[Reader-list] On remixing, by William Gibson

[Monica Narula]

God's Little Toys 
Confessions of a cut & paste artist.
By William Gibson

you can read the entire article here: 
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html

a bit thats esp nice:
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.

Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process 
generates countless hours of creative product (another antique 
term?). To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is 
simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has 
gone the way of the record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, 
the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the 
turn of our two centuries.

We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) 
and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But 
there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The 
recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore's graphic 
novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with 
game engines (Quake, Doom, Halo), the whole metastasized library of 
Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of 
Star Trek or Buffy or (more satisfying by far) both at once, the 
JarJar-less Phantom Edit (sound of an audience voting with its 
fingers), brand-hybrid athletic shoes, gleefully transgressive logo 
jumping, and products like Kubrick figures, those Japanese 
collectibles that slyly masquerade as soulless corporate units yet 
are rescued from anonymity by the application of a thoughtfully 
aggressive "custom" paint job.

-- 
Monica Narula [Raqs Media Collective]
Sarai-CSDS
29 Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 054
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.sarai.net