Remix Culture

#Musica_Dispersa
Rubén López Cano
Editorial: Musikeon Books (Barcelona)
Año de publicación. 2018
ISBN:  978-84-945117-1-4
http://rlopezcano.blogspot.com.es/2018/04/musica-dispersa-apropiacion-influencias.html

Palabras clave:
Identidad y modos de existencia de las piezas musicales. Apropiación. Reciclaje musical. Intertextualidad. Préstamos e influencia. Reutilización. Plagio. Música grabada. Autenticidad y discursos de legitimación. Covers y versiones. Remix. Sampleo. Mashup. Memes musicales. Escucha digital. Pacto perceptual.

Citas, alusiones, paráfrasis, apropiaciones, collages, arreglos, adaptaciones, covers, versiones, sampleos, remixes y memes; son formas de revisitar músicas preexistentes, apropiarse de algunos de sus elementos y reutilizarlos legítimamente o no, para producir más música. De Hildegard von Bingen a Dj Danger Mouse, todas las culturas musicales de todas las épocas han empleado estos recursos. Pero mientras sus procedimientos son unos cuantos y no han cambiado mucho a lo largo de la historia, su valoración y relación con ideales estéticos, principios legales y discursos de autenticidad y legitimidad artística, se han transformado radicalmente. Si para los compositores de las cortes de Aviñón o Milán del siglo XIV y XV citar ingeniosamente una y otra vez las canciones de los grandes maestros del pasado era un valor estético en sí mismo que les reportaba reconocimiento y prestigio, con las leyes de propiedad intelectual actuales, Beethoven, Schubert o Brahms no serían más que delincuentes comunes.

La escucha digital no se limita a la portabilidad, ubicuidad y recuperación inmediata de nuestros contenidos privados. Es también el acceso súbito, nunca antes visto, a una inconmensurable cantidad de músicas de tiempos y espacios distantes y dispersos. Es la posibilidad de la escucha en serie, casi simultánea, de varias interpretaciones, arreglos, versiones y variantes de la misma pieza y la percepción directa de parecidos y coincidencias entre músicas distintas cuya detección solía ser prerrogativa exclusiva de especialistas. Navegar por la red en busca de la canción, versión o interpretación adecuada, nos revela hasta qué punto las nociones de innovación y originalidad, la creación exnovo, el genio solitario que crea un universo personal sin deudas con su pasado o su entorno inmediato, constituye un ideal que a menudo colisiona con las prácticas reales.

Música dispersa muestra que la creación musical es menos una epifanía y más una conversación infinita entre creadores de todos los tiempos quienes con sus intercambios, apropiaciones y repeticiones, vertebran su propia civilización musical dotando de significado nuestras experiencias auditivas. Nos lleva de la mano por los entresijos de diversos procesos y registros de reciclaje; analiza críticamente los discursos de autenticidad que han mediado en nuestra relación con lo musical desde el papiro hasta el iPad o el móvil; detalla los diversos pactos perceptuales implícitos con los que "disculpamos" nuestros placeres con la música grabada; pasa lista a los vanos intentos por reducir la música a objetos cerrados, concluidos y completos y manejables; y propone que el desafío mayor de la reciente remezcla y reciclaje digital no es su aparente saqueo indiscriminado del descomunal archivo musical atesorado en dos mil años y que ahora parece que se nos viene encima, sino su diáfana capacidad para mostrarnos que la música es un fluir indómito cuyo poder y originalidad está mucho menos afincado en su materia física, sus estructuras o componentes, o incluso en la genialidad inconmensurable de creadores, compositores, productores y postproductores. Su valor emana fundamentalmente de nuestra íntima historia personal con cada pieza, obra o canción.

How do social meanings and general associations attached to certain musical genres come into play when classical music meets disco, hip-hop meets the symphony or heavy metal meets the opera? How do artistic or commercial concepts and communication strategies affect composers' techniques of mixing genres? This study observes musical exchange between western art music and various forms of popular music with regard to intra- and extra-musical aspects. The examination of crossing over within popular music focuses on jazz fusion, progressive rock, classical-crossover and mashup. Analyses of chosen works from Gentle Giant, Liquid Tension Experiment, Kutiman, and of popular adaptations of Vivaldi´s “Four Seasons” help illuminate characteristics of different sub-categories of “crossing over”. Qualitative interviews with current international genre-mixing composers expand the scope of the study. The exploration and systematization of a wide range of crossover phenomena reveals that different types of background motivations, such as marketing concerns of record companies or the experimenting attitudes of musicians, can result in highly dissimilar pieces being labelled generally as Crossover.

Remix--or the practice of recombining preexisting content--has proliferated across media both digital and analog. Fans celebrate it as a revolutionary new creative practice; critics characterize it as a lazy and cheap (and often illegal) recycling of other people's work. In Of Remixology, David Gunkel argues that to understand remix, we need to change the terms of the debate. The two sides of the remix controversy, Gunkel contends, share certain underlying values--originality, innovation, artistic integrity. And each side seeks to protect these values from the threat that is represented by the other. In reevaluating these shared philosophical assumptions, Gunkel not only provides a new way to understand remix, he also offers an innovative theory of moral and aesthetic value for the twenty-first century.

La musica, in quanto forma testuale, non è sfuggita ai processi d’ibridazione permessi dalla tecnologia digitale, anzi l’estrema facilità di appropriazione, manipolazione, rielaborazione e mescolanza è forse l’aspetto che più di altri contraddistingue il testo musicale digitale.

Found Footage denomina el tipo de cine realizado con material de archivo como un objeto encontrado: películas caseras, históricas de archivo, anuncios, películas pornográficas, reportajes, documentales, programas de televisión... que se remonta, remezcla e incluso distorsiona, con el fin de generar una nueva obra audiovisual. Su apropiación es significativa en las películas de collage o cine reciclado, los documentales, y, actualmente, en otras obras como los videoclips y las sesiones de vjs. Sus orígenes se remontan a los años 50, sin embargo, en una época en la que es posible hacer películas con un teléfono móvil o a partir de imágenes tomadas de YouTube, una de las tendencias de mayor crecimiento en el ámbito cinematográfico es el metraje encontrado. En este artículo se analizará cómo las nuevas posibilidades de apropiación de metraje en Internet, así como las nuevas tecnologías digitales de distribución, exhibición, y (post) producción, propician el desarrollo continuo y la revitalización de este tipo de cine, para aportar, además, sus propias contribuciones estéticas.

One doesn’t need to look far to find examples of contemporary locations of cultural opposition. Digital piracy, audio mashups, The Onion and Wikipedia are all examples of transgression in our current mediascape. And as digital age transgression becomes increasingly essential, it also becomes more difficult to define and protect.

The contributions in this collection are organized into six sections that address the use of new technologies to alter existing cultural messages, the incorporation of technology and alternative media in transformation of everyday cultural practices and institutions, and the reuse and repurposing of technology to focus active political engagement and innovative social change.

Bringing together a variety of scholars and case studies, Transgression 2.0 will be the first key resource for scholars and students interested in digital culture as a transformative intervention in the types, methods and significance of cultural politics.

This article examines how popular culture is remixed for the purposes of facilitating mystical experiences within a global electronic dance music culture. In particular, it investigates the sampling of space travel and alien contact narratives within psytrance, whose DJ-producers are like media shamans remixing fragments from cinema, TV series, documentaries, NASA’s lunar program and other popular cultural sources for gnostic purposes. I explore ways outer space travel becomes a narrative device for interior travels, the “hero’s journey,” and how the figure of the alien other allegorizes the potential for the discovery of the self. In the artifice of remixticism, the alien is a device for universal
consciousness and self-empowerment, a process I dub alienation.

In the twenty-first century, the remix, the mashup, and the reboot have come to dominate Western popular culture. Consumed by popular audiences on an unprecedented scale, but often derided by critics and academics, these texts are the ‘monsters’ of our age—hybrid creations that lurk at the limits of responsible consumption and acceptable appropriation. Like monsters, they offer audiences the thrill of transgression in a safe and familiar format, mainstreaming the self-reflexive irony and cultural iconoclasm of postmodern art. Like other popular texts before them, remixes, mashups, and reboots are often read by critics as a sign of the artistic and moral degeneration of contemporary culture. This is especially true within the institutions such remixes seem to attack most directly: the heritage industry, high art, adaptation studies, and copyright law.
With this context in mind, in this thesis I explore the boundaries and connections between remix culture and its ‘others’ (adaptation, parody, the Gothic, Romanticism, postmodernism), asking how strong or tenuous they are in practice. I do so by examining remix culture’s most ‘monstrous’ texts: Frankenfictions, or commercial narratives that insert fantastical monsters (zombies, vampires, werewolves, etc.) into classic literature and popular historical contexts. Frankenfiction is monstrous not only because of the fantastical monsters it contains, but because of its place at the margins of both remix and more established modes of appropriation. Too engaged with tradition for some, and not traditional enough for others, Frankenfiction is a bestselling genre that nevertheless remains peripheral to academic discussion. This thesis aims to address that gap in scholarship, analysing Frankenfiction’s engagement with monstrosity (chapter one), parody (chapter two), popular historiography (chapter three), and models of authorial originality (chapter four). Throughout this analysis, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein remains a touchstone, serving as an ideal metaphor for the nature of contemporary remix culture.

This article explores new forms of serial structure found in transmedia story worlds, with particular attention to the innovations of amateur transmedia works.  Although the term transmedia has most often been associated only with corporate media at the center, taking amateur works as the paradigmatic example produces new insights into the affordances of digital technology, beyond the industry’s limitations, namely how transmedia creativity can function in the absence of the need to remain marketable, to maintain a coherent brand, and to work within a corporate family of conglomerated media companies.  This study thereby focuses on fan fiction, art, and “vids”, a form of remix video collage, to demonstrate how contemporary amateur production interacts with professional content, but also produces its own type of complex narration through unique forms, aesthetics, and story structures, likewise encouraging alternate reception practices as a result.  This article identifies at least three types of transmedial seriality elucidated by studying amateur fan media.  First, fan works emphasize the increasingly complex nature of seriality in all transmedia and the way in which serial effects do not vanish, but increasingly depend upon the viewer’s choices. Secondly, fan works create their own kind of flexible and multiple serial effects wherein meaning does not depend on consuming a specific sequence of narratives, but instead upon reading any collection of narratives within larger cycles or tropes to assemble a sense of flowing norms, genres, and preferences. Finally, fan works also uniquely analyze and reconfigure the serial effects of tropes found not only across the transmedia components of individual stories, but also across the breadth of popular culture. By remixing and reimagining repeated structures of representation, fan works often call attention to latent forms of seriality within popular culture as a collective whole.

Critical Remix Video (CRV) is an emerging form of experimental video art activism that uses as raw materials previously published, often copyrighted audio-visual content in order to critique perceived wrongs and injustices or make political statements. In many cases, CRVs seek to expose dominant ideologies embedded in mainstream media messages, for example authoritative journalism, persuasive advertising or political broadcasts. This paper uses Visual Semiotics to analyse a representative CRV (I Am Not Moving) and shows how this critical video is equally susceptible to ideological influence by revealing the alternative or oppositional ideologies embedded within it. The following questions are addressed: which version of events is the more accurate representation of reality – the narratives presented by mainstream media or the deconstructed versions presented by CRVs? To what extent are the critical messages presented by CRVs diluted by the ideological biases to which they too are subject? How long can Critical Remix survive as a form of alternative artistic practice before being completely subsumed by mainstream media - a trend we can already see happening today? Despite such shortcomings, CRVs represent an opportunity for grassroots activists to have their voices heard on a global stage, utilizing the full potential of digital networking and mobile technologies as well as spreadable media content.

Although social media platforms have garnered much attention in recent years for their putative role in dramatic social and political movements around the world, scholars such as Clay Shirky and Ethan Zuckerman have suggested that the real potential of such tools for change exists in the way they empower citizens to publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views throughout society. In this view, social media matters most not in the streets and squares but in the social commons that Jurgen Habermas termed the public sphere. New image-based social media platforms and creative practices in Vietnam are emerging as powerful tools in this regard, offering a voice to a citizenry who since 1975 have lived under an authoritarian, and not clearly delineated, legal order restricting the opinions and views eligible for public expression.

In the past year, Vietnamese netizens have turned to the digital techniques of remix and memetic culture to indirectly express and debate sentiment on issues of often-sensitive social and political relevance. Using several recent case studies, we argue that this widespread practice constitutes a culturally-specific form of civic and political engagement that appears to be exerting a subtle but real influence upon state policy in this rapidly developing Southeast Asian nation.

Pasamos de la imagen que remitía a la cosa, la suma de las cuales constituía el mundo, a la suma de las imágenes como mundo. El actual contexto multipantalla de producción de imágenes se basa en la idea de interfaz como lugar sin espacio en el que tienen lugar veloces intercambios de datos y de imágenes que son aprovechados por las grandes empresas donde data is Gold y el compartir y todo lo que implique una interacción con los datos e imágenes es el motor del data. Las obras audiovisuales found footage que operan desde el pulso dialéctico y alegórico, definen el léxico que nos permite entender una sociedad y una cultura definidas y vigiladas a través de sus imágenes y, por extensión, de sus interfaces. La obra found footage pone de manifiesto que toda imagen es una interfaz, esto es, un espacio de producción visual que convierte la imagen en susceptible de ser manoseada, usada, desrealizada y remontada. La obra found footage hace comprensible la historia de estas imágenes que configuran nuestro saturado y mediatizado entorno visual, ya sea desde el extrañamiento, desde el viaje dialéctico y alegórico en el tiempo o como ecología dialéctica en la era del superávit audiovisual.

This article considers the ways in which metal has interacted with the aesthetics of electronic music since the 1980s, from its earliest exchanges with hip hop through to recent developments in the djent subgenre. It highlights the persistence of metal’s practitioners in adopting new technologies (including samplers, drum machines and Digital Audio Workstations) and the challenges that this has brought to established ideas of conventional metal music practice. Underlying the discussion is the notion of the ‘code’, a familiar term in metal music studies, which has been employed to articulate ideas of metal’s core musical attributes. In these terms, electronic music’s creative practices can be seen to have facilitated both the deconstruction and re-contextualization of metal’s code, enabling the genre to be re-imagined and ultimately enriched.

UNREVISED VERSION of a first attempt to draw the aesthetic of genres of music involving sampling, this article seeks to explore aesthetic grounds for new paradigms of legal legitimation of the new status of authorship incarnated by different trends and genres in electronic musics, especially popular and urban musical cultures.

“There’s only here, and now, and light.”

This line is taken from Arseny Tarkovsky’s poem, Life, Life, and was incorporated into the script of the show Afterlife: an audiovisual performance. Alongside this Film & New Media Capstone research paper on phantasmagoria shows and VJing, Afterlife was a production I devised with an outstanding group of collaborators. It was part of the NYU Abu Dhabi Theater Capstone Festival and premiered on 30th March 2018 at the NYUAD Arts Center.

Between the pages, are digitally created illustrations; visuals that were created during the process of experimenting with content creation, or used in the final show. Though this paper will not address the production, the visuals here serve as a trace – a memory – of Afterlife.

This paper argues that VJing and audiovisual (AV) performance today are descendants of magic lantern phantasmagoria shows of the 19th century. As live performances that involved the real-time manipulation of images, phantasmagoria shows created a sensorial, immersive experience through the use of projections. The discussion centers on phantasmagoria shows and VJing as visual spectacle, as framed through film historian Tom Gunning’s concept of the “cinema of attractions” described in his paper, “Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators, and the Avant-Garde.”

The paper will firstly provide context on the history of the magic lanterns and the phantasmagoria shows that were to emerge a hundred years later. This will also include a description of the dramaturgy of the phantasmagoria shows of two showmen in particular, Philidor and Robertson. I will then proceed to make a comparison between VJing and contextualize the form as existing in a tradition of the creation of visual experiences, touching on examples that pay particular attention to the relationship between sound and visuals. The importance of light as a medium to work with, will also be analyzed with examples of audiovisual performances that have revolved around light. The relationship between live cinema and VJing will be briefly discussed, addressing ideas of realtime performance. Lastly, characteristics of VJing will be examined specifically as a remnant of the phantasmagoria shows.

How did we get from Hollywood to YouTube? What makes Wikipedia so different from a traditional encyclopedia? Has blogging dismantled journalism as we know it?

Our media landscape has undergone a seismic shift as digital technology has fostered the rise of "participatory culture," in which knowledge is originated, created, distributed, and evaluated in radically new ways. The Participatory Cultures Handbook is an indispensable, interdisciplinary guide to this rapidly changing terrain. With short, accessible essays from leading geographers, political scientists, communication theorists, game designers, activists, policy makers, physicists, and poets, this volume will introduce students to the concept of participatory culture, explain how researchers approach participatory culture studies, and provide original examples of participatory culture in action. Topics include crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, grid computing, digital activism in authoritarian countries, collaborative poetry, collective intelligence, participatory budgeting, and the relationship between video games and civic engagement.

Contributors include: Daren Brabham, Helen Burgess, Clay Calvert, Mia Consalvo, Kelly Czarnecki, David M. Faris, Dieter Fuchs, Owen Gallagher, Clive Goodinson, Alexander Halvais, Cynthia Hawkins, John Heaven, The Jannissary Collective, Henry Jenkins, Barry Joseph, Christopher Kelty, Pierre Lévy, Sophia B. Liu, Rolf Luehrs, Patrick Meier, Jason Mittell, Sarah Pearce, W. James Potter, Howard Rheingold, Suzanne Scott, Benjamin Stokes, Thomas Swiss, Paul Taylor, Will Venters, Jen Ziemke

Edited by Aaron Delwiche and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson

In the lead-up to the release of some feature films, fake and fan trailers are created by users and uploaded to YouTube and other Web sites. These trailers demonstrate that users are literate not only in the form of the trailer itself, but also in the Hollywood system and how it markets products to audiences. Circulating in a networked environment online, these texts, which play with the form of the trailer, perform and embody users' and fans' desire to see not just the feature film but also the official trailer itself. I discuss these fake and fan trailers in relation to cinematic anticipation and describe how they navigate both spatial and temporal bounds. Using the architectural concept of the desire line, I argue that spatial frameworks can be usefully employed to consider how users navigate online spaces, media, and concepts through the form of the trailer.

This article aims to discuss the role humour plays in politics, particularly in a media environment overflowing with user-generated video. We start with a genealogy of political satire, from classical to Internet times, followed by a general description of “the Hitler meme,” a series of videos on YouTube featuring footage from the film Der Untergang and nonsensical subtitles. Amid video-games, celebrities, and the Internet itself, politicians and politics are the target of twenty-first century caricatures. By analysing these videos we hope to elucidate how the manipulation of images is  embedded in everyday practices and may be of political consequence, namely by deflating politicians' constructed media image. The realm of image, at the centre of the Internet's technological culture, is connected with decisive aspects of today's social structure of knowledge and play. It is timely to understand which part of “playing” is in fact an expressive practice with political significance.

Appropriation, transformation and remix are increasingly recognized as significant aspects of digital literacy. This article considers how one form of digital remix – the video remix – might be used in classrooms to introduce critical conversations about representation, appropriation, creativity and copyright. The first half of the article explores the opportunities that remix presents to reflect on mainstream media ideologies, emerging modes of collaborative creativity, and the complexities of intellectual property. The second half illustrates this potential by examining the use of one popular video remix, Buffy vs. Edward, in a secondary school English class and an undergraduate popular culture course. Throughout, the article argues that critical discussion of digital texts and practices opens up the possibilities for students to analyze their everyday lived media experience. This is an important undertaking in a context in which young people's identities and world views are increasingly shaped through digital texts and interactions.

The thesis of this essay can be stated quite directly: Slavoj Žižek, despite having little to say about mashup and remixing in any direct way, engages this new media phenomena in both theory and practice, providing contemporary culture with both a conceptual understanding of the mashup and a carefully executed illustration of its methodology. The examination of this will proceed by way of two movements. The first investigates how Žižek's work, especially his general interest in "short circuiting," provides theoretical insight for understanding the mashup and its cultural significance. The second turns things around, demonstrating how the mashup explains and describes Žižek's own compositional practices. In other words, the first part explains the mashup by way of Žižek, while the second explains Žižek by way of the mashup.

How did 'remix' a post-production technique and compositional form in dance music, come to describe digital culture? Is it an apt metaphor? In this article I consider the rhetorical use of remix in Lawrence Lessig’s case for copyright reform in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008). I argue that Lessig’s understanding of remix is problematic as it seems unable to accommodate its musical namesake and obscures the particular history of media use in recent music culture. Drawing on qualitative analysis of popular music cultures, I argue that the conceptualization of remix as any media made from pre-existing media is problematic. The origins of remix, I argue, provides a lens for thinking critically about the rhetorical uses of the term in current discourse and forces us to ponder materialities. My aim is not to dispute the word’s contemporary meaning or attempt to establish a correct usage of the term—clearly a wide variety of creators call their work remix—instead, this article considers the rhetorical work that remix is asked to perform as a way to probe the assumptions and aspirations that lurk behind behind Lessig’s argument.

As an electronic dance music movement, for over 20 years, psytrance (psychedelic trance) has been a context by which sonic, visual, pharmacological and virtual media have facilitated the expression of interwoven narratives, experimental modes of performance, and the experience of intense sociality in scenes the world-over. A key theme adopted within this movement is the ‘tribe’, the discourse around which is multivalent, though here I focus on the transgressive dimensions of psytrance to which one is attached as a member of a tribe apart. The article provides detailed examination of the outlaw figure and sensibility in psytrance, illustrating how cultural producers –e.g. DJ-producers, label owners, scene writers, event management – facilitate the party vibe, and a distinct ‘psychedelic. or ‘freak’ identity via this trope. Among the chief icons of performance, prestige and tribalism sampled within psytrance music and culture, the outlaw is adapted from popular cultural sources (especially cinema) and redeployed as a means of dissolving and performing difference. The exploration of the outlaw conceit in what I call nano-media amplified by the producers of psytrance music illustrates how a psychedelic fiction is generated. Specific, although not exclusive, attention is given to Israeli producers, which offers comment on psytrance in Israel where this music is considered popular.

This article examines user-generated music remix videos critiquing or commenting on Donald Trump throughout the 2016 election cycle. Our aim is to discover not just whether remix was used as a vehicle of critique or support, but how remix affordances have been adapted into a rhetorical language for these purposes. Above and beyond the remixes’ unique qualitative characteristics, we identify four specific rhetorical tactics that appear consistently, which we call “witnessing,„ “pwning,„ “incongruity,„ and “noisification.„ Ultimately, we argue that these tactics yield a complex, nuanced, and yet widely understood and broadly accessible language of critique and commentary through remix.

During a recent conference panel on mashups, remixes, and bootlegs (NCA 2009), one of the attendees asked what was initially termed an "innocent question."  Although I cannot remember the exact wording, the gist of the inquiry concerned aesthetics: How can we decide whether a particular audio mashup is any good or not?  What is it that separates a good mashup from a bad one?  Or more pointedly, how can you tell whether something is a well-designed mashup as opposed to an accidental concatenation of materials simply thrown together?  This line of questioning is, despite how it was initially presented, anything but "innocent."  It is a crucial and insightful inquiry that asks us to reconsider long-standing assumptions about art, artistry, and aesthetic judgment....

La lettura è sempre stata un’attività allo stesso tempo individuale e sociale; l’evoluzione di tale peculiarità ha condotto alla formazione di eterogenei contesti di condivisione; tra questi vi sono i gruppi di lettura, i quali, grazie all’introduzione delle tecnologie 2.0, si sono recentemente spostati online, dando vita al fenomeno del social reading.
Remixare e condividere sono i due comportamenti che contraddistinguono l’era postmediale; ma per destreggiarsi all’interno dello sterminato materiale a disposizione è necessario acquisire delle competenze specifiche, al fine di filtrare e interpretare al meglio l’informazione. La didattica ha quindi il compito di trasformare le modalità d’insegnamento tradizionali per adattarle alle innovazioni tecnologiche e digitali e di sfruttare gli strumenti del web 2.0.
In particolare, per quanto riguarda la promozione della lettura a scuola, i docenti possono trarre vantaggio dal social reading, del quale sono da considerare con attenzione pregi e difetti, e le relative piattaforme online.
Esempio di social reading è il metodo TwLetteratura, che consiste nel leggere un testo tramite la riscrittura e la condivisione su Twitter. Il recente progetto #MattiaTw, realizzato con la collaborazione della Fondazione Cariplo, ha previsto una fase di monitoraggio, che ha consentito un’osservazione approfondita dei risultati. In tal modo è stato possibile individuare in modo oggettivo le potenzialità e gli svantaggi del metodo.
Obiettivo della didattica è quello di usare i mezzi tecnologici e digitali per migliorare e innovare i metodi di insegnamento. Occorre quindi impegnarsi nel riproporre gli aspetti positivi dei metodi già sperimentati e cercare di superarne limiti e difetti.
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Reading has always been an individual and social activity at the same time; the evolution of this peculiarity has led to the formation of heterogeneous contexts of sharing; among them, there are the reading groups, which have recently moved online thanks to the introduction of 2.0 technologies, giving life to the social reading phenomenon.
Remixing and sharing are the two behaviors that characterize the postmedial age; but to maneuver in the endless material available, it is necessary to acquire specific skills in order to better filter and interpret the information. Therefore, teaching has the duty to transform traditional teaching methods, in order to adapt them to technological and digital innovations, and to exploit the tools of web 2.0.
In particular, with regard to the promotion of reading at school, teachers can take advantage of social reading, which is to be considered carefully for its qualities and lacks, and the respective online platforms.
Example of social reading is the TwLetteratura method, which consists in reading a text through rewriting and sharing on Twitter. The recent project #MattiaTw, realized with the collaboration of the Cariplo Foundation, included a monitoring phase, which allowed a deep observation of the results. In this way, the potential and disadvantages of the method were objectively identified.
The objective of the teaching is to use technological and digital means to improve and innovate the teaching methods. Therefore, we have to undertake to re-propose the positive aspects of the methods already tested and to try to overcome their limitations and deficiencies.

Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever recombinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay does not side with either position but identifies and critiques the common understanding and fundamental assumptions that make these two, opposed positions possible in the first place. The investigation of this matter is divided into two main parts. The first considers the traditional understanding of technologically enabled reproduction and the often unquestioned value it invests in the concept of originality. It does so by beginning with a somewhat unlikely source, Plato's Phaedrus—a dialogue that, it is argued, originally articulates the original concept of originality that both determines and is reproduced in the theories and practices of sound recording. The second part of the essay demonstrates how the audio mash-up deliberately intervenes in this tradition, advancing a fundamental challenge to the original understanding and privilege of originality. In making this argument, however, the essay does not endeavor to position the mash-up as anything unique or innovative. Instead, it demonstrates how mash-ups, true to their thoroughly derivative nature, plunder, reuse, and remix anomalies that are already available in and constitutive of
recorded music.

Poaching ideas, texts, material and its forms of distribution have become a processes inextricably entrenched in the practice of creative production. This development contributes to an ecology of creativity, where audiences are no longer spectators of culture but active users and participants in cultural production. It has simultaneously offered audiences freedom to create and regenerate content from existing sources, and yet trapped these users in regulations that inhibit appropriation on grounds of trespassing on intellectual property. This complex web of engagement and participation is transforming traditional notions of producer-consumer relations, in which ‘creator’ is increasingly applied to the appropriator of other’s work.

El presente trabajo supone una aproximación a las nuevas formas de producción, distribución y consumo emergentes en la industria musical. Bien visto como amenaza o como oportunidad, Internet ha revolucionado (o evolucionado) la manera en que la música es creada, comercializada, distribuida y consumida. A partir de la revisión de conceptos clave en la cultura audiovisual digital - la hipertextualidad, la narrativa transmedia y las prácticas de remix como fandom – se analizará el modelo de negocio del músico Trent Reznor. Músico, compositor, mult-instrumenista y productor de Nine Inch Nails, es conocido en la industria por el uso innovador de las tecnologías digitales. Una aproximación a dos case study nacidos a la luz de sus últimas producciones dará cuenta de ello: la transmedialidad de la obra Year Zero (2007), y la apertura parcial en el proceso de producción y control sobre los contenidos (a partir del desarrollo de las comunidades de remixes www.NINremixes.com y www.remix.nin.com).

A través de ellos profundizaremos en sus vías alternativas de comercialización, utilizadas para esquivar los canales tradicionales de la industria, la convergencia mediática, y, sobre todo, la relación casi horizontal entablada con su comunidad de fans, a favor del proceso creativo libre y colaborativo que permite la red. Un caso paradigmático dentro de la industria, innovador y visionario, que da cuenta de las nuevas prácticas culturales surgidas en torno a la industria musical digital.

From Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media Into the Classroom, Grades 5-12:

Students are plugged in, powered up, and connected. Are you?

The author gives teachers a deeper understanding of the dynamic potential for increasing student learning through digital media. Based on a three-year study of youth and their use of new media, this teacher-friendly resource includes:

Descriptions of digital tools such as social networking platforms, YouTube, Wikipedia, virtual worlds, digital music, and more
Vignettes about how young people use digital media
Sidebars debunking common myths about technology
Advice about navigating digital media for both novice and expert teachers
Pedagogical implications and practices, including sample activities

This paper evaluates the work of Gene Youngblood on television in the context of a digital multiplatform television environment. In the 1970s, Youngblood called for a media revolution based on an inversion of the structure and function of the centralised mass media. For this to occur Youngblood proposed that the public be given access to a multiple-address communication system so that they could create and distribute content. Television has a special place in this process because, as Youngblood argues, it acts as a kind of expanded consciousness that connects people from across the planet. Today's digital television environment seems uncannily similar to that described by Youngblood over 40 years ago. It connects people with shared interests from across the globe; it offers interactive possibilities and avenues for production and self-distribution. This paper reflects on some of Youngblood's ideas about television, art, and consciousness to see what we might make of them in today's media environment. It does this with a focus on two specific forms of media art that have emerged in an online digital television environment: the video remix and the web documentary. These examples seem to embody much of Youngblood's ideas on how media can expand consciousness by making art an everyday practice.

Remix is now considered by many to be a form of derivative work, but such generalizations have resulted in numerous non-commercial remixes being wrongfully accused of copyright infringement. Gallagher argues that remix is a fundamentally transformative practice. The assumption that cultural works should be considered a form of private property is called into question in the digital age; thus, he proposes an alternative system to balance the economic interests of cultural producers with the ability of the public to engage with a growing intellectual commons of cultural works. Multimodal analyses of both remixed and non-remixed intertextual work, with a particular focus on examples of critical remix video, fuel the discussion, synthesizing a number of investigative methods including semiotic, rhetorical and ideological analysis. Author: Owen Gallagher (Routledge, 2017)

https://www.routledge.com/Reclaiming-Critical-Remix-Video-The-Role-of-Sampling-in-Transformative/Gallagher/p/book/9781138285262

The theory and practice of sound recording, from at least the moment of the invention of the phonograph, has been groping toward "simulation" and the "hyperreal" even if these words are not used as such or, when used, are employed in a way that is not entirely faithful to or even cognizant of Baudrillard's writing.  Conversely Baudrillard's texts from at least Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976) to the recent interviews collected in Fragments: Conversations With François L’Yvonnet (2001), whether explicitly acknowledged or not, articulate and provide a vocabulary for explaining, perhaps better than any competing theoretical lexicon, developments in sound recording.  To put it another way, Baudrillard is one of the most attentive theorists to sound and sound reproduction, without saying much about it and without the music industry or contemporary theorists recognizing it as such.

In this article I analyze the cover version as a specific form of copying
in music recording and performance, and then evaluate it as a cultural variable that is part of the creative process in remix practice. This analysis demonstrates that cover versions, versioning, editing, sampling, and remixing are dependent on copying and, for this reason, my eventual focus is on the relation of copies to originals and copies to copies. Another important element examined throughout the essay is the role of selectivity in the creative process as a foundational principle of communication and how it shapes varying popular and individualized assumptions about definitions of originals and copies.

This paper focuses on chutney, a form of popular music in Trinidad with roots in prepartitioned North India, as an intriguing genre through which, culturally, to analyze Trinidadian social dynamics. It concentrates on developments during the Trinidad Carnival of 2009 to illustrate how chutney interrogates and confronts a variety of interrelated struggles over multiple identities—musical, socio-cultural and racial—in a bid to reinscribe broader definitions of Trinidadianness and challenge traditional notions of Indianness. Through lyrical, timbral, thematic, and performative analyses, the paper explores three popular chutney recordings of 2009—“Rum & Roti,” “Radica,” and “Jep Sting Naina”—to uncover the discursive and often discrepant complexities of Trinidadian culture.

O desejo de estabelecer correspondências entre som e imagem vem intrigando e suscitando inúmeros questionamentos e analogias há séculos. Esta pesquisa visa levantar questões relativas ao sonoro e ao visual, discutir a prática dos mashups enquanto estética própria, e sugerir uma reflexão sobre a cultura remix da qual emerge. Copiar, cortar ou colar agora são ações intrínsecas ao cotidiano do ciberespaço, em que a recombinação da informação evidencia-se como prática usual. Nesse contexto, questões referentes à colaboração, interação e autoria, assim como a conceitualização da prática, sustentam-se a partir dos estudos de Lev Manovich e Lúcia Santaella. Essa conceitualização é fundamentada na maleabilidade do código binário e na transposição de um meio a outro. Constata-se que o processo formador do mashup, baseado na fórmula “a+b=c”, ou seja, na combinação de duas ou mais fontes para formação de algo novo, é o mesmo adotado nos diferentes períodos da história, variando apenas na forma e no relacionamento entre os conceitos antecessores às tecnologias e mídias emergentes. Partindo desta premissa, tentamos identificar e conceituar a estética do mashup. Para tanto, foram elaboradas quatro etapas. Na primeira, um levantamento histórico, baseado principalmente na “obra de arte total” proposta por Wagner e no “efeito Kuleshov”. O conceito é discutido na segunda etapa, a partir de textos de Eisenstein e do movimento da Música Visual. Na terceira, associamos a dimensão visual da música aos aspectos relacionados à linguagem hipertextual dos meios digitais. E, por fim, com o objetivo de dar visibilidade a essa tendência contemporânea, examinamos, como objeto de estudo, o álbum-mashup virtual “Thru You”,do músico Kutiman, onde “o que você vê é o que você ouve”.

Palavras-chave: a+b=c; Remix; Mashup

The desire to establish correspondences between sound and image has been intriguing and bringing up several issues and analogies for ages. This research aims to raise questions related to sound and visual fields, discuss the practice of mashups as a particular aesthetics and propose a reflection about the remix culture from where it comes from. Coping, cutting and pasting are nowadays intrinsic actions of cyberspace where recombining information has become an usual practice. In this context, questions related to collaboration, interaction and copyright, as well as the conceptualization of the practice are supported by the studies  of Lev  Manovich  and Lúcia  Santaella. This concept is  based on  the malleability of the binary code and on the conversion of one media into another. It was realized that the mashup forming process, based on the formula a+b=c, in which the combination of two or more sources generates something new, is the same that has been being adopted throughout human history, varying only in form and in the relation between the concepts that precede the emerging media and technologies. Based on this premise, we tried to identify and form a concept of the mashup aesthetics. Therefore, four stages were elaborated. In the first one, a historical approach based mainly on the Gesamtkunstwerk proposed by Wagner and on the Kuleshov effect. The concept is discussed in the second stage having as a starting point texts by Eisenstein and the scene of Visual Music. In the third, we associate the visual dimension of the music to the aspects related to the hypertextual language of the digital media. And finally, aiming to give visibility to that Contemporary trend, as study object we examined the virtual mashup-album “Thru You” by the musician Kutiman, in which “what you see is what you hear”.

Keywords: a+b=c; Remix; Mashup

In its hybridized, intertextual and multifaced core, internet memes carry hereditary characteristics of cultural repertoires, such as day-to-day matters, media content and socio-political discourses. They are part of a vast digital culture DNA that resonates in the groups of communities of social networks websites, giving a new meaning to the interactional practices of collective curatorship of the social actors in the networks and its relationship to the consumption of the entertainment industry products that are linked to affections of the day-to-day life. Created from deviations, clippings, appropriation and free creations of texts and audiovisual works, this digital culture artifacts reveal themselves as well as a library of innumerable cultural repertoires and behavioral traces in the fertile ground of various groups and communities in the social networks websites. Memes can, in this sense, provide clues about how daily themes and political debates can intercross with entertainment and mobilize millions of people, working as collaborative micronarratives marked by innovation in its format, articulation of the signs, with high synthesis power (dense in content and simple in its format) and for the exercise of humor’s transposition. Is undeniable that in the last decade the digital environments in its several formats and genres have been a rich tool for the empirical studies of cyberculture. From 2013, especially, it is possible to observe a higher popularity of memes and its comprehension as relevant phenomena, fertile and still lacking study.

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Em seu cerne hibridizado, intertextual e multifacetado, os memes de internet carregam traços hereditários de repertórios culturais, tais como assuntos cotidianos, conteúdos midiáticos e discursos sociopolíticos. São parte do vasto DNA da cultura digital que pulsa nos grupos e comunidades de sites de redes sociais, ressignificando as práticas interacionais e de curadoria coletiva dos atores nas redes e sua relação com o consumo de produtos da indústria do entretenimento vinculada a afetos e afetações do cotidiano. Criados a partir de desvios, recortes, releituras, apropriações e criações livres de textos e obras audiovisuais, estes artefatos da cultura digital se revelam também como repositório de inúmeros repertórios culturais e traços comportamentais no fecundo terreno de variados grupos e comunidades dos sites de redes sociais. Os memes podem, assim, fornecer indícios acerca de como temas cotidianos e debates públicos podem se entrelaçar com produtos do entretenimento e mobilizar milhões de pessoas, funcionando como micronarrativas colaborativas marcadas pela inovação no formato, pela articulação dos signos, com alto poder de síntese (densos no conteúdo e simples no formato) e pelo exercício da transposição da comicidade. É inegável que na última década os ambientes digitais em seus mais variados formatos e gêneros têm sido uma rica ferramenta para os estudos empíricos da cibercultura. A partir de 2013, especificamente, é possível observar uma maior popularidade dos memes e sua compreensão enquanto fenômeno relevante, fértil e ainda carente de estudos.

Delivering engaging and rigorous learning experiences in online environments has become a key priority for higher education institutions, driving prolific innovation in tools, pedagogy, and research over the last 20 years. The design and research of collaborative, networked learning experiences in particular has been fueled both by socially-turned theories of learning as well as the meteoric rise of social media and digital networks, which have introduced radical new forms of connectivity and sharing in daily life. In this dissertation, I offer three articles that each focus on one tool in the SuiteC collaborative learning system, a set of interconnected software applications designed to foster peer-to-peer sharing and collaborative, remix composing in a gamified environment. Looking across four semesters of student usage of the SuiteC tools in an online/hybrid undergraduate education course, I employ a mixed-methods approach grounded in “assemblage theory” that leverages learning analytics mined from the SuiteC database, content analysis of student artifacts, and student feedback to explore the kinds of social interactions and collaborations that emerged in the course. Findings suggest best practices and curricular strategies for the design of peer-centered online learning courses, recommendations for software tools, and the utility of assemblage concepts in studying complex sociotechnical systems.

[ Proceedings: International Association of Visual Semiotics 2012 ]

Critical Remix Video (CRV) is an emerging form of experimental video art activism that uses as raw materials previously published, often copyrighted audio-visual content in order to critique perceived wrongs and injustices or make political statements. In many cases, CRVs seek to expose dominant ideologies embedded in mainstream media messages, for example authoritative journalism, persuasive advertising or political broadcasts. This paper uses Visual Semiotics to analyse a representative CRV (Vote Different) and shows how this critical video is equally susceptible to ideological influence by revealing the alternative or oppositional ideologies embedded within it. The following questions are addressed: which version of events is the more accurate representation of reality – the narratives presented by mainstream media or the deconstructed versions presented by CRVs? To what extent are the critical messages presented by CRVs diluted by the ideological biases to which they too are subject? How long can Critical Remix survive as a form of alternative artistic practice before being completely subsumed by mainstream media - a trend we can already see happening today? Despite such shortcomings, CRVs represent an opportunity for grassroots activists to have their voices heard on a global stage, utilizing the full potential of digital networking and mobile technologies as well as spreadable media content.

This article addresses the most recent projects in early and silent film exhibition at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands (Amsterdam), in particular, those promoting users’ remixes of digitized clips from its silent collection. By placing current curatorial strategies within a longer history of the museum’s changing preservation and exhibition approaches, the article examines the kind of interaction and historical understanding of silent cinema crowd-­‐‑curated remixes foster. Digitization, open access, appropriation, and remix open up new and controversial historiographic approaches and curatorial avenues to explore.

Unlike conventional discourses around remix, this paper frames video remixing as a regurguration practice, one capable of incorporating research as well as its expression in the resultant artifact. By demonstrating the ways in which the form embraces polyvocality as well as historical precedent, a more generous and generative view of remix is possible, one that is infused with tactics based in rhetorical principles of argumentation.  The extended notion of remix in this context may be seen as a radical approach of (self)destruction and (self)regeneration, one capable of overturning institutionally sanctioned epistemologies.

Proceedings from the 2018 conference of the Society for Artistic Research: ARTISTIC RESEARCH WILL EAT ITSELF,  April 11-13, 2018. Geoff Cox et al, editors.

This paper examines the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Marriage Equality logo as an example of a meme to further understandings of memetic transmission in social media technologies. The HRC meme is an important example of how even seemingly insignificant moves such as adopting a logo and displaying it online can serve to combat microaggressions, or the damaging results of everyday bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. This article suggests that even small moves of support, such as changing one’s Facebook status to a memetic image, assist by demonstrating a supportive environment for those who identify with marginalized groups and by drawing awareness to important causes. Often dismissed as “slacktivism,” I argue instead that the digital activism made possible through social media memes can build awareness of crucial issues, which can then lead to action.