Ole C Brudvik's List: Participatory Culture

• Appropriation — the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content

    The digital remixing of media content makes visible the degree to which all cultural expression builds on what has come before. Appropriation is understood here as a process by which students learn by taking culture apart and putting it back together. Art does not emerge whole cloth from individual imaginations. Rather, it emerges through the artist’s engagement with previous cultural materials. Artists build on, are inspired by, appropriate and transform other artists’ work. They do so by tapping into a cultural tradition or deploying the conventions of a particular genre. Beginning artists often undergo an apprenticeship, during which they try on for size the styles and techniques of other, more established artists. Even well established artists work with images and themes that have some currency within the culture. Of course, this is not how we generally talk about creativity in schools, where the tendency is to discuss artists as individuals who rise upon or stand outside any aesthetic tradition.
• Our focus on autonomous, creative expression falsifies the actual process by which meaning is generated and new works produced. Most of the classics we teach in the schools are themselves the product of appropriation and transformation, or what we would now call «sampling» and «remixing.» Homer remixed Greek myths to construct The Iliad and The   Odyssey; Shakespeare sampled his plots and characters from other author's plays; the Sistine Chapel ceiling mashes up stories and images from across the entire Biblical tradition. Lewis Carroll spoofs the vocabulary of exemplary verses that were then standard to formal education. Many core works of the western canon emerged through a process of retelling and elaboration: the figure of King Arthur shifts from an obscure footnote in an early chronicle to the full-blown character of Morte D'Arthur within a few centuries, as the original story is built on by many generations of storytellers.
  
• Many of the forms of expression that are most important to American youth accent this sampling and remixing process, in part because digitization makes it much easier to combine and repurpose media content than ever before. Despite the pervasiveness of these cultural practices, school arts and creative writing programs remain hostile to overt signs of repurposed content, emphasizing the ideal of the autonomous artist. Yet, in doing so, they sacrifice the opportunity to help youth think more deeply about the ethical and legal implications of repurposing existing media content, and they often fail to pro

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  vide the conceptual tools students need to analyze and interpret works produced in this appropriative process.
  
• Appropriation may be understood as a process that involves both analysis and commentary. Sampling intelligently from the existing cultural reservoir requires a close analysis of the existing structures and uses of this material; remixing requires an appreciation of emerging structures and latent potential meanings. Often, remixing involves the creative juxtaposition of materials that otherwise occupy very different cultural niches. For beginning creators, appropriation provides a scaffolding, allowing them to focus on some dimensions of cultural production and rely on the existing materials to sustain others. They are able, for example, to focus more attention on description or exposition if they can build on existing characters and plots. They learn how to capture the voice of a character by trying to mix borrowed dialog with their own words. Mapping their emotional issues onto pre-existing characters allows young writers to reflect on their own lives from a certain critical distance and work through issues, such as their emerging sexualities, without facing the stigma that might surround confessing such feelings in an autobiographical essay. These students learn to use small details in the original works as probes for their own imagination, overcoming some of the anxiety of staring at a blank computer screen. Building on existing stories attracts wider interest in their work, allowing it to circulate far beyond the community of family and friends. In turn, because they are working with a shared narrative and many others have a stake in what happens to these characters, they receive more feedback on their writing.

• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand our mental capacities 

    Challenging the traditional view that intelligence is an attribute of individuals, the distributed cognition perspective holds that intelligence is distributed across «brain, body, and world» (Clark, 1997), looping through an extended technological and sociocultural environment (Clark, 2003). Explaining this idea, Roy Pea (1997) notes, «When I say that intelligence is distributed, I mean that the resources that shape and enable activity are

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  distributed in configurations across people, environments, and situations. In other words, intelligence is accomplished rather than possessed» (p. 50). Work in distributed cognition focuses on forms of reasoning which would not be possible without the presence of artifacts or information appliances, which expand and augment human's cognitive capacities. These devices might be forms that externalize memory, such as a data base, or they can be devices that externalize processes, such as the widely used spell checker.
• Gamers may be acquiring some of these skills at distributed cognition through their participation in squadron-based videogames. James Paul Gee suggests that in playing such games, one has to form a mental map of what player and non-player characters are doing (non-player characters are characters controlled by the A.I of the game). To plan appropriately, the player may not need to know what other participants know, but they do need to know what it is those participants are likely to do. Moreover, in playing the games, one may need to flip through a range of different representations of the state of the game world and of the actions which are occuring within it. Learning to play involves learning to navigate this information environment, understanding the value of each representational technology, knowing when to consult each and how to deploy this knowledge to reshape what is occuring. Humans are able to play much more complex games (and to solve much more complex problems) in a world where keeping track of key data and enacting well-understood computational processes can be trusted to the processing power of the computer, and they can thus focus more attention on strategic decision making.
• Students need to learn the affordances of different tools and information technologies, to know what they can do well and in what contexts they can be trusted; they need to acquire patterns of thought which regularly cycle through available sources of information as they make sense of developments in the world around them. The term «distributed intelligence» emphasizes the role that technologies play in this process but it is closely related to the social production of knowledge which we are calling collective intelligence.
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation — the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking — the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms

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• Unravelling the social network: theory and research
• Despite the widespread popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) amongst children and young people in compulsory education, relatively little scholarly work has explored the fundamental issues at stake. This paper makes an original contribution to the field by locating the study of this online activity within the broader terrain of social network theory in order to inform future educational debate and further research. The first section offers a way of classifying different kinds of online social networking and then places this within the context of the study of social networks. It is argued that relational networks create a sense of belonging and that online networks just as easily trace the contours of existing social divisions as they transcend or transform them. This analysis informs the second section which specifically addresses educational issues, including both the attractions and the limitations of such work. Th

• Ripping is gathering digital content, mix is selecting, edit and/or recombining, feed is to transmit and to share.
   Today, when we browse and search, we invoke a series of chance operations - we use interfaces, icons, and text as a flexible set of languages and tools. Our semantic web is a remix of all available information - display elements, metadata, services
• mages, and especially content - made immediately accessible.Paul Miller
• When recorded, adapted, remixed, and uploaded, expression becomes a stream unit of value in a fixed and remixed currency that is traded via the ever shifting currents of information moving through the networks we use to talk with one another.

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• Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.

    

  The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.

    

  The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum

• Summary

    

  By Greg Peverill-Conti

    

  [This is an edited summary, not a verbatim transcript.]

    

  Moderator Henry Jenkins began by pointing out that there had been discussions throughout the conference of the historical antecedents of the topics at hand.  In terms of using remixing as a tool for learning, he cited Lev Kuleshov – who started what may have been the first film studies program in the early days of the Soviet Union – asking his students to re-edit Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and also pointed to the use of commonplace books in the 19th century as an example of collected/appropriated content.

    

  The purpose of this session is to share information on a number of current projects dedicated to promoting learning through remixing content. Jenkins pointed out that engineers learn how machines work by taking things apart and putting them back together. Can the same be done with culture? The people and projects represented on this panel demonstrate that it might.

• Erik Blankinship started things off by discussing his current company, Media Modifications, which develops tools for exposing and enhancing the structure of media in order to make its full creative and learning potential accessible to all. This is a theme he promises to return to throughout the course of his comments and demonstration.

    

  If one starts with a black screen, you have the space to create a screenplay and ultimately a film or video.  In the case of his demonstration, the video was a clip from Star Trek the Next Generation. On the left-hand side of the screen the video of the scene appeared, on the right side, the text of the script.  Blankenship was able to drag and drop sections of the script which in turn reordered the words and action in the video. He described it as being similar to magnetic poetry, exposing the structure of the media and allowing it to be rearranged and reloaded.

    

  He next demonstrated how this type of remixing and restructuring could be used to create new content.  In this case, he created a countdown by selecting and connecting numbers used by Star Trek characters in many different episodes.  Giving fans access to the structure of media – as in this case – can be a lot of fun.

    

  This project led developers to begin further work around the idea of adaptations. In the case of the Star Trek countdown, he was able to adapt the Star Trek content to tell the simple story conveyed through the numbers in an interesting and original way.  At this point he announced adapt.tv, a soon-to-launched Web site that will provide access to tools for media adaptation.

    

  He used adapt.tv tools to demonstrate on how people can expose the structure of media to create new adaptations.
• A final, fun element of the process that Blankinship demonstrated was the ability to cast a remixed version of the film by using and combining performers from each of the versions at hand.

• Renee Hobbs started by discussing the importance of media literacy as a way for young people to understand the underlying nature of the media.  Remixing, she believes, is a tool that can deepen our appreciation of the constructedness of media messages.  As a media literacy educator, this understanding needs to be a core element of the community.

    

  Remixing also helps illustrate the plasticity of meaning and how it can so easily be altered.  This works because remixing allows us to see and appreciate the functions and structure as they are expressed in the content. 
• The first time he did this project was at the Rhode Island Training School, a reform school.  The participants were all bright people and he explained to them that they were going to be doing Moby-Dick as cocaine – but that they would have to read the novel and then choose a character that they identified with and redefine it for the new context.  One example of this recontextualization was Queequeg as a pimp.  Why a pimp?  Because Queequeg is colorful, exciting, dangerous, he deals in human flesh and he's loyal.  However the kids choose to redefine their characters, Pitts-Wiley forced them to defend their choice using the novel.

• The new theories focus more on the process by which people create meaning and include ideas like:

    
    
  • Multimodial literacy
    
  • Multilteracy framework
    
  • Collective intelligence
    
  • Problem-based learning
    
  • Situated and distributed cognition
    
  • Peripheral participation
    
    

  At the heart of all of this is the question, where does meaning come from?  Much of the way new literacy has been taught has been based on a consumerist model – to view an image and to understand what it is trying to communicate – similar to what Hobbs's work [described above] attempts to do.

    

  This approach is now expanding to include the participant when thinking about the creation of  meaning by considering what happens in the space between the individual as the consumer of a message and the writer or producer of a message. Robison isn't interested in the making of meaning but more in what happens in the space between the production and consumption of meaning.

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• Appropriation is central to the new media literacy. Appropriation should not be understood simply as plagerism -- that is, simply taking what someone else has created as your own property. Nor should appropriation be understood simply as resistance -- that is, refusing
   or rejecting existing cultural framework. The point of appropriation is some kind of negotiation between the self and the larger culture -- an absorption and transformation of shared resources into the raw materials of one's own expression.

   

  For beginning creators, appropriation provides a scaffolding, allowing them to focus on some dimensions of cultural production and rely on the existing materials to sustain others. For all creators, appropriation facilitates communication with others because it acknowledges the shared cultural context within which all expression must occur.

   

  All expression depends on a balance between convention and invention or appropriation and innovation. As we develop media literacy education, we need to rethink the assumptions about the creative process which shape our current educational practices.

• Media in Transition 5: Learning Through Remixing

  • New Media Literacy Framework (Jenkins) on "Learning through Remixing".
    
    Appropriation: meaningfully sampling and remixing media content.
    Judgement: evaluating the reliability and credebility of different sources.
    Networking: searching for, synthesizing, and disseminating information.

• 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.

• Metaverse meets mash-up: come June 15, there's going to be another Free Culture/Creative Commons event in Second Life, this one springboarding off the recent CC Art Show 2006 at NYU and the Sharing is Daring event at Harvard.  The object here is to take the art featured at those sites, and then remix it for an in-world showing on the 15th.  You can do the remixing with Photoshop and other standard tools, of course, but for this event, the ideal medium is SL itself.  Which is what I did with an Untitled photo by Joseph Gergel, uploading it as a texture, displaying it in-world, and using it as a backdrop for a dramatic screenshot, above.
  

    

  No doubt Residents can come up with way better remixes, taking the appropriately-licensed art from here and here*, then converting them into screenshots, 3D sculptures, interactive sites, whatever.  I'm looking forward to reporting on what comes out of this.

• 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.

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• World Wide Web as a whole is also completely modular. It consists from numerous Web pages, each in its turn consisting from separate media elements. Every element can be always accessed on its own. Normally we think of elements as belonging to their corresponding Web sites, but this just a convention, reinforced by commercial Web browsers.

• 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.
• In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed 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. (44)
• 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.

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• Who is the Author?  Sampling / Remixing / Open Source
• The commonality of menu selection / remixing  / sampling / synthesis / “open sourcing”  in contemporary culture  calls for a whole new critical vocabulary to adequately describe these  operations, their multiple variations and combinations. One way to develop  such a vocabulary is to begin correlate the terms that already exist  but are limited to particular media. Electronic music theory brings  to the table analysis of mixing, sampling, and synthesis; academic literary  theory can also make a contribution, with its theorizations of intertext,  paratext²¹, and hyperlinking; the scholars of visual culture  can contribute their understanding of montage, collage and appropriation.  Having a critical vocabulary that can be applied across media will help  us to finally accept these operations as legitimate cases of authorship,  rather than exceptions. To quote Poscardt one last time, “however  much quoting, sampling and stealing is done – in the end it is the  old subjects that undertake their own modernization. Even an examination  of technology and the conditions of productions does not rescue aesthetics  from finally having to believe in the author. He just looks different.”²²

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