Scholarly Remix: Academia Reassessed

Brian Dettmer

As mentioned before, as part of my remix contribution to Mark Amerika‘s project site accompanying his new volume Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) I will be blogging and tweeting on remixthebook.com during this week. Underneath the blog entry I submitted.

Scholarly Remix: Academia Reassessed

As part of my research practice I explore the potential of remix theory and remix practices to reexamine the basic notions underlying scholarship and scholarly communication. Many of our preconceptions concerning what merits authorship, authority, originality and so on get constructed within certain dominant discourses on what scholarship is and should be (mostly centered on upkeeping, conserving and repeating print-based notions in the digital realm). Remix practices, I believe, have the power to intervene in these constructions, to disrupt traditional discursive practices, and to both theoretically and performatively create new, experimental practices, based on sharing, openness, process and interaction. However, even in our experimental research practices we often end up repeating the established structures we try to critique, as we as scholars are massively embedded within a knowledge system that demands us to perform in a certain way and to adhere to the scholarly reputation economy. Yet I do believe that even small changes are important, like questioning the system as it is currently set up, and thinking about the values that we deem important in scholarship. A first step is to be aware of the fact that many of our preconceptions towards scholarship are constructions: constructions we can reconsider and change.

My research practice can be seen as my own attempt at reassessing scholarly communication, mostly through examining what the future of the book in scholarly communication can be (or should be) and by exploring what potential role remix practices can play in both scholarship and in the future of the book. The remix I made for remixtebook.com is part of my intervention, as is this blog entry and the tweets I will be sharing with you here. These will be contain some fragments of source material from my remix for remixthebook.com, combined with a selection of links and references I have collected over the years related to remix and scholarship. Finally at the end of the week I hope to be able to live-tweet The culture of Remix, the 2nd International Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture, which takes place in Lisbon on 13-14 October 2011, and promises to showcase some exciting new research on the multiple dimensions of remix.

Remixthebook

Video Remix: Rick Silva, Audio: Chad Mossholder, Micro-Cam Footage: Mark McCoin, Voice: Mark Amerika

Remix artist and author Mark Amerika recently launched his new book Remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press) together with a complimentary website of remixes based on material from remixthebook. From the blurb on the project site:

The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists, creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is central to their research interests. remixthebook author Mark Amerika, along with co-curator and artist Rick Silva, has invited over 25 contributing international artists, poets, and critical theorists, all of them interdisciplinary in their own practice-based research, to sample from remixthebook and manipulate the selected source material through their own artistic and theoretical filters.

I was fortunate enough to have been asked to contribute a remix to this project, which can be found online as part of the project website here, including a short artist’s statement.

Underneath you can find the text of my contribution. As part of my contribution I will also be blogging and tweeting on the remixthebook project site during the week of October 9th. So stay tuned for that. Thanks again to Mark Amerika for this opportunity to contribute to his project, and do check out all the amazing other remixes available here, for instance this Isarithm remix by Rick Silva and Woulg:

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CREATIVITY (Capital C) has been hijacked by the artists

 

Think of the scholar as a medium. Think of the scholar as a postproduction medium. What does it mean to be an avant-garde scholar tuning their instrument so that they can then BECOME something like a meta-medium? Remix theory takes the inherent properties and the possibilities of the new medium (the Internet) as its basics and not the properties of the specific media it incorporates or reflects upon (be they textual or sound- or image-based). In this regard, think of the scholar as a kind of remixological filter. Even THIS is a kind of generative remix performance where the scholar selectively samples from and filters or manipulates the data as a way to open up more creative potential. The power of remix lies in its selectivity, the filter it imposes, where the ‘author’ becomes a ‘remixer’, the remix an object of interaction. The philosophy of the remix is essentially ‘rhizomatic’, the methodology collaborative and processual, focused on the added value of the various media in the communication process. The remix as concept and practice is not new; new are the increased possibilities and the ease to share and recombine media in the digital environment in a collaborative manner. Notions of authority, originality and authenticity get challenged in remix theory, where the remix is a collaborative crowd effort, the reception point is only one part in the process of information and culture transmission and the producer becomes the consumer and vice versa.

One can observe however how over the course of history the media that scholars work with may change but the assortment of potential trajectories scholars follow tend to stay the same. This serves to show the strength, the reach and the impact notions of stability, authorship, and authority (echoing the rhetoric of printed publications) still have within the digital environment.  In reality, the authority of the author is thus not challenged. Does the Internet and its online social networking apparatus open up potentially new trajectories for scholars to “make history”? It already has … but not to the degree it still needs to in order to usher in a dramatic shift in the way we position both the scholar and the scholarly work in contemporary network culture. This serves to show how even in our explorations of the new medium, it is very hard to let go of the kind of essentialist notions that we have inherited from the rhetoric of print publications. There are some ‘knowledge practices’ we have adopted and grown accustomed to, such as authorship, stability and authority. Digital and online media offer the potential to increasingly critique these notions where thinking a knowledge system beyond these notions increasingly seems to become a practical reality. Remix is a liminal concept in this way; it stands on the border of these customary ways of thinking. It shakes them up. It poses a potential crisis.

Here’s a question: if we are all scholar-mediums, how do we trigger novel states of creativity? Remix Theory can be seen as a new way to critically think the potentiality of the book, as a way to think beyond the book, as a strategy to explore its multiple potentialities, to challenge established notions like stability, identity and materiality that are all bound up with (printed) books and at the same time with our current conception and practice of knowledge. Remix is a cultural and a political phenomenon, it can be seen as a resistance against essentialisms. It can be used as means to critique the essentialist doctrines at work within the Humanities. Remix Theory can be a framework to question issues of authorship, stability, authority and originality within these disciplines and within science at large, just as much as it has been a framework to question these in for example music, art and poetry. Finally, the way it mixes theory and practical methodology, and the way it mixes media can be seen as both a commentary on and an inspiration for the (digital) humanities. And although, as we have argued before, it does not fundamentally challenge or alter these concepts, it is a (necessary) step in the right direction, towards a more fluid conception of the humanities. Remix theory is a strategy to explore its multiplicities.

Scholars always have to develop and reconfigure their SENSE of measure over time. Exactly how DO scholars or hackers or creative remixers develop a sense of measure over time? The remix scholar whose sense of measure enables them to BECOME a postproduction medium sampling from the vocabulary of critical thought is what we would call A CONTEMPORARY THEORIST. By re-claiming creativity for the scholar as their birthright we can begin to open up the neural pathways to prophetic illumination.

We need new ways of expanding the narrative of the monograph in a ‘remixed’ manner or fashion. The stable form of the text-based version gets challenged by the input of ‘foreign’ elements, be they from other narratives, other voices or other discourses. For the contemporary writer as interdisciplinary media scholar the lyrical conceptual poetic narrative movements come in wildly assorted forms everything from dance to cinema to performance art to the scribbling of pen or pencil on paper. This enables the postproduction scholar to intuitively mirror the neuron activity of the ones who came before, something that feels like a deep interiorization of someone else’s creative rhythm mediumistically syncing with whatever filters one turns on at any given time during the remix performance. These elements are then inserted (or not really ‘inserted’ as they have increasingly been part of the creation process from the start) into the narration in a continual manner, melting together into a new never-ending ever-updateable ‘form’. We can also go beyond these categorizations, where there is the possibility to include all forms of experimentation in one ‘digital humanities project’ or ‘publication’: a web-based wiki-shaped networked narrative.

Will this be the future of digital scholarship in the Humanities? How would a contemporary remixologist divining their own just-in-time context for the compositional playing field of the moment jump-start a renewable tradition made out of all of the “renewable energy sources” (i.e. scholar-mediums) signaling from the past / present / future? All three forms of experimentation still offer the possibility to create or extract a ‘solid form’, a stable published text, whilst at the same time they give an increased insight into knowledge creation, into the process of Humanities scholarship and communication as it grows and forms and gathers strength and form. In this way these experiments form a beautiful bridge between product and process, between the old and the new, between print and digital, holding on to the best of the print past and the possibilities of the digital future. “How can artist-researchers developing new practice-based initiatives in remixology turn the immediate future into a renewable source of ‘energy’ that fuels their unconscious readiness potential?” Monographic experiments as a new monographic potentiality.

This is why remixthebook – which this composition samples from – is our attempt to cross-contaminate Process Theory with Creativity or creative class struggle — and believe us, if you are a contemporary scholar, no matter what your financial situation, you are suffering through creative class struggle. One of the things remixthebook plays with is how scholars use networked and mobile media technology to discover forms of writing that MAY introduce new patterns of meaning. The acknowledgment of the constructivist nature of stability urges us to conduct a closer analysis of the structures underlying our knowledge and communication system and how they are presently set-up. Just like stability, fluidity is an ideal type, just like openness, it is a rhetorical stance. Within an information environment it can be seen as a paradox; although information might flow, knowledge inherently needs some form of objectification or stability to be called knowledge. True liquidity is thus an impossibility, fluid knowledge is an impossibility, and, at least in our definition of the term, fluid texts are an impossibility. We can only ever achieve quasi-liquidity. This impossibility to achieve real liquidity should however not be seen as a failure, as it still has rhetorical power. As rhetoric it helps us deconstruct the structures of our object-oriented knowledge systems and it enables us to experiment with a way of thinking and practicing that (performatively) challenges these preconceptions and helps us to think and create them differently.

Unless you’re a fatalist, then we should at least consider the aesthetic functions of the scholar as remix performer. It’s important to keep in mind this idea of remix performance as a kind of structured improvisation, because it’s this “always live” PERFORMANCE that enables the remix scholar to ride the wave of intuition. Think of the remixologically inclined performance scholar as a novelty generator, someone who positions their aesthetically fit energy bursts as an intervening sense of measure to be reckoned with. Could we say that the contemporary scholar AS remixologist or provocateur of postproduction art, EMBODIES what it means to FEEL aesthetic? Let’s face it, scholars are always sampling and manipulating other scholars SENSE of measure and this is how they create a formal aesthetic over time. In remix theory the remix is seen as a process, an activity, a verb; it is a process of constantly renewing, building upon and modifying mediated and reworked cultural materials. In this process new creative work is produced: the remix. The remix occurs in a stratified structure, no longer linear but multilayered, hybrid and liquid. The remix is a collage, it combines various elements to build something new. Remixing is part of our digital culture, it is essential to our creativity and one of the main contemporary composing practices

For now we are still in the race but these scholars were the ones who taught us how to haunt the texts that came before us even as these same texts haunted us back. Memory is a form of context shaping, it determines the meaning we attribute to scholarship: we see a repetition of the past in the creation of the new. The mystery and unclear meaning of the texts is in this case what makes it meaningful to the viewer as interpreter, as ‘meaning-searcher’. As a practice-based remixologist filtering the meta-perturbations of Source Material Everywhere the scholar as postproduction medium choreographs an ongoing structural improvisation projected from the deep interior sense mechanisms of other scholar-agents autopoietically postproducing a novel togetherness that reconfigures the world into yet more renewable energy that doubles a source material seducing us into our next remixological becoming. The vacuum of meaning creates potential: it creates a space for interpretation and functions as a reflection of our search for patterns and meaning. It thus offers a meta level in a way, similar to what abstract art does: it is about the search for meaning, about wanting to discover the secret context and inherent patterns in the structure of the text, like in a way abstract art is a reflection on art itself. Patterns are the new real of our society. The visionary scholar always gyrating at pivotal locations throughout the narrative becomes a multitude of flux identities and transformations nomadically circulating within the networked space of flows. This idea of the content creator as the real medium, putting things on its head in a way, literally incorporating and mixing the different media into one single communication expression, in whatever format, could be a nice fit for thinking about what a post literate content producer should be able to do. Success in this area of practice-based research could lead to the scholar becoming a valuable postproduction medium running

… at full speed, in all directions, into the memory, into the future, into the data of the present, to grasp the unexpected, the luminous, stupefying, connections.

But let’s say that you are a “creative writer” or net scholar or live A/V performer or interdisciplinary “code-smith” who accesses all available source material to cobble together your new work of conceptual sculpture. This triggers the question: Is an object finished when it at the same time constitutes a building block for another object? How would we determine the variance of value for each of these outputs? How would we differentiate the stylistic tendencies of scholars who remixologically inhabit a multitude of multi-media forms of language and how would we measure the value of their work as postproduction mediums? Experiments with new way of conducting and publishing monographs in an open manner, like for instance via liquid books or wiki monographs, might be a first step away from an object-oriented approach focused on a finalized product, towards a publishing system based more on constant, collaborative and simultaneous knowledge production.

Remix Panel Discussion at CoDE

I am running a bit behind on my conference and symposium notes, but here are a few of my observations based on the screening of ‘RIP: A Remix Manifesto’, by Brett Gaylor, at CoDE a few weeks ago. I wrote about RIP before here and here. The screening was followed by an interesting panel discussion between Bill Thompson, Becky Hogge, John Naughton, Jussi Parikka and Geoff Gamlen.

The discussion focused mainly on three themes: remix culture, copyright and business models. Concerning remix culture, the idea was discussed whether culture can be narrowed down to re-mixing or sampling. What about original ideas? As Geoff Gamlen stated, without originality, we will end up in a cultural vacuum. Remix is still quite important, but it focuses more on adding value or re-contextualising things. Remix is an example of collaborative culture more in general and collaboration as a process of culture creation and/or production. These processes are new and at the same time very old, where Henry Jenkins has for instance shown that 19^th century folk production was also build on these principles. As Bill Thompson however remarked, it seems that the current media does not want this kind of collaborative production. This has led to, as Jussi Parikka explained, a culture wars. As the documentary showed, you can’t stop copying.

On the issue of how to create revenue from remixes or remixing, Becky Hogge remarked remix is also used as a capitalizing/commodifying idea. However, labor time going into remixes needs to be compensated in some way, and as Jussi explained, we need business models for this. Big corporations are also incorporating open source. Open source has become a business model that can be applied by different people and companies from various backgrounds.

Next John Naughton touched upon the third theme of the larger copyright system. He described how the debate is derailed: file sharing is not automatically theft. There is nothing wrong with copyright but the copyright system in this world is obscene at the moment, John claimed. The current copyright regime is completely unfit for purpose, as the documentary has also shown. Bill argued that this is a deficiency in the democratic process; we thus need to focus on congregational change. The legislation machine is not listening to the requests for reform. Becky recalled her experiences as a legislation lobbyer for the open rights movement and stated how everything revolves around money: copyright is bought by intense lobbying operations which influence legislation.

Going back to the theme of revenue from remixes and remixing, Geoff remarked how the current system is inhibiting, as he would very much like to sell the work that he makes with his collective. He explains how they found other ways to make a living other than releasing remixes. According to Geoff they have never found any opposition from copyright owners.

Returning to the theme of remix culture, John asked whether remix unchecked is the end of originality. This is the rhetoric of people like Jaron Lanier. But as John remarked, there is no way to stop people from being creative. This also poses the question whether creativity is only fuelled by the money that comes from copyright; to what extend are creative people motivated by money?

On the theme of copyright again, the question of moral rights came up. Does a creator have inalienable rights to control the way her or his creative expressions are used? Are moral rights still relevant in the digital age? Jussi explained how this leads back to an ontological point about creativity. We always create from a reservoir of culture, think for instance about language and sound. So even if you have moral rights, this does not mean you control the next step. But what if, as Geoff stated, if it is not possible to control it anymore, your cultural contribution becomes a characteristic part of a remix you don’t agree with?

Returning again to business models, Becky claimed the film did not really tie up the idea of how to pay/reward people for their work. As the great corporations do not let alternative business models come to the rise, they actually make piracy happen, she claimed. John remarked how the film as a political argument reaches a large number of people by focusing on remix culture. But it likewise misses a large group of people: everyone over 40. They don’t see the importance of remix culture, according to John. The film also does not really focus on how remix applies to other or older parts of culture. Every vibrant culture continuously borrows from what comes before.

Going back to the models bit, the discussion returned to the question of who makes money out of remix? As Geoff explained, Girltalk for instance gets paid for being a DJ, not for publishing his work. It is a rare thing to get paid for remixing. As Jussi remarked, this is not something uncommon, there are only very few artists and writers (as well as academics) who actually make money with what they do, most of them can’t live of their work. Geoff commented that there must be a way to think out a digital rights system that works and at the same time provides money for cultural producers. Jussi described how capitalism functions as an absorption machine; it absorbs contradictory mechanisms. Remixing seems to be adverse but corporations are slowly coming up with business models to incorporate remixing. Remix is thus not anti-capitalist, and as Geoff added as a final remark, it is not against corporate interests at all.

New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 1 – Eduardo Navas

In the first part of New Visions for the Book, I described how the concept of the book is being used as a strategic power tool to argue for a certain knowledge system. I tried to show how within this discourse certain essentialist notions—such as authorship, stability, and authority—still hold a lot of prestige and are hard to discard. In the subsequent parts of New Visions for the Book I therefore want to take a few expeditions outside the world of the scholarly book to look at the way other disciplines and other media have struggled with or have come to terms with the above mentioned notions. I want to start with looking at the concept of remix, engaged with mostly in music and art theory but increasingly a concept applied to describe and analyse culture at large. Here I want to focus on two thinkers who have extensively theorized remix: Eduardo Navas and Lev Manovich. After taking an in depth look at Navas work on remix first, I will explore Manovich’s thoughts on the subject in the next post, contrasting it with Navas’s ideas. Finally, I will explore what the consequences of their thoughts and their analysis of remix are for the scholarly book, the knowledge order it stands for and the concepts it reifies.

Eduardo Navas is a researcher and an artist with an interdisciplinary practice, a crossover between art, culture and media. Remix can however be seen as the overarching theme of his work. Remix Theory is the name of his blog, where he posts his own essays and articles on remix, and where he also ‘host(s), archive(s) and promote(s) projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline’. I will reflect on some of his writings as published on Remix Theory, predominantly on Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, Remix: The Bond of Repetition and Representation, and After the Blogger as Producer.

Allegorical strength

Navas analyses the concept of remix from a historical materialist perspective. According to Navas it is necessary to explore the history and development of remix to understand the dialects at play within remix. He describes how the concept of remix was derived from the model of musical remixes in the late 60s and 70s with roots in Jamaica. The musical remix then expanded through hiphop DJs via versions, turntablism, sampling and the practice of cut n’paste. According to Navas remix culture only came about with the coming of digital technologies: ‘Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste.’ The concept of remix, which Navas defines as ‘the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste’ has thus been extended to other areas of culture. New Media and the Internet are for example based on the concept of sampling (cut/copy & paste ).

Navas descibes how remix has as an allegorical function. This allegorical function enables it to be a critical reflection on history and society. Navas distinguishes four main types of remix, which more or less developed chronologically: the extended remixⁱ, the selective remixⁱⁱ, the reflexive remixⁱⁱⁱ and the regenerative remix^iv. Although not all in an equal manner, these four types of remix all rely on the allegorical function. They reference history; they rely for their authority on the sources they cite, even if they claim autonomy:

“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.”¹

For Navas remix is an active force which originated as a critical discourse from an outsider position. He describes remix in music in the shape of the DJ as a form of resistance. He draws upon Jacques Attali‘s concepts of repetition and representation and on Attali’s claim of how repetition (brought about by the possibility of mechanical reproduction) functioned as a force that took over representation in music and became the power tool of commercialism and the culture industry to enslave the artist. Repetition became ideology. Navas critiques Attali by showing how the DJ was able to turn repetition into an active force again. The DJ caused a rupture in the culture industry, Navas states, disrupting repetition and reintroducing representation with agency. Navas makes clear that the DJ was able to take back this critical position with the use of remix and by being able to reclaim the production tools (for instance Navas shows how this accessibility was pivotal in the development of Dub). The same development can be seen in the rise of blogging as a critical (remix) practice, and the potential of the blogger as a producer of information, independent from the vested publishing channels and institutions. Navas states: ‘Representation, then, is repeated in a perfect loop—the result is a constant remix of repetition by representation.’ However, Navas goes on to show how this form of resistance is soon again seized and incorporated by commercial parties. When this happens remixes are no longer critical but become part of consumer culture. This is where Navas claims, borrowing the term form Adorno, they become regressive.

“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 co-option by repetition; if anything, today it is optimized for assimilation, by being constantly reblogged (remixed). What does this signify for cultural production? How can we reflect on the contentions of such shift?”²

In this way, next to being a potential for critique, next to being reflexive, as Navas states, remix can also be regressive. It has a ‘double face’. For Navas however it is essential to keep the loop alive, to keep on taking and producing this critical position to battle the forces of repetition which give people ‘false comfort’. We need to confront this false-consciousness by taking in a critical position, to enable ‘a constant flux between representation and repetition’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fluid mashups

But this constant battle with the forces of repetition and commercialisation is not the only problem Navas is struggling with concerning remix as a critical discourse. Another problem has to do with (the development of) remix itself. Increasingly the allegorical (and thus critical) function of remix is marginalized. Navas makes this clear by his discussion of reflexive mashups, an example of what he calls the fourth kind of remix, the regenerative remix. In the regenerative remix, updates are made constantly, for example by the use of software that also creates a well-organised archive, as with the example given by Navas: Google News. Here allegory is no longer the main function, but functionalism and efficiency are. Regenerative remixes are (at least initially) proposed to serve as convenient and efficient forms to stay informed rather than to be entertained. This development too has its benefits:

“The principle of periodic change, of constant updates (i.e. Google news are regularly updated) found in the Regenerative Remix makes it the most recent and important form that enables Remix as discourse to move across all media, and to eventually become an aesthetic that can be referenced as a tendency. Nevertheless, even in this fourth form, allegory is at play—only it is pushed to the periphery.”³

As it is automated however, reflexive mashups increasingly seem to loose their critical power. Partially to this is the problem of the lack of ‘agency’ in reflexive mashups. Where for Navas authorship has been replaced by sampling—’Sampling allows for the death of the author’—and the critical position in remix is taking in by s/he who selects, this stance becomes increasingly problematic once remix is automated. How are we to regain this critical power in the real-time web and without the fixed position or identity of s/he who selects?

Navas touches upon an important point here where when allegory and authorship are pushed to the borders, critical reflection becomes a challenge:

“The concept of critical distance, which has been used by researchers and intellectuals to step back and analyze the world, is redefined by the Regenerative Remix. This shift is beyond anyone’s control, because the flow of information demands that individuals embed themselves within the actual space of critique, and use constant updating as a critical tool.”⁴

As Navas shows, the regenerative remix is focussed on creating efficiencies in the ever-present, in the constantly changing now. It however still needs its archive, or history, as a legitimation device. The ability to search the archive of the regenerative remix gives the regenerative remix both its reliability as well as its market value, Navas argues.

Thresholds and Liminality

Navas trows out a few extra life-lines to cope with this situation. First of all, in order to get more grip on these fluctuations, he looks at postcolonial identity politics, mostly at Homi Bhabha‘s concept of liminal space ‘where identity is constantly defined, where one is neither one nor the other, where one is both and neither; where a third space to gain autonomy can begin to take place’. He uses the marxism of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to criticise Bhabha’s position, where they state his position leads to undecidability. Although Navas concludes these positions mostly seem to clash, he also sees them both as integral and complementary aspects of the project of Critical Theory, they are ‘mutually intertwined’. For Navas is interested in how agency in the end does occur from this liminal position and from a culture that is in a constant state of flux, on ‘a feedback loop from the periphery to the center’. For Navas, even from within the liminal space, their remains the option to take in a critical position, to break through the undecidability:

“With these contradictions on trying to take control of the tools of production, what one can find in Bhabha’s proposition of searching for agency within the threshold is that, even when one has been pushed to the margins, and is not there by choice, one can actually do something productive within this space. One can actually take control of the tools available if one figures out how to do that.”⁵

A second life-line looks not so much at the problem of hybrid and fluid agency but at how to deal with culture that is in a constant state of renewal and real-time updates. Drawing on the example of the regenerative remix mentioned above, Navas looks at the idea of the archive to give legitimacy to fluidity retrospectively. By recording information, it becomes meta-information, information that is, as Navas states, static, it is available when needed and always in the same form. And this recorded state, this staticity of information retrospectively, is what makes theory and philosophical thinking possible, Navas claims:

“The archive, then, legitimates constant updates allegorically. The database becomes a delivery device of authority in potentia: when needed, call upon it to verify the reliability of accessed material; but until that time, all that is needed is to know that such archive exists. But there is another face of the coin: the database, which is played down in the front pages, is actually extremely crucial for search engines. Here the archive becomes the field of knowledge to be accessed; it is the archeological ground to be explored by sophisticated researchers and lay-people alike. It is a truly egalitarian space, which provides answers to all queries possible.”⁶

But again, the archive is easily commercialized too. The data we collect is harvested by Google and our databases are predominantly build up on social media sites. This has lead to an increasing rise of information flow control:

“At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is evident that the Regenerative Remix is defining the next economic shift. Remix culture is experiencing a moment in which greater freedom of expression is mashed up against increasingly efficient forms of analysis and control.”⁷

As Navas however states, with the coming of the regenerative remix, remix moves beyond basic remix principles, and a rupture develops which enables new forms of cultural production. The potential of the regenerative remix is a strong one for Navas, where it ‘mirrors while it also redefines culture itself as a discourse of constant change.’ And for Navas this movement of culture is then a movement between the centre and the periphery, between repetition and agency. Music (or culture) is always in a constant state of change to create progression. However, to thrive and evolve, culture needs to dwell on the threshold.

 

1 See: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=361

3 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

4 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

5 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=345

6 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

7 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=444

 

i A longer version of the original song containing long instrumental sections making it more mixable for the club DJ. (reference: remix defined)

ii Adding or subtracting material from the original song. (reference: reflexive and regressive)

iii 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. (reference: reflexive and regressive)

iv A recombination of content and form that opens the space for Remix to become a specific discourse intimately linked with new media culture. The Regenerative Remix can only take place when constant change is implemented as an elemental part of communication, while also creating archives. (reference: reflexive and regressive)



Poetry and Audio Cassettes as Vehicles for Social Change. On the Film Men Of Words by Johanne Haaber Ihle

Johanne Haaber Ihle graduated this fall from the MA program in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester with the stunning documentary Men of Words on the topic of Yemenite poetry. Packed in a burqa and carrying a camera (so I have been told), Ihle traveled into the vast mountains of Southern Yemen to the area of Yafi’ to record an ancient Yemenite tradition: a gathering of men, of poets, discussing and reflecting on current issues, politics, economics, social conditions and the local news and going ones via poetry. Clinging strongly to ancient oral traditions, at the same time the global media and communication streams have not gone unnoticed, even here in the localized context of Southern Yemen. Remarkable though – though not so remarkable as you first might think, as shall be explained later on – is that, in the light of increasing digitization and online media participation, the preferred means of recording and spreading these poetic discourses and reflections for Yemenite poets is the audio cassette. The specific media attributes of the cassette tape makes them into a strong moral weapon and communication and distribution device in a context of political and religious suppression and censorship.

As Ihle shows in her film, since the unification in 1990 of North and South Yemen, the country has been politically unstable. Poetry fulfills a very important function in the barren rural landscape, where illiteracy reigns and where television and radio (let alone the Internet) have not yet gained (much to any) ground. This is (next to the roughness of the mountains) due to socio-economic circumstances, but most of all due to political and religious conditions. For the rise of mass media has lead to fierce resistance from the side of the Muslim authorities (and amongst others to satellite dishes being shot of roofs as you can read here).

Ihle’s documentary is for a large part based on the book The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen by Flagg Miller, who gives an amazing analysis of the political and moral mediation practices that are at play in contemporary Arab poetry in a glocalized context. The book can almost in its entirety be read online at Google books here.

Ihle’s documentary focuses on the whole production or publishing process of Yemenite poetry, starting with the local context (the drought that plagued the farmers in Yafi’ last summer) and then going on to reflect upon the apprehension of this theme into poems during the gatherings. She then interviews one of the poets, who explains how the process further continues: the poet will write down his poem (often in response to another poet) and fax his poem to the other poet and/or to a singer, who will then send it back recorded on cassette. The cassette is then send to the shopkeeper. The poet does not make any money in this process, as Ihle lets the poet explain; poetry is a hobby, something one does next to their work and family life (the singer will however get paid a little by the poet). The film then shifts to Aden where Ihle goes on to interview an audio cassette shopkeeper, who explains that he holds a large collection of original tapes which are not for sale. He copies them and then sells the copies in his shop, where the customers can also listen to the cassettes. The shopkeeper is thus the first to profit from the poetry in this system. As the shopkeeper states, these cassettes, or better said the content on these cassettes, then spreads rapidly through pirated copies all over the Arab world and even beyond.

Ihle shows in her film how poets and both their recorded and oral poetry play an important role in Yemenite society: a poet reflects the public opinion. Where, as explained in the documentary, in the seventies love poetry was most popular, now poetry about current issues is preferred. Using cassettes offers a political medium to poets to spread their message and their commentary on the situation in Yemen. They are cheap and easy to copy and distribute. In this way cassettes play an important empowering role and function as vehicles for social change, giving poets an arena to reflect their opinions upon in an otherwise closed down public sphere dominated by controlled official media channels. Cassettes are a necessity in an environment where other new media, due to specific local circumstances and characteristics, not yet seem to have fully broken through. The cassette’s salient features thus form a bridge between the local orality and the global conversation. The use and mixing of different media in and for different contexts also becomes clear in Ihle’s documentary where in a few shots you see the poets filming each other with the cameras on their mobile phones during their recitations. 

Screenshot from Men of Words

The beauty and power of Men of Words lies in the fact that it not only gives you a short glimpse into the Yemenite society, environment and landscape, it also takes you on a tour into the world of Arabian Poetry, letting the different participants – the poet and the other people involved (the farmer, the poet’s peers, the shopkeeper and the client) – talk for themselves, explaining the process of poetry production and consumption and the strong role the oral tradition still plays in this respect. Ihle captured this process in a clear and coherent story, doing an excellent job on a subject that is difficult to get close to (especially being a foreign woman with a camera in a male-dominated Arab environment).

If you are interested in seeing Johanne’s film online, or want to get more information, you can drop her a line at johanneihle[at]hotmail[dot]com. She has been screening Men of Words in Copenhagen and Berlin and will be showing it in Cambridge this Thursday, December 17th. You can find more information about this screening here.

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 photo by Steve Garfield CC BY-NC-SA http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevegarfield/3361531377/

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.