Tactics of Remix and Postproduction


Network Conductor Professor Mark Amerika
email: artist@markamerika.com
www: www.markamerika.com
Remix Yourself  
"If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."

Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act"


"If we are all artist-mediums, we must then accept the fact that we are all in perpetual postproduction and that our aesthetic fitness relies on our ability to trigger novelty out of our unconscious creative potential. All of the decisions we make while performing our ongoing work of postproduction art rest with pure intuition and are envisioned as part of the creative act."

from Professor VJ's Big Blog Mash-Up

Seminar Introduction:

Remix culture is everywhere. Although popularized in music culture and now the Web 2.0 online networking scene, we find it in many art forms including literature, photography, film/video art, net art, audio art, hactivism, live A/V performance, and video games/machinema. We can trace its history through many other practices such as collage art, Rauschenberg combines, and Duchampian readymades (where he recontextualizes "found source material").

In this short seminar we will investigate the emergence of interdisciplinary media art practices that experiment with digital remixing, textual mash-ups, appropriation, blogging, live A/V performance, and other art forms that engage with renewable source material. The seminar will explore practice-based research methods in intermedia art-making that sample from and integrate radical theories into the mix including recent inquiries into rhythm science, postproduction art, literary cut-ups, participation art, pla(y)giarsm, hactivism, détournement, and remixology.

Readings for the seminar:

BOOKS

  1. Mark Amerika: META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press, 2007) (Paperback) -- available in the museum bookshop

  2. Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid): Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004)

ESSAYS

  1. Nicholas Bourriaud:"Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World"

  2. William Burroughs: "The Cut-Up Method"

  3. Guy Debord: "Methods of Détournement"

  4. Professor VJ: "Source Material Everywhere", "The next version of 'you'," and Artist, Medium, Instrument"