[iDC] notes on media remix

[Komninos Zervos]

i am enjoying the discussion your original post has sparked.
i have been experimenting with motion text not graphic image since 1995.
but you never seem to acknowledge the new uses of text. perhaps the
visual/text reading debate of the 1980s has prejudiced you against textual
representations. haven't you noticed the greater incidence of text used in
film, in television, in advertising, music video clips, like you say, the
effects filters that blur the images, the text that sharpens certain
images.

this is new use of text, animated and in a 3d space, with sound and image
if required, that has to be interpreted for its meaning and its actions and
visual appearance.
i do not believe it is remix at all.

the work of nicholas klauss of www.flyingpuppet.com is not remix although
he works with musicians, choreographers, dancers, visual artists, images,
text, sounds and voices.

it is a new kind of non-temporally fixed (like a film or book) art that
requires the input of the end user and is very much an of-the-moment
experience. you get what you get while you're getting it, and then you move
on and maybe return to experience the work again.

all the talk of remix is terribly pre-digital and seems just to be once
again re-proving the theories of post-modernism, the taking of fragments of
image/text/sound and re-ordering them, bricolage. the trouble is that
literary theorists use traditional literature to judge new media
literature, film theorists use traditional film to explain , judge, analyse
and theorise new media, music theorists try to conceive of new media in
terms of pre-digital standards. so they are blind to the media, the art
born of new media because they don't have the vocabulary to address it. the
thing is that people are making art now that don't think how can i make a
film as a multimedia work, or how can i create a book on the internet? they
are thinking how do i best express what i want to say in a medium where
almost any combination of media is possible.
we have to reverse our thinking and see it from the new perspective, the
new actualisations that have been made possible by digital technologies and
the virtualisation of art and life that they have facilitated and
necessitated.

the internet affords artists the opportunity of being absent from their art
and being present at the same time, of creating an art that performs
itself, with the end-users help. i leave poems on my website for others to
come along and play with.

cheers
komninos





komninos zervos
lecturer, CyberStudies major
School of Arts
Griffith University
Room 3.25 Multimedia Building G23
Gold Coast Campus
Parkwood
PMB 50 Gold Coast Mail Centre
Queensland 9726
Australia
Phone 07 5552 8872 Fax 07 5552 8141
http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
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