Cave Bunny

As already hyped over the Net, Nick Cave (the multitalented Australian singer, screenwriter, actor, writer and what have you) is releasing his second book The Death of Bunny Munro. Surrounding the presentation of his new book, Cave, assisted by publisher Canongate, is launching a huge marketing campaign using all digital/new media marketing possibilities to promote Bunny. This viral operation, combined with the aura surrounding Cave, makes this a very interesting endeavor to take a closer look at.

 First of all, what is the book about?  From the publisher’s website:

“The Death of Bunny Munro recounts the last journey of a salesman in search of a soul. Following the suicide of his wife, Bunny, a door-to-door salesman and lothario, takes his son on a trip along the south coast of England. He is about to discover that his days are numbered. With a daring hellride of a plot The Death of Bunny Munro is also a modern morality tale of sorts, a stylish, furious, funny, truthful and tender account of one man’s descent and judgement. The novel is full of the linguistic verve that has made Cave one of the world’s most respected lyricists. It is his first novel since the publication of his critically acclaimed debut And the Ass Saw the Angel twenty years ago.”

I have not (yet) read Cave’s first novel (mentioned above) but love his song writing, and although, as novelist Will Self states in his amazing review on Cave as a writer, writing good song lyrics is not the same as writing a good book or poem, Self (with me agreeing – I hope) seems to make an exception when it comes to Cave. From his review, entitled Dark Matter (originally published in The Guardian): 

“Cave, as a poetic craftsman, provides all the enjambment, ellipsis and onomatopoeia that anyone could wish for. A word on eroticism and the dreadful dolour of knowing not only that all passion is spent – but also that you’re overdrawn. If Cave were to be typified as a lyricist of blood, guts and angst, it would be a grave mistake. He stands as one of the great writers on love of our era. Each Cave love song is at once perfumed with yearning, and already stinks of the putrefying loss to come. For Cave, consummation is always exactly that.”

This promises quite a lot and the fact that Cave’s writing skills extend to prose does not surprise me, although it does make one a little envious of such an unlimited talent. 

Published by Canongate, the UK publication of Bunny is planned for September 3^rd 2009. Accompanying the book release a beautifully designed website has been created, on which one can (of course) find more information about the book, reviews (reviews from the Australian release are already up here) and information about the events surrounding the release. As this is an international release, being published in 31 countries around the world, these events are an important part of the campaign. Cave is doing webchats, interviews, evenings and talk sessions all over the world. These events will not only gather there own revenue but will definitely also promote the sales of the book. Cave is also booked to come to Amsterdam, states his Dutch publisher J.M. Meulenhoff: On the 14^th of October Cave will ‘do’ the renowned venue Carré (an evening with Nick Cave) – press interviews afterwards. Knowing these Carré events, tickets will probably go for around 100 euros. Good plan Nick.

Still, nothing out of the ordinary here. What makes this such an interesting multimedia release however is the fact that Cave simultaneously releases an audiobook version, read by the man himself, with an accompanying soundtrack created by Cave and Warren Ellis (who worked before with Cave on The proposition and in his Grinderman project). The soundtrack uses a ‘3D audio spatial mix’, specially designed for listening on headphones and thus, as the website states ‘creating a fully immersive experience for the listener’. Next to that one can also find videos on the Bunny site (and on Youtube) showing Cave reading from the book (detail: notice bling-bling rings on fingers) – again accompanied by the aforementioned soundtrack: all creating the necessary buzz around the persona or brand of Cave. I watched some of it, and, in a part which recalls a kind of absurdist Ellis, I especially liked chapter 11 part 1.

You can buy or order different formats of the book: the signed, numbered and slipcased limited edition (up to 120 pounds and increasing with every sale – real fans buy everything). The standard hardback, the ebook in EPUB format, an audiobook box set (with DVD of Cave reading extracts from the book) and an audio download will also be available. This multimediality offers the reader all kinds of entrances into the narrative, providing choice and convenience. The Guardian zooms in on this aspect in a very good analysis of these  kinds of ‘enhanced book editions’ that will be available for the iPhone:

“The Enhanced Edition does some of the things we’re now accustomed to seeing as standard in electronic texts: you can faff with fonts, change colour, bookmark it, and so on; and there’s some smart social networking stuff attached. But it also includes enhancements that could have a noticeable effect on the experience of reading. Instead of paginating the book conventionally, it’s presented as a continuous vertical scroll (one geek-pleasing trick is that you can adjust the scrolling speed with the angle of tilt of the phone), and the App includes an audiobook that syncs with the written text.  Pop on the headphones, thumb the screen and Cave’s voice picks up where you left off.”

The Guardian seems very enthusiastic about the possibilities these kinds of experiments might bring to our reading experience: making it less monolithically text based and more immersed with our other senses, experiencing mixed media at the same time, as we are increasingly more used to nowadays anyway:

“This is interesting. It could be regarded as a gimmick, but if it catches on, it will subtly change the way we experience fiction. If you half-read, half-listen to a book, your experience of reading will partly be shaped by the voice of the audiobook; your memories of the text will be coloured by how you took it in, passage by passage. (…) So, some whiffs of roses and haddock. But the breadth of the package, it seems to me, is at the very least a weathervane. There’s no ignoring the fact that the e-book will, not too far from now, compete with the paperback; and the likelihood is that some readers won’t just use them to read. It’s a longstanding truism to say that every reader reads a different book. As more packages like this find their way to market, the book itself, as well as its readings, will become more plural, more blurred, and less monolithically booky. Smells good to me.”

Well, I am ready for the experience and will try to read the book simultaneously with the audiobook; as I am a fast reader I wonder if Nick can keep up with me, but maybe the rich baritone of his voice will keep my eyes gripped on the words a little longer.

 

Where Open Philosophy meets Open Music

Via Transversalinflections I learned about Re.Press, an Australian publisher of Open Access titles in Philosophy. Their business model is based on a free Open Access edition in combination with print sales, the model at the moment many presses are experimenting with (amongst others: Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, fellow Australians ANU E Press, Rice University Press, AU Press, and Bloomsbury Academic.

Re.Press already established a wonderful collection of titles, amongst others The concept of model by Alain Badiou, Graham Harman’s new book on Bruno Latour and forthcoming titels on Walter Benjamin and on first love by Sigi Jöttkandt, also co-founder of Open Humanities Press. I especially like Re.Press’s statement from their website:

“In line with this ambition, re.press is itself a new kind of publisher. Attentive to the latest developments in contemporary technologies, re.press publications are available globally, wherever there is access to the internet. We seek to make as many of our publications as possible available as open-access files, free to anyone who wishes to download them. Our hard-copy books are print-on-demand, minimizing waste and cost. Yet our publications also maximize design values, boosting clarity and aesthetic qualities.”

They clearly state in there Open Access policy that they believe, as I concur, that the digital and the print fulfill different functions (at least will do so for the time being) making it possible for them to thrive side-by-side. And this dual existence can even strengthen (traditional) Humanities/Philosophy publishing and scholarly communication :

“Our academic titles are published under an open access licence ensuring the greatest possible exposure for our authors’ work through the almost unrestricted distribution channels of the internet. This does not mean that re.press is a digital publisher: we are a publisher of ‘real’ books that are available in bricks and mortar booksellers (as well as on-line retailers). However, our open access titles are also available free of charge in digital form. We do not consider the digital version a replacement for the physical book. On the contrary, we believe that the two mediums perform different functions, offering the best of both worlds. In fact, it is our hope that open access publishing will strengthen traditional publishing and scholarship more broadly by releasing ideas and thinkers from the constraints of the market. You can support our endeavour to make our books widely available as open access titles by encouraging your library to buy a print edition (from the usual sources) or by buying one yourself.”

Via the Re-press link section I discovered another very interesting ‘Ópen Access’ initiative, to be more precise, a record company, called Records on Ribs. They actually seem to bring into practice the Maecenas model I described before (and up to now thought to be kind of hypothetical): they give away their music for free (with Creative Commons licenses) and offer deluxe editions for sale and hope that community support will generate some extra revenues. So they actually take donations targeting the ‘good-music-loving-and-supporting hearts of their community. 

I love their manifesto so I am going to publish that integrally here now. Read and weep: 

Manifesto

Records on Ribs gives away it’s music for free.

Records on Ribs is against nothing. We are not here ‘in reaction’ to anything. We are merely putting into practice what we believe. And this is what we believe…

To sell music for profit is to deny its worth. It is to reduce it to numbers, spreadsheets, targets.

Desire cannot be quantified thusly.

Tapes, CD-Rs and the internet give us the opportunity to distribute music for free without losing significant sums of money.

Anyone could do what we are doing. A free for all. Brilliance obscured by an avalanche of mundanity.

So what? There is an avalanche of mundanity already in the shops, and it costs you £9.99 a go.

We only ask that you listen with open hearts and minds. And if one hundred, one thousand, one million people want to do the same as us then good luck to them. What a world that would be! Desire freed from profit.

We accept donations, but do not expect them. What we do costs us little, but we cannot avoid making a loss. Nor can the artists who have to buy equipment and take time to rehearse, perform and record. Any money you give us will go to loosen these burdens and will be gratefully received.

You can also buy lovingly crafted CD-Rs of our albums (made to order). We like to think they are objects worth owning, because we know you are all commodity fetishists when it comes to music, and an MP3 isn’t quite the same. We are hoping to do vinyl one day in the future.

All the best

The Records On Ribs Team

 

Are there more record companies working with such a model I wonder? And does it work, does it create enough revenue to be sustainable?

Fair Use?

I have been browsing through my old bookmarks and data sources lately and found some interesting things I would like to draw your attention too. First thing is the video underneath on fair use of online video resources from the Center for Social Media at American University. Now what is fair use again? In the accompanying text it says:

 “Fair use is the part of copyright law that permits new makers, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The courts tell us that fair use should be “transformative”—adding value to what they take and using it for a purpose different from the original work. So when makers mash up several works—say, The Ten Commandment , Ben-Hur and 10 Things I Hate about You , making Ten Things I Hate about Commandments —they aren’t necessarily stealing. They are quoting in order to make a new commentary on popular culture, and creating a new piece of popular culture.”

Hmmm, although still vague, the video offers some true potential to online creativity, counter posing strict copyright rules with examples of what exactly is permitted under the nomen of fair use, balance, community codes and prevention of censorship. And it seems quite a lot actually. But how exactly do I know when it’s fair use? The video states ‘so long as you don’t use so much that your work becomes the substitute for the original.’ Or ‘don’t use more than you need to illustrate your point.’ These still seem unclear boundaries to me, but at least fair use rights do offer a lot of opportunities for remix and mashup artists to make an argument for their case. Still ‘this code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights’, it says on the website. It seems it has to be ‘reasonable’ use. Diving deeper into the explanations on the website.

 Remix Culture: Fair Use is your friend

“Fair use is flexible; it is not uncertain or unreliable. In fact, for any particular field of critical or creative activity, lawyers and judges consider expectations and practice in assessing what is “fair” within the field. In weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, the extent of the use and its economic effect. This still leaves much room for interpretation, especially since the law is clear that these are not the only necessary considerations. In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions 

1) Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?

2) Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

Both questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner.”

These guidelines actually give people quite some power to defend their use of copyrighted material, as long as it ‘adds’ something. A report which can also be found on the site ‘points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.’

Still, mashups stay contested as the video underneath shows. The discussion continues…

 

To show a beautiful example of the potential of a remix or collage (or assemblage) of a movie (made as long ago as the early 30’s) you can find underneath part 1 of the mesmerizing work Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell (which I found through the equally astonishing article ‘Theatre of the spirit: Joseph Cornell and Silence’ by Catherine Corman, in Paul D. Miller’s Sound Unbound). The film is a collage of footage from the 1931 movie East of Borneo, from which the sound was stripped and during live performances accompanied by a record of Brazilian music. The movie is an ode of Cornell to actress Rose Hobart, focusing almost exclusively on the scenes she appears in. Corman quotes Cornell calling the film ‘a communication of her essence as a human being’. Thank god for fair use.

 

Adieu Copyright – A debate

Last Wednesday one of Holland’s most famous and disputed anti-copyright defendants, Joost Smiers, presented his new book (or essay) co-written with partner-in-crime Marieke van Schijndel, at cultural hot-spot De Balie (a former courthouse in Amsterdam). Surrounding the presentation a debate evening was organized based on the utopian notion of ‘imagining a world without copyright’. The essay, entitled Adieu auteursrecht, vaarwel culturele conglomeraten (Goodbye copyright, farewell cultural conglomerates) was presented to economist Arjo Klamer.  Klamer gave a sparkling speech – setting the tone for the following discussion – by claiming that Smiers and Van Schijndel’s essay was just not radical enough. By referring to well known numbers (10% of the cultural producers claim 90% of the remits) and hopelessly cumbersome and complicated processes of IPR regulations, upholdings and claimings, Klamer wondered why we even have such a system. He went on to systematically explain how property right is closely intermingled with a product, an object one can trade. This proprietary right is the basis of our market thinking. This market can only function through the merits of a state that enforces this proprietary right. Klamer calls this a conspiracy between the market and the state. He explains that in the utopian thinking of Smiers and Van Schijndel, the abolition of copyright serves mainly to break down the power of the large cultural conglomerates that control the cultural market in order to encourage a fairer system of competition. They claim this would be more democratic, will encourage free communication and will be beneficial for our cultural life.

Klamer wants to go even further. He claims that the authors still grasp too much to the idea of music and art as products. Klamer questions the whole idea of cultural products and product oriented thinking. He claims the way we look at these cultural artifacts or expressions as products is a simple metaphor for our ability to buy them. But artistic expressions are no products, they are ‘words’, they only get their ‘meaning’ when they are uttered, they function in a larger context and in this way are dependent on us, the ‘utterers’, the consumers, the potential readers. His starting point is not the product but the metaphor of the conversation [the term discourse to me sounds even better]. Art is a conversation, music is a conversation, science is a conversation. Nobody owns a conversation; it can be compared with friendship [also an inalienable, tangible good]. A conversation is a good people share together in a community, you cannot enforce it (not even the state), you cannot steel it and you cannot free-ride on it; and it is based on the principle of reciprocity [think of the gift economy about which I will write some more in the future].

But money comes into this system too. Klamer calls this the third sphere, the ‘in-between sphere’. Science still functions like this to a large extent. The scientific community works from the common understanding that knowledge is something we all share, science is the conversation we all build upon. Who owns an idea? Even Nobel Prize winners base their ideas on endless conversations with others. IPR does not do right to this conversation and to the quality of the conversation. In science this problem is solved by the providing of services (Klamer gives the example how in the US many artists have a position at the university were they teach and work. There art work is seen as a kind of service to the community in which art is ‘less commercialized’). Klamer’s final statement: leave the state and the market for what they are and let’s acknowledge cultural expressions for their true value, which is much better realized or finalized in the social space, the ‘third space’ in which communal goods reign. This is the sphere we want to contribute to, from which we can get acknowledgement and establish reputation. For the real and true scarce good is attention. This is what distinguishes the one from the other nine, both in science and in art. This is not a fair system and it will never be a fair system. And this unfairness lies not in the power and the influence of the cultural conglomerates, Klamer states, attacking Smiers and Van Schijndel’s premise; the scarcity of attention is a social phenomenon. This scarcity is also exactly what can be liquidated (see for instance how Damien Hirst plays with this notion). This is not to say that the market and the state should rule this world, and in this sense Klamer states the presented essay is still of the utmost importance. Cultural life exists in the third sphere and is realized in (this) community with others, people who feel committed to a bigger interest instead of in the creation of a product for their own profit. Reciprocity, conversation and attention: that is what this sphere is all about. 

After Arjo Klamer finished his speech, Joost Smiers gave a short exposition of the book. He stated that with the abolishment of copyright the market will no longer function as radical around the numbers of one and ten: the public will be much more able to follow their own taste [ignoring the fact I think that the long tail maybe does not exist as recent research has contested]. Smiers does however throw away notions like Creative Commons, stating that they no longer merit the ownership of products and this is an issue he does not want to discuss. He does not believe we should do away with the ownership of cultural goods [on a side note, I feel Smiers is conflating Creative Commons licenses, which are alternative copyright license and thus still centre around the notion of ownership, with the more radical parts of the free culture and free information movement. They are interlinked but not the same!]. Smiers asked the question what will happen to the market once we abolish copyright, how will the market function? He strongly believes entrepreneurial people will be needed in such a new system and this will offer opportunities for those who are active. 

In the first debate Annelys de Vet (graphic designer at the Sandberg Institute) and Nirav Christophe (lector theatrical creation processes and open dramaturgy) engaged with each other and the public. De Vet argued that copyright is a closed manner of handling things; it is a standstill opposed to an open movement. Artists don’t design products, they create processes in a context of processual design in which they are part of a larger whole. Artists don’t quote; they are part of a dialogue or a conversation. Copyright is based on a world of fear where she wants to work and collaborate in a world based on trust. Christophe concurs that theater is foremost a dialogue and thus serves as a good metaphor for the evenings debate. For theatre is always a half-product: as a theater writer your play only comes into existence once it is finished by others. A theatre writer is used to people making adaptations to his texts, making their own interpretations; it makes the texts better. Theatre does not create products, it creates processes. Christophe states that copyright is foremost also a philosophical problem. What is the relationship of the author to his text? Is the text yours? Since Roland Barthes and the death of the author it is no longer maintainable that texts produced by an author are the possession of that author. Only the experience of them being read or uttered, the interaction, makes them come alive. A cultural experience is only created during a certain amount of time in a process that is often created together with others, even together with the public. 

De Vet thus concludes that art should be seen as a dialogue, as a process. The oeuvre of an artist consists of all kinds of different moments, in which the links between these moments create the meaning and this is not linkable back to a product. There is so much pressure on artists nowadays to be original, and so much fear to appropriate, to copy. Yet De Vet encourages this, it will still be different, it will always be used in a different context, it will follow another trajectory. Being unique and signing your work can go hand in hand with the above attitude, they are not each others opposites. Many people are involved in the creation of a design; design is about the creation of a dialogue. Copyright has no relevance in this process, claims De Vet. Christophe concurs and states this is a more realistic view of the modern artist than the romantic 19th century conception of the individual performer. De Vet and Christophe see the economic difficulties of their notions but are up to the challenge of thinking in different ways. 

Questions from the audience phrased the fear of plagiarism: what if one copies or steals my work? What if I get ‘screwed over’? As we know from the debate between Habermas and Foucault, conversations are not always open and honest. This is a way to idealist stance. De Vet  replied that no system is perfect, in a 1 to10 system people are ‘screwed over’ too. She wants to keep a positive stance based on trust.  Media sociologist Jaap van Ginneken replied by stating that under the current copyright system Walt Disney steals everything and then patents it again as its own. Even the Lion King is an adaptation of a Japanese story. So big business seems very efficient in screwing you over too. Joost Smiers remarked that for wrongful appropriation (for instance by a fascist regime) you have alternative laws, you do not need copyright for that. Next to that a system of shaming will probably develop. Other mechanisms will thus develop to maintain the system

In the second debate we met Hans Abbing, emeritus professor in art sociology and Jan-Willem Sligting, programmer at Paradiso and musician. Sligting remarked that copyright is such a different concept where it covers multiple domains, from law to philosophy and economy. Referring to Thomas More and Utopia, he states that a world without copyright will unfortunately just be that: an utopia. But Abbing dives into this make believe world, stating the time is ripe: copyright is increasingly contested online and the current economic crisis urges for the need of equal playing fields. First of all it will improve the situation of artists, where their incomes while become more equal. But most of all the consumer will benefit. There will be more space for diversity and niches. But Abbing also doubts this fantasy. Diversity is not inherently connected to copyright. A society can only handle a certain amount of diversity: you cannot know the details of everything. We need to trust on others, on selection, our attention span is always crooked. The consumer wants selection and we shouldn’t trust too much on the premise of ‘small is beautiful’. And what about that level playing field? How does this relate to different regions on a world scale? We also need big corporations. We should just as well fear social monopolies. Don’t underestimate the power of funders for instance.

Klamer still emphasizes the benefits of contributing to something that is bigger than you. In science and religion the financing is done by way of gifts (gift economy), which according to him is a very valuable system as we are reimbursed for our services. According to Abbing however, gifts only work in small societies on a personal level. Gifts on the Internet will never have a real shape, this will not work according to him. 

Sligting however mentions initiatives like Fabchannel and SellaBand which have business models which are centered on the community. Abbing states that there are a lot of experiments going on but that they need to be based on reciprocity, people will not just donate something, and they want to feel connected to a cause. Simple commercial artifacts (t-shirts, stickers) already help a lot.

Arjo Klamer remarks that science is also totally based on reciprocity: services for reputation. There is however a fierce strive for recognition in this field. This situation is very similar to the independent arts; Klamer claims that such a reciprocal model will be very well applicable to this sector too. Using copyright in this realm is abnormal, it does not work like that in other cultures and it should thus not be norm giving. We need to be more creative with how we establish value. Think about the potential of deluxe editions.

Comments from the crowd focused on the elitism of the debate: not all art is equal, the 1/10 rule is there for a reason, simply because not all works are good. We also need to discuss quality in this context. With a final statement Joost Smiers ended the debate, using the scientific metaphor of the paradigm shift: if a model no longer works we need another one. A world without copyright is not imaginary. We need to break through this dominance to establish a more normal and competitive market in which more people will earn more money. Smiers’ goal is to support this notion with hard figures. It is not an utopia. Smiers wants to create alternative business models and will keep developing them in the future. 

My feeling about the evening was that from a theoretical point of view it hopelessly complicated matters and on a practical level didn’t offer any solutions. Although the debate an sich was very interesting, I think the attack on the big conglomerates by Smiers and Van Schijndel should not be the primary goal of the abolishment of copyright. I feel the fierce attacks on the state and the market that were uttered during the evening (notwithstanding the fact that their powers and reach might actually be too large) unnecessarily complicated the issue, and made it more disputed than it already is. Compare the debate between Lawrence Lessig and Kevin Kelly in which Kelly compared Web 2.0 with socialism (I agree with Lessig in this matter).

Even if we accept the notion of art as a process and dialogue, this does not mean we have to do away with the big companies and commercialization. Making money with their work, in what way they deem fit is still a free choice of creative producers, and commercialization of an experience economy, more akin to the processual and fluxual nature of the current art procedure, is already well on its way. This is why I applaud initiatives like Fabchannel, SellaBand and also Creative Commons, who, on an alternative note, try to create new business models based on sharing, community and reciprocity. Without loosing the option to liquidize these created values. This criticism connects to that of the confused public, which during the evening continually begged for practical solutions and did not receive any. The debate remained too theoretical on many levels, without offering truly new potentials. And doing away with initiatives like Creative Commons, that in a very practical manner try to do something refreshing with the whole IPR problem, to me seems just stupid. The total lack of references to new business models by Smiers and Van Schijndel was also very disappointing. Maybe the practical solutions can be found in their book, however, it is not available Open Access on the net and unfortunately, after this evening, I felt neither compelled nor convinced to buy the book. Felt kind of like a lost chance….

RiP, Maecenas and Event

Brett Gaylor, the director of the Open Source documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, is experimenting with the ‘Maecenas model’ (by others dubbed the ‘pay–as-you-like’ or Radiohead/NIN model) while launching his documentary online as a free download. I have written about RiP before here and since then the (CC licensed) feature length film has only gained more popularity and media attention.

WIRED dedicated a whole article, consisting of an interview with Gaylor, on the movie and discusses its business model, the release and popularity of the movie and the ‘copyfight movement’ Gaylor is involved in.

 Why would Gaylor choose the Maecenas model? When we consider other possible free online content (or Open Access) business models, the Maecenas model does seem to be a more logical model than the model I wrote about yesterday which Bloomsbury Academic is applying to Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix. For in this model there is a clear cut end product, a printed book that can be bought to cover the costs for the production and the free online dissemination of the product. In the case of RiP, this seems a less logical path to follow: the whole idea behind this documentary movie is of course that there is no end product: in the process of continually remixing, reediting and mashing-up the material RiP consists of, the documentary could better be seen as a (continuous) project than a product. As WIRED states: ‘in the realities of remix culture, where there is no such thing as a final cut’. This of course does not mean that certain ‘snapshots’ of the documentary can not be ’materialized’ and sold as products to cover for the costs. And Gaylor does this too, releasing DVD versions of the movie and showing his documentary in a theatrical run at movie theaters and festivals. So in a way, he is betting on two horses. However, Gaylor’s alternative choice for the Maecenas model seems very interesting for the current project. In this specific case it seems like a very good idea to apply this community based model, where RiP collected quite a large network of remix collaborators and enthusiasts around its project core and attracted lot of similar minded folks interested in the goals and values Gaylor tries to spread and promote with his movie, who might definitely be interested in promoting this project further.

However, one of the additional problems of financing and even possibly profiting from such an inherent collaborative and community based project is how to divide the costs and the benefits? As Gaylor states in the WIRED interview:

 “But since we have so many partners that helped us make the film, including theatrical and television distributors, it was a delicate balancing act to make sure the good faith they showed in making the film would be rewarded, that we wouldn’t undercut their efforts to promote and recoup on the film by giving it away.”

 This of course also refers to the problem of attribution in such an ‘authorless documentary’ or collaborative approach: who will get the money? Will it go to Gaylor, (who of course in this case is still very much the master mind and creative brain behind the project) will it go to the foundation Open Source Cinema, which Gaylor has founded?

For Gaylor this does not seem to be the biggest problem however. His goal is to make the documentary as largely available as possible, arguing that that should be what copyright should be about in the first place. Gaylor in WIRED:

 “We’ve gone to really great lengths to make this film as accessible as possible,” […]“It’s already on the Pirate Bay, and that’s great — it’s another delivery format. We didn’t put it there ourselves, though; we didn’t need to. Had we gone that route, it’s fairly likely, given the realities of the film-distribution universe, that we wouldn’t have these other opportunities to get the film to people who still watch TV, rent DVDs or go to movies, which is, in fact, most people. We wanted those people to watch this movie.”

 

When asked about his views on copyright he favors a balance between creating an incentive for producers and at the same time creating as wide accessibility to the consumer population as possible:

 “The classic copyright ones: Providing an incentive, while at the same time ensuring the public’s access to the work. Ultimately, that’s what I, and most people in this movement, are pushing for — a balance. So the film release was a lot more “free as in speech” than it was “free as in beer,” because it was important for me that average folks could see the film on TV or in theaters. And eventually, after a limited term (measured in months!), the film will fall into the public/pirate domain and be copied freely.”

 Gaylor also has some interesting thoughts about the future of remix culture and business models concerning movie distribution in such a context. He talks about going to the cinema as maybe becoming a (money making) experience event on the same scale as going to a concert. This could then serve as a way to cover for the costs that will be lost when the content will be available as a free download or as a pirated version:

 “We’ll see how I feel about that in a year. The remixing is just starting to take off, and I envision a time when these sorts of interactions will create an environment where a theatrical screening is to filmmakers what live performances are to musicians. The ability to create something unique for a particular screening or event allows you to offer an added value to that audience member, as well as have something unique that’s different from what you can get on a DVD or online.”

 And this is interesting indeed, while things might be increasingly online for free the logical option seems to be to charge for events that are unique and cannot be recreated in a ‘reproductive’ manner in an online environment. And this means that, paradoxically enough (or is it even that paradoxical?), Event becomes a capitalist commodity, whereas that what can be reproduced and spread easily online will more and more become available for free. Talk about turning around your business model.

Einmal ist Keinmal

 Memory comes when memory’s old
I am never the first to know   

–        Fever Ray  –

Last Tuesday I attended the excellent lecture series The Old Brand New, in the Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam. The speakers that evening were the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans and the French dancer/choreographer Boris Charmatz. Their talks were reflections on the evening’s topic, New Virtuosity, and on the overarching theme of the series, looking at the term new, in the light of the old and the relationship between the original and the representation. These problems of originality, of the absolute new and the idea of referentiality and remix are themes I have written about before. What I would like to do now, in this post, is to combine the thoughts that came forward during the lectures of these two artists, with some theories and concepts I have recounted recently, thinking about ideas of the static and the fluid, memory and modernity, ownership and collectivity, repetition and representation, actor and participant, reality and virtuality and virtuosity and geniality.

 

I would like to present a virtual conversation between the ideas and works of Tuymans and Charmatz, as developed and presented last Tuesday, and the thoughts of thinkers and writers as diverse as Paolo Virno, Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, Guy Debord, Jacques Attali, Aleida Assmann and Margaret Atwood.

 

What interests me the most in this hypothetical discourse is what our relationship will or can be to the image, to the work of art, to information and knowledge and thus to content in a more general manner, in the present digital age. Taking into account our relationship towards these representations or constructs as narratives in language in our growing stance of/as prosumers (active participants) in an age in which the old and the new are constantly recontextualised in a flow of continual remix or refluctuation, forming a radical (virtual) potentiality posited towards the future, creating a sort of meta-referentiality in which the old and the new almost seem to fall or collapse into each other, or maybe don’t matter anymore… then all becomes movement, everything is stream.

 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back to the beginning. The theme of last Tuesday’s gathering was New Virtuosity. From the flyer:

 

“Nowadays the concept of virtuosity has moved away from notions such as excellence and distinction and seems to have become synonymous with craftsmanship and mere technical prowess. What is the status and place of a notion as virtuosity in an epoch in which the borderline between mastery and ordinary ability has dramatically shifted?”

 

Luc Tuymans started his talk by stating that the concept of a New Virtuosity is grounded in ideas of timing and position. Virtuosity offers a more versatile understanding of reality using understatement. As he says, there seems to be a discrepancy between memory and oblivion. Thus, an image needs to be shown in all its layers. This kind of fragmentation can then be seen as a way of dealing with the larger context as a whole. The image has become an object of desire, it has become interchangeable and interactive.

 

As Tuymans goes on to talk about the meaning of the image, he touches on the aspect of remediality, of the appropriation of the image, or the concept and context of the image, in other media. His talk focused mainly on his new exhibition ‘Against the day’ in Brussels, and the paintings that will be exhibited there. Starting with Jan van Eyck, he shows how the painting has broken away from mere mimesis. Images have become constructions, as Tuymans also shows in the painting Map (2008) which has been completely created digitally, in a way becoming a non-existent entity. Tuymans sees in the repetition of images a further moving away from the mimetic; he creates huge site-specific wall paintings derived from his own paintings (Cathedral), making works that do no longer refer to reality as such but only to the image as a concept.

 

This connects strongly to the thoughts of Walter Benjamin, who, as Charles W. Haxthausen states in his article on Benjamin and Carl Einstein, argues that the aura of a work is located in the image, not in any unique physical object. For Walter Benjamin, the reproduction of a work of art, meaning to lift it from its constraints of tradition, is a way of renewing it, by offering it a new context, actualizing it in the present.

 

Tuymans also discusses the role of memory when it comes to interpreting a work of art. In a painting showing towering dust clouds, the observer is confronted with the remembrance of and imagery surrounding 9/11. The same applies to a painting depicting ballroom dancing, in which one can reminisce back to times of crisis. In this way, Tuyman remarks, observation of and interaction with a work of art can be seen as a regressive form of conservatism. The imagery (in its collective re-medialised re-membrance) itself gives the context, its form is simultaneously a veil and a projection, states Tuymans.

 

 

 

As Aleida Assmann shows in her article Transformations between history and memory. (Part I: What Does It Mean for a Community to Have a Memory?), memory increasingly comes to us through images and movies. It is the image that triggers a constructed collective memory:

 

“Participation in social memory is always varied because it is based on lived experience and linked to autobiographical memory, which is irreducibly specific in its position, perspective and experiential quality. The memory of the Holocaust, for instance, will vary vastly among survivors depending on the fact whether they endured the torments of the concentration camps, hid in secret places, or managed to escape into exile. For the second and third generation of the survivors, however, as well as for the members of other nations, this memory will become more and more homogeneous as it is reconstructed by historians and accessed through the shared representations of public narratives, images, and films.”

 

In this respect one could say that in Tuymans work, memory as a form of context shaping, determines the meaning we attribute to art: we see a repetition of the past in the creation of the new. As Haxthausen shows in his aforementioned article, in which he juxtaposes Benjamin and Einstein and tries to find their communalities, for Einstein this repetition gives an illusion of the immortality of things, where he feels that everything is truly in a constant flux. The question for Carl Einstein was basically how to break free from these constraints of the past to create something radically new, something which Rimbaud says faut être absolument moderne.

But for Benjamin reproduction strips away this veil (which reminds me of Nietzsche’s conception of art as a veil, art as a Dionysian illusion); Benjamin states reproduction frees art from the constraints of tradition and makes it remixable and malleable, it gives it movement. The new medium gives the viewer the chance to contextualize the art, to project his/her subjectivity on the art, to actualize it; the viewer makes it new.

 

 

A GOOD PAINTING IS NEVER FINISHED

 

Going back to the work of Luc Tuymans, the influence of the context of the past, in Einstein’s fashion, can be seen more clearly, as Tuymans shows, in the painting depicting Condoleezza Rice, which shows a vivid depiction of determinacy, but can also be seen as a representation of African American slavery and emancipation.

This contextualization of memory can be seen maybe most confrontingly in Tuymans painting Gas chamber. Now it is the title that gives the context, that triggers our memory of the past, more than the image an sich. Without the title we would just see an empty room. In a way, Tuyman says, this painting represents the irrepresentable and it shows how painting is really a conceptual form of art. Again, without the title, it would just be mimesis, a depiction of an empty room. Tuymans says it is a tricked space, disguised as a chamber. This shows again the polylevel of images (Tuymans calls this a sort of subdued virtuosity). A painting is not mobile, but is in its multi-layeredness confronted with mobility.

 

Benjamin concurs with this idea that when one releases the image of its aura through reproduction, the image becomes a mere concept, mirroring Tuymans idea of painting as a conceptual art, no longer mimetic. This concept, as Haxthausen states, is for Benjamin external to the work, it is waiting for actualization. Tuymans does exactly this, using either another medium (wall painting) or recontextualizing the image through language (adding a title).

 

 

In Wonderland the title gives a Disneyland reference. As Tuymans states, in this painting the utopic is instrumentalized. We are eluting content from fantasy, creating context out of virtuality. Tuymans also draws a parallel with another context: Hitler was a big Disney fan; he used to love to draw dwarfs. As Tuymans states, we have entered an imagery that consists of non existent (virtual) spaces. Reality is produced as raw material. Painting increasingly reflects an animated world without anima.

But the relationship with the past and the effect of memory can also be seen in the creation of a work: painting is custom, says Tuymans; it is a style, it is a remembrance of ones own style, but it is also a movement: nothing is completely still, style knows a development too. In painting one can see an element of deconstruction of the image, one refers to the past and memorizes/internalizes history in ones style.

The spectator or viewer eventually terminates the image (in numerous ways): this has the ultimate consequence that “a good painting is never finished”, according to Tuymans.

 

Tuymans plays with the difference between the power of the image and the influence of the spectator, in a way playing with the same tension Haxthausen distinguishes between Benjamin en Einstein, but he, like Benjamin, does let the consumer play a crucial role when stating that the work of art is never finished, the view of the spectator and the loss of the aura of the image through reproduction make for this combination of the static and the flux. I think that this duality between Einstein and Benjamin, as Haxthausen has brought forward, can be seen in Tuymans work, where he plays with the notion that on the one hand the image carries inside itself the context of the (image of) past and our recollection of that past and in this way works in a very deterministic, conservative, inescapable way. It is the context of the tradition of the image, of the memory, of the original context and meaning of the image that is bestowed back on us, this subjectivity of the image itself. This resists actualization and recontextualization. This is what Tuymans plays with in his work, this relationship between voluntary constructed memory and recontextualisation and the image that comes up in front of our eyes involuntary (Hitler/gas chamber/ the desire of the image).

 

 

But on the other hand, Tuymans also is very much aware of how the technological possibilities now give us the opportunity to distill the image from its tradition and to use it in our creation of a new reality/imagery, a new constructed memory and the role the medium and the viewer play in this. For Einstein (the forms of) art/the image are active, they shape our views and memories, our world and our society. For Benjamin the focus lies more on how we determine art, how we give it meaning and context through our remembrance and remedialisation, we make art/the image passive and never ending through our context giving.

 

Tuymans also mentions Robert Barry, an artist who creates non-material works of art. Tuymans talks about art as a vide (plural emptiness), quoting Barry who states an empty space = a room where you are free to think what you are going to do. A work of art can then be thought of as an empty space, where it becomes a field of potential action and of potential thought.

 

In a sense culture has thus turned towards a representation of the unrepresentable: of the concept, of imageries, of memories and the constructs we create around them. Where, as Benjamin states, the technology of reproduction detached the object from the domains of its tradition, it detached it from its uniqueness, making it also into an object that can be construed in different contexts.

 

THE BODY AS A MUSEUM, THE MUSEUM AS A BODY

 

Boris Charmatz wants to create a museum for modern dance, a Musée de danse contemporaine. In his book Entretenir – À propos d’une danse contemporaine, cowritten with Isabelle Launay, he speaks of dancing as a form of entretenir: as a form of upkeep, keeping up the conversation with the past. Dance can be seen as a reenactment, the performance as a reconstruction: you perform the dance again and again, whilst at the same time holding an immediate view on history. Charmatz describes the struggle between the new and the old in dance as a tension between renewal and remembrance. In the 80’s being modern was an absolute must: artists needed to make their own brand. Reproduction was a taboo; you needed to create your own style. In the 90’s this changed, says Charmatz: making something new did no longer seem to be the best way forward. There was a strong tendency to consider ones own culture.

Charmatz describes how in dance there are basically two options: one reenacts a dance, so one performs the same dance time and again over history using new dancers, or one can create a new work or production. Create something new or reflect on the old.

 

Charmatz tried to reflect on this theme of the old and the new in his work on jeunesse, in which he tried to create a tension in movements between the virtuosity of the young body and the growing distance to that when growing older. The dance then becomes a description of time, we are looking back and are reenacting time within our body, as he states, reconfiguring and reenacting the past.

 

Charmatz also plays with memory, with bodily memory and the memory of sensations. With Odile Duboc he created a dance in which he, as he says, dived deep into a memory of sensations, an improvised memory that is, making the body work with different materials (wood, stone) and surfaces, and then taking these things away. The newness of this lies in the connection of the things we experienced (in the past) with our memories of them in the present.

 

Another way of confronting the past is to work on what you still do not know but can re-member. Charmatz mentions an exercise in which he was asked to improvise Nijinsky’s dance Afternoon of a faun. Charmatz explains how this requires you to make an archeology on yourself, a need to scan your memory (things came back slowly he said and formed a memory context/construct: Mallarmé, Debussy, faun, nymph, myth, obscenity, animality). In this way he states that the improvisation became a performance of things we didn’t know beforehand, but could reconstruct.

 

This (re)working of memory and remembrance is also a theme that plays an important role in the work of Benjamin, as Haxthausen shows. When it comes to the aura of a work, Benjamin (building on Proust) distinguishes between two kinds of memory:

-         Involuntary: spontaneous memories, like in Tuymans work depicting dust clouds; involuntary passive association and memory, remembrance.

-         Conscious, willed acts of remembrance; constructed memory: like Charmatz’ dance of Nijinsky or his improvised dance based on material remembrance.

 

The first kind is what Benjamin then sees as aura. But as Tuymans also shows in his work, aura lies not in the reproduction or the medium, but in the image itself, in our memory connected to a specific image. But also in language (the title Gas chamber).

 

Aleida Assmann also states, like Benjamin and Proust, that memory “takes into account the ambivalence of the past both as a conscious choice and as an unconscious burden, tracking the voluntary and involuntary paths of memory.” 

Assmann discusses Susan Sontag who states there is no such thing as collective memory; all memory is individual. She states that experiential memories are embodied and thus personal and non-transferable. We can see this in Charmatz’ work in which the memory of the body plays an important role, indeed necessarily individual and non-reproducible and shaped by its own specific context and history. As Assmann states, however, Sontag forgets that individual memory has two important dimensions that transcend this individuality, namely our interaction with others and our interaction with external signs and symbols. We cannot transfer our embodied memories but we can share them, she states. This is done by the means of language or representation in an image, through which the individual’s memories become part of a collective.

 

Assmann quotes Margaret Atwood who stresses that collective national memory is always designed for a purpose and specific use:

 

“The past belongs to those who claim it, and are willing to explore it, and to infuse it with meaning for those who are alive today. The past belongs to us, because we are the ones who need it.”

 

Thus, with the remixing of images that constitute the memories of individuals of the past we construct our own new memories and contexts.

 

As Charmatz states, history can thus be taken quite literally as a way to produce new works; this wide approach in dance to history in the 90’s can be seen as an approach to make new works about our own fantasies of history, based on our own preconceptions as viewers and producers. In this way we can reconsider/reframe/reproduce history. Charmatz identifies many frontiers between the old and the new; fixation and movement, patrimonium and creation, visual art and the life arts… In his Musée de danse contemporaine, he wants to create a space that talks about these divisions between the fixed/static and movement, to create a new platform for dance.

It would be a musée précaire. For Charmatz such a museum is not only a fixed frame but it could be something in which you engage yourself to create a/the museum. The museum is a space that opens up what an (idea of) a museum is. It will be an experimental project to think about an utopian/new space for the dance. It could consist of objects/pieces/movements and is no longer fixed to a certain medium. Conceptual art, literature, digital art could all be a complete part of it without excluding each other.

In this museum, Charmatz envisions that the divisions between producer and consumer would disappear. He wonders how the museum could facilitate that the dance be enacted or performed by the participants/visitors themselves. The people inside should also produce the art that is inside in a collaborative effort. As Charmatz explains, this is a way to think movement: movements of the museum itself, movements of the visitors, movements of the dance. The museum becomes a mental space, a taxonomy of potentiality.  

 

 

Benjamin also involves the viewer in his theory of art: he/she plays an important role in the perception of the image: the perspective of the viewer changes over time and thus the personal memory. In different times an image of clouds conjures up different remembrances (see Tuymans).

With a change in perspective in the modern image reproducing age, the consumer becomes a participant in the art. He/she finishes (or never finishes, Tuymans) the work of art. By incorporating the role of the viewer into the work of art, making him/her an integral part of its concept, we create a work that is never finished, that is fluid, flexible and reinterpretable, without a static meaning.

 

In Charmatz’ thinking about dance as a concept, a potential space, the lines between producer and consumer seem to shift. Jacques Attali displays a similar view on music in his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music. From the outline of his book by Theodore Gracyk:

 

“This new activity is NOT undertaken for its exchange or use value. It is undertaken solely for the pleasure of the person who does it (its “producer”). Such activity involves a radical rejection of the specialized roles (composer, performer, audience) that dominated all previous music. The activity is entirely localized, made by a small community for that community. There is no clear distinction between consumption and production.”

 

Charmatz summarizes that his museum would necessarily encompass three kinds of spaces: the mental space, as described above; the architectural space (nomadic), stating the physical present; and the body space. The first museum in dance is your own body: the site where you remember the movements you learned. The body becomes the main space of the museum: it encompasses contexts of education, history, the social, gender and most importantly, the (potential) of movements. Body as a site of work.

Body as potential of activity.

Reinvent.

Rethink.

 

VIRTUOSITY COMMODIFIED

 

Charmatz went on to discuss virtuosity, the ability to do movements, in which they become virtues or daily movements, referring to the work of Paolo Virno. He states that new virtuosity is centered, or should be centered, not on the things you are able to do but on the broader potential of action you have, the potential rethinking of history, of opening up your body, of thinking about movements rather than performing them. Virtuosity also entails a breaking free of these skills, to enlarge your own potentiality. You can only become free whilst (re)considering your own skills.

 

Paolo Virno develops some very interesting thoughts in his book A Grammar of the multitude. For an analysis of contemporary forms of life, on performance, virtuosity, repetition and the culture industry. He states that a performance is an activity that finds its own fulfillment in itself. It does not objectify itself into an end product. He also states that the performance requires the presence of others: the performance only exists in the presence of an audience. Interestingly enough this seems to blur the lines between for instance dance and painting, as seen through the eyes of Tuymans and Charmatz, where both artists state that their works depend on the viewers, on the consumers, who ensure through their participation, their view, their gaze, their interpretation, that the image/dance is never finished. In this sense the difference between live art and visual art, between painting and dance, is no longer a difference as such.

They too would probably agree that art and knowledge, being never finished through the interaction with others, cannot be objectified. Virno, however, states that as a result of the post-Fordist culture industry this objectification into a product has occurred and this is where the problem with the exploitation of static works of art and knowledge (through for instance copyright) lies, where this objectification seems to go against the whole conceptual principles and underlying values of culture, art and knowledge, at least if we follow the definitions we are talking about here.

 

Virno states that when the performance is recorded, when it is fixed, it is no longer virtuosity, it is potentiality objectified and thus the end of movement. Using a Marxist perspective, Virno argues how intellectual labor is objectified in the culture industry. But intellectual labor is a product without an end product:

 

“The second type of intellectual labor (activities in which “product is not separable from the act of producing”) includes, according to Marx, all those whose labor turns into a virtuosic performance: pianists, butlers, dancers, teachers, orators, medical doctors, priests, etc.”

 

Virno sees verbal language as the ultimate potential virtuosity,  since it doesn’t have a necessary end-product. He refers to the Frankfurt School, where the stream of thought was that capitalism has serialized and apprehended the spiritual production. Virno also refers to Guy Debord, who states that “spectacle” is human communication which has become a commodity. Debord says that the spectacle enables communication through verbal language. With the commodification of human communication and the growing importance of human communication in all sectors of our daily life, this has become a concern. But the problem again lies, says Virno referring to Debord, with the fact that communication is a potentiality; it knows no end product:

 

“Unlike money, which measures the result of a productive process, one which has been concluded, spectacle concerns, instead, the productive process in fieri, in its unfolding, in its potential. The spectacle, according to Debord, reveals what women and men can do.”

Jacques Attali shows likewise in Noise how commodification (first the labor of creation (composition) is assigned monetary value, then so is interpretation (performance), normalizes, harmonizes music, making it in a way static and stripping it of its potentiality:

 

“The use-value of spectacle involves parallel developments of music. As music develops as a commodity and as harmonic developments display rational progress, music makes us believe in social cohesion. In short, “representation leads to exchange and harmony.”

 

But it seems that in the digital age art, culture and knowledge increasingly have the potential, by means of the possibilities offered by the online environment, to be freed from this static objectification, this fixation in a solid shape, which the commodity necessarily needed to be in order to sell/make a profit. Where Virno states that repetition of the image has turned it into a commodity, in the digital age the ease of repetition and its representation in multiple remixes en recontextualisations, actually might offer a de-commodification of the cultural object. Repetition does no longer need to entail static objects.

In remix representation is no longer representation/mimicry of the world of the social system, but representation of repetition, creation as reflection upon the past, and in this sense creation of the new. The boundaries between representation (actor/active/new) and repetition (mechanical/commodity/static/passive) seem to disappear in the digital age.

Just as Charmatz states that art and literature and music have all become part of the museum of dance, so conceptual art, not only as thinking, but also in its material form, in its interaction with memory, its connecting of the creator and the participant in the act of thinking about potential creation, has also become a part of the philosophical and theoretical discourse. In this way everything has become remix and fluidity, referentiality on thoughts and things together. The world of (virtual) things and the world of thoughts are coming closer.

Schyzophonia. On Remix, Hybridization and Fluidity

I read Lawrence Lessig’s Remix a few months ago, a great book with a stimulating positive approach to the whole piracy and copyright problema, focusing on finding solutions which cater to the increasingly prevailing remixed and remediated forms of digital art and culture, in which the hybrid has become common ground. Lessig discusses new musical ‘innovators’ like Girl Talk, who creates elaborate and eclectic remixes of current pop sounds and anthems, creating a new musical discourse which reflects, winks, ironizes and mocks, while still standing firmly on its own. These kind of adaptations, versionings or reinterpretations have been part of music since its beginnings, coming to the forefront mostly in dub, hiphop, turntablism and the use of samples in electronic music. Just think about all the beats, breaks, loops and glitches that have made a career for themselves and their derivative offspring in musical history.

 

Electronic music, though now very much grounded in the digital realm, did not originate there, but it did find a save heaven or warm nest in the online environment. Remixing, sampling and turntablism can be seen as the starting point of all kinds of different genres in electronic music, they might even be seen as the most essential aspect of this music genre. This has lead to all kinds of ontologies and classifications into genres and subgenres which have been set up to help define te jungle (ha!) of all the diverse electronic creations.

 

A great sarcastic attempt to develop such a musical ontology for electronic music has been around on the web for years: Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. A highly personalized ontology that is (with many self-created genres and similar definitions and descriptions), though in its hilarity also strangely precise and very informative. The master mind behind Ishkur is Kenneth John Taylor. In an interview with Taylor, conducted by Joe Farbrook from Histories of Internet Art (who sees Taylor’s work as a form of found art), Taylor explains himself and his guide. His main reason to publish his guide on the Internet was the fact that there are to many copyright infringing samples on it and Taylor did not want to create a commercial product to profit of others work. He also wanted to be able to add the samples next to the text, playing whilst you are reading. Taylor’s vision towards his guide is very interesting, defining it as an unfinished project:

 

“If you are really into New Media and internet art and all that jazz, here’s some food for thought: My Music Guide isn’t done. It will never be done. It’s what you call a “work in progress”. I continually update it, revise it, change it, add different samples, newer samples, new genres, new definitions and snarling little comments to it as time goes on. There is no definitive version of it at all. It is constantly being changed by me. I think that is something that the New Media world is adopting now. I first heard of it, actually, from George Lucas when he mentioned the original Star Wars Trilogy as being a “work in progress”. And when you think about it, that’s exactly what the internet and new media is. There is no central planner. There is no Great Design to this World Wide Web of ours. We really have no idea what we’re doing now, and we have no idea what this thing is going to look like ten years ago (when it will likely be run and controlled by technologies that don’t exist yet). We are making this thing up as we go along. Every webpage is “under construction”, a work in progress. There’s no such thing as NOT being under construction, after all. I think that appeals to art as well. Under the traditional view, an artist will finish a piece (be it a book or a painting or whatever), and then work on the next piece. But the new model is one of continuously revising and updating existing pieces to fit new paradigms, to broaden their message, to evoke more complex reactions and responses, to keep up-to-date and make relevant commentaries about social life, or to keep improving. Art as Maintenance, and Maintenance as Art. If that doesn’t crank your gears, I don’t know what does. It’s a fascinating concept, I think.”

 

In this way the new remix culture can be seen and defined as a never ending story, in which (digital) culture is becoming fluid, amendable and liquid. This can be seen in music foremost but also in movies and documentaries, as I wrote about before, and in books. Some examples of fluidity in this respect can be seen in the unbook movement for general trade market publishing and the liquid publication project for scientific publications. But most of all this remix culture can be seen in the production of knowledge itself: knowledge can even be defined as a remix of different types of information into a meaningful context. So in a more meta context our whole information society is based on (the possibility of) remix, as Lessig also remarks in Remix. In a way,  as Eduardo Navas argues in his article Remix, the bond of repetition and representation, the remix connects a culture with its past, reflecting as it does on a previous narrative:

 

“The remix is always allegorical, meaning that the object of contemplation depends on recognition of a pre-existing cultural code.The audience is always expected to see within the object a trace of history.”

 

But to get back down from this generalization cloud, we need to define the difference between this inherent remixiality in culture at large and todays specific remix culture. In a great wiki on the web called extendboundariesofliteracy (of which also a formal article has been published) it is explained as follows:

 

“The principle of remix has always been integral to cultural development, an invisible process through which cultures grow and evolve. On top of this “organic process”, however, self-conscious practices of remix have become popular cultural pursuits of cultural activity. Digital technologies have vastly amplified – in terms of quality and quantity – remixing options. Today, remixing cultural resources comprises what Lessig (2004) refers to as the new “alphabet” – that is, as the new building blocks of creative writing.”

 

Returning to Ishkur and electronic music, his ontological cravings concerning music go even further as he created the Great Samples Database, which is a user generated list of records and their respective source samples. The whole idea of creating a music ontology (which was already apparent in online encyclopedias/databases like Allmusic and Discogs) was very much enriched with the development of streaming Internet radio. With the coming of Last.fm (which only streams 30 seconds samples on request and the ocassional full track) and the likes (Spotify seems to be the next best thing so I hear) such an encyclopedia plus sound has increasingly become reality. Based on user generated tagging and categorising and based on the principle of serendipity, the whole music scene can and is now being indexed, subindexed and interlinked, creating an immense database of potential ways to discover and interact with music (not withstanding the fact that Last.fm has great lacks and gaps in content covered and played).

 

But back to the question of sampling, remixing and copyright. When did sampling exactly become such an outlawed activity, making artists liable to clear the different samples they used in their music? Why exactly does this feel wrong to me an clearly many others? Eduardo Navas goes back to the basics of remix, tracing its origin to music and leaning heavily on Jacques Attali’s concepts of repetition and representation, representation meaning the live performance by the author, aura still intact, and repetition reflecting the possibility the mechanic offers to record the music, to expand its use in different contexts and mediums. Navas actually argues that it is the (remix) DJ that again, by means of his agency, introduces the concept of representation into music, stating that in his way the DJ is actually composing a new score, freeing the music once more from its convines of repetition. In this way the copyright claims concerning the old idea of copy/repetition are no longer valid, as the remix is no longer a form of copy and past, but a new cultural creation, which Navas even calls a form of cultural resistance (consumer becomes producer, liberating him/her from his/her passivity: consuming via interactivity), referring to Critical Theory:

 

 

“To be clear, then, what the DJ initially brought forward is the appropriation of repetition by representation; thereby making representation friendly to repetition. Thus, representation does not resist cooption by repetition; if anything, today it is optimized for assimilation, by being constantly reblogged (remixed).”

As Jonathan David Tankel argues in a 1990 article on sound engineers (The practice of recording music: remixing as recoding), the remixer can be seen as an independent artist:

“The remix engineer can be viewed as an artist distinct from the original musician(s), no longer a collaborator, as Kealy suggested, but an independent creative force.”

 

With the introduction of agency in the remixing and aggregation of certain parts or elements of music into a new whole, the parallel can be drawn to what I argued before about information turning into knowledge by means of an active stance of the creator, combining information nodes into a meaningful collection which then constitutes knowledge:

 

“It is in a way his or her interpretation, combination and contextualization of the information. This explains why people have moral rights or even claim copyright or intellectual ownership over their active creation of knowledge out of information.”

 

Navas agrees that this constant new interpretation of history is what gives the creator his agency and independent stance:

 

“Thus, reflection of history comes through constant interpretation (in this case, by way of representation remixing repetition). The added lines of “Le Catalogue” are a metaphor for this element of historicity. In the end, no matter what tools are used to mix or remix in culture, what is important is being able to develop a critical position: one that will allow for a constant flux between representation and repetition with the purpose to confront false-consciousness.”

 

As Tankel argues, remixing is recoding. And the remix never ends, it is everlasting, ever expanding and unstopable, an active force giving actual potentiality to the creator and freeing music/content/information from its constraints. The progressive possibilities to mash-up, refashion and reconfigure culture in such an inherently modern manner, makes music/content/information/art, as Tankel concludes while referring to Benjamin, into the building blocks of represented repetition itself:

 

“The remix recording creates a new artifact from the schemata of previously recorded music. It is prima facie evidence of Benjamin’s contention that to “an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.”