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• It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of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?

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.