William Basinski’s lecture was very important to me because I frequently work with sound explorations and the moving image, and was also a great way to close out the visiting artist lecture series. This event was less a lecture and way more of a viewing experience. The lights dimmed and the screen lit up to show selections from several collaborations with his sound and footage from James Elaine. Elaine’s masterful work behind the lens of his lo-fi super 8 camera creates soft poetic images from landscapes and events common to everyday life (with the exception of the ticker parades which no longer take place). The soft details and grainy quality create a more relaxed feeling, which is mirrored by the ambient loops played Basinsky. The visuals and audio exist so well together that it is almost hard to imagine that they were made on separate occasions, and in some cases in different parts of the country. The familiar imagery used throughout allows for the viewer to easily associate and create their own personal meaning with, while the resonant sounds float through the air and in a way mirror the images. The heavy echos and ambient compositions allude back to Eno’s Music for Airports, but with Basinsky’s own unique style to the approach. Time becomes lost when viewing these films, what seems like very short section could really be 5 minutes, and vice versa. I found this lecture/viewing to be very insightful as well as inspiring to my own works. I noticed the importance/impact that a cohesive mix of audio and video can have, as well as realized that it is ok to let your pieces take their own form and that you don’t always have to cut them short (i.e. Disintegration Loops).
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Blink! x Isaac Julien
Blink/Isaac julien
Blink! The new exhibition at the Denver Art Museum opened last week, showcasing work from some of the top names in digital art over the past couple decades. The sheer size of the show is impressive in itself, without even taking the work into account. Light, sound, projections, and neon fill the back room of the DAM, with no competition over audio or visual cues, and everything seems to fit right in its place. Works from legends such as William Kentridge, David Flavin, Nam June Paik, Bjorn Melhus, Mark Amerika, and surprisingly even Bill Rumley sit side by side, working together to show the world the possibilities of digital art in the 21 century.
The piece that I found most interesting was Still Men Out There by Bjorn Melhus. This installation contained three groups of televisions playing six different channels of video, to a common soundtrack. These televisions acted out a narrative while seemingly interacting with each other. The sound, light, and overall sensation I felt within this installation was very inspiring for my own digital works, and I am very grateful that the DAM brought this show in for our community.
The following day, Isaac Julien presented his newest work titled Ten Thousand Waves. This 50 minute film is designed to be played on 9 different screens throughout the installation, each connected to a different channel of video output. This design is set up to choreograph the viewer around the installation space, with the use of editing techniques and visual cues. For this presentation, however, the work was played out on one screen with 9 smaller frames within. This provided a different viewing effect, while also showing how the piece may work within the installation space. Innovative design aside, the actual content of the film was awe-inspiring. The photography is well planned and technically exquisite, and the narrative is captivating and easy to become involved in. The overall presentation of this work led me to the feeling that I need to see the installation in person, as well as any other works by Isaac Julien.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Erckletronic Remix Theory ft. Paul D Miller
It’s life in the data-cloud [of course] but it’s also about life in such a dense place that the human mind acts as kind of an osmotic unit, absorbing randomly but at the same time with some underlying structure. In Jamaica, the dub masters call it “versioning.” In modernism, think of Robert Rauschenberg buying a drawing in 1953 from Willem de Kooning only to erase it. Sampling is like sending a fax to your self from the sonic debris of a possible future; the cultural permutations of tomorrow, heard today, beyond the corporeal limits of the imagination. Ours is a Milieu in which much of what is heard, seen, and thought, is basically a refraction of the electronicized world that we have built around ourselves. Its not so much that the technology changes the compositional process, as it extends it into new realms. With the needle the DJ weaves the sounds together. There’s so much information about who you should be or what you should be that you’re not left with the option of trying to create a mix of your very self. Identity is about creating an environment where you can make the world act as your own reflection. But at the end of the day, the music speaks louder than any individual voice, and the music is saying that the old boundaries no longer exist. You just have to be open to different frequencies. Nothing is direct, everything is an interpretation. Whatever mix you make of it, it can only be a guess – you have to make your own version, and that’s kind of the point. With that in mind I ask that you think of this as a mix lab – an “open system” where any voice can be you. The only limits are the game and how you play it. You get my drift?
Whether you like it or not you are a remixer. Of music. Of thoughts. Of ideas, conversations, concepts and designs. And there is nothing you can do but accept your position within the apparatus, and consciously participate.
Since the beginning of time humankind has survived off of the constant remixing and reformulating of ideas, theories, and beliefs. Our shared experiences in life are how we create our understanding of the world, and the continual building upon ideas is greatest way to progress as a whole. A free flow of information to and from the greatest number of people provides the greatest possible amount of diverse thought, thus deeper understandings as a whole. Information and media should be free to the people in order to provide all the freedom to add to the diversity of culture. Remix also exists to recontextualize source material in a way that is more meaningful or relevant in the time when it is reproduced. This means a song from the 80’s can be chopped up, slowed down, looped, and totally be repurposed into a new work today, while simultaneously paying homage to the original work. In this way the piece lives on forever.
There are no right or wrong answers in remix, only questions. Questions that may only be answered through experimentation and manipulation. Questions that may not be relevant to any generation but our own. But it is our duty to use the apparatus to get our thoughts, ideas, and messages out, no matter how fruitless they may seem in the eyes of others. That’s kind of the point. Remix is an art form that has been used forever, however, is only recently being defined and separated. It is unlimited to any media, and that is the beauty of remix. It is not constricting to any one idea or manifestation, instead open to as many interpretations as the mind can create, and that is our duty as conscious observers in this game we call the remix. Build on the past. Create the future. Sample, chop, cut, reverse, slow down, pitch up, loop, rewind, repeat. But most importantly remix for life. And don’t let life remix you.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Debord x Bourriaud: A Remix Manifesto
It is our responsibility, in this generation, to accept our role in society in terms of the remix culture that we are all a part of. It is our duty as conscious participants to further the use of detournement and remix to build upon history to create a richer future. We are remixers and we live by a code:
- Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. All that was directly lived has moved away into a representation, inhabiting historicized styles and forms, reprogramming existing works and making use of images, and using society as a catalog of forms.
- Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; it addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. Life can never be too disorienting, cut, splice, delete, sample, loop, copy, reverse, build, destroy!
- It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of "citations."
- The spectacle presents itself at one and the same time as society itself, as a part of society, and as instrument of unification.
- Life burns to pour out through the diversity of sentiments, and thus rediscover itself in the sum of diversity. Ideas and realizations in the realm of détournement can be multiplied at will.
- It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest efficacy, and undoubtedly, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the affirmation of appearance and the affirmation of all human life, that is to say social life, as simple appearance.
- Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for the ensemble of others.
The methods that we have briefly dealt with here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize. Art functions as an active agent, how can we make do with what we have?
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Copyright, Copywrong, Copyleft...Bring it on
Open source/open content presents many advantages to the idea of a remix culture, primarily the ability to easily access and legally manipulate someone else’s content to make it a new work conveying different messages or ideas than the original might have. It provides freedom to artists/musicians/authors, and allows for more free flowing ideas benefiting the overall culture that these remixes are being released into, by adding more information and ideas to the mass of information available. I believe that it is only necessary to restrict content if it is somehow personal or requires a great amount of personal effort to produce (many years working), however, just because it restricted to the public doesn’t necessarily mean that it is protected from remixers.
The digital networking culture has opened a new world of possibilities for remixing, whether it be legal or illegal, and for this reason I believe that intellectual property has become much more obsolete. Because of this I feel that if you want something of yours to be protected you do have to take extra effort. Once something is put out into the digital world it is basically free for anyone to download, steal, copy, or manipulate, whether it is done legally or illegally. Whether it is moral or not this will continue to happen, because of the mass amount of people taking part in this culture. While one may not necessarily be anonymous in this network, there are too many people doing it to take every single person who is down.
While there is the well-known copyright, I tend to subscribe more to the copyleft view on personal material, allowing for manipulations and reproductions for future generations to come. I believe that the original author or artist’s labor should indefinitely be acknowledged, however, I don’t think that just because they made something great and put a copyright on it that its life should be restricted to that one use. If this were the case in the past many inventions and scientific breakthroughs would never have occurred, because many ideas in these fields build off of ideas and inventions that have come before. Remixing has been around since day one, and no matter how hard copyright activists try they will never fully be able to protect works and ideas from future remixes.
Coming from two former hippy parents that lived in the glory days of rock and roll music I was raised with the music from bands such as the Greatful Dead and Jimi Hendrix. These musicians added covers of other musicians to keep their live performances interesting as well as pay homage to the great minds that created those songs (Bob Dylan was even quoted once saying that "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way... Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way"). The first time I consciously remember hearing a remix/cover was in my dad’s Volkswagen bus around the age of 4. This track was a recording of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” from Woodstock in 1969, and was probably the first time I ever felt mind-blown. Hendrix took a song every American knows and turned it into something entirely new, yet still recognizable. This memory still remains in my mind, which I think pays testament to the power of Hendrix’s musical talent and the power of music overall. I think this and other musical explorations of other people’s work by Jimi Hendrix resulted in betterment for the overall culture, and I believe (arguably) changed the face of music forever.
Recently I have been playing around with the idea of remix in my own sound art works, using logic pro and a MIDI controller to assign and trigger samples. In the past I believed that it was unacceptable to appropriate other peoples work into my own, not for legal issues, but more for the moral belief that I want to produce MY art, but have recently been straying away and I think my art has only benefited. Most recently I used samples from Dan Deacon’s “Drinking Out of Cups” and the tone when apple computers turn on (created by the one and only Brian Eno), as well as environmental recordings to create a futurist compositional soundscape. I believe that this piece is entirely original, and the original samples taken would not be recognizable without prior knowledge of the source material.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Erckle and I-The Borges and I remix
The other one, the one they call Erckle, is the one things happen to. I wait for the bus in the cold night air for what seems like an hour, but is only a moment and go straight home from school; I know of Erckle from the ridiculous late night text messages and drunken “graffiti”. I like art, snowboarding, red wine, and interesting sounds; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the precursor of chaos. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live. I live through Erckle’s failure. Erckle lives through my success. The things Erckle remembers are at least somewhat impressive, and those memories save me, perhaps because for every person in the world exists an opposite mind to balance the order and chaos throughout the universe. I believe we exist to protect the sanity of the other, and as a combined force are more powerful than either could be alone. Besides, we both know Erckle will slowly begin to disappear, never entirely, but the distance will increase over time. Increased distance, rather than ceased existence.
As I see Erckle appear less even now, I am learning to treasure his existence and draw energy and inspiration from the stories he shares. He will continue to brag about art works and big air competitions he had nothing to do with, I will continue to hold his hair back as he throws up in the early hours of the morning. I have known people that have tried to live like Erckle wants and have never found success. And vice versa. Thus I know I must welcome Erckle into my life and hope that he does the same. Even now the suds remaining in the empty bottle on my desk allude to Erckle’s presence in my life.
I do not know which of us has written this page.