You are posting a comment about...
Pseudsday Phthursday
Until I read the TLS today I didn't know there was such a thing as a "remixologist". Katherine Hayles reviews Remix the Book by the improbably monickered Mark Amerika.
Writing an incantatory prose lineated as poetry [does this just mean prose with the line breaks in silly places? -- M.J.] Amerika performs as well as explains, an artistic practice he calls "remixology". He "samples" Alfred North Whitehead, Nam June Paik, Allen Ginsberg and a host of others, in his role as "VJ Professor" (by analogy with a DJ, a VJ improvises a mixture of video images as well as sounds). Such performances are "postproductions" (because they sample from pre-existing material) carried out "with just in time/ source material as part of an open-source lifestyle". "Remixologists", then, are artists who
stand with their hyperimprovisational instruments
on whatever ground of the moment
they happen to be playing on as they
port their narrative/network potential
and its manifest aesthetic facts
into the compositional playing field
their novelty generation operates in
[...] In Amerika's vision, the artist's goal is to work towards an ecstatic state in which he is consciously and unconsciously performing in sync with complex feedback loops.
But who will sample the samplers? Someone, presumably a re-remixologist, called Rick Silva whose "art and research has been supported through grants and commissions from places such as Turbulence, Rhizome, and The Whitney Museum of American Art":
The “Isarithm” remix is sourced from the 184 sections of Mark Amerika’s “Sentences on Remixology 1.0” essay. Each sentence becomes a 30 frame video multi-verse where forms oscillate between intelligible lines and illegible texts. The video is accompanied by Woulg’s music which samples Mark Amerika’s “Consider the Is” audio reading.
Remixing should not be confused with free mixing. The latter is forbidden by the Koran, but presumably not the former, since the Koran is itself a re-re-remix of Judaism, Christianity, pagan Arab myths and the desires of that arch-sampler/remixologist Mohammed.