Our lectorial today taught me that it is okay to play Jay-z over K-pop beats and Lennon-esque piano – if done so in the name of art.
The conclusion we reached before we began was that “there is no such thing as an original idea.” Beyond this sad truth, however, it is through the recreation, the deconstruction and breaking of old ideas that we are able to make original content with influenced yet personal meaning.
The capacity of sound in 1930’s cinema took on board this idea of remaking old ideas with new perspectives. Silent classics were remade with modern technologies. Critics such as Benjamin began to question how the reproduction of materials presented ideas based on the context of the source. Benjamin notes “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility”, where previously art culture was based on ritual new methods were introduced to mass produce and reproduce art media – the negative that can be developed repeatedly and the printing press that can communicate identical information simultaneously to an area as wide as it’s audience.
Remix theory: The beginnings of the modern day dj, when radio presenters moonlighted at the popular clubs in town. They were hired by club owners, event planners, and everyday party-throwers alike to organise music to be played back to back. The more innovative of them would seamlessly transition between tracks of similar tempos and rhythm sections. Technology developed to allow people to clip, paste, speed and slow audio clips and disc jockey’s started creating tracks in advance to play back to back at events. DJ’s began to mix the tracks of separate pieces into one sound, not a sequential mash-up, but a simultaneous remix. Questions arose about the morality of re-using content to be passed off as something new that you have “created.”
I think that there are certainly times when re-worked or remixed media cannot be classified as original content. However, it is the blurred nature of the line between what is a creatively unique approach, and those that are simply the relaying of source material that makes it hard to define “original material” of this nature. We listened to an extract from Girl Talk’s “This is the Remix” and some material from there was certainly extorted and re-designed to a point where I would define it as original content. Some tracks are completely unrecognisable, while others that are similar to their source material are rather re-situated, falling on the side of reproduced content. Having a listen on this link and try and write down all the songs you recognise. You’d be surprised how many tracks have been altered beyond recognition to use as background material.
Things strayed from the path of remix for a while and crossed into an existential question of our interactions with recreations. Is it a more pure engagement with some-one to interact with what they want you to see, rather than what they naturally give? There is certainly a ‘wholeness’ to the feeling of the exact moment. Benjamin questioned whether or not you can and to what extent media captures that feeling, what disparity is there in authenticity between the aura of the source and the reproduction? How much of this aura is incorporated in the artefact itself and how much is drawn from our memory, or our fabricated understanding from wider social and cultural codes?