MEFT3102

Some links now we’re back from the break—hope it was a good one for you.

For those interested in/still thinking through the philosophy of aesthetics, here’s a nice general intro.

As for this week, the Houston reading on VJing and Simondon is perhaps complex but I think one that might lead you to rethink your relationship to technology. I enjoy it more each time I read it. But the key quote for this week is probably this, from Anne-Marie Boisvert:

It is significant that we speak about a remix “culture”, for it is much more than a mere musical movement. Naturally it includes cultural products - in other words, the “works” themselves. But it is also and especially the events in which these “products”(ie, music and/or video works) find themselves not so much presented as truly (re)created and remixed each time. The remix depends, above all, on the way the artist interacts with his or her machinery; on the “samples” chosen and the way they are related … (On Bricolage: http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/remix.php?is=8&file=4&tlang=0)

Which is to say that everything can be sampled/resequenced/modulated … music and sounds, images, bits of code (whether computer or genetic), experience, friendships, brainwaves, relations, technical structures, their elements, their modes of relating to the exterior, internal resonances, even perhaps “imagination” or “intuition”. Boisvert even applies this to politics, suggesting remix culture is the “death of ideology”, and a ongoing remix of the elements of history in general (so that any kind of notion of fixed history, or of living in an easy to define “historical period” goes out the window).

The other side of this, as DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) notes, is that “Whenever you look at an image, there’s a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply to create a sense of order.” (http://www.djspooky.com/articles/rebirth.php). And the same for all the other things above I’ve suggested are open to sampling, resequencing, modulation. Here Houston’s account of Simondon’s approach to technology is very useful beyond the context of VJing!

Really interesting contemporary aspects of this re-modulation/sequencing are thought about in the fabulous issue of Vague Terrain—Biomorph (in my opinion now a leading journal in several areas).