Abstracts
Mark Amerika—The renewable tradition (extended play remix)
Drawing from a network of appropriation artists, process philosophers, performance poets, pla(y)giarists, and other remix provocateurs, this experimental artist essay investigates the act of remixologically inhabiting the body language of others and, in the process, devises an aesthetic theory that situates the contemporary artist as a "postproduction medium" whose methodologies further extend avant-garde practice into the 21st century.
Ross Harley—Cultural Modulation and The Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art
Australian media artists particularly have been engaged in using found-footage strategies — as evidenced by work made over the past three decades and included in recent retrospective exhibitions such as 'SynCity: Remixing three generations of sample culture' (2006). Armed with techniques of cut and copy, these artists purposefully manipulate and hack found material for their own strategic purposes. In doing so, they dislocate archival material from its original techno-cultural location and re-animate global popular culture in their own personal/local style. Artists have always been plugged into archives, whether it be for inspiration, research purposes, or as a source of raw material. The present digitisation of archives into web databases and peer-to-peer networks has further accelerated this relationship of storage and cultural exchange. Tracing a conceptual bass-line that can be followed from the avant-garde filmmakers of the 20s, Situationist détournement and Burroughs’ cut-up techniques of the 1960s, 1980s Super8 strategies, contemporary VJ culture, creative commons, wikimedia, open source and P2P networks, this article lays out some of the stakes involved in remixing the archive in the bit-torrent age.
Lisa Gye—How can you be found when no-one knows you’re missing?
Try to imagine Wolf Creek with an Australia style marketing and tourism campaign. The John Jarratt action figure. Milk cartons proclaiming The Thrill Is In The Hunt. Such an imagining invites us to ponder the capacity of a ‘national cinema’ to reflect or refract ‘national identity’. It allows us to ask whether the idea of a ‘national cinema’ is relevant (or in fact ever was) in a world where the rapid and global circulation of images ensures that we are never able to control or distil them into any kind of meaningful semiotic assemblage for very long. In such a world, is national identity anything more than a marketing strategy? These ideas are explored in this article by way of the reflexive remix in order to examine, more broadly, the functioning of reflexive remix as a mode of critical discourse. Can reflexive remix perform criticism, an applied grammatological critique? Drawing on and remixing the writings of Greg Ulmer, Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, the author argues for a positive response to such questions.
Ian Haig—Sputnik Baby
In this article, Haig argues that UK New wave, post punk pop band Sigue Sigue Sputnik made an important and undervalued contribution to the history or remix and sample culture in the mid 1980’s. Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s overloaded cyberpunk image and album 'Flaunt it' are discussed, along with discussions of the role of Sigue Sigue Sputnik as a sampler of pre existing music, styles and iconography.
Steve Jones—James Brown, sample culture and the permanent distance of glory
The James Brown song ‘I’m Real’ (1988) features lyrics regaled from James Brown’s back catalogue, alongside vocal samples extracted from his earlier hits. As one of the most sampled artists of the hip-hop era, James employed sampling in order to reclaim his position as the “Godfather of Soul” and express his disatisfaction at having his work overtly plundered. The central questions I pose here focus on what the choice to sample himself reveals about Brown’s status as a Soul legend, and whether the contemporaneous James could sincerely live up to the mythic status inherent to the message of ‘I’m Real’ given its self-conscious form. This confusion appears to be an extension of Walter Benjamin’s conception of déjà vu as an acoustic effect - ‘the cool tomb of long ago, from the vault of which the present seems to return only as an echo’ (Benjamin cited in Breyley, 2009: 145) - only here the slippage between past and present is quite literal, involving the discordant imbrication of two divergent temporal states. Via a detailed investigation of the song ‘I’m Real‘, I will probe Brown’s playful employment of his own past. His gambit, I will argue, may be read simultaneously as testament to his own glory, and as a signifier that the excesses of egotistic auto-projection were always more distant than they first appeared to be.
Esther Milne— Materialities of Law: Celebrity Production and the Public Domain
Celebrity production and consumption are powerful socio-economic forces. The celebrity functions as a significant economic resource for the commercial sector and plays a fundamental symbolic role within culture by providing a shared ‘vocabulary’ through which to understand contemporary social relations. A pivotal element of this allure is the process by which the celebrity figure is able to forge an intimate link with its audience, often producing public expressions of profound compassion, respect or revulsion. This process, however, is complicated by emerging participatory media forms whose impact is experienced as new conditions of possibility for celebrity production and consumption. As Marshall argues, video mash-ups of celebrity interviews, such as those of Christian Bale or Tom Cruise, are dramatically changing the relation between celebrity and audience (Marshall, 2006: 640). Meanings produced by these audience remixes challenge the extent to which a celebrity might control her image. So is the celebrity personality, therefore, a public or private commodity? Who owns the celebrity image within remix culture? Although the celebrity figure has been thoroughly researched in relation to its patterns of consumption; semiotic power; and industry construction; less attention has been focused on the forms of celebrity governance enabled by legislative and case law settings. How might the law deal with the significant economic and cultural power exercised within celebrity culture? Craig Saper—Materiality of a simulation: Scratch reading machine, 1931
Using Bob Brown's reading machine and the prepared texts for his machine, called readies, both designed in 1930, as an example of scratch turntablist techniques, suggests an alternative to narrow definitions of literacy and new ways to appreciate the history of scratch techniques. Brown's machine resembles the turntablist’s ability to rapidly shift reading (its direction, speed, and repetition) rather than slowly flipping the pages of a book. Punctuation marks, in the readies, become visual analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (—) that also, by definition, indicate that the sentence was interrupted or cut short. The old uses of punctuation, such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. The result looks like a script for a turntablist’s performance, and dj Herc starts to sound like a reading teacher. An online simulation of Brown's machine, http://www.readies.org, reproduce, or approximate, the motion, scratch, jerking, flickering, and visual effects produced or illuminated with the machine. Those supplemental aspects of reading are always already part of reading. The supplement (movement, visuality, mechanicity) to traditional notions of literacy usually remain part of an implicate process. The reading machine and scratch techniques are not simply a new conduit for the same supposedly natural process. The scratch reading highlights what Jacques Derrida calls the "virtual multimedia" (of reading print) on paper. The increasing prevalence, even omnipresent and [to some critics] epidemic, use of text(ing) machines, something outside or beside traditional literacy, the scratch-meaning becomes foregrounded. Brown's machine puts the natural process of reading under erasure or scratch (simply by adjusting the speed, direction, and layout). dj Herc did the same for music.
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