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12 Jul 07
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With ripping and mixing one already has a significant part of the compositional process. Information is ripped from the network of distributed cognition (media, sensory information, memory, etc.). As these rips emerge through cognitive processes into consciousness, they spread their affects, their contagion, as thought unfolds. The rips, or their ripples, intersect one another, as tagged points of conduction, and form a rhizomatic, compositional network. They mix together to produce a heterogeneous accumulation of interconnected media.
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in the practice of producing a mix of music on a CD (from which the phrase “rip, mix, and burn” comes), burning in the step in which the music files are recorded onto the CD so that the files can be shared with another. Whereas a working media file, whether a piece of music or video or image, keeps the various rips separate (in layers for example in Photoshop) so that those pieces can be individually edited, a burned file flattens the layers. This is analogous with the difference between a printed paper turned in for a class and the word-processing file from which the paper came. Before the file is burned or printed, the compositional process is ongoing; changes might still be made. After burning, changes might still be made to the working media file, but they would have to be re-burned.
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n technical terms, a burned file is a compression of the working media file. That is, the file size is literally smaller. Though this is not always the case, particularly when producing for the web (where large files mean longer download times), one makes an effort to reduce file size as much as practically possible. Obviously this means they contain less information than working media files.
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the burning process is part of composition; the purpose of burning is not to create a file equivalent to the unburned file, or even necessarily to approximate it, but to be other than the unburned file, to mutate.
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Burned files are generally not as easily editable as unburned ones: note, for example, the difference between editing a Word document and a printed essay or a PDF file. However, while the burned file is not as easily editable, it is far more accessible via a network. This accessibility is not only a result of its compression but is, in fact, the purpose of burning.
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For example, “burning” (though that’s not the term conventionally used) a Photoshop document (a PSD file) as a JPG image file, allows that file to be viewed via a web browser and makes the image accessible to users who may not own Photoshop. JPG files—ripped, mixed, and burned files in their own right—can then become part of other compositions: websites, PowerPoint slideshows, print documents, and other multimedia. As composition is an iterative process, there is no endpoint.
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Analogous to the compression of data in the burning of media files is the compression of sensory data entering the brain and the compression of data in our cognitive processing of texts and other media. This compression is recognizable in the writing process. As one writes, words appear on the screen or page. There is no simple way to separate the articulation of particular words from other parts of the cognitive process of composition; that is, the process is iterative and recursive in each moment. Each event in writing, each word, emerges from a rhizomatic network of proliferating, contagious affects produced from data ripped from the network. That data enters cognition through a process of compression but then unfolds, spreading outward with potential. Each word then is a burning: the apprehension and compression of a topological event of affective unfolding. As compression, each word is a noisy, partial capture. This is not “error,” nor is it a problem with writing to be solved or avoided. It is instead an integral part of composition, which allows for the transmission of data across the network. Who would want or need to have access to the layers of thought that are compressed into each word? Only one who imagined that clear and distinct thoughts appear from nothingness in a final, unproblematic form could also imagine that a language could exist to communicate such thoughts. However, our minds do not function in this way and neither does our language, which is obviously an integrated part of cognition.
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If ripping spreads contagion with indeterminate effects (like eating a strange mushroom), and mixing proliferates that contagion along a rhizomatic network, then burning engenders a process of involution, an inward turning and shrinking, much like Derrida’s hérrison (hedgehog) balling up defensively.
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Technically, burning is a translation from one file format into another. However, in my broader use of the term here as a compositional process, burning is the transfer into language. As such, it is a point where the indeterminate, virtual topology of thought becomes actualized as specific words. This is an involution, a compression, an infolding of possibility.
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In this sense, the process of involution might be separated from the process of translation or interpretation. As I mentioned before, burning files alters them and makes them accessible in a variety of applications. In this sense, it makes them available for translation into a new setting. However, one cannot imagine burning as a transparent process that leaves the file unaltered or opens its “truth” for everyone to see. As the same time, involution is unavoidable. As Derrida suggests, all one might do is approach the poem as singular, as “a thing.” In connecting to this thing, the compositional process begins anew: another connection, another contamination.
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