Foundations and Media: Bringing the System On-Stream
Foundations in Art, Theory in Education Conference, (FATE) St. Louis, MO
March 30 –April 2, 2011
Dean Valadez, Associate Lecturer.
University of WI-Milwaukee; Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.
dvaladez@uwm.edu, deanvaladez@miad.edu
www.deanvaladez.com 262.271.8009
Remix Pedagogy
Most anticipated is the likelihood that learners in post-secondary education will compartmentalize their academic experiences and will, if in varying amounts, somehow synthesize their knowledge autonomously in someone else’s course. Perhaps it is anecdotal to use myself as a model for discussion, but my experience was an operation in three exclusive spheres during nearly all my years of undergraduate study.
Sphere 1: The academic or the ‘non-studios’, this being English Comp, Philosophy, Art History, Art Survey, Science, Geology, and the like.
Sphere 2: The ‘Arts’ or the ‘studios’, which themselves were also self-contained and hermetic.
Sphere 3: Youth subculture. Skateboarding, snowboarding, coffeeshopping, underground hip-hop scene-ing, rave raving, friend socializing, videogaming, MTV surfing, hi-fi music sharing, lo-fi music making.
These spheres could not touch, nor was it mentioned that it was feasible to even consider that they could (redundancy intended). With all respect to my professors, that is how I operated. Remix Pedagogy is an attempt to change that - intellectually, conceptually, and artistically - in order to engage the space between literal learning, experiential learning, and applied learning. Remix Pedagogy is an attempt to unveil the culture to its self, a mirror to reflect reflection, and a way of disrupting disconnect.
This is not meant to sound as a vanguard, nor is it to contrive a relationship where none exist, nor is it to condescend ‘untrendy’ or ‘unhip’ educators, nor should it be obligatory that educators glam up their pedagogy. But rather, in simple terms, it is to bring life and ideas together so that the educator’s teaching can bring life to ideas; so that the students’ learning and life experiences can crossbreed fluently while educators can still maintain the objectives of each various institution and their respective curriculum.
While the projects contained herein are exampling remix concepts with direct observation and other traditional drawing methods, their plasticity should be evident – in fact, many of the project ideas are from non-drawing art forms, thus the inverse is noted.
Remix Theory and Remix Culture
Fragmentation of space and time in Eadward Muybridge’s multiple still frame photographs yielded sensorial effect, whereby time could be perceived not as fluid linearity but as an assemblage as a proxy for a simultaneous whole. Situating those fragments in rapid succession birthed film as it is known: a simulation of factually lived linearity – ‘the moving image’. The work of filmmaker Georges Melies, the cinemagician, foreshadowed beyond simply Hollywoodian visual effects; his work cannibalized itself repeatedly through the use of technological self-consumption, redistribution, file sharing, and montage - aggregates of information. The process of film-making overrode linearity with its substitution of non-sequential construction despite the simulated linearity it proposed.
Left to right: Eadweard Muybridge, time-lapsed photo, circa 1880. Click to play animated stills - First Motion Horse-Muybridge.mov;
The Industrial Revolution was still an assertion, machines have contrasted with tradition, and Charles Dickens has already written in opposition to the mechanized hand in labor. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land preceded and promised the role of a future collective voice; its tempo was rift in cognitive dissonance, shifting time through temporality, multiple references, and multiple religions, as though globalization had already occurred. This rift - the collective multiplicity, the temporality that occurs in fragmentation of form - was one in which was a sense of a disquieted zeitgeist, as remembrances of WWI echoed faintly from the fore and WWII was bringing near the rear: The Waste Land was all that, the landscape upon which machinery and bricolage collided.
Yet, William S. Burroughs scavenged from this debris of the technoculture, urban composites, and lifted artifacts. His proposition: if Duchamp could lift readymades, and if the Dada-ists could employ remix as senselessness, why not himself? It was a claim of his that Eliot lifted from newspaper headlines and became the forerunner to the cut-up method of writing he and Brion Gysin further employed. 1959 marked the date of publication of his composite literature, Naked Lunch, and also foresaw, in a 1984 interview, the topic of Burrough’s cut-up method of writing. His response asserted beyond a focus on content-based formal sociology, and instead was suggestive of the field of psychogeography, “It's simply the old montage method that's old hat in painting applied to writing. It's closer to the facts of human perception, because whenever you walk down the street or look out the window, your consciousness is affected by random factors. In other words, life is a cut-up.”[1]
The precession of a technoculture is one that repeatedly consumes its own goods, recycles, regenerates, reuses – remixes. Hip hop culture was birthed from this field of bricolage, of recycling jazz, call and response, and the urban composite into a music scene that often features multiple artists contributing disparate rhyming schemes, styles, and personas into a singular soundscape. Hip hop fed off of composite personas, sometimes in dj battles, other times in hip hop battles - face-offs between competitors which ultimately became the product itself. What T.S. Eliot and Burroughs devised in literature – collision of disparate thoughts, shifts in temporality, shifts in speaker locality, and fragmentation of structure - hip hop made mainstream. But this acceptance by the larger youth culture conforms to a generated model of a techno-centric society, where the birthing of hip hop was preceded by electric information, possible via the telephone, the television, and the tape recorder, among other electronics, as structuring a media ecology – a landscape of mediated effects. The notion of a remix culture, articulated from the simultaneity of the mediated eye of Muybridge, to the simultaneity of the electric age is sensed from thewords of Marshall McLuhan, “Today, the instantaneous world of electric information media involves all of us, all at once. Ours is a brand new world of all-at-onceness. Time, in a sense, has ceased and space has vanished. Like primitives, we now live in a global village of our own making, a simultaneous happening. The global village is not created by the motor car or even by the airplane. It is created by instant electronic information movement.” [2]
McLuhanism contends what the psychogeographers were also theorizing, projected foremost by Guy Debord, who stated in 1955 that psychogeography was “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” [3] The human mind, situated within arenas complex in effects, cannot deter itself from bricolage. Remix environments ephemerate non-porous barriers, disdaining differentiation between forms, thus ‘geography’ in Debordian and McLuhanian time frequently fused with the electric; ecology today, with the mediated and the digital in combinatory relations with the electric. The remix geography is physical, is virtual, architectonic, literary, audible, mechanized, electric, and, almost self-refutingly, without geography (Africa and Russia are now proximally located alongside our neighbors’ doorsteps – “Time, in a sense, has ceased and space has vanished” [4]).
The remix geography is remix culture is remix artifact. Mash-up DJ’s are participatory culturalists, sometimes armchair deejays with digital Technics ®, or simulations thereof, with youTube publication. Other deejays are professional, but in either, sampling and cut-ups are not theoretical acknowledgements, but rather dj necessity. (J-a-y are the letters of his name, cutting and scratching are the aspects of his game. – Run-DMC lyrics, 1984) [5]Mash-up DJ's DJ Spooky, Max Tannone, and multitude others, reclaim Duchampian readymade practice, not as creators of new songs, but as creators of new experiences with already-experienced experiences. The audio readymade cut-up puts on the role of re-spun syncretist; it plays semiological confusion as coherence. On Jaydiohead, Tannone’s mash-up album, Thom Yorke’s Radiohead play ground to Jay-Z’s figure, already an Eliot-Burroughian literary sinuous fold, compounding the sign convolution further. (‘Semiotic turmoil’, as sculptor Marco Maggi describes his own work.) The readymade is a bricoleur that creates a system of signs, whereby the sign syncretism is empowered by those prior experiences. A form of dialectic to equivocate an interpellational position.
The opening image of Josh Bricker’s two channel video now surfaces the complexity of remix: his work is taken from actual video footage of the first Gulf War of 1991, the most current occupation in Iraq as released from Wikileaks, and from the video game “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare”. The undifferentiated complicity between the three is expressed by Bricker himself,
“Instantly and for the first time the reality of war was primetime entertainment merging both reality and simulacrum. Each step in this binary timeline desensitized us further from the horrors of war……Additionally as the audio plays we become aware of the encroachment upon reality by the media driven simulacrum. At the start of the piece we hear the audio taken from the Wikileaks video, gradually as the video plays the audio becomes entwined and merged with audio pulled from the video game. The end result is an approximately equal mix of sound from real and unreal sources, blurring the line of reality a little further.”[6]
Inside this complex arena of mediated experiences, some soldiers engage warfare through television monitors mounted in their warcraft, which become simulated into leisure youth activity, whereby the home television reenacts the soldiers’, which has pre-mapped the game. For those youth who later find themselves in warfare, that gaming activity pre-maps their warfare experience, a reversal occurs, therefore, real warfare simulates the game. The two collude, if even unknowingly, as a dialectic, passing the point of discernible reality, recycling already-experienced experiences into real life.[7]
This is Remix Theory. This is eRmix Culture.
Notes:
[1] William S. Burroughs, interview (interviewee unknown), 1984
[2] Marshall McLuhan,“McLuhan on McLuhanism,” WNDT Educational Broadcasting Network, 1966
[3] Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Les Levres Nues #6, 1955
[4] Marshall McLuhan,“McLuhan on McLuhanism,” WNDT Educational Broadcasting Network, 1966
[5] Run-DMC , “Jam-Master Jay”, self-titled album, Profile Records, 1984
[7] Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983)
Project Descriptions and Discussion Points
Note: The above essay is presented more thoroughly and in a more academic vernacular than in my classroom presentation, which is delivered with more informality and more approachable language.
Portraiture Re-Configured (sometimes titled The Mash-up Project)
Students executed an Old Master copy and a self-portrait (both as separate projects over the course of weeks). After the projects were graded, students had to cut and collage them.
Significant outcomes: Encourages revisiting past works to use as ideation, encourages ‘fence-breaking’ through cannibalization, reinforces active discussion into Old Master works
Discussion Points:
o What happens to authorial intent of the Old Master image?
o What happens to authorial intent of the original student self-portrait?
o How is identity expressed or altered?
All student works are collage and charcoal on paper
Reconstructed ReadyMade Project
Students disassembled an inexpensive object in order to reconfigure it, and displayed the remixed readymade in front of an Old Master printout of choice. Direct observation was used to draw the arrangement.
Significant outcomes: Kinesthetic learning, Cross-disciplinary process
Discussion Points:
o What conversations occur through the collocation of the object and the image?
o What happens to the functionality of the object when reconfigured?
All student drawings are charcoal on paper
Media Ecology Project- Non-observational drawing project done further into semester. As legitimization for the use of photographic references, discussion points prioritize the televisual reference specifically as content, not as technique.
Students had to watch TV (just mentioning that in class draws laughter), or a film, or other media and decontextualize a minimum of two images from the media sources, combining them into one image.
The combinatory form should create narrative, in either coherent or incoherent language.
Significant outcomes: Deep student engagement dealing with already-experienced tv culture.
Discussion Points:
o Does appropriation change the definition of originality?
o How does meaning change when context changes?
o When familiar quotations are reformatted, how does the viewer interpret the image?
Other Remix Lecture outcomes:
to engage students who have a 3-D, literary, music, and film background or interest
to show parallels in historicity between those fields and culture
to create discussions and projects related to Art History or Survey courses and contemporary art practices
to encourage interconnective thought across courses and disciplines
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