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.”

The following summary is a copy and paste collage (a type of literary remix) of my lectures and preliminary writings since 2005.

music remix, in general, is a reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the “aura” of the original will be dominant in the remixed version.

The first remix is extended, that is a longer version of the original song containing long instrumental sections making it more mixable for the club DJ.

The second remix is selective; it consists of adding or subtracting material from the original song.

The third remix is reflexive; it allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable.

Allegory is often deconstructed in more advanced remixes following this third form, and quickly moves to be a reflexive exercise that at times leads to a “remix” in which the only thing that is recognizable from the original is the title. But, to be clear—no matter what—the remix will always rely on the authority of the original song. When this activity is extended to culture at large, the remix is in the end a re-mix—that is a rearrangement of something already recognizable; it functions at a second level: a meta-level. This implies that the originality of the remix is non-existent, therefore it must acknowledge its source of validation self-reflexively. In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed at least for a second time must be recognized otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism. Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix.[5]

The extended, selective and reflexive remixes can quickly crossover and blur their own definitions. Based on a materialist historical analysis, it can be noted that DJs became invested in remixes which inherited a rich practice of appropriation that had been at play in culture at large for many decades. Below are brief definitions with visual examples.

For the Selective Remix the DJ takes and adds parts to the original composition, while leaving its spectacular aura intact

In both of these cases there is subtraction and addition (selectively–hence the term, Selective Remixes).

selectively allegorizes and appropriates elements from the Technics 1210 turntable;

Reflexive Remix takes parts from different sources and mixes them aiming for autonomy. The spectacular aura of the original(s), whether fully recognizable or not must remain a vital part if the remix is to find cultural acceptance. This strategy demands that the viewer reflect on the meaning of the work and its sources-even when knowing the origin may not be possible.

Although they were made 30 years apart, both decontextualze the objects they appropriate.

each individual fragment in Hoch’s work needs to hold on to its cultural code in order to create meaning, although with a much more open-ended position.

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.

The DJ manipulates a record and the Internet user manipulates the Turbulence archives. Metaphorically then, we can think of the Turbulence archive as a record, and like a "vinyl recording," it can develop scratches, and indeed it has, especially when we consider early works such as Not Walls (1996) by Laurel Wilson which uses Apple's Quickdraw, (5) an online interface that remixes image and text in a 3-D environment. The online work cannot be viewed because the plug-in is no longer available and the work has thus turned into an unplayable or scratched section in Turbulence's record groove.

The Hip hop DJs improved on the skills previously developed by Disco DJs starting in the late sixties. They took beatmixing and turned it into beat juggling, which means that they played with beats and sounds, and repeated (looped) them on the turntable to create unique momentary compositions. This is known today as turntablism. This practice found its way into the music studio to become part of the tradition of sampling, and has now been extended into the culture at large with the practice of cut/copy and paste.



Loops are also essential to computer technology, for what else does the computer do but execute loops to know what it should be doing at all times? In the days before the first computers, people did calculations manually, but at one point the need to have repetitive computations performed in a more efficient way became a concrete idea. (38) And in 1945, with ENIAC, computers started to take over the role of human computers. (39) The concept of loops played a crucial role in culture at this time, as Pierre Schaeffer and Stockhausen were creating compositions consisting of loops that were performed not by humans but machines. (40) The loop in music became crucial for DJ Culture, as has already been pointed out; and DJ culture would meet digital culture in new media art, in particular Internet art. This merging is crucial to Remix, as I have demonstrated above. Let us now define Remix to understand its complex role in new media art and popular culture.

What the DJ did is s/he stopped the record and played with it as an instrument to create ephemeral experiences that could certainly be recorded, but which did not lose their power of representation. After each performance, the record was left as it was originally made, with obvious wear and tear, of course. The record, in terms of its future access was essentially the same after each performance. It was like a database ready to be accessed again. This is the case with all of the works that have been examined in this text, they are all ready for access from a database, and the user can "play" them, like the DJ would play records. Of course the online user, by default, does not have the same ability to alter the work as the turntablist does, given that the turntablist is essentially a hacker, but the argument here is that all of the works mentioned here can function without having the actual information lost (unless the record is scratched or the server storing the net art files crashes).

In new media, with cut/copy and paste, the artist has the ability to sample without worrying about destroying the file from which the information was taken. Further the user who views the work understands this and knows that the copy being viewed can be accessed in the same exact way, like a record would (this is true even for new media projects, like Grafik Dynamo, which uses randomness with exactitude to present the illusion of chance to create a supposed unpredictable narrative: while text and image may not be repeated together, the algorithm presenting unrepeatable material is repeated perfectly. This type of "collage" that makes new media work possible is completely dependent on sampling, and as I have demonstrated above, sampling is the essence of Remix. This means that while H�ch, Heartfield and Duchamp shared elements of remix, their works were not remixes in the way Remix has been defined in this text with the works of Armstrong, Tippett, Stern, Neustetter, Levin and Paetzold. During their times, their works were called readymades, photo-montages and collages because the technology at that time allowed for sampling described by such terms. The basic elements of Remix found in Analog technology (the vinyl record), however, as I have shown, were already at play in their works with great accuracy.

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.

lectronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple-authorship responsibility in which the specific concepts of the composer, the performer, and, indeed, the consumer overlap. . . . In fact, implicit in electronic culture is an acceptance of the idea of multilevel participation in the creative process.²

Questions of originality (origins of a work) are rarely clear-cut. In his recent Harper's article "The Ecstasy of Influence," the novelist Jonathan Lethem imaginatively reviews the history of appropriation and recasts it as essential to the act of creation.³

Confronted with this reality, Lethem concludes: "Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses."

Lethem's article is a must-read for anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, creativity, and intellectual property. It brilliantly synthesizes multiple disciplines and perspectives into a wonderfully readable and compelling argument. It is also, as the subtitle of his article acknowledges, "a plagiarism." Virtually every passage is a direct lift from another source, as the author explains in his "Key," which gives the source for every line he "stole, warped, and cobbled together." (He also revised "nearly every sentence" at least slightly.) Lethem's ideas noted in the paragraph above were appropriated from Siva Vaidhyanathan, Craig Baldwin, Richard Posner, and George L. Dillon.

Artistic and scholarly works build on the work of others.

Reading Walter Benjamin's highly influential 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"⁴ it's clear that the profound effects of reproductive technology were obvious at that time. As Gould argued in 1964 (influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan⁵), changes in how art is produced, distributed, and consumed in the electronic age have deep effects on the character of the art itself.

The ease of copying and manipulating digital media naturally supports the sampling and recombining of materials. Like participatory media genres such as blogging, media production tools have gotten cheaper and easier to use even as they have become more powerful. The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous media artists who are reimagining the iconography of popular culture, unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube.com to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers.⁶

The "remix" of digital content can happen in any number of ways. As Tony Hirst has argued: "The easiest remix is not really a remix at all, and barely counts as a reuse, though it is a republish or represent—just take a direct copy of someone else's content and make it your own property/publish it on your own site, in your own content area . . . at least it shows someone else cares enough to take a copy. And it's another place for eyeballs to see that content."⁸ From there, one might delete or edit irrelevant references, add and update links, perhaps embed an appropriate online video, and link to a podcast. Maybe a dynamically updated RSS feed from a relevant blog or del.icio.us tag can be rendered on the sidebar to provide a steady stream of fresh content. Hey . . . now we're mashing it up!

The question is, why should a culture of remix take hold when the learning object economy never did? What's the difference? I would argue that for one thing, the standards/practices relationship implicit in the learning objects model has been reversed. With only the noblest of intentions, proponents of learning objects (and I was one of them) went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing an arduous and complex set of interoperability standards and then working to persuade others to adopt those standards. Educators were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff. Not surprisingly, almost all of them passed.

lthough the disappointing impact of the learning objects approach is easy to criticize, Web 2.0 remix won't be any more significant on campus unless certain conditions are met:

Open and Discoverable Resources. Internet users enjoy a wealth of available resources from a vast range of sources. In addition to the surprising effectiveness of free text searching in Google, emergent communities provide a steady stream of socially filtered and recommended materials via blogs, social bookmarking tools, and networking nodes such as Twitter. Whatever one thinks of Wikipedia's epistemic legitimacy, it is an astonishing resource that provides an excellent starting point for research on almost any subject. Essential to the circulation of all these sources is that they are readily found on the open net and can be linked to directly. Educators might justifiably argue that their materials are more authoritative, reliable, and instructionally sound than those found on the wider Web, but those materials are effectively rendered invisible and inaccessible if they are locked inside course management systems.

Open and Remixable Formats. In order for educators to reuse other educators' materials, they need to be able to customize or adapt the materials—maybe because they need to make a resource more applicable to their local context or maybe because they have a new idea, one that the original creators never imagined.

The potential payoff for using open and discoverable resources, open and transparent licensing, and open and remixable formats is huge: more reuse means that more dynamic content is being produced more economically, even if the reuse happens only within an organization. And when remixing happens in a social context on the open web, people learn from each other's process.

the term data mashup describes a Web site or application that combines the data and functionality of multiple Web sites into an integrated experience.

Perhaps no single development illustrates the increasing simplicity of mashup programming more dramatically than the introduction of Yahoo!'s Pipes service (http://pipes.yahoo.com/). Described by O'Reilly as "a milestone in the history of the internet,"¹⁷ the Pipes interface is a remarkably intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows the user to bring in resources from Google, Flickr, and other data sources, manipulate the resources, and generate outputs that can be implemented in most Web environments.

In other words, this Pipe can create a filtered search of trusted domains that are relevant to a particular course, and the filtered search will adjust automatically as new links are added to the course materials. Of course, this added functionality requires open content and a reusable data format in order to work properly. If the course unit in question is locked away in a course management system behind a password firewall, Pipes cannot access the data required to create the customized search. As with content remixing, open access to materials is not just a matter of some charitable impulse to share knowledge with the world; it is a core requirement for participating in some of the most exciting and innovative activity on the Web.

Moving toward the Mashup

We might ask if the content we presently lock down could be made public with a license specifying reasonable terms for reuse. When choosing a content management system, we might consider how well it supports RSS syndication. In an excellent article in the March/April 2007 issue of EDUCAUSE Review, Joanne Berg, Lori Berquam, and Kathy Christoph listed a number of campus activities that could benefit from engaging social networking technologies.²⁶ What might happen if we allow our campus innovators to integrate their practices in these areas in the same way that social networking application developers are already integrating theirs? What is the mission-critical data we cannot expose, and what can we expose with minimal risk? And if the notion of making data public seems too radical a step, can APIs be exposed to selected audiences, such as on-campus developers or consortia partners? However educators choose to respond, and whatever educators think of the term mashup, the complex relationships between individuals, organizations, content, data, and applications will never be the

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.

Hip-hop DJs have a phrase to describe the detailed, moment to moment controlling of a set of turntables, celebrated in the classic early track by Gang Starr, "DJ Premier in Deep Concentration". The post-futurist novel will employ just such a concentration in its use of language.

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.

There are two types of mashups, which are defined by their functionality.  The first mashup is regressive; it is common in music, and is often used to promote two or more previously released songs.  Popular mashups in this category often juxtapose songs by pop acts like Christina Aguilera with the Strokes, or Madonna and the Sex Pistols.2 The second mashup is reflexive, and is usually found outside of music, and most commonly in web 2.0 applications. Some examples of this genre include news feed remixes as well as maps with specific local information.  This second form of mashup uses samples from two or more elements to access specific information more efficiently, thereby taking them beyond their initial possibilities.  While the Regressive Mashup is a remix the Reflexive Mashup is not, that is if a remix is defined as an allegory that finds its authority in sampling pre-existing objects.  But to move further with this argument Remix must be defined in detail.3

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.

he first two are familiar approaches to autobiography or memoir. The final approach demonstrates how the example is not about my life, the material, but about the composition method and the mode of literacy/electracy to which it points. Only here can one grasp how a new media, rip/mix/burn, pedagogy can extend the teaching of cultural studies and post-process composition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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