It is a truism today that we live in a “remix culture” propone Lev Manovich en What comes after remix (versión .doc):
…Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas - music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food - are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well…
Pero mientras la remezcla es una forma de producción aceptada en la música, sigue suscitando reticencias en otros ámbitos creativos:
… electronic music and software serve as the two key reservoirs of new metaphors for the rest of culture today, this expansion of the term is inevitable; one can only wonder why it did no happen earlier. Yet we are left with an interesting paradox: while in the realm of commercial music remixing is officially accepted, in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing. So while filmmakers, visual artists, photographers, architects and Web designers routinely remix already existing works, this is not openly admitted, and no proper terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to describe these practices.
One term that is sometimes used to talk about these practices in non-music areas is “appropriation.” …
The other older term commonly used across media is “quoting” but I see it as describing a very different logic than remixing. If remixing implies systematically rearranging the whole text, quoting refers inserting some fragments from old text(s) into the new one. Thus I think we should not see quoting as a historical precedent for remixing…
La remezcla como práctica de producción cultural nace con la música en los años 1960 y 70. Pero es la llegada de Internet, la digitalización de los contenidos que se hacen granulares o modulares, el crecimiento exponencial de la información disponible y la aparición de licencias flexibles para la gestión de los derechos de distribución y reutilización lo que está cambiando radicalmente la importancia cualitativa y cuantitativa de la remezcla como práctica creativa, mientras que es mucho más lenta la aceptación social de este tipo de prácticas. En mi presentación en ArtFutura 2007, planteaba que mientras la web 2.0 permite la eliminación de las barreras para la distribución de contenidos, la web 3.0 abrirá posibilidades casi ilimitadas para la remezcla audiovisual utilizando una enorme base de contenido granular y etiquetable. Ante un escenario de exuberancia informativa, puede que la creación nuevos contenidos sea casi innecesaria de modo que la la creatividad sea consecuencia básica de la remezcla. Pero sobre el valor creativo de la remezcla existen diferentes opiniones que oscilan entre aquellas que anuncian un nuevo renacimiento cultural y aquellas otras que declaran la muerte de la creatividad en un mundo digital en que ya “todo está inventado” y la larga cola de creadores amateurs inunda de contenidos de baja calidad la red.
Para centrar el debate podemos acudir a Remix Theory, el proyecto de Eduardo Navas para crear un repositorio sobre investigación en remezcla como producción cultural, nos proporciona una definición de remezcla:
Generally speaking, remix culture can be defined as the global activity consisting of the creative and efficient exchange of information made possible by digital technologies that is supported by the practice of cut/copy and paste. The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music. Today, Remix (the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste) has been extended to other areas of culture, including the visual arts; it plays a vital role in mass communication, especially on the Internet…The hip-hop DJs play an important part in the cultural shift from a passive consumer model to a consumer/producer model, which is currently in place throughout the Internet, and is most evident in the blogger.
La remezcla puede operar bajo diferentes modelos creativos, desde la extensión de la obra original, a la combinación y eliminación de materiales hasta la alteración de de las obras originales:
To understand Remix as a cultural phenomenon, we must first define it in music. A music remix, in general, is a reinterpretation of a pre-existing song, meaning that the “aura” of the original will be dominant in the remixed version. Of course some of the most challenging remixes can question this generalization. But based on its history, it can be stated that there are three types of remixes. The first remix is extended, that is a longer version of the original song containing long instrumental sections making it more mixable for the club DJ… The second remix is selective; it consists of adding or subtracting material from the original song. …The third remix is reflexive; it allegorizes and extends the aesthetic of sampling, where the remixed version challenges the aura of the original and claims autonomy even when it carries the name of the original; material is added or deleted, but the original tracks are largely left intact to be recognizable.
Mientras estas formas de remezcla se han desarrollado en la creación musical en las últimas décadas, el audiovisual está siendo ahora uno de los ámbitos preferidos de experimentación que abarca los tres modelos anteriores (y que podríamos simplificar en la recombinación de secuencias originales o la creación de nuevas secuencias mediante la fusión de diferentes imágenes).
Pero mientras que Eduardo Navas propone a El blogger cómo productor, y por tanto como un nuevo paradigma del creador como comisario que utiliza la remezcla como forma de producción, otros declaran que la “cultura alternativa”, aquella que podrían representar los blgos en los inicios del siglo XXI, ha muerto. Warren Ellis (en Suicide Girls, y tal como explica Kazys Varnelis) concluye que “our curatorial culture is just plain exhausted”:
Every corner of the web is blitzed with the light shone by thousands of curational blogs whose job is to parse the internet for their readers. I mean, I hunt for research material all the time and store it on my website, I'm as guilty as anyone. But at some point producing actual content on the web went out of fashion -- almost all of the top one thousand blogs are reportage and linkblogging sites. At some point people have to stop checking to see what happened yesterday and start thinking about tomorrow. And it's that that "alternative culture" comes from -- the drive to do what's next and the impulse to make the sound no-one's heard yet. That's just not where we are right now. We're still suffering exhaustion from the most utterly mad and brain-burning experience in human history -- the Twentieth Century.
La cuestión no parece estar resuelta y ni el propio Lev Manovich, de nuevo en What comes after remix, se siente capaz de predecir lo que nos deparará el futuro:
The question that at this point is really hard to answer is what comes after remix? Will we get eventually tired of cultural objects - be they dresses by Alexander McQueen, motion graphics by MK12 or songs by Aphex Twin - made from samples which come from already existing database of culture? And if we do, will it be still psychologically possible to create a new aesthetics that does not rely on excessive sampling? When I was emigrating from Russia to U.S. in 1981, moving from grey and red communist Moscow to a vibrant and post-modern New York, me and others living in Russia felt that Communist regime would last for at least another 300 years. But already ten years later, Soviet Union ceased to exist. Similarly, in the middle of the 1990s the euphoria unleashed by the Web, collapse of Communist governments in Eastern Europe and early effects of globalization created an impression that we have finally Cold War culture behind - its heavily armed borders, massive spying, and the military-industrial complex. And once again, only ten years later we seem to be back in the darkest years of Cold War, except that now we are being tracked with RFID chips, computer vision surveillance systems, data mining and other new technologies of the twenty first century. So it is very possible that the remix culture, which right now appears to be so firmly in place that it can’t be challenged by any other cultural logic, will morph into something else sooner than we think.
I don’t know what comes after remix. But if we now try now to develop a better historical and theoretical understanding of remix era, we will be in a better position to recognize and understand whatever new era which will replace it.
