His work transformed the disassociated YouTube uploads of people around the world into an unwitting orchestra, and gave new life to material that might have ordinarily been lost in the tidal wave of content filling up distant data centers. Secondly, there’s the need to acknowledge and defend the processes of cultural evolution that have existed for millennia, in which the practice we now call ‘remix’ has long played a fundamental role.Ī new online work by the renowned artist and YouTube star Kutiman engages both issues, by allowing people to mix together and record clips from solo performances of musicians across the city of Tel Aviv to produce new compositions.Ĭommissioned by The Space and British Council, Mix The City is a further development of his earlier project, ThruYou, a work that garnered over 10million page views in just two weeks.Ī self-described “non-techy guy,” Kutiman had tapped into an online cultural practice that has become a distinct vernacular form. Whatever your feelings about the artistic merits of the mash-up as a form or the efficacy of modern copyright legislation, there’s a far higher set of principles at stake here.įirstly, there’s the question of the kind of Internet we want moving forward – one increasingly controlled by corporate gatekeepers who get to sanction what creative expression looks like, or one in which the freedom of this expression is valued above share price.
#Mashup definition tv#
The art form known colloquially as “vidding” for example – editing found footage from TV shows and movies to music – actually dates back some 40 years and has often celebrated, what the theorist Francesca Coppa describes as, “a distinctly female way of seeing.” That progression represents an important engagement with the gender politics of pop culture, specifically as a critique on the historical dominance of the male perspective in dramatic storytelling. One could argue that remix culture has been around as long as the idea of “culture” itself. The best examples of this kind of creative work are often marked by a reframing of the original narrative, and so produce a fresh perspective on both the source material and the context in which it first existed.
If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re not really making art for the 21st century.” Networks won’t get slower or harder to access.
Hard drives aren’t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. He goes on to make the point that “Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today. As Cory Doctorow puts it: the Internet is “the world’s most efficient copying machine.” The news report, the cult TV show, the summer blockbuster, the chart hit or iconic photograph – all are open to endless reinterpretation by anyone with the right software. As with much else, technology has made this process easier and more visible. All cultural artifacts are open to re-appropriation. Jobs freely admitted to being “shameless about stealing great ideas,” and many of today’s bedroom artists might be said to have taken this mantra to heart. Meaningful appropriation remains a key tenet of creativity and innovation, whatever form they take, and Jobs understood this better than most so do those whose natural form of expression is the remix or mash-up.įrom Duchamp to Damien Hirst, artists have consistently challenged the idea that meaning ascribed to objects is permanently fixed. The line “good artists copy great artists steal,” attributed to Pablo Picasso and appropriated by Steve Jobs in a 1995 interview, is in some ways at the core of much of the aesthetic endeavors that engage modern technology.
0 kommentar(er)
