Theodor Adorno’s aphorisms are carefully analyzed and reinterpreted in order to explore the principles of the selective remix, often found in music and video. The selective remix consists of adding to or subtracting material from a pre-existing source.

Minima Moralia Redux is the result of a long term post-doctoral analysis in cultural analytics performed for The Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, in collaboration with Software Studies Lab at the University of California, San
Diego.

Minima Moralia Redux is part of the Blog Remixes.

the optimal value for y, by DataSpaceTime, is a collaboration between sound & visual artist Ray Sweeten and artist & set designer Lisa Gwilliam. The artworks in the show revolve around the QR Code – the modern incarnation of the bar code – and the data it contains, taking our current obsession with obtaining information on demand through IPads, wifi, and smartphones to the next level, turning everyday objects, in this case portraits and wallpaper prints, into interactive data retrieval centers.

Artworks in the show are made completely from QR codes, containing the results of an internet search embedded in each, which is then retrievable by handheld devices. Portrait images including those of Gaddafi connect to hundreds of YouTube videos. A sound piece is a QR code audio visual remix of Handel’s Triumph of Time and Disillusion (Trionfo Del Tempo e Disinganno) Italian Libretto. And, wallpaper prints are primarily a poetic gesture, using Google’s NGRAM Book Project as the source, the codes retrieve 5-word combinations that have been least used in English literature, including the title of the exhibition.

Ray Sweeten is a data artist and programmer, working in the intersection of image, sound and information systems, using a hybrid of digital and analog sound and visual media. Sweeten has performed and screened at The Kitchen, PS1, the New Museum, San Fransisco Electronic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, CinemaTexas, The Stone, Liverpool Biennial, Participant Inc Gallery, Pacific Film Archive, and others. Sweeten studied at Oberlin Conservatory of Music with Richard Povall, Todd Winkler, Gary Nelson and composition with Randolph Coleman.

Lisa Gwilliam is a production designer and painter based in New York City. Her design work can be seen in Italian Vogue, Allure, American Vogue, Interview, Glamour, Rolling Stone, GQ and the New York Times Magazine. She has also worked on special projects for New York Fashion Week including runway presentations for Monique lhuillier, Milly NY and Tadashi Shoji and created installation events for Victor and Rolf and Puma. She is inspired by the affects of light and movement on traditional photographic processes and how that can be approximated through painting.

Nearest subway: J/M/Z - Mrytle/Broadway

Image: Terrorist (Julian Assange), DataSpaceTime, QR Code Printed on paper/YouTube Data, 42 x 42″, 2011 (Courtesy of DataSpaceTime © 2011)

“For us, art is not an end in itself … but it is an opportunity for the true perception and criticism
of the times we live in.” Hugo Ball.

The challenge in trying to review a book like Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook, is the feeling you can only do justice to the text by doing the same with your review. The apparent simplicity coupled with the multifarious outcomes are intoxicating. You could be mistaken for believing that every possible remix would produce fresh and exciting outcomes. The key of course, is to have good source material in the first place. Also, to have developed a keen eye for what blends and meshes together and what doesn’t. Even the most disparate work requires judgment and prior awareness. Remixthebook asks us to consider the idea of remixology as part of the work of modern artists. The tone and style of the book is a blend of ideas, voices and thoughts with a myriad of concepts, which attempts be the very embodiment of the ideas it espouses.

Amerika explores various precedents for the remixological concept and draws on some known practitioners from the past: amongst them, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. He explores existing ideas and welds them into his own armoury. Their ideas considered as part of his own creative practice, brought back to the now with new life, in our contemporary networked culture.

“Food Remix” is interdisciplinary performance artist Michelle Ellsworth’s remix of Mark Amerika’s remixthebook. Video - http://vimeo.com/27221493

Other than just being a systematic breakdown of the different types of remixing and their potential outputs (or artifacts, as they might be better known in an art critical framework?) Amerika considers the pathways and theoretical underpinnings of remix culture. Having taken this beyond his own practice of the written word and web-based projects, he considers his recent and ongoing VJ work. Blending and collage-making with images during live music performances suggests some of the instinctive, instantaneous ideas that come out of a lifetime’s collecting, collating and absorbing of diverse imagery, words and cultural concepts. It’s within this process that he believes more novel outcomes can arise, against the constant flux of media creation and dissemination. It is the ‘becoming’ of the media artist that is revealed in the live remixing performance.

Rick Silva and Woulg remix Mark Amerika’s remixthebook. http://vimeo.com/27209266

Reflecting on this process of cultural assimilation Mark Amerika, situates remixology within a wider creative output and theoretical framework. This involves a cross hybrid of everyday, mainstream references with high art and ‘high’ theory, all written in his at once complex and convoluted, yet easily read and enjoyable writing style. But like remixology, what looks simple is the result of deep reading and heavy conceptual thinking. This isn’t to say that you won’t have trouble decoding the writing and getting to the heart of his thinking, but it helps if you spend time with the text and allow the rhythms and structures to become second nature to you. Close reading allows the text to fall into place. For example, consider the following extract from the section eros intensification:

Here is where we enter the realm of
what I have been calling intersubjective jamming
which is different than the idea of a Networked Author
or Collaborative Groupthink Mentality that preys
on the lifestyles of the Source Material Rich
and seemingly forever Almost Famous.

It is worth remembering that Mark Amerika is a creative writer first and foremost. He uses theory as a palette from which to draw out ideas and situations for further reflection and to help give some context to the point he is trying to make. The text of remixthebook is an example of his creative practice in action, as much as it is a personal reflection on his attempts to develop a thought process for it. Theory becomes entwined in critical reflection and creative output. You don’t necessarily come to remixthebook for philosophical answers and hard academic points of view, instead you ride the maelstrom of thoughts and conceptualizing to gain a better handle on a way of considering artistic practice.

Will Luers remixes Mark Amerika’s remixthebook http://vimeo.com/27186118

The website of the book (probably a ubiquitous extra for any media art-related publication these days) follows a natural path of inclusion and invites artists to take sections of the book and remix them according to their own aesthetic and remixological preferences. While some of the work brings in extra visuals and places itself in a flowing context of media streams, allowing different work to become part of the project, Rick Silva’s The Isarithm sources Amerika’s Sentences on Remixology 1.0 and explodes them out of the screen and into a layered and playful vortex of shapes and lines.

Will Leurs uses some captured footage taken directly off the tv screen for A Pixel and Glitch Hotel Room and combines it with some source material supplied by Amerika from several ‘lectures’ he has supplied. These lectures appear within several other contributors work as well. The point of some of these remixes and the varied forms they take (the collection includes some purely audio work) is that, as well as being interesting works themselves, they are exemplars and guides to even further potentials of the remixological principle.

Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook at times may leave you looking beyond it to the appendix or for any footnotes that would fill out spaces or help make conceptual leaps for you. That isn’t the point of the book. The idea is to take the book as a starting point and expand on your own creative process.  Possibly the best approach is to literally cut-up the book and try some experimentation of your own, Brion Gysin style. Flex the covers back and pull out the pages. Through destruction and reconfiguration, the book might be bent to your will and become something that you can use. Perhaps the sight of a ripped and destroyed book would strike horror into some authors. I can’t help thinking that Mark Amerika would take great joy in the image and say that he’d planned it all along.

Other Info Related to Remixthebook & Remixing Culture:

The remixthebook.com website
http://www.remixthebook.com

The remixthebook Blog
http://www.remixthebook.com/theblog

Remixology by OpenMedia.ca - a national, non-partisan, non-profit organization working to advance and support an open and innovative communications system in Canada.
http://openmedia.ca/remixology>

Society of the Spectale (A Digital Remix)
By Mark Amerika On August 16, 2011.
http://www.remixthebook.com/society-of-the-spectale-a-digital-remix

REMIXTAPE 2.0 //
Remixology is a music blog based in Paris (France) devoted to remixes friendly music.
http://remixology.tumblr.com/

REFF- Remix the world! Reinvent reality! exhibition at Furtherfield Gallery between 25 February and 26 March 2011. http://www.furtherfield.org/exhibitions/reff-remix-world-reinvent-reality

Visitorsstudio - an online place for real-time, multi-user mixing, remixing, collaborative creation, many to many dialogue and networked performance and play.
http://www.visitorsstudio.org/x.html

Brion Gysin. Essays & Stories, Interviews, Excerpts & Publications
http://briongysin.com

A model of contemporary remixing and a groundbreaking reflection on digital media

Digital technology has transformed contemporary culture. New social media, hyperlinks, and cut-and-paste techniques have changed the way we write. E-books, which allow us to carry entire libraries with us, are bringing new browsing and reading habits. Digital editing and other on-the-fly postproduction processes have altered how we make music, films, and visual art. A key rhetorical trope employed in all aspects of digital media is the remix, the creation of innovative new works of visual, literary, and performance art through the mashup.

In remixthebook, Mark Amerika explores the mashup as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. A pioneering media artist and acclaimed cultural theorist, Amerika offers a series of philosophical essays that trace the art of the remix to previous forms of avant-garde and modernist art through mashups of deftly sampled phrases and ideas from a wide range of visual artists, poets, novelists, musicians, comedians, and philosophers — among them Alfred North Whitehead, Guy Debord, William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Allen Ginsberg.

A provocative textual performance that is at once a dazzling model of the literary remix and a state-of-the-art reflection on remix culture, remixthebook captures the unique and continually shifting digital moment in which we live and situates the remix as an art form and literary intervention. To coincide with the publication of remixthebook, Amerika will launch a companion website, remixthebook.com, to facilitate new ways of participating in remix culture by inviting other artists and writers to create remixthebook mashups of their own, pushing the boundaries of art and literary culture further, beyond the current publishing paradigms.

Mark Amerika is a cult novelist, media theorist, web publisher, and VJ artist. He is the author of many books, among them The Kafka Chronicles, Sexual Blood, and most recently a collection of artist writings, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics. His artwork has been exhibited in several national and international venues, including the Whitney Biennial, the Walker Art Center, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His literary writing and artwork have been featured in Time magazine, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Village Voice. He is professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and principal research fellow of media studies at La Trobe University.

312 pages | 5 1/2 x 9 | Available September 2011

Daisy Chain is an interconnected series of performances that will be featured at Antena Gallery while simultaneously occurring across the Internet. Performances should incorporate one or more other performances in the series via projection, monitor, laptop or audio in the performance space. This will require an active Internet connection during the performance as well as two computers or devices that can access Ustream.com. Performers will be able to select from any other performance in the series but each proposal should remain open to the incorporation of another performance: react to, project behind, play audio over. Improvisation will need to be an element of any performance. Multiple performers are welcome to co-submit individual performances as a group that will “daisy chain”.

We are seeking featured performers for projection in the gallery. We are especially interested in durational performance, including performances that might span from 6pm-10pm.

We welcome traditional performance but are also interested in performances that may not be likely to be shown in traditional venues: experimental, completely improvised, completely chaotic, non-artist, angry, bizarre, edge. (Note: We can make non-Ustream arrangements for performers likely to be banned from Ustream).

We are also interested in proposals for media mixing (dj/vj/etc) if you can explain how your performance will include (remix live?) other performances in the series.

Submission Requirements (Note: Incomplete applications will not be considered):

- Written proposal (as many words as required for your thoughts), via email. Include a vivid description of performance.
- Include how long the performance is. Shorter performances will be accepted but preference for featured performances will be given to longer duration performances
- Explain how the performance will include other performances in the series
- Links to previous performance footage
- Up to 4 jpeg images, no larger than 300 dpi, that support your proposal
- Artist Bio
- CV or Resume (if applicable)

email to: daisychain [at] onchanneltwo.com

Daisy Chain: An Anarchic Performance Event is curated by Adam Trowbridge and Jessica Westbrook of Channel TWo.

Adam Trowbridge makes work exploring the aesthetic possibilities that arise as communication breaks down. He invents incidents and simulations that occur slightly above the noise level, between words that organize our communities and the chaos that lies beyond them. His work was recently awarded a 2011 Turbulence commission and has been featured nationally and internationally including The Grey Market and Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Pleasure Dome, Toronto; Workspaces Ltd., San Francisco, CA; The Hyde Park Center, Chicago, IL; and festivals in France, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Korea, and Russia. Trowbridge is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Contemporary Practices and Art and Technology Studies Departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jessica Westbrook’s projects explore desire, visual cues, cultural artifacts, systems, language, and contradictory sensations that vacillate between great fortune and impending catastrophe. Always semantic in nature and modular in form, she considers her productions a section of visual language culled from a complex matrix of assets, reconfigured and repurposed per space and time. She was recently awarded a 2011 Turbulence commission and has exhibited work nationally and internationally including recent and upcoming projects for: gli.tc/h/ Chicago, InLight Richmond, Nature/Nurture Kinsey Institute, Carnegie Museum, and Experimental Media Series Hirshorn Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institute. She is currently an Assistant Professor and the Director of Technology Initiatives in The Department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The UrbanRemix platform consists of a mobile phone system and web interface for recording, browsing, and mixing audio. It allows users to document and explore the obvious, neglected, private or public, even secret sounds of the urban environment. Participants become active creators of shared soundscapes as they search the city for interesting sound cues. The collected sounds, voices, and noises provide the original tracks for musical remixes that reflect the specific nature and acoustic identity of the community.

In collaboration with the Times Square Alliance Public Art Program, UrbanRemix will host a series of events in Times Square. Throughout April and May 2011, the public is invited to capture and contribute sounds from Times Square using the free UrbanRemix apps for iPhone/iOS and Android. Then, using the web site, anyone-anywhere can explore the contributed sounds online, view them on a virtual map of Times Square, and mix and share their own soundscapes. On May 12, New York-based electronic musicians Travis Thatcher and Damon Holzborn will perform live remixes of the collected sounds in a free performance in Times Square.

We look forward to your participation!

Urban Remix from Matt Gilbert on Vimeo.

1. DOWNLOAD the free mobile app:

iOS App: http://bit.ly/gWxGoO

Android App: http://bit.ly/esEuIe

2. LAUNCH the app and sign-in

(username: TimesSquare and password: TimesSquare)

or create your personal user account at http://urbanremix.gatech.edu

3. GO TO TIMES SQUARE, record sounds and take photos, then hit “upload” to share them.

4. Visit http://urbanremix.gatech.edu to see what others have shared and to make your own remixes online.

IF YOU CAN’T GET TO TIMES SQUARE, you can still use our web site to explore and remix the sounds that have been contributed: http://urbanremix.gatech.edu/content/times-square

Video Vortex Reader II is the Institute of Network Cultures’ second collection of texts that critically explore the rapidly changing landscape of online video and its use. With the success of YouTube (’2 billion views per day’) and the rise of other online video sharing platforms, the moving image has become expansively more popular on the Web, significantly contributing to the culture and ecology of the internet and our everyday lives. In response, the Video Vortex project continues to examine critical issues that are emerging around the production and distribution of online video content.

Following the success of the mailing list, the website and first Video Vortex Reader in 2008, recent Video Vortex conferences in Ankara (October 2008), Split (May 2009) and Brussels (November 2009) have sparked a number of new insights, debates and conversations regarding the politics, aesthetics, and artistic possibilities of online video. Through contributions from scholars, artists, activists and many more, Video Vortex Reader II asks what is occurring within and beyond the bounds of Google’s YouTube? How are the possibilities of online video, from the accessibility of reusable content to the internet as a distribution channel, being distinctly shaped by the increasing diversity of users taking part in creating and sharing moving images over the web?

Contributors: Perry Bard, Natalie Bookchin, Vito Campanelli, Andrew Clay, Alexandra Crosby, Alejandro Duque, Sandra Fauconnier, Albert Figurt, Sam Gregory, Cecilia Guida, Stefan Heidenreich, Larissa Hjorth, Mél Hogan, Nuraini Juliastuti, Sarah Késenne, Elizabeth Losh, Geert Lovink, Andrew Lowenthal, Rosa Menkman, Gabriel Menotti, Rachel Somers Miles, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Teague Schneiter, Jan Simons, Evelin Stermitz, Blake Stimson, David Teh, Ferdiansyah Thajib, Andreas Treske, Robrecht Vanderbeeken, Linda Wallace, Brian Willems, Matthew Williamson, Tara Zepel.

Download the PDF (Free). To order a hard copy of Video Vortex Reader II email: books [at] networkcultures.org.
NOTE: if you are an educator or affiliated with a university, teaching programme or course and would like to use the readers as teaching material, or think students of your programme would find the readers useful, please send an email to the address above specifying what school, type of course, how many copies needed, and where to send them. The publications are free, and shipping costs are covered.

Colophon: Editors: Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles. Copy Editor: Nicole Heber. Design: Katja vay Stiphout. Cover Image: Team Thursday. Priner: Ten Klei, Amsterdam. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Supported by: the School for Communication and Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool van Amsterdam DMCI). The Video Vortex Reader is produced as part of the Culture Vortex research program, which is supported by Foundation Innovation Alliance (SIA – Stichting Innovatie Alliantie).

At AOS (and in the other initiatives such as REFF and FakePress) we’ve been proclaiming the rise of a new (or old?) idea of Augmented Reality, a philosophical approach screaming: “Autonomy! You have the power and tools to shape your own world, creating additional spaces for your expression and free action!” We’ve started some time ago, joyfully attacking supermarkets with our augmented reality invasion in Squatting Supermarkets. Then we continued the Augmented reality experiments with FakePress, exploring the possibility to invent new languages and usage grammars for the world that had impacts on education, knowledge, society, cities and relationships.

And, lately, with our recently released Augmented Reality Drug, with REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory. All these actions used technologies and practices to reinvent the world, our roles and the things we can do each days, promoting a multilayered, polyphonic, multicultural, free, autonomous version of reality, and suggesting that new imaginaries, languages, strategies, politics and poetics can be created, reinventing art, business, activism and communication.

This is why we’re truly happy to present Vacanza! (Holiday), a series of micro-workshops, micro-lectures, micro-forums and micro-interstitial meetings executed using crumpled-up Augmented Reality and other technologies.

Workshops on Augmented Reality executed by throwing crumpled-up micro-slides to other people during other workshops. Lectures on the Reinvention of Reality made for 1 people at the time while we invent new ways of remixing beer, vodka and tomato juice. The tales of our latest actions with squats in London, student groups at universities, taking them “REFF’s education program on the methodologic reinvention of reality through critical practices of remix, mashup, recontextualization and re-enactment” and organizing the initiatives for the protest that will take place on March 24-25-26 2011: narrated wearing stupid glasses with fake mustache and plastic noses, hiding post-it notes, qrcodes, AR markers and distributing small softwares, micro slideshows, mini websites prepared there, live, in realtime.

Feedback and interaction
Workshops are open for everyone!
They are anytime, anywhere, always!
Being hit by one of the crumpled-up slides will mean that you are in one of them!
The objective of the workshops is to create emergent, spontaneous, effective, reproducible, appropriatable, remixable, re-enactable, disseminated, augmented discussions.
Throw me your micro crumpled slides with questions and ideas!
Throw them to other people, so that they can be in the workshop, too!
Copy, fake, reproduce, show and plagiarize the micro workshops! use the post-its and qrcodes!
Make “fake” ones yoruselves!
Place them all around AHAcktitude and in the whole city!
Copy the micro softwares and micro-lectures!
send them by mail to everyone! click “i like” and “share” on social networks!
Finally, reality is augmenting.

Babel Fiche is an imaginary media for future anthropologists. It asks which behaviours, objects, traditions and conflicts we want to communicate to a future world. Today’s human cultures, physique and technology will inevitably develop out of all recognition. So how might a future species translate our current times?

Babel Fiche will ponder the problem by animating and remixing the microfiche contents as a series of new short films. This production stage is driven through Wreckamovie, an online platform to help organise participatory movie projects. Babel Fiche wonders if it will be possible to resolve coherent films under these social conditions.

What the World Tweeted on #Egypt the day Mubarak Resigned from VJ Um Amel on Vimeo.

In the last two months, the Middle East and Africa have been rocked by a series of revolutions and protests across several countries. The folding of the Tunisian government inspired citizens in other regions to rise up in peaceful defiance to their own corrupt governments and demand expansive reformations. Through the turmoil, much of the focus has been on the key part social media has played in supporting and strengthening the solidarity and communication of the countries’ citizens.

Egyptian-American Laila Shereen Sakr is a media artist who explores the impact social media has had on Egypt through her work as VJ Um Amel. In her investigations of the media, she has come to the conclusion that our contemporary world is one that is not only moderated, but also constructed and defined, by the media. Culture is engineered through different levels of communication and expression.

In her application of different remix and data visualization techniques, Sakr developed a body of work that puts into perspective both the revolution and how it has been shaped by the current media environment. Her work uses hashtagged Twitter conversations collected by the Twitter analytics site R-Shief as its raw material and YouTube videos that highlight key aspects of the events.

Semantic Content Analysis of 800,000 #Jan25 Tweets from VJ Um Amel on Vimeo.

Sakr’s work experiments with the concept of a database narrative, whereby existent information is not manipulated into a story, but represented and enhanced by special effects to illustrate naturally occurring narratives. Even the visualizations that lack a video element portray a narrative logic that is reflective of the interactions among Twitter users during the protests. She takes the idea one step further in the remixed visualization “What the World Tweeted on #Egypt the Day Mubarak Resigned.” Calling it more “data poetic” than narrative, Sakr means for it to be a “sentimental analysis” in its flowing assemblage of important words, phrases, and crescendoing electronic soundtrack. The progressive accumulation of words is intoned with the excitement protesters felt on the historic day.

VJing in this sense is less of a multimedia spectacle, but a new kind of filmmaking that culls its material from various sources to discover meaning by remixing what is already available. An array of interfaces accessing several streams of information converge to map out a broad picture that still retains the integrity of the actual events. Patterns emerge in the conflux of data that would otherwise be obscured by the sheer immensity of what was gathered. Sakr collected a staggering 800,000 tweets for #Jan25 alone, and as she notes, “Just as large numbers of Egyptians were flooding the streets of Egyptian cities throughout the country, pedabytes of data were mediated through various networks.”

#JAN25 remix by @vj_um_amel 4 #Egypt from VJ Um Amel on Vimeo.