And then my toes fell off
Apr 24th, 2007 by brian
Elements of remix have been present in art from the beginning. Maybe the borrowing was framed in terms of “tradition,” or “influence,” but artistic and scholarly work has always built on the work of others. Having said that, it is also clear that the past century’s developments in technology have corresponded with a new attitude to the “aura” associated with an “original” work of art, and more aggressive attitude toward appropriation. Perhaps it’s coincidence that the rise of photography and audio recording occurred alongside the rise of modernist genres using collage techniques. But judging from Walter Benjamin’s highly influential 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” it’s clear that these effects of reproductive technology were not lost on contemporary observers. The Gould quotation excerpted above, itself obviously influenced by theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, demonstrates that changes in how art was produced, distributed and consumed in the electronic age were expected to have effects on the character of the art itself.
Pioneers in the art of music remix as we currently think of it worked with pre-digital technology, by laboring painstakingly to loop and splice tape, or by manipulating vinyl turntables. But without question the rise of digital technology pushed the practice to new levels of activity and imagination. The ease of copying and manipulation of digital media naturally supports the practices of sampling and recombining artifacts. And as with other new forms of participatory media such as weblogging, the tools have gotten cheaper and easier to use even as they have gotten more powerful. The result has been a flood of work created by largely anonymous new media artists, reimagining the icons of popular culture or unearthing forgotten artifacts and contextualizing them anew. One only has to spend an hour surfing YouTube to get a sense of the subversive fun being had by hundreds of thousands of culture mashers, and we all have our favorite examples of the art. (Two of my most enjoyed clips are the remix of The Shining’s trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVjl7gK4HGU, and the mash-up of the original TV series of Star Trek with a Monty Python song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEnyT0_BjxA).