsequent generations of a remix) essentially provide a pre-established narrative framework for shits’n'giggles. You can shoot a movie with all your friends in, you don’t have to worry about originality (too much), nor script, rules, delusions of grandeur and so on and so forth - it’s all already there for you to play with. A finely grained form of genre if you will. Similarly, the pop-culture reference, first to The Breakfast Club and then to the already existing remixes secures a critical form by which to enjoy and maybe judge the work.
Zak Snyder’s made a career out of it
A good history of the mash-up sample culture:
http://www.ubu.com/sound/dj_food.html
Btw - the S-Club to KRS-One (’Sound of da police’) segue is one of the finest moments in post-modern non-history.
Manovich and others have argued that we perceive reality through representations of reality, or more precisely, we perceive reality in terms of the techniques and technologies for representing reality which are dominant in our cultures. E.g. perspectival space is a pictorial convention that has little to do with either space or the way we naturally perceive space, but few notice this any more because it has been utterly naturalised as “realistic”. All representation is in this sense generic and derivative - the utterly original is unreadable. Remixes/re-appropriations fall into 2 camps: those that reiterate the ideological & perceptual schemata of the originals, and those which question, attack or subvert them. Both retain a dialectic relationship with the original representation, but there is potential for “the art of the short circuit” - unexpected collisions between two representational systems that are in fact logically or structurally incompatible but both of which we have internalised e.g. most people’s expressed political ideology is democratic and pacifistic, but they all also seem to like action movies that revolve around a single hero at violent war with the entire universe - a common schizophrenia that manifests as the subversive re-visionings of hero archetypes, which youtube has in spades (e.g. gangsta Luke Skywalker; gay Batman & Robin; hitler-youth Superman…)
You need also to factor in the idea that identity IS information, and that the “material” of cyberspace is information, too…
What you are therefore observing when you see mash-ups is something akin to a being “exploring their bodies’ relationship to its environment”, learning to manipulate the materia out of which they are constructed and in which they swim…
On top of this, you need to factor in the notion that the TRUE materia of both cyberspace and identity is ineluctably MATERIAL.
Part of what’s being explored here is the lost/veiled/masked/reconfigured intersection of real bodies with technology, of real bodies with other real bodies, of real physical desires with real physical materials. The world is literally changing, in a way that isn’t quite covered by your “march of cultural progress” metaphor Chris, because of these technologies. The desires of rich westerners for premade 2nd life avatars have created a slave-caste of Koreans who make twinks for rich middle class children; the desire of every schoolchild for an iPod creates and sustains their countries’ economic relationship with producer-states etc…
A lot of mash-up culture is screaming at the wall-of-light, trying to see if there’s anything solid behind it…