Now, to prepare myself for the arrival of my family…

With this piece my main focus was Remix Culture and the use of sampling in the art making process. It is my belief that innovation and creativity grow from connecting ideas rather than from protecting them. The lines between art, music, film, literature and technology have blurred – making everything fair game for communicating ideas. I wanted to explore the concept that Remix is an art in itself and has the potential to evolve and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.

I spent countless hours searching the World Wide Web for various audio and image based sources that I sampled for potential use in my own piece. This was followed by a selection process where I chose the audio and video files I felt were best suited to the piece. Finally they were edited to meet my specifications. I also created base audio and video tracks that would loop while the NanoPads were not being interacted with.

I used two Korg NanoPad MIDI controllers, one to control audio clips and the other to control video, as the interactive components in the piece. Using black acrylic and various tools, I fabricated two custom housings for the NanoPads, allowing only a select portion of the controller to be used by the audience.

Using Max/MSP/Jitter I built a patch that allowed certain video loops to be launched when they were triggered by the video dedicated MIDI controller. It also allowed audio coming in from Ableton Live, triggered by the audio dedicated MIDI controller, to have a direct effect on the color space. This patch was essentially the framework for the whole visual aspect of the piece, as well as some parts of the audio component.

Look for some video updates to follow once editing is finished

We live in an ever increasingly digital world where we are constantly bombarded with media. There is a seemingly infinite amount of media and source material right at our fingertips just waiting to be sampled, edited, altered, chopped, and reinterpreted. Access to tools of creation, manipulation, production, and distribution grow more and more easily accessible. This is a time when millions of bits of information can be disseminated around the globe in mere seconds with the click of a mouse. The lines between art, music, film, literature and technology have blurred – making everything fair game for communicating ideas. This is Remix Culture.

Street culture, music, and the media environment we live in heavily inspire and influence my perspective as an artist. I rely on a diversity of forms including video/audio, mixed media, digital compositions and photography. My compositions are often a synthesis of multiple mediums, in which sampling and remediation are involved.

It is my belief that innovation and creativity grow from connecting ideas rather than from protecting them. Ideas can be improved and expanded upon when they are allowed to circulate freely. From Thomas Jefferson remixing The Bible to produce The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Jefferson Bible) to William S. Burroughs employing the “cut-up” technique to produce literature to Andy Warhol sampling iconic American imagery in the creation of pop art, remix is present in numerous aspects of our art and culture. Remix is an art in itself and has the potential to evolve and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.

With Read/Write/Remix my goal is to make a commentary about the state of this progressive and immersive new media movement by creating an interactive environment that allows users to take sounds and images from the culture around us to create their own audio-visual remix of Remix Culture.

Intro

We live in an ever increasingly digital world where we are constantly bombarded with media. There is a seemingly infinite amount of media and source material right at our fingertips just waiting to be sampled, edited, altered, chopped, reinterpreted. Access to tools of creation, manipulation, production, and distribution grow more and more easily accessible. This is a time when millions of bits of information can be disseminated around the globe in mere seconds with the click of a mouse. The lines between art, music, film, literature and technology have blurred – making everything fair game for communicating ideas. This is remix culture.

A brief history of remix/sampling

~1820 – Thomas Jefferson completes The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Jefferson Bible) which is essentially the original American remix

1912 – Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo publishes a Futurist Manifesto, The Art of Noises, which proposes the composition of music based entirely on the use of sound sources from the environment.

1915 – Dada is born – collage, photomontage, assemblage, readymades

1939 – John Cage’s ‘Imaginary Landscapes’

1948 – Pierre Schaeffer introduces Musique concrète and predicts that there will be an instrument that will “provide the sounds of an orchestral instrument by means of a bank of pre-recorded events”

1949 – Joseph Schillinger publishes A Mathematical Theory Of Music in which he proposes that popular music can be composed by combining snippets of existing popular music.

1958 – Novelist William S. Burroughs employs his “cut-up” technique, slicing up phrases and words to create new sentences, in his novel Naked Lunch.

1961 – James Tenny’s ‘Collage No. 1 (Blue Suede)’ is one of the first examples of using copyrighted popular music as a sound source. (Elvis Presley’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’)

1985 – John Oswald coins the term ‘Plunderphonics’ to describe the “borrowing” of existing recordings to create a new composition.

1991 – The World Wide Web comes to the Internet as a publicly available service, providing linked pages of text & graphics

A more current partial list of artists who practice, incorporate, or advocate Remix

DJ Spooky
Shepard Fairey
Andy Warhol
KAWS – remixing popular culture, cartoon characters
Jefrey Lacson – transforms Japanese robot toys, and mutates them into clean industrial-esque images
Brian Jungen – takes familiar products such as Nike shoes and white plastic chairs and transforms them into sculptural biomorphic forms
Sarah Lucas – 90′s-current, appropriation/readymades, collage
Romare Bearden – Collage work in the 60′s and 70′s
Negativland
Steinski – Steven Stein
Grand Wizard Theodore – first scratching DJ, turned turntable into instrument
8-bit Operators – music of Kraftwerk recreated with 8-bit video game systems
Vicki Bennett – People Like us
Z-Trip
Girl Talk

Radiohead
Nine Inch Nails
Public Enemy
Beck

Lawrence Lessig – basically the largest advocate of Remix, author of Remix, etc – “Remix is literacy in the 21st century”

So why Remix?
It is my belief that innovation and creativity grow from connecting ideas rather than from protecting them. Ideas can be improved and expanded upon when they are allowed to be circulated freely rather than when they are strictly regulated by copyright law.
Clearly sampling and the concept of remix have existed for quite some time. It has played a large role in art and music and in shaping our culture and it is a movement that is continually growing and developing. Remix is an art in itself and has the potential to evolve and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art. Remix has been democratized.

Concept
To make a commentary about the state of Remix Culture by creating an interactive environment that allows users to take sounds and images from the culture around us and use them to say things differently, to provide users the ability to create their own audio-visual remix of Remix Culture.

How it works
Start with a bank of audio, spoken word and musical, and visual, moving and still, samples
One or two pads dedicated to audio and one for visual
Each button triggers a certain event
The audio has direct effect on visual

Considerations
Allow the ability for users to record and take their individual remix?
Visual Component
Skins for pads
Speakers vs. Headphones

Budget
Korg nanoPAD USB Controller – $59 x 2 = $118 http://www.sweetwater.com/
Ableton Live 7 LE – $139 http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/
Sony MDR-V6 Studio Headphones – $75.85 http://www.bhphotovideo.com/
Lauren Folding Wire Music Stand – $9.95 x 2 = $19.90 http://www.austinbazaar.com/
= $352.75

Imation Apollo External Hard Drive 250 GB – $72.99 http://www.buy.com/
= $430.74
+ $ 21.54 pricing contingency
= $452.28

Check it out here

More mixes to come soon…

Really good piece about Fair Use by Negativland

A rundown on many types of remix, music and other

The Author Function in Remix

Interview with DJ Spooky on Digital Culture

Radio interview with DJ Spooky and Girl Talk

YouTube video of DJ Spooky lecture about media and remix culture – this is essentially the lecture he gave at DU

TED talk from Larry Lessig about creativity, copyright law, and remix

Total Recut – video recut/remix site

With this piece my goal is to create an entirely sample based audio/visual (re)mix that will examine the use of sampling and remixing in various art-forms through history up to the current state of the remix culture. I will attempt to show how sampling/remixing is an art in itself and has the potential to evolve and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.
Other topics that arise within this theme are issues of fair use-sampling/remixing someone else’s work for the purpose of comment and criticism (“If they want to critique me, they’ve got to be able to quote me”) as well as copyright law and piracy.