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William Gibson on The Age of The Remix
wordisms writes "William Gibson of Neuromancer fame gives his thoughts on remix and innovation in the digital age, in a short essay at Wired Magazine entitled God's Little Toys. From the article: 'Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.'"
First, reading the article, paragraph, how many people know what the heck coruscating means? (definition here)
Anyway I don't know where the line is, but somewhere it is there albeit not a bright line. I loved the re-mix (don't remember who, don't remember the name of the song) where Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride was the core of the piece but I would be disappointed if credit isn't extended and a cut of the profit isn't provided to Steppenwolf for providing the original inspiration and music. Certainly if someone were to digitally re-master any song in its purest and most original form and release that as their own work they would be guilty of out and out ripoff. But, a song with hints of the motif or melody of some other work is more subtle and probably more difficult to clearly state theft of said original work.
In classical music it was quite common for composers to "rip off" a theme or motif of another composer and incorporate it into another original work. In many cases it was considered the ultimate homage to the original creator.
I guess for me it boils down to how much is added by the "new" artist's work. Some of the re-mixes I've heard come pretty darned close to ripoffs.
Today's audience (uh huh) isn't listening at all - it's participating (uh huh, yeah). Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record (biggups to B.I.G.), the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical (what's up, foo'?). The record, not the remix (rica rica reeeemix), is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital (Inch'allah).
Peace out, homies.
Since we're on the subject of remixes, I think it's important to point out that many remixes are not legal. The folks at http://www.downhillbattle.org/ are working to let mixers into the ballgame, so to speak.
Also from the folks at downhillbattle.org comes http://bannedmusic.org/ which distributes some music that has been banned for copyright reasons (mixes and sampling). Included are the Double Black Album (Metallica's black album mixed with Jay-Z's black album) and the Grey Album (Beatle's white album mixed with Jay-Z's black album). There is much more stuff there, too, so check it out if you're into music advocacy.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
Excuse me while I gag...
Having invented several of them, Gibson is arguably a master of buzzwords. His literary work is known for stylish writing, and his adoration for the inclusion of buzzwords is especially prevalent in Pattern Recognition.
Do you like German cars?
"I remixed a remix.......it was back to normal!"
Baseless and sweeping generalities (like the one I'm writing), even if dressed up by prepending "the" to common words, will always be popular since the vagueness can never be proven to be right or wrong.
But let's prove his theory, and borrow all of his newly released novels instead of buying them. As he says in the article, it belongs to us anyway.
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.'"
Baloney. There will ALWAYS be an audience, because not everyone is as adept at making things (even remixes require some talent - not much, but some) and not everyone WANTS to make things or finds making things interesting. There are a huge number of people, and I would submit that such a number constitutes a majority of people in general, who aren't really interested in being cultural producers of any variety. They LIKE to be entertained, they LIKE having people do that for them, and they LIKE having people do it for them in a COMPETENT manner.
Remixing is a marginal case, and while it will grow in popularity, it is just the flavour of the month until people tire of hearing Led Zeppelin being mixed over a brain dead hip hop beat with some spacey and/or glitchy atmospherics tossed in for the sake of "creativity". People will want to hear Real Music Made By Skilled Professional Musicians and remixing will go the same route of professionalisation and renewal like the rest of it.
Appealing to William Gibson as an authority is not a wise idea in this case. I have an idea - I'll OCR Mona Lisa Overdrive and remix it. Oooops! Can't really do that, can I? I have to KNOW HOW TO WRITE SCI-FI to do that. Same goes for music.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
For those of you who don't know, Gibson is largely accepted as the creator of the term we are familiar with nowadays - Cyberspace and a completely new sub-genre in Science Fiction.
It is funny how in his book Neuromancer (Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Philip K. Dick Award) he presented the idea of a global information network and called it "the Matrix" in 1984.
I think we can trust his predictions. So far they have been quite accurate.
Too bad for the record industry if what he says comes true in the near future: "Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us.
Though not all of us know it - yet."
For the curious - Gibson is regarded as one of the experts in the field of technology and its effects on human life. Most of his books are quite dark and I think he has quite a pessimistic opinion on the future of men and technology.
In an interview, to the question of what is cyberspace, Gibson replied: "Cyberspace is a metaphor that allows us to grasp this place where since about the time of the Second World War we've increasingly done so many things that we think of as civilization. Cyberspace is where we do our banking, it's actually where the bank keeps your money these days because it's all direct electronic transfer. It's where the stock market actually takes place, it doesn't occur so much any more on the floor of the exchange but in the electronic communication between the worlds stock-exchanges.
So I think that since so much of what we do is happening digitally and electrically, it's useful to have an expression that allows that all to be part of the territory. I think it makes it easier to visualize what we're doing with this stuff.
Gibson was also asked the question:
"Some Americans claim that the Europeans are more afraid of the kind of society that you describe in your books..."
To which he answered:
"I think that the sort of societies I am describing would be more disturbing to someone who lived in a cohesive, functioning social democracy than it would be to someone who lives in the United States"
Interviewed for "Raport", Sweden's largest TV-news program. Interview done by Dan Josefsson, November 23, 1994.
A hungry bear does not dance!
"Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of Burroughs' work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us."
Yes, and the links on his site are to places you can BUY his books, not download them for free.
billy - do as I say...not as I do
God's little toy was a floating camera in one of his books, that a character used to take footage of her life, and the life of people around her..
kind of fitting reference- remixing the video of your life, i guess.
How is any component of that sentence a buzzword?
He uses "remix" literally, so that's out.
"The digital" is the domain that encompasses digitally-stored data.
Art and sociology theorists consider true "digital" storage to be random-access, which is a caveat that purely technical people disagree with, but it's as pointless now as the hacker/"cracker" debate, because it's been entrenched for many years.
What he's saying is that as soon as you have random-access, perfectly-reproducible, easily-accessible storage, people are going to use it to make collages (of which "remixes" are the most popular subset today).
Furthermore, those collages represent a kind of "collective consciousness" because all of us in Western society grew up exposed to some or all of the components of that collage, and since our memories are based on associations, collage is a powerful tool for an artist to use.
This is basic modern art theory that was covered in a first-year course required for all students at the university I went to. Of course, >= 95% of the class ignored it or didn't care to remember, but whatever.
Gibson is a really, really smart guy. He's seen a lot of large-scale things in his life, and he has a good grasp on human nature and culture. It's easy to dismiss him as flakey because he writes and talks like an artist instead of a scientist, but that would be a mistake.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman