The Hip hop DJs improved on the skills previously developed by Jamaican music producers, and Disco DJs during the seventies. They took beatmixing and turned it into beat juggling, which means that they played with beats and sounds on the turntable to create unique momentary compositions. This is known today as turntablism. This practice found its way into the music studio and became part of the tradition of sampling; and sampling is the basis for the popular practice of cut/copy and paste.

Remix (with a capital “R”) is not only defined by material activities but the political contexts of those activities. The remix of NYC was developed in large part due to commercial interests to promote specific songs in a growing consumerist market thriving on the wings of Disco and Hip Hop subcultures. Yet historically, it is agreed that the basic concept of remixing that was defined in NYC was already at play in Jamaica. When considering this, one should keep in mind that the type of consumption that took place in Jamaica’s culture is very different from what took place in popular culture in the United States and othe places of the world, and that this does affect the different names that acts of appropriation attain. In short, there are cultural and political reasons why Jamaican musicians called their remixes “versions” and not “remixes.”

Learning By Remixing

RHYTHM
SCIENCE

he Internet also depends on sampling, on cut/copy and paste in order to function as a network. File sharing, downloading open source software, live streaming of video and audio, sending and receiving e-mails are but a few of the activities that rely on copying, and deleting (cutting) information from one point to another as data packets. This means that cut/copy and paste is a pivotal element of Internet based art, and apply directly to the Turbulence archive.

What is particular to Internet art is that the user plays a crucial role in activating the work, like the DJ does when s/he plays with vinyl records. The Internet user manipulates the files in the Turbulence archive in the same way the DJ manipulates the record on the turntable. Both access pre-recorded material. The seventies DJ, however, was following the tradition of hackers, because s/he was manipulating records on a machine that was originally used for passive listening. This active interaction with pre-recorded material became part of the mainstream, and we can see how the online user falls within a category in part deriving from the DJ; the user now is expected to play with the files (like a DJ with records) and not just listen or view them passively, because interaction, touching, or in the case of the online user, clicking, is now integrated into culture.

Walter Benjamin,

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

(Note: Footnote numbers appear thus: [1]. The notes are at

the end of the file. Click on any note number to go to the note.)

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were

established, in times very different from the present, by men

whose power of action upon things was insignificant in

comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our

techniques, the adaptability and precision they have

attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a

certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient

craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical

component which can no longer be considered or treated as it

used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern

knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter

nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.

We must expect great innovations to transform the entire

technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention

itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in

our very notion of art.

It's all in the mix

What do you get if you combine, say, the tagging system from one site with the RSS feed of another? A software mashup, one of the hits of Web 2.0, reports Jack Schofield

So What Exactly Is An OpenLearn Content Remix?

As the term suggests, mashups involve the reuse, or remixing, of works of art, of content, and/or of data for purposes that usually were not intended or even imagined by the original creators. Although the historical roots of remix and mashup culture are deep, the properties of digital media are what have given ordinary individuals the power to reshape works on an unprecedented scale. In recent years, with the emergence of Web 2.0, the ability to copy, to combine, and to remix has been extended. Increasingly, it's not just works of art that are appropriated and remixed but the functionalities of online applications as well.

But for readers unfamiliar with the term, or ones confused by the indiscriminate usage that Paradis justifiably complains about, I offer here some definitions. Remix is the reworking or adaptation of an existing work. The remix may be subtle, or it may completely redefine how the work comes across. It may add elements from other works, but generally efforts are focused on creating an alternate version of the original. A mashup, on the other hand, involves the combination of two or more works that may be very different from one another. In this article, I will apply these terms both to content remixes and mashups, which originated as a music form but now could describe the mixing of any number of digital media sources, and to data mashups, which combine the data and functionalities of two or more Web applications.

Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can't we writers have some fun as well?

With this in mind, we could use Richie Hawtin's CD as the template for a novel. We need to create 38 stories, which then blend into each other using the CD's diagram as a guide. As one story comes to an end, another story, or two other stories, are mixed into it. These new stories are then carried on, until further stories are added to the mix.

Hawtin will return to the same record twice, or to a different remix of the record; we can use this technique to allow our various stories to reappear at different places in the narrative. The special effects and the drum machine elements can be interpreted in their own ways, according to the individual imagination. There are no rules, only opportunities. Above all, imagine the pleasure gained from following the various stories through the mix.

This gives just one possible structure for a post-futurist novel. I now want to talk a little about the language that such a novel could use. We have become very adept in this country, at writing "books". By this, I mean that we tend to concentrate on the big picture, rather than the interplay of words.

Looked at in a different light, however, words become a liquid medium, a malleable substance capable of being transformed in surprising ways. Words can be stretched, broken, melted, drugged, mutated, forced into submission, set free. We need writers who revel in the wild excitement of language, at this deepest level, creating a kind of dub fiction.

Media in Transition 5: Learning Through Remixing

Combinatory: produsage is fundamentally based on an approach which deconstructs overall tasks into a more granular set of distributed problems, and therefore in the first place generates a series of individual, incomplete artefacts which require further assembly before becoming usable and useful as a whole. As a result, information and knowledge as generated through produsage processes is itself distributed and inherently incomplete; as Pesce puts it, "knowledge is everywhere, freely available, but hyperintelligence doesn't confer any great wisdom". In order to effectively participate in and benefit from the knowledge space of hyper- or collective intelligence, therefore those engaging in and with produsage and its artefacts require enhanced capacities to combine and recombine these specific artefacts in their pursuit of personal understanding. But beyond the pursuit of knowledge itself, combinatory capacities are also required for active participation in produsage processes: as we have seen, produsage in many contexts also proceeds from the reappropriation, reuse, and remixing of existing content in new combinations which themselves create new meaning and new understandings of knowledge. Learners must therefore develop the capacities to identify and harness individual chunks of existing information which may be constructively employed in this fashion, as well as the capacities to undertake such recombination and redistribution of information and knowledge through the shared collaborative environments of produsage projects.

regressive and reflexive mashups in sampling culture / eduardo navas



Today, sampling is practiced in new media culture when any software users including creative industry professionals as well as average consumers apply cut/copy & paste in diverse software applications; for professionals this could mean 3-D modeling software like Maya (used to develop animations in films like Spiderman or Lord of the Rings);1 and for average persons it could mean Microsoft Word, often used to write texts like this one.  Cut/copy & paste which is, in essence, a common form of sampling, is a vital new media feature in the development of Remix.  In Web 2.0 applications cut/copy & paste (sampling) is a necessary element to develop mashups; yet the cultural model of mashups is not limited to software, but spans across media.   Mashups actually have roots in sampling principles that were first initiated in music culture around the seventies with the growing popularity of music remixes in disco and hip hop culture; and even though mashups are founded on principles initially explored in music they are not always remixes if we think of remixes as allegories.  This is important to entertain because, at first, Remix appears to extend repetition of forms in media, in repressive fashion; but the argument in this paper is that when mashups move beyond basic remix principles a constructive rupture develops that shows possibilities for new forms of cultural production that question standard commercial practice. 

The following examination aims to demonstrate the reasons why mashups are not always remixes and the importance of such difference in media culture when searching for new forms of critical thinking.  I will first briefly define mashups and Remix to then examine mashups’ history in music, then briefly consider them in other media, to then examine in detail their usage in web applications.  This will make clear the relationship of mashups to Remix at large, and will enhance our understanding of sampling as a critical practice in Remix and Critical Theory.

The entertainment discourse project begins as a cultural studies investigation into the way in which a popular film participates in the formation of identity by passing along subjective traits to young viewers. However, the widesite project invites students to rip apart such media compositions and infuse them with other affects. The image of Luke Skywalker staring across the desert might still evoke the excitement of an impending journey but it is no longer one toward a ready-made identity. Instead there is an opportunity for experimentation and risk. Compositions such as the one I describe above do not necessarily come quickly or by chance: the composition of a rhizome requires experimentation to discover what will cause the proliferation of information. Nor is the wide image an answer. It does not reveal the “truth” about me. It is not a confession: I have nothing to admit. Instead it is a tool, a compass-like device, which orients my responses to media in relation to the unfolding of my thoughts and the articulation of my subjectivity. As such, it is a tool that provides further critical insight into my affective responses to future media; it produces a critical electracy analogous to my critical print literacy.

Ripping, mixing, and burning present a topological approach to composition in which one can articulate a process, replete with mechanisms, but do so without reducing writing to a discrete set of practices. That is, unlike invention, arrangement, and revision, ripping, mixing, and burning are not steps, not even recursive steps. Nor are they deterministic in their products in the sense that invention is where ideas are produced, arrangement is where those ideas are organized, and revision is where “correction” or clarification occurs. Instead, they describe the unfolding, the composition, of thought as it moves from a virtual, undecided state and becomes articulated in the conscious as language (an unfolding that includes the material, technological act of writing).. 

Ulmer’s text extends on the theme of navigation by relating an anecdote regarding Albert Einstein. At the age of eight, Einstein received the gift of a magnetic compass. The memory of this gift was forever vivid for him, as “in retrospect [he] recognized the symbolic value of the compass gift since he of all people became the one to explain the physics of the electromagnetic field that caused the action of the needle” (Ulmer 2003, 21). This anecdote becomes a starting point for a project that arcs through the text, the production of a web site in which students investigate their own sources of creative energy and their relationship with institutions of what Ulmer terms the “popcycle” (essentially the primary ideological apparatuses of our society). Where the compass charts the currents of electromagnetic energy across the surface of the earth, Ulmer’s widesite charts affective currents in the intersection between the body, the conscious, and institutions. The widesite experiment, if successful, produces a tool for affective-proprioceptive attunement whereby the writer can navigate affective currents. The widesite operates as a compass, locating the pull of the popcycle, but like the compass, which does not require the user to go north but provides orientation for moving any direction, the widesite enhances the user’s cognition of cyberspace.

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.

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.