I+C+i #2 // The Remix as Cultural Ecosystem

“Culture is an infinite palimpsest”, wrote Roland Barthes. The media landscape is full of texts, audios, videos and fixed images that flow in an interchange, turning our culture into a constant loop of ideas that travel at the speed of light and constantly enrich us. 

 

 Because the remix is much more than an artistic precedent developed by the avant-garde with its collages—much more than the technique of sound sampling developed since the early days of field recording and peaking with DJs beginning in the 1980s. The remix forms a very real part of our culture, running through all our notions of education, communication, knowledge, politics, etc.

PROGRAMME

11 a.m.-2 p.m. “Back to the Future”. Micro-remix workshop with ZEMOS98 and Trànsit Projectes

“The term origin is not intended to describe the process by means of which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming. Our past and our history are at once our future”. Walter Benjamin

The remix is present in our everyday process of becoming. The act of imitation performed by a baby when learning to speak is remix. The work of a publicist who sees a video on Youtube and decides to develop a new idea for a commercial is remix, like that of the musician who reads the newspaper and picks out a phrase to turn it into a song, or the cook who devises a dish while watching his friend the gardener at work. The remix is everywhere, but most of all it is in our brain. Our brain as an anagram-place, where past, present and future play at constructing our identity. With the idea of “remixing everyday life”, this workshop, organized by ZEMOS98 and Trànsit Projectes, aims to introduce some of these concepts.

 7 - 9 p.m. “Political Remix Video”. Talk + debate. With Jonathan McIntosh. Moderator: Mario Hinojos of Trànsit Projectes

McIntosh’s talk will centre on the concept of Political Remix Video as a DIY process of cultural creation that challenges the dominant message and socio-cultural myths of the mass media, transforming the content of fragments of moving images into something quite different to their initial intention, using the remix technique. Electoral broadcasts, pop culture (Hollywood films, MTV music videos and Disney animations), TV adverts, infomercials or reportages and features from the evening news are the main sources of the works by others that McIntosh will be showing or talking about and of the videos that he makes himself.

Follow the debate atwww.cccb.org/icionline