New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 3: Remix re-examined

See here for part 1 and here for part 2

Navas’s and Manovich’s thinking on remix seem to complement each other nicely. Where Navas analyses remix as discourse from a historical context, taking into account power-relations and the wider societal context shaping and triggering the rise of remix, Manovich takes a deep leap into the future, trying to think a world in which remix and the free flow of information through meta-media have become ubiquitous. He explores what this will mean for the way we produce, consume and analyse culture. Navas shows how remix has been an active force for change in the past, Manovich wants to explore how remix can still be an active stance to shape culture in the future. Both of them introduce the problem of fluidity and time and what this means for our (print-based) object-oriented society based on repetition of well-defined objects created by specific authors. Navas looks at the archive as a means to capture and stabilize cultural fluidity whilst at the same time creating reliability. Manovich looks at the way we can work with modularized recombinable data-sets to structure and control information flows. Both of them struggle with the dilemma of object-like thinking within a fluid environment. For both of them remix is or has become the defining characteristic of our digital culture.

Open Books

The dilemma’s Navas and Manovich touch-upon in their writing on culture at large can be directly related to our thinking surrounding the book and/or the future of our knowledge and communication system within academia. As Deleuze and Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, a book is an assemblage, a multiplicity, it only exists in its connections. The paradox lies in the fact that a book can at the same time be seen as an organism as well as a body without organs, with neither a subject nor an object, as pure becoming:

“A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don’t know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of a substantive.”¹

This very well captures the dilemma between a more closed off and object-oriented thinking of the book and a more fluid, open thinking of the book as a network of relations, making contact on and through the outside. The metaphor of remix and the influence of remix culture and theory on the way we look at the book is thus an interesting one. What happens with the order of the book as we embrace this more open thinking of the book as becoming, without a stable core, no fixed author and a yet unknown system of authority? The question is whether it is still useful in the digital age to think of the book—and our knowledge system based upon it—as a stable object and whether it is possible (and necessary!) to look at the book more as an object of possibilities, a fluid moment of potentiality and becoming. And this is where remix theory comes in handy, trying to think exactly what it means when objects increasingly become bodies without organs and only exist in their connections to each other.

The importance of Navas analysis of remix for the book and the knowledge system we have created around it, lies in the way he tries to cope with the problems of stability and authorship. Navas discusses three partway solutions that are, as I feel, of direct interest for scholarly communication and its battle with these notions in the digital age. First of all he explores the archive as a way of both stabilizing flow and creating a form of authority out of flux and continual updating. Next to that he proposes the role of s/he who selects (or curates or moderates) as an alternative for the author. In a way one can argue that this model of agency is already quite akin to scholarly communication, where selection of resources and referring to other sources, next to collection building, is part of the research and writing process of most scholars. Finally Navas tries to explore an alternative means of critique based on a fluctuating identity and culture that tries to resist commercialization by staying on the liminal threshold; one based on seizing the production tools, and on seizing control over repetition by means of representation. And Manovich argues for a similar potential, the potential of culture (and in this respect knowledge) creators to modularise data and make it adaptable within multiple media and various platforms, mirroring scientific developments with standardized meta-data and the semantic web. These are all interesting steps beyond thinking ‘the book’ status-quo, challenging scientific thinking to embrace process, sharing, and letting go of idealized ideas of authorship that can stand in the way of true creativity. Navas does an interesting job in starting to deconstruct them, to show how they increasingly become problematic in todays remix culture brought about by the possibilities of digital media.

But in many ways Navas (as well as Manovich) runs up against what seem to be the borders of this more process-oriented thinking. His alternative options are equally still very much connected to stability: the archive is needed to objectify culture; selection is another form of agency and does not (fundamentally) do away with authorship; and an alternative form of critique is still a critique focused on agency and on a (stabilized) object, on a structure of control. The question of keeping an archive also becomes increasingly problematic when objects become dispersed amongst various platforms. How do we keep track of an object or of data once it goes viral? And what about the role of the selector when selections can be made redundant, choices can be altered and undone by mass-collaborative, multi-user remixes and mash-ups? In what way are the solutions Navas and Manovich offer only temporary solutions to cope with a world that is and always has been in flux and is now increasingly unstoppable in all its fluid manifestations? In what way might it be necessary to let go of this object-like thinking and to start theorizing a perception of culture, science and critique that lets go of these fixed frames of thought and immerses the real of eternal becoming? Wouldn’t it be more interesting to perceive culture as a fluidity from which we abstract objects for the sake of analysis and clarity, instead of seeing culture as being build up out of separate building blocks and recombinable data-modules? Isn’t it time to start thinking a knowledge and communication system based on continual updates and change, without a stable core, both as its object and subject? And is this even possible? In what way does the concept of the open book present us with a paradox in this respect?

Performative inflections

Remix Theory and many remix theorists (like for example Navas, Manovich, Lawrence Lessig, Paul Miller a.k.a DJ Spooky, Mark Amerika) have one more important aspect in common. Many of them experiment with different kinds of remix-practices themselves. In many ways their work poses a challenge to the often perceived dichotomy between theory and practice. Navas remixes his older writings, updates them and uses various media (amongst others film) to bring his message across. By using a blog as his main outlet he connects to other thinkers and consumers. On his blog he also acts as a curator or selector, bringing together other texts on remix. Furthermore he practices an interdisciplinary practice mixing his theoretical writing with his curatorial and art practices concerning remix. In Navas words:

“Remix Theory is designed to move towards a remix of itself, by recombining much of the material that is archived to put to test the possibilities of Remix. This will become transparent as the database grows, and specific projects are developed. The site is designed to host, archive and promote projects which explore the current possibilities of Remix online and offline; it is prepared to become a repository of collaborations with different people and institutions.”2

Manovich approach to his work in many ways mirrors software production. He brings out various versions of his work, unedited, and in many ways “unfinished”, waiting for feedback from the community after/from which they can subsequently be updated. His books can also clearly be seen as a remix of his various articles. Furthermore his scientific method can be seen as one in which media and methods from the hard sciences get mixed up and applied to ‘traditional’ humanities subjects within his cultural analytics framework.

Remixing knowledge

What is so interesting about remix for academic knowledge production, consumption and dissemination? I see remix as an exciting way to initiate a ‘thinking beyond the book’. Digital texts and books contain the potential to transform our knowledge system or the way we think and relate to knowledge. This ‘thinking beyond the book’ is not something that only became possible with the rise of the digital. It has always been part of the way we have envisaged and constructed our knowledge system.  There are however 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.

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 I 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.

 

1 See: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=2

 

New Visions for the Book II: Remix

Part 2 – Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich is a professor of Visual Arts, at the University of California, San Diego, specialized in new media, software and digital culture. Manovich directs the The Software Studies Initiative where he practices cultural analytics. Similar to Navas, he has theorized and applied the concept of remix frequently in his papers and books. However, although at some points overlapping, Manovich position on remix differs in specific ways from Navas’s where his focus seems to lie more on the functional possibilities of remix than on the dialectical power structures that have surrounded and triggered remix. In his article ‘remixability’ (2005) Manovich explores Dybwad’s concept of collaborative remixability, which is build upon the aspects of shareability and recombinable information and media. Manovich mostly focusses on the way both the production and the consumption (and analysis) of culture has changed with the coming of new media. Through the development of software, remix has become a common condition for our digital culture. Symptomatic to remix culture is the introduction of the time-aspect. As Manovich states there are no longer senders and receivers of information in the classical sense, they are only temporary ‘reception points’ in information’s path through remix. The concept of modularity is also important in Manovich’s writing on remix, where he sketches an utopian future in which culture would function as Lego-blocks:

“Will the separation between libraries of samples and “authentic” cultural works blur in the future? Will the future cultural forms be deliberately made from discrete samples designed to be copied and incorporated into other projects? It is interesting to imagine a cultural ecology where all kinds of cultural objects regardless of the medium or material are made from Lego-like building blocks. The blocks come with complete information necessary to easily copy and paste them in a new object – either by a human or machine. A block knows how to couple with other blocks – and it even can modify itself to enable such coupling. The block can also tell the designer and the user about its cultural history – the sequence of historical borrowings which led to the present form. And if original Lego (or a typical twentieth century housing project) contains only a few kinds of blocks that make all objects one can design with Lego rather similar in appearance, computers can keep track of unlimited number of different blocks. At least, they can already keep track of all the possible samples we can pick from all cultural objects available today.”¹

With this quite instrumental vision of culture, Manovich seems to disregard the tension that is created in ‘remix as discourse’ which Navas so eagerly defends. Furthermore on the one hand Manovich claims to let go of the idea of culture as finalized objects (using the metaphor of information running like a stream of water down a mountain, branching out in an immense variety of interconnected streams) but at the same time he does stress the importance of modular blocks of data culture, thereby in a way holding on to the same essentialist notions he tries to deconstruct, only on another scale. He does not find a way out of this object-like thinking although he suggests to do so: ‘In this scenario, any well-defined part of any finished cultural object can automatically become a building block for new objects in the same medium’ This triggers the question: Is an object finished when it at the same time constitutes a building block for another object? Manovich plays with more of these paradoxes in his thinking, for instance where he makes a plea for standardisation of culture via modularity whilst at the same time leaving space for diversity: ‘ In other words, if pre-computer modularity leads to repetition and reduction, post-computer modularity can produce unlimited diversity.‘

Modular ecology

Many of Manovich ideas devised from his ‘look from the future’ as he calls it, can be seen as honourable convictions focussed on ‘helping bits move around more easily‘. This ecology in which remix and modularity are reality is a method for Manovich to devise a new way with which we can perform cultural analysis. Nonetheless, although standardisation as a strategy and a means to make culture more free and shareable is a goal worth pursuing, by not targeting the context surrounding cultural production and consumption, Manovich neglects the political and economic conditions that for a large part confine and determine the possibility of sharing. In this respect his approach seems a bit naïve. The problem of copyright for instance hardly gets touched upon in his writings on remix. He seems to ignore the fact that the Internet and digital media are no free playing grounds but are for a large part defined by proprietary cultural entities and interests.

Manovich sees a lot of potential for the Internet (as Navas does) where it, as he states, has put the production tools in the hands of the prosumers: ‘ Culture has always been about remixability – but now this remixability is available to all participants of Internet culture.’ But is it actually that easy? Is there more freedom to culture in the digital realm? Although we might now have more control with respect to the production tools, as Navas has made clear we are still immersed in platforms that control our data flows and feed off the data we produce. At what price does the possibility of remixability really come about and in what way and from which perspective should we look at it as a liberating force? Manovich does however not completely ignore problems of power-relations and copyright. In ‘What comes after remix‘ he remarks:

“Yet we are left with an interesting paradox: while in the realm of commercial music remixing is officially accepted, in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing. So while filmmakers, visual artists, photographers, architects and Web designers routinely remix already existing works, this is not openly admitted, and no proper terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to describe these practices.”²

But although he does mention these issues he does not seem to draw the consequences of these circumstances for the possibility of his larger theory. Manovich does not fundamentally debate remix in a critical contextual manner, although he does define it in his book Software Takes Command as being ‘the cultural logic of global capitalism’. This lack of a critical approach mainly has to do with the fact that Manovich wants to look beyond the present situation and power structures to a possible utopian remix future. As he states, he is more interested in showing how software has enhanced the possibility of blending in culture more easy: “To use the terms of Roland Barthes, we can say that if modernist collage always involved a “clash” of elements, electronic and software collage also allows for “blend.”

Deep remixability

Manovich tries to explore how with the coming of software a shift in the nature of what constitutes a cultural “object” has taken place, where cultural content often no longer has finite boundaries: it is no longer received by the user but it is traversed and/or in constructed and managed. In this way for Manovich culture is a product that still gets constructed both by the maker as well as the consumer. However, the real revolution lies not in the possession of the production tools but in the possibility to exchange information between media, what he in Software Takes Command calls the concept of ‘deep remixability’. As Manovich argues in ‘Remix and Remixability’, culture is actively being modularised by users to make it more adaptive.

“ On the other hand, what seems to be happening is that the “users” themselves have been gradually “modularising” culture. In other words, modularity has been coming into modern culture from the outside, so to speak, rather than being built-in, as in industrial production.”³

And this is where Manovich gets more to the point. For him culture is not modular, it is (increasingly) made modular—however, he still does not address the tension here where standardization and modularization could also be seen as an attempt at commodification and commercialisation of culture, as much as it can be seen as an active act of prosumer resistance (as Navas has already shown: remix has a double face)—and what Manovich is interested in his in how this modularity is increasingly being extended to media themselves. Manovich introduces the term deep remixability to show how remix of various media has become possible (a common software-based environment) next to a remix of the methodology of these media:

“Software production environment allows designers to remix not only the content of different media, but also their fundamental techniques, working methods, and ways of representation and expression”⁴

The future Manovich sees for human culture with the increase of pre-fabricated modularity is a future of softwarization: media will become remediated in the ultimate remediation machine: the computer. According to Manovich this will lead to a new aesthetics and ultimately to a new species. This for him is the power of technology and remix culture, the power to actively change and shape culture. As Manovich states, we need smaller re-combinable parts for this:

“Remix culture demands not selfcontained aesthetic objects or self-contained records of reality but smaller units – parts that can be easily changed and combined with other parts in endless combinations”⁵

Where Manovich calls remix the basic logic of cultural production, culture is transformed from objects to data in his vision, the difference being mainly scale and modularity. In ‘Generation Flash‘, Manovich argues for a modernist viewpoint (though keeping the skepticism of post-modernism) by declaring a preference for as he calls it a ‘belief in science and rationality, emphasis on efficiency and basic forms, idealism and heroic spirit of modernism’. Manovich vision on remix is a vision of how he wants culture to become, to be shaped, to be prosumed and analysed. The question is however whether by focussing on data mining and visualizations and on thinking culture as data we are not running the risk of fixating on studying meaningless vessels. Although Manovich defends his approach as one of complementarity, of expansion, the question remains, do we want to understand culture or do we want to analyse utopia?

 

1 See: www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remixability_2.doc

2 See: http://remixtheory.net/?p=169

3 See: www.manovich.net/DOCS/Remix_modular.doc

4 See: softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.doc

5 See: softwarestudies.com/softbook/manovich_softbook_11_20_2008.doc

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)



Society of the Query – Part 2: Gugerli, Fuller, Manovich, Ludovico, Bruno and Van ’t Hof

Part 1 of my notes on the Society of the Query conference can be found here.

David Gugerli a historian specialized in the philosophy of science gave a lecture on the history of databases and of data management as a signifying practice. In a Deleuzian fashion, he states, knowledge operates in distributed networks. The world is a database and database management systems are shaping our world. It is a very big market (think IBM, Oracle and Microsoft)  with a high level of client lock-in where people are very dependent on their data management systems. Before however (in old databases) data was structured in a hierarchical tree-system. In this way the structure of the database determined which questions could be asked. With the coming of the search and query language every possible combination of entries could be interpreted based on recombination and relation. This meant that interpretation of data became independent of the data structure and place. These new systems were highly efficient and made for new and unexpected questions. They were also more narrative based. Gugerli compares this rise of the relational database model with the rise of critical thinking in the 60’s. Critical thinkers like Barthes, Derrida and Foucault found that a literary work could be seen as a machine that can deliver interpretations. It is a galaxy of signifiers, it has no beginning and we can gain access to it in different ways, none of which is authorative. The interpretation of the text cannot be determined by its author, the interpretations the reader produces when reading are part of its meaning. These traits can also be seen in the development of database concepts: the cultural consequences of these changes are stupendous, according to Gugerli. They do not only influence the relation between author and text but effect any form of information processing in every format. This also has big societal consequences for it has changed our information processing and caused major changes in software structure. The search society and its idea of recombination operates in real time. This requires continued change management, Gugerli concludes, a permanent fluctuation of its composition, of its practices of search and query, which shows the importance of the underlying (relational) database system. The full text of Gugerli’s talk can be downloaded here

Matthew Fuller took a closer look in his talk at the alternative modalities of search and how to develop them. He states that search engines have a morphology, a scheme that generates body, they have different internal structures. Search engines can be seen as cultural machines, they connect information and knowledge. Fuller states that since the rationalization of culture is impossible, this explains the noisiness and the inaccuracy of search engines. Search engines also focus on the analysis of users and the identification of situations. This is an even more abstract process than mere personalization, where the user is not individuated but recognized as a force that produces information. As Fuller states, we need to think on the basis of populations of data producing subjects instead of on the basis of individuals. We need to focus on the dynamics and conditions of search engines. Fuller goes on to discuss different kind of search engines, in order to delve deeper into the morphology of search. Viewzi for instance adopted the aesthetics of the iPhone into a search engine, it makes maps of images and lets you see if they are linked in any way. Oamos views information search as an experience. It is not a full search engine but it uses results from a certain amount of search engines and it looks at relational information. Kartoo and Liveplasma are examples of network visualization interfaces. DAUM, NAVER (both Korean) and Directionless.info of context driven engines. With these examples Fuller gave a good overview of the multiple possibilities for search and the different possibilities for interface design. Fuller states that delving deeper into the complexities of the web and its users and reflecting this in its design is the challenge for the next wave of search.

Lev Manovich’s lecture focused on how we can learn from Google. How can the search engine design serve as a new methodology for cultural analysis, or, how can we use Google as a tool for cultural analysis? First of all he stresses it is important to look at the size of our data. Most of the time cultural analysis focuses on a very small sample of cultural production, where a search engine uses every accessible web document (and now Google also indexes Twitter and Facebook) offering much larger scale for analysis of contemporary cultural production and interpretation. Secondly, when it comes to categorization, mostly cultural objects are placed into small numbers of genres/categories. A search engine can make an analysis of each web document to generate its unique description (using 200+ signals). As Manovich states, although significant research in automatic classification of web pages into genres exist, Google does not use it, because it wants to give you any page that is most relevant. Thirdly, when it concerns “links”, traditionally cultural criticism gives an analysis of a small number of selective links (“influences”) between a given object/person and others. A search engine on the other hand gives a systematic consideration of all (explicitly defined) links between a given web page and other pages. Fourthly, Manovich states that what is very important in cultural production, is that it builds on the old, on old features (characteristics, attributes, dimensions), or a small number of subjectively selected features different from text to text. A search engine focuses on lots of features and can take the interaction with the user into consideration. Where traditionally in cultural analysis theoretical work does focus on reception, in practice it gives more an analysis of documents as experienced by a critic. Web analytics on the other hand can give a good analysis of user interactions with a web site. As Manovich states, cultural analysis looks from one critique, and is thus is not empirical, as it does not look at the user interactions with cultural products. Next, when it comes to zoomability, in cultural analysis the focus is mostly on a document, a creator, group, period or paradigm with highly uneven coverage. With Google search technology or Google trends the search patterns of billions of people over a number of years can be analyzed. Think of the possibilities of Google Earth and Google Street View. As Manovich states, software developed by the digital culture industry and also by the academy often contains innovative theoretical ideas about culture which are embedded in its design (i.e. what software does to calculate the results). However this design is often used to support an outdated (i.e. 20^th century) understanding of culture when it comes to search (looking for particular members of a set) or classification of culture into a small number of genres. Manovich understands the search technology as a new paradigm for cultural analysis: what if we take the principles from search engines, web analytics and Google trends (interactive visualization of patterns), and imbed them in new software tools for analysis? In this way we can extract features from each document in a set, instead of using the features to classify documents into a few classes, and we can visualize the patterns and the variability across a set. As Manovich concludes, the old search paradigm is based on knowing what you want to find, where the new search paradigm is based on finding relations. Manovich ends by asking: might Google take over the Humanities?

Alessandro Ludovico and Christophe Bruno both focused on the potential search engines offer to art, by both using search engines and by reflecting upon them (in an often critical and playful manner). Ludovico discusses his project Google Will Eat Itself (GWEI), in which he established a fake website about online marketing, and subscribed to the Google AddSense program, which lets you publish Google textual adds on your web site. After opening a bank account for the project, they developed a special software which would generate an unique IP address, simulating a user, and would make automatic clicks on the adds by Google. As Ludovico explained, it would be impossible to define a fraudulent click from a true one, making it hard for Google to ban them. Ludovico sees GWEI as a conceptual artwork, as a scientific experiment. Through this project they got a lot of attention in the media. As Ludovico concluded, the worst enemy of a giant is not another giant, it is a parasite. If enough parasites would suck out enough money, it will suck the giant empty. Ludovico wants to dissect, decode and expose these giants through conceptual artworks and theories in order to create cultural anti-bodies. Christophe Bruno also discussed some of his recent artworks or Google hacks. He mentioned Ephiphanies,  a Google Poetry hack which he developed (based on Joyce’s walks in Dublin during which Joyce would collect random sentences overheard). Keywords typed into the Ephiphanies machine will collect random sentences from Google and send them back to the program to form a new poetical structure. Poet Ton van ’t Hof gave a short introduction on Flarf, a cut-up technique using Google search results, rearranging them to make a new text. As Van ‘t Hof explains, these kind of cut-up techniques are not new, as they have been used before in the 1920s by the Surrealists, and in the 50s and 60s by for instance Burroughs. As Van ‘t Hof states, its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to ‘the exploration of the inappropriate in all its guises’. The idea behind Flarf is to mine the internet with odd search terms and then to distill them into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, or plays on other texts. According to Van ‘t Hof the genre is very popular now and would not have existed without Internet or without Google.

Culture is Data

By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution

Paradiso was enlightened last Sunday by the presence of a true Digital Media apostle: Lev Manovich, the renowned professor of Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, came to give a lecture on Cultural Analytics. His lecture was part of a one day conference, Archive 2020, organized by the Dutch expertise centre for e-culture, Virtueel Platform.

Manovich used the intriguing title Activating the archive or data dandy meets data mining, in which he referenced Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink who previously described the fetish of data collection by individuals and institutions. Manovich’s talk centered on the massive digitization efforts of existing cultural assets by institutions all over the world, from ARTstor to Google Books and BBC motion gallery (and even China’s CCTV). As Manovich argues, no human being will ever be able to keep track of all this data. However increasingly measures are taken in which the digital preservation of cultural assets is turning into an obligatory act (hence the fetish reference). Moreover this institutionalized digitization is accompanied since, let’s say 2005, by the rise of huge amounts of user generated content. As Manovich mentions, the number of images uploaded every week to Flickr is likely to be larger than all objects contained in all art museums of the world. This development sees a parallel expansion of the professional cultural universe. This rapid growth of a professional universe can mainly be seen in newly globalized countries foremost due to the growth of software tools which made for the instant availability of cultural news. Everyone now has access to the same ideas, information and tools: there are no more centers and provinces. Manovich even argues that the students, cultural professionals and governments in newly globalized countries are often more ready to embrace the latest ideas than their equivalents in the “old centers” of the world.

By Anne Helmond (cc) non-commercial name attribution

All in all this has lead to an explosive growth of cultural production. This has again lead to some intriguing questions and problems: “What does it mean to be a (video) artist today and what does it mean to do cultural criticism in such a world of superabundance? Before cultural theorists and historians generated theories and concepts about relative small data sets. But how can you track “global digital cultures” with billions of cultural objects? As Manovich argues, we need some new methods to track these developments in our cultural imagination. We need a new methodology for the study of cultural processes and artifacts – including cultural production, sharing and consumption. As Manovich explains, to analyze large cultural data sets of cultural information we can apply tools already employed in the sciences to analyze big data. We can create interactive visualizations and dynamic maps of large cultural data sets to find new patterns – and to generate new theoretical questions. Traditional boundaries disappear as visualization can be seen as esthetic statements about the world, so as forms of art (see for instance Stefanie Posavec’s literary organism). Forms of cultural data mining are already starting to rise up as we are slowly shifting from a world of new media into a world of “more media”. In this respect Manovich states ‘culture has become data’. This data (including media content and people’s creative and social activity around this content, i.e. social media) can be and will be mined and visualized.

Manovich explains his new methodology of ‘cultural analytics’ as the use of data mining and interactive visualizations of large sets of cultural data in the humanities context. Manovich introduced the idea of cultural analytics first in 2005 and you can find more information about this method at softwarestudies.com.

Manovich argues that if you have an interesting idea today, you can be sure someone has the same idea somewhere else. Thus it makes no more sense to experience and study these single events. We need to start studying trends and patterns in culture instead of individual projects of ideas and concepts. We need to look at these projects in a larger context of global cultural production.

But how do you put this in practice? We need to represent and work with individual cultural objects and then work to larger and larger datasets. The key differences between existing work in culture visualization and Manovich’s approach, lies in the fact that most research projects now are driven by the existing data. Manovich wants to create techniques which can be used for much larger data sets. In contrast his methodology uses the computational analysis to generate new metadata. In this way one now creates the metadata around the objects, not the patterns inside. Manovich proposes to appropriate software from hard sciences and use them to look at work of arts and cultural works.

He gives examples of a few research projects he has worked on focusing on modern art. You can for example use software to analyze large datatsets of paintings. In this way a computer can ‘see’ whether a painting is realist or modernist (by measuring grayscale, particles, forms etc). Along these lines you can analyze the development of visual culture over time. By means of image processing you can describe the paintings qualitatively in terms of numbers. We can now make new distinctions on the basis of these outcomes; a trend line. In this way one generates new questions. As Manovich states, this method is not about answering old questions. Instead it offers new visions concerning the development of modernism from realism to modernism.

Manovich did a similar project which analyzed 165 paintings by Mark Rothko using a visual super computer to extract computational data. These are all examples of easier and sometimes more productive ways to look at culture. We can get a lot of data from these methods, Manovich says. Also, born digital media is highly interactive, and it is easy to record user interaction and user statistics. We can now use these techniques to ask different questions. This could be very interesting for, for instance, reception theory; we can now analyze the actual patterns of interaction with culture.

Manovich also expanded his analysis to movies, analyzing the variance in shot lengths in movies showing a “development over time”. The average shot length of feature films between 1900-2008 gives some interesting insides into the differences in cultural history in different countries, comparing France, the Soviet Union, the US etc. (in which the Russians proved most extreme or avant-garde prone with Vertov at the one extreme and Tarkovksi at the other…).

These kind of tools would also be able to ‘go around’ the canon. Where in normal science the focus is mostly on the canon, now we can do art history about larger contexts. But unfortunately it is mostly the canon that has been digitized. We should thus expand the canon in our digitization efforts, argues Manovich. But we can not archive everything…Therefore Manovich states we should archive equal amounts of ‘important’ canonical art and ‘random art’ to balance, in his words, ‘the important stuff wit the non important stuff’.

The critique of the audience focused mainly on the problem of how one can quantify qualitative issues? For Manovich seems to propose a shift from qualitative to quantitative analysis. As Manovich replied, quite pragmatically: it is going to happen anyway, it is what social scientists are doing. With these techniques we can do more than with a simple manually descriptive qualitative analysis. For computers can analyze things we cannot: they can find similarities and differences in similar and likely objects. And in a way the question stays ‘how do we see?’ The brain is also a kind of computer, Manovich says. Do we analyze that different from a computer?

But, on the other hand, won’t we loose a sense of meaning if we analyze culture like a thing? Manovich argues that this is of course a complementary method, we should not throw away our other ways of establishing meaning. It is a way of expanding them. And it is also an important expansion, for how is one going to ask about the meaning of large datasets? We need to combine the traditionally humanities approach of interpretation with digital techniques to find out more. And again, meaning is not the only thing to look at. It is also about creating an experience. Patterns are the new real of our society.

You can find an interview with Lev Manovich held by Virtueel Platform here and an article explaining cultural analytics here.