‘Take any text speed it up slow it down run it backwards inch it and you will hear words that were not in the original recording new words made by the machine different people will scan out different words of course but some of the words are quite clearly there and anyone can hear them words which were not in the original tape but which are in many cases relevant to the original text as if the words themselves had been interrogated and forced to reveal their hidden meanings.’ William S. Burroughs, The Invisible Generation

People got their opinions
Where do they come from?
Each day seems like a natural fact
And what we think changes how we act.
Gang of Four, ‘Why Theory’

In the epigram above, the post-punk band, Gang of Four, explains why we need theory because ‘each day seems like a natural fact,’ but, in fact, what seems natural is based on a world-view or ideology. Changing ‘what we think changes how we act,’ and the deconstruction of naturalization and cultural mythologies allows one to see this process where the everyday reality looks both inevitable and the most rational state of affairs.

Using a type of grammatological approach, and borrowing from William Burroughs discussion of adding speed and movement to texts, this essay interrogates the supposedly natural connection between voice and reading or de-coding texts. Burroughs, in the epigram above, suggests that one can desediment any text by putting the text ‘under erasure’ to borrow Jacques Derrida’s phrase, usually thought of as ornamental or distortions of the text.

As Derrida explains in The Paper Machine, ‘The page remains a screen. . . . by carrying us beyond paper, the adventures of technology grant us a sort of future anterior; they liberate our reading for a retrospective exploration of the past resources of the paper, for its previously multimedia vectors’ (Derrida, 2005: 47). The new media technology allows the mechanized vectors of reading to appear. The turntablist desidiments listening, grown scaled-over and practically deaf through habits of how to spin a record, and a reading machine would do the same for the reading that only appears in retrospect as always already there.

Scratching, a turntablist technique, produces a distinctive sound by moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable while simultaneously manipulating the crossfader on a DJ mixer. Much scholarship has examined the strategies and impact of montage in sampling and re-mix. For various reasons, it is more difficult to talk about scratch-effects because it concerns ‘reading the illegible,’ a phrase coined by Craig Dworkin to describe visual poetry experiments (Dworkin, 2003)..

To appreciate reading outside of literacy, we need to run an experiment: deconstruct what we think of as natural reading. Using the Gang of Four lyrics, we could title the experiment, reading seems like a natural fact, but changing how we think, changes how we read. There is a risk here-with all the concern about literacy it is heretical to suggest learning to read scratch effects, learning to untangle reading from its naturalization-and a parodic effect easily missed.

The experiment might begin with the minor cultural myth stated in a dialogue.

‘Is reading a natural fact?’

‘It’s not a composition practice, but a physiological and cognitive ability or skill, right?’

‘You can apply sampling and remix to texts and composition, but reading and listening are natural facts. You can deconstruct Plato, but you can’t deconstruct the process of reading, can you?’

‘What if someone had built a scratch machine that changed reading into something besides the foundation of alphabetic-print culture literacy? What if someone today built an online e-version of the machine to allow for the simulation of the interaction and engagement with the material conditions of reading-as-a-technology, with more in common with scratch remix than sounding out words?’

‘What would a primer for this mechanic reading look like?’

The target for the comparison, natural reading primers, offers a clue.

Lew Anna Ball, in her Natural Reading Primer (Ball,1906), presumes a one to one correspondence between word and line-drawing, a strict delineation between the alphabetic and the image, and the innateness of these relationships as the foundation of natural reading. What if a cubo-futurist wrote a primer for a mechanical reading that parodied Ball? What if Hugo Ball wrote this primer? How does that change the reading? (Ball, 1906: 5)

What if the mechanical process of reading, a reading machinicity, had already long ago undergone a transformation using scratch techniques, allowing for variations of eye scanning beyond the confines of traditional literacy?

Quickly glossing the scratch process, and placing it in a specific historical development, will highlight the analogy between listening and reading under erasure or via desedimentation or through scratching.

DJ Herc, whose name first appeared from his friends who thought his large muscular frame resembled Hercules, backed into the musical innovation of scratching. He was DJ-ing parties for his sister, first in their home’s basement, and he noticed that the crowd really liked the instrumental bridges and beats; they could really dance to those. So, he simply wanted to find a way to extend those sections. When he pulled back on the disc, he could play parts over again. He noticed, to everyone’s delight, that the scratch created a beat in itself, and the sound supplemented the particular song. The technique is not an anything goes disruption of the record being played; instead, the processing of the music had a series of steps and corollary effects. Grandmaster Flash and DJ Herc, through a creative competition, advanced scratching to a genre of music eventually embraced by a mainstream popular music that threatened music label moguls, who resisted any change from which they did not directly, and immediately, draw a profit.

This essay looks at that machine, and draws the explicit line from scratch techniques to de-reading; that is, scratch is not an ornamental value distorting the text, but rather a crucial way of reading, uncovering the ghosts of meanings lurking in plain sight. The turntablists are sometimes thought of as producing something to dance to rather than a poetics or demonstrating how to read. In large part, because of scratching’s beginnings at basement parties, and the later controversies over copyright, effaced the fact that scratching puts the music under erasure and processing it both beyond recognition, when the music plays backward at a high rate, and as a citation and repetition of recognizing a piece of music, when the music repeats small fragments over and over again. Certain musical parts seem stressed through the repetition, and others seem transformed when played backward.

What if instead of learning to read the ‘natural’ way, one learned by scratching? What if those musicians spinning vinyl records were the future of literacy efforts?

Recently, our culture has produced electronic reading machines, but forcefully banish any turntablist techniques at least at the level of the individual line. One can electronically flip the pages to produce a flickering, but the effects are limited. We do not yet have a turntablist of e-readers. To find a corollary to the scratching in music, we need to study avant-garde experiments that sought to use scratching as reading.

Bob Brown (1886-1959) invented a reading machine sometime in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

He announced the machine to the world with a series of publications in the early 1930s: ‘Without any whirr or splutter writing is readable at the speed of the day – 1931 – not 1450, without being broken by conventional columns confined to pages and pickled in books, a READIE runs on before the eye continuously – on forever in-a-single-line-I-see-1450-invention-movable-type-Gutenberg’ (Brown, 1931:184).  The significance of Bob Brown’s eerily prophetic The Readieslooks now like a media experiment in scratch techniques. He includes plans for an electric reading machine and strategies for preparing the eye for mechanized reading. There are instructions for preparing texts as ‘readies’ and detailed quantitative explanations about the invention and mechanisms involved in this peculiar machine.

Brown writes about the machine’s potential to change how we read and learn. In 1930, the beaming out of printed text over radio waves or in televised images had a science fiction quality–or, for the avant-garde, a fanciful art-stunt feel. Today, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text-messaging, electronic text readers, and even, or especially, electronic music re-mixing and turntablists’ scratching. His description of the machine’s operation sounds much like Burroughs’ much later explanation, in the epigram to this experimental essay, of his reading strategy: ‘Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box container the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 or million words spill out before his eyes . . . in one continuous line of type . . .  . My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead . . . magnifying glass . . . moved nearer or farther from the type, so the reader may browse in 6 point, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits him.’ (Brown, 2009: 29).

Brown’s machine, as well as his processed texts for it, suggested a shift toward a different way to comprehend texts. That is, the mechanism of this book, a type of book that resembles the turntablist’s rapidly shifting direction, speed, and repetition of the text rather than slowly flipping the pages of a book. Punctuation marks become visual analogies. For movement we see em-dashes (–) that also, by definition, indicate that the sentence was interrupted or cut short. These created a ‘cinemovietone’ shorthand system. The old uses of punctuation, such as employment of periods to mark the end of a sentence, disappear. The result looks like a script for a turntablist’s performance. It suggests the following directions: at each – pull/push/tap the recording. Reading machine-mediated text becomes more like watching a continuous series of flickering frames or listening to music played backward or scratched.

I’m not the first to recognize the scratch-potential in Derrida’s work. One Professor Burt came to an otherwise somber symposium of important Derrideans, like Professor Peggy Kamuf, the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at USC, and gave his presentation dressed, and talking like, Flavor Flav, with a big clock around his neck. Burt’s talk was greeted with deafening silence. Burt shocked the audience by explaining, ‘For in absenting our speakers awhile, my aim has been to commemorate and conjure up the spectre of Shock Derrida in these remarks.  . . . I hope we can keep open our ears and hear the party in the aftershocks of Jacques Derrida’s de-parti-ng. So let me officially begin this first session of the final day of our conference by closing with a thanks and a shout out  …’ (Burt, 2006, n.p.).

The readies sought to illuminate the form of a process rather than the form of a medium. The mechanical poetics of scratching techniques magnify reading as a cultural technological medium without a single essential form. Using punctuation in this way–as a visual score rather than cues for reading aloud–moves reading from interpreting words in connection with an author’s voice to emphasizing design, aesthetics, and movement. Scratching does not efface expressivity.

So, his machine added speed or motion to the still text. One could unwind a spool of text, magnifying it as it passed under the viewer, and read all works of literature very quickly. Because the text unrolled, one could roll it backwards as well.

By building a simulation of Brown’s machine, a whole array of possibilities appears that one would never consider without the simulation. Simulation becomes paradoxically the best way to understand the material conditions of reading as a technological process. It also immediately allows for the machine to appear in the context of scratching

‘Why?’

Because before building the simulation, one simply read the prepared texts, but after playing with the simulation, one notices the effects of moving the text backward and forward quickly until it becomes a flickering blur — at very high speeds the text seems to jerk or flicker and most interestingly the direction of movement becomes difficult to determine. It seems to reverse direction. The careful scholarship on Brown’s readies always focuses on the way he prepared the texts and how it relates to broader concerns of the modernist poets, and avant-gardists, who participated. (North, 2005; McGann, 1993; Rothenberg, 2000; Dworkin 2003). If we focus on the machine and the scratching, then it produces an entirely different reading. Brown saw the machine much like the one Burroughs envisions or a turntablist might use.

A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug . . . equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or shot ahead . . .  . (Brown, 1930: 28)

A screen grab can produce one frozen moment, but not the visual-scratching effect, and it is that effect that may mark an unforeseen aspect of reading. The discontinuous, hyperlinked, and multilinear reading always already existed in book and codex. One could flip back and forth, and one could approximate the hyperlinking remix using a montage strategy as demonstrated here.

It is much more difficult to reproduce or even approximate the motion, scratch, jerking, flickering, and visual effects produced or illuminated with Bob Brown’s machine. Those supplemental aspects are, in Derrida’s phrase, always already part of reading. The supplement (movement, visuality, mechanicity) to traditional notions of literacy usually remain part of an implicate process. The reading machine is not simply a new conduit for the same supposedly natural process. It highlights what Derrida calls the ‘virtual multimedia’ of reading print on paper (Derrida, 2005: 47).

Scratch Reading Machine (Saper, 2009: readies.org)

Paul Saenger, in Space Between Words, defends ‘the thesis that the separation of words, which began in the early Middle Ages, altered the physiological process of reading and by the fourteenth century enabled the common practice of silent reading as we know it today’ (Saenger, 1997; ix). Without word separation or punctuation (scripture continua), reading requires enormous effort and one had to read aloud so that one could hear and unconsciously choose/invent the delineation and punctuation among a long continuous string of words. The scratch reading machine moves us back to that ancient practice of reading. Saenger explains that, ‘The reintroduction of word separation by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes marks a dramatic change in that relationship and constitutes the great divide in the history of reading between antique cultures and those of the modern Occident’ (Saenger, 1997: 12).

What does it mean to simulate an experience of reading, an experience that heightens the scratch-effects lurking in so-called natural reading, but not brought to the surface without the machinicity — without the speed-mechanism (an analogy for the turntable), the reading machine, the DJ readie (suggesting groupie or fan of reading as a mechanical process as well as Bob Brown’s readies and all that his term suggests about the shift in reading he prepared for)? The answer involves an epistemology of doing: using the machine to read and experience reading via a machine. The simulation suggests that with the increasing prevalence, even omnipresent and [to some critics] epidemic, use of text(ing) machines, something outside or beside traditional literacy, the scratch- meaning. becomes foregrounded. Brown’s machine, and its connection to modernist poetics, puts the natural process of reading under erasure or scratch (simply by adjusting the speed, direction, and layout).

What does it mean to apply a term usually thought of in terms of composition (music, media, writing) to a cognitive process of a subjectivity? Almost all the secondary literature on reading and literacy focuses on the process as a crucial component of an individual’s maturation into responsible and fully-conscious subjectivity and, even, good citizenship. By shifting the terms of the debate, the frame of how one defines reading, the process now resembles composition rather than reception. Reading as something more akin to scratching and the turntablist’s DJ-ing suggests a subject formation as a bricoleur-in-motion. Eyes spinning, jumping, and blurring are best understood in the actual experience of the simulation of the reading machine. One can almost imagine dancing to the reading experience.

Author’s Biography

Craig Saper is Professor of Texts and Technology in the English Department at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Networked Art (2001) and Artificial Mythologies (1997).  His most recent book is Imaging Place(2009), edited with W.F. Garrett-Petts and John Craig Freeman.

References

Ball, Lew Anna.  Natural Reading Primer (New York: Ginn and Company, 1906).

Brown, Bob, et al. Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (Cagnes-sur-Mer: Roving Eye Press, 1931).

Brown, Bob. The Readies (Bad Ems,: Roving Eye Press, 1930).]

Brown, Bob. The Readies. Ed. & Afterword, Craig Saper in the series Literature by Design: British and American Books 1889-1930 (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 2009).

Burt, Richard. ‘Derrideath’, A Conference to Celebrate the Legacy of Jacques Derrida, University of Florida, Gainesville FL, October 9th-11^th. 2006.

Cavallo, Guglielmo, Chartier, Roger  and Cochrane, Lydia G.. A History of Reading in the West. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book (Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).

Derrida, Jacques. The Paper Machine. trans. Rachel Bowlby (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

Dworkin, Craig Douglas. Reading the Illegible(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003).

Fischer, Steven R. A History of Reading Globalities (London: Reaktion, 2003).

Johnson, Frederick Charles. The Historical Record, v. 2 and3 (Wilkes-Barre: Press of the Wilkes-Barre Record, 1888).

McGann, Jerome J. Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Rothenberg, Jerome, and Clay, Steven. A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing(New York: Granary Books, 2000).

Saenger, Paul. Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Saper, Craig. ‘The Reading Machine’. 22 May, 2009, http://www.readies.org.

The brand’s image and its customer’s self-image will be refracted through the ‘prism’ of a star’s persona and produce a new set of perceptions … the reason it is tricky is that celebrities are unusual brands in that they talk back and they may also change their behaviour, their views and their perceived personality quite quickly, literally making them not the person they used to be and certainly not the individual with whom the brand originally partnered.

– Pringle, Celebrity Sells

Saddam Hussein wants to keep advertisers from using his picture in unflattering contexts. Clint Eastwood doesn’t want tabloids to write about him. Rudolf Valentino’s heirs want to control his film biography. The Girl Scouts don’t want their image soiled by association with certain activities. George Lucas wants to keep Strategic Defense Initiative fans from calling it “Star Wars.” … Uri Geller thinks he should be paid for ads showing psychics bending metal through telekinesis. … And scads of copyright holders see purple when their creations are made fun of.

– White v Samsung Electronics

Introduction: The Commercial-Cultural Formations of Celebrity Persona [1]

These opening quotations illustrate that the celebrity figure is able to produce considerable economic and social meaning, it is a ‘locus of formative social power in consumer capitalism’ (Marshall, 1997: 51). As a commercial product, the celebrity offers to the advertising and merchandising sector an indispensable strategic element within marketing. Data from UK advertising industry figures, for example, demonstrates that a celebrity product endorsement can more than double sales revenue and dramatically increase market share (Pringle, 2004: 282-299). In addition, a major revenue stream for sports and entertainment industries is offered by celebrity merchandising and ‘tie-ins’ through the reproduction and distribution of celebrity images on t-shirts, caps, mugs, toys and sportswear. As Chris Rojek explains, celebrity association ‘operates on the principle that the public recognition of the celebrity as an admirable or desirable cultural presence can be transferred onto the commodity in a commercial’ (Rojek, 2001: 92). The fundamental power of celebrity endorsement was judicially considered in the Paul Hogan merchandising case in which Burchett J found that an ‘association of some desirable character with the product proceeds more subtly to foster favourable inclination towards it, a good feeling about it, an emotional attachment to it’ (Pacific Dunlop v Hogan14, 45).

In addition to the material economic function, a number of media scholars have suggested that the celebrity operates as a crucial symbolic element in market economies by representing to the audience the behaviours and processes of consumption. For David Marshall, the film star symbolises the ‘independent individual’ of consumerist capitalism able to ‘supersede the constraints of institutions for the true expression of personal freedom’ (Marshall, 1997: 83). Similarly, Rojek suggests that ‘celebrities humanise the process of commodity consumption’ so much so that ‘consumers desire to possess them’ (Marshall, 1997: 14-15). This desire to possess may be realised after the death of the celebrity through the buying of posthumous commemorative memorabilia such as the golf clubs belonging to President Kennedy, Andy Warhol’s collection of watches (Rojek, 2001: 59) or Princess Diana’s dresses: in 2005, a copy of the wedding dress worn by Diana was sold for £100,000 (Monsters and Critics, 2005). Regulating how a celebrity manages the commercial appropriation of her image, likeness, persona, name or voice has significant economic ramifications through a wide range of the sports and entertainment industries.

If the celebrity performs an important commercial function in contemporary culture, its productive social value must also be acknowledged. US courts have recognised that celebrity can play a ‘non-economic’ social role since ‘celebrities are an important part of our public vocabulary’ (Cardtoons LC v Major League Baseball Players Association). This shared vernacular, this ‘peculiar yet familiar idiom’ as Michael Madow puts it (1993:125), allows the articulation and public discussion of a broad range of social, political and moral issues through semiotic appropriation or technological remix. Richard Dyer, for example, has shown the degree to which the meanings of star persona can be reinterpreted by audiences in radical, oppositional ways. The image of Judy Garland represented a vehicle through which urban gay culture of 1960s America could represent the pain of adhering to mainstream gender roles (Dyer, 2004: 137-191). From a feminist perspective, Catharine Lumby argues that celebrity gossip helps to redefine and ‘democratise’ the public sphere by blurring the, often masculinist, divide between the public and private domains, enabling a ‘diversification not only of voices but of ways of speaking about personal, social and political life’ (Lumby, 1999: xiii). For other commentators, the function played by celebrity culture is explored as the extent to which the phenomena resembles and hence may replace the socio-political functions of declining institutions such as the monarchy, religion, the nuclear family and local community (e.g. Rojek, 2001; Frow, 1998). Of course, not all elements of celebrity culture are enthusiastically endorsed by media theorists. Daniel Boorstin, for example, is exemplary of the disapproving stance adopted by some commentators. Rather than earning the right to fame, through labour, achievement or skill, celebrities are merely ‘well known for their well knowness’, to use Boorstin’s oft quoted definition (Boorstin, 1992: 57).

We shall return to consider the complexity of labour in remixing and reformulating the celebrity figure.  But for our purposes now, there is a crucial component involved in the production of celebrity. Whether in celebration or condemnation, most critics acknowledge the allure of celebrity culture is inflected by the process through which the celebrity figure is able to forge an intimate link with its audience, often producing public expressions of profound compassion, respect or revulsion. As Graeme Turner notes, this dynamic depends on the interplay between the public and private spheres:

We can map the precise moment a public figure becomes a celebrity. It occurs at the point at which media interest in their activities is transferred from reporting on their public role (such as their specific achievement in politics or sport) to investigating the details of their private lives. Paradoxically, it is most often the high profile achieved by their public activities that provides the alibi for this process of ‘celebritisation’ (Turner, 2004: 8).

This process, however, is complicated by emerging participatory media forms whose impact is experienced as new conditions of possibility for celebrity production and consumption.  As Marshall argues, video mash-ups of celebrity interviews, for example, are dramatically changing the relation between celebrity and audience (Turner, 2006: 640). Meanings produced by these audience authored texts challenge the extent to which a celebrity might control her image. For Marshall, these are pressing legal questions in an era increasingly defined by such texts which function to narrow the ‘representational gap’ between celebrity and fan (Turner, 2006: 640). As he puts it:

In contrast to traditional media, it is less clear where a product begins and where it ends as this new system of production implies multiple forms produced by users … Perhaps what is even more interesting is that these indiscretions of reproduction and remaking have legal implications related to when a user actually possesses and makes a cultural form his/her own (Turner, 2006: 641).

The image or persona of the celebrity, then, is a significant economic and cultural tool which presents to the user an opportunity to wield financial and social power. As paradigmatic of the era of ‘public privacy’ (Kitzmann, 2004), the celebrity occupies an ambiguous position between ‘private ownership and public image’ (Madow, 1993: 127) making regulation of such appropriation a complex economic, legal and cultural challenge.

Although the celebrity figure has been thoroughly researched in relation to its patterns of consumption; semiotic power; and industry construction (e.g. Gamson, 1994; Marshall, 1997; Turner, 2004; Dyer 2008;), less attention has been paid to the forms of celebrity governance enabled by legislative and case law settings. [2] As I have argued elsewhere (2008: 93-103), this research imbalance has real impacts for students who often find it difficult to recognise the cultural architecture and materialities shaping media policy and law. In other words, students may enthusiastically endorse the semantic fluidity at play in the representation of law through popular culture, for example, and, similarly, explore the multiplicity of meanings generated by the celebrity figure. Yet it is often difficult to demonstrate to students that, perhaps, media legislation, itself, is similarly mutable and hence, requires analytical reading.

In response, this paper maps the origins and scope of that ‘peculiarly American right’ (Gaines, 1997: 131): the right of publicity. It will be seen that the basis for protection, in property or privacy, has been problematic, with consequential complexity surrounding the scope, defences and remedies of the action. That uncertainty has echoes in the varied legal avenues used to protect celebrity image in Australia. Beyond such doctrinal issues, questions of principle remain as to the place of economic and autonomy-based rationales for law’s engagement with the celebrity image.

Section One: The Origins and Scope of US Publicity Rights

A   The origins of publicity rights in privacy law

The US right of publicity has been defined as: ‘the right of an individual, especially a public figure or a celebrity, to control the commercial value and exploitation of his name and picture or likeness and to prevent others from unfairly appropriating this value for their commercial benefit’ (Presley’s Estate v Russen). The right has been endorsed in a number of decisions as a property right (Waits v Frito-Lay Inc) with the capacity, therefore, for inheritance or descendability (eg Martin Luther King v American Heritage Products). Such a right may be assigned or licensed (McCarthy §10:10), and remedies can include damages and injunction (Presley’s Estate v Russen 1339, 1382). There is no uniform federal, ‘right of publicity’ in the US because of the variations in its treatment through common law and state statutes (Caudill, 2004: 263). While at least 27 US states have recognised publicity rights, there remains considerable doctrinal variation affecting the regulation, licensing and exploitation of the celebrity image (Zapparoni, 2004). As the major entertainment production centre of the US, it is not surprising that California offers personality protection through both statutory and common law regimes (Dawson, 2001: 662-663). Adding complexity to the doctrine is its development though both privacy and property law and the extent to which court decisions have been ‘mired in confusion between property and privacy principles’ (Flagg, 1999: 179).

Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis

It is widely accepted that the ‘principal historical antecedent of the right of publicity is the right of privacy (Unfair Competition § 46′) and that it can be traced to ‘one of the most influential pieces of writing in American legal history’ (McCarthy § 1:10), the 1890 article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis entitled ‘The Right to Privacy’. Significantly, the ‘necessity’ for such a right arose, according to Warren and Brandeis, from the increasing intrusion of the press who were ‘overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency’ and invading ‘the sacred precincts of private and domestic life’ (Warren and Brandeis, 1890: 196). The authors distinguish the right of privacy from proprietary rights within intellectual property, explaining that the ‘principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality’ (Warren and Brandeis, 1890: 205). As we shall see, despite the distinction made by the authors between doctrines of privacy and property, as the right of publicity has evolved, through decisions driven by questions of celebrity image, the conceptual difficulties involved in the ‘property-privacy divide’ (Zapparoni, 2004: 705) have remained evident.

Roberson v Rochester Folding Box (1900): action denied

One of the earliest judicial considerations of the Warren and Brandeis article arose in the 1901 case of Roberson v Rochester Folding Box. Roberson brought action for invasion of privacy against a flour company that, in its marketing, had produced, printed and circulated on publicity posters a large lithograph portrait of her face. The trial judge held in the plaintiff’s favour: ‘her face is her own private property, and no photographer would have a right to take advantage’ (1900). However, on appeal her action failed as the court worried that a decision in her favour would invite a ‘vast amount of litigation’, its scope ‘bordering on the absurd’ (1902).

Despite the failure in Roberson to recognise ‘the so-called “right of privacy”‘ (1902), and perhaps in response to the ‘storm of public disapproval’ (Prosser, 1960:  385) that followed, New York’s legislature enacted the first US privacy legislation in 1903. The statute made it ‘both a misdemeanour and a tort to use the name, portrait or picture of any person for “advertising purposes or for the purposes of trade” without written consent’ (McCarthy 25, § 6:74). Thomas McCarthy notes that, since the statute was not designed to endorse the broad principles expressed by Warren and Brandeis but simply to overturn Roberson, it imposed a narrow scope for deciding cases. What began as an innovative development became a ‘straitjacket locking New York law into the factual pattern of the Roberson case’ (25, § 6:74).

Pavesich v New England Life Ins Co (1905): action recognised

Shortly after enactment of the New York legislation, the Georgia Supreme Court established a common law right of privacy in Pavesich v New England Life Ins Co. Reversing the trial decision and relying substantially on the dissenting view in Roberson the court found for Pavesich. The case resembled Roberson factually since both involved unauthorised photographing and publication of the plaintiff’s face in advertising. The court unanimously held that an invasion of privacy constitutes the publication ‘of one’s picture without his consent by another as an advertisement, for the mere purpose of increasing the profits and gains of the advertiser’ (81). In a decision that analogised the publication of Pavesich’s image to slavery, the court found his liberty had been ‘taken away’, he was now ‘under the control of another … no longer free and … a slave without hope of freedom, held to service by a merciless master’ (80).

Notably, the court considered whether a famous person should have similar recourse to protection as those not in the public eye, deciding that ‘the mere fact that a man has become what is called a public character’ does not give ‘to everyone the right to print and circulate his picture’ (80). What the court had not considered, however, was where a public figure might actually desire publication of their image for their own commercial profit or may seek to protect that image from unauthorised, commercial exploitation by another. That the law had hitherto dealt inadequately with such situations was Melville Nimmer’s argument in his 1954 article, which became the ‘foundation stone of the right of publicity’ (McCarthy § 1:27). According to Nimmer, a major shortcoming of using privacy doctrines to protect ‘publicity value’ (Nimmer, 1954: 204) lies in the principle of celebrity waiver. In contrast to Pavesich which did not endorse the view that celebrity status waives the right to privacy (Nimmer, 1954: 26), certain courts have found the very fact of celebrity status means a person has dedicated their life to the public and waived protection. Although some US courts have held that the ‘public personality’ is entitled to protect a private, ‘non-professional’ aspect to their lives, these courts have not been able to provide protection for ‘the appropriation by others of the valuable use’ of ‘name and portrait’ (Nimmer, 1954: 205).

For some commentators, it appears paradoxical that the right of publicity has its origins in privacy doctrines since, as John Frow suggests the rights can be seen ‘in direct opposition to each other’ (1995:158). However, as noted above, celebrity is produced in part by the dynamic interplay between private and public spheres, the ‘public display of the private’ in Marshall’s words (2006: 638). Given this decisive element of celebrity production, it is perhaps understandable that a legal and economic mechanism developed which would address specifically the management of the socio-economic interplay between the private and public persona, and that the law would find such a task challenging.

B   Scope of publicity rights through key decisions in US common law

This section outlines the scope of the right of publicity, examining its judicial recognition; implications of its conceptual connections with both privacy and property law; free speech and parody defences; the test for identity and remedies to infringement. These elements will be traced though key decisions in the US common law of publicity rights.

As noted above, historically an obstacle preventing successful deployment of the right of publicity may have been its close connection with privacy doctrines. As McCarthy explains, famous plaintiffs began to bring actions over the unauthorised use of their image in advertising. The problem facing courts was that the complaint often:

sounded out of tune with the concept of ‘privacy’. Their complaint was not that they wanted no one to commercialise their identity, but rather that they wanted the right to control when, where and how their identity was so used …mesmerized by the ‘privacy’ label, judges could not see how such plaintiffs had a claim for invasion of ‘privacy’ since they often already had become well-known in the press and in commercial use by permitted licenses (§ 1:7).

Haelan Laboratories v Topps Chewing Gum (1953): recognition of the right

In 1953, the landmark case of Haelan Laboratories v Topps Chewing Gum addressed these concerns by judicially establishing the ‘right of publicity’ and recognising the right could operate distinctly from privacy. In the majority decision Frank J found that ‘in addition to and independent of that right of privacy … a man has a right in the publicity value of his photograph … the right to grant the exclusive privilege of publishing his picture’. The dispute in Haelanconcerned two rival chewing gum manufacturers who were competing for rights to use photographs of base ball players. These players had entered into contracts giving Haelan Laboratories the exclusive right to use their photographs in advertising. Haelan brought action against Topps arguing it had ‘deliberately induced’ (868) the same players to assign use of their photographs to Topps, breaking the exclusive contracts held with Haelan. The defendants questioned the effectiveness of the Haelan contracts, arguing they constituted mere ‘waivers’ to possible invasion of privacy actions. Since, under New York statute, the right of ‘privacy is personal, not assignable’ the plaintiff would have no ‘”property” right or other legal interest’ which the defendant’s ‘conduct invaded’ (867). In rejecting this defence, the common law right of publicity was established.

In 1960, William Prosser set out further analysis for developing a publicity right. Drawing on arguments made by Warren and Brandeis and summarising the relevant privacy case law, Prosser created a taxonomy of four torts:

1. intrusion upon the plaintiff’s seclusion or solitude, or into his private affairs;

2. public disclosure of embarrassing private facts, about the plaintiff;

3. publicity which places the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye;

4. appropriation, for the defendant’s advantage, of the plaintiff’s name or likeness (1960: 389).

The fourth of these torts, concerning appropriation, has commonly been viewed as central to publicity. It forms the ‘basis for commercial appropriation of personality or right of publicity claims’ (Flagg, 1999: 187).

If Haelan established the existence of the right of publicity and made it distinct from the limitations of a privacy doctrine, this did not prevent future judicial uncertainty. Indeed, in creating a demarcation between privacy and publicity rights, Haelan may have symbolised ‘a wrong turn’ in the coherent application of the doctrine (Haemmerli, 1999: 403). Conceptual uncertainty now existed in the development of publicity rights, as Alice Haemmerli has explained. On the one hand, publicity rights were understood as an economic property right with the provision, therefore, of transferability and descendiblility. On the other hand, publicity rights remained a ‘personal’ privacy right, nonassignable and non descendible (Haemmerli, 1999: 403).

Zacchini v Scripps-Howard Broadcasting Co (1977): free speech defences to infringement

This case was the first, and indeed remains the only, US Supreme Court decision to affirm publicity rights (McCarthy § 1:33). It is also noteworthy because of its treatment of possible defences to publicity rights in the form of First Amendment freedom of the press. Hugo Zacchini sued over the videotaping and broadcast of his ‘human cannonball’ act in which he was shot from a cannon over 200 feet into a net. This 15 second clip, constituting Zacchini’s entire performance at an Ohio county fair, was broadcast on television news. He sought damages for ‘unlawful appropriation’ of his ‘professional property’ (564). In contrast to the ‘classic situation’ (McCarthy § 1:33) of publicity rights involving commercial appropriation of identity, Zacchini was unusual because it concerned a news broadcast. The Ohio Supreme Court reversed earlier judgments for the plaintiff because ‘a TV station has a privilege to report in its newscasts matters of legitimate public interest which would otherwise be protected by an individual’s right of publicity’ (565). However, this judgment was reversed by the US Supreme Court, which held that the First Amendment does not ‘immunize the media when they broadcast a performer’s entire act’ (575). Also significant about Zacchini is its emphasis on the doctrine as a form of property right, ‘closely analogous to the goals of patent and copyright law’ (575). In this way, the court distinguished the pecuniary elements of the right from the ‘false light’ privacy tort, relying upon an argument for providing economic incentives to justify the protection of publicity. Zacchini’s act, the court found,

is the product of petitioner’s own talents and energy, the end result of much time, effort, and expense. … [T]he protection provides an economic incentive for him to make the investment required to produce a performance of interest to the public. This same consideration underlies the patent and copyright laws long enforced by this Court (575).

Zacchini conferred ‘prominence and respectability’ (McCarthy § 1:33) upon publicity rights, yet because it so narrowly construed the facts – publicity rights were said to subsist in the broadcast of ‘entire performance’ – it has provided limited guidance to the doctrine (Flagg, 1999: 195 n 55).

Martin Luther King v American Heritage Products (1982): descendability of right

If Zacchini established the right of publicity as conceptually analogous to copyright and trademark law insofar as it adheres to the principles of property rather than privacy, then this decision further enhanced the connection by endorsing descendability. As McCarthy has explained, the post-mortem survival of publicity rights is a key factor in the ‘”property” versus “personal”‘ debate (§ 9:3). In this case, the Estate of Martin Luther King brought action against a company for unauthorised manufacture and sale of plastic busts of Luther King, claiming these violated his post-mortem right of publicity which had been inherited by his heirs (697). Citing a number of decisions regarding the proprietary element of the right of publicity, [3] the Supreme Court of Georgia found for the Estate, holding that the right of publicity is distinct from privacy; it is ‘assignable during the life of the celebrity’, survives the owner’s death; and is ‘inheritable and devisable’ (King v American 704-705).

The court also considered whether descendibility depended on the degree to which publicity rights had been utilised by celebrities during their lifetime, the so-called ‘lifetime exploitation’ principle (McCarthy § 9:13). The court found it pertinent that previous case law on this issue had been concerned with entertainers rather than, as here, those involved in public life for other reasons.

A well known minister may avoid exploiting his prominence during life because to do otherwise would impair his ministry. Should his election not to take commercial advantage of his position during life ipso facto result in permitting others to exploit his name and likeness after his death? (King v American706)

The Georgia Supreme Court therefore held that there is no ‘necessity to exercise the right of publicity during one’s life in order to protect it from use by others or to preserve any potential right of one’s heirs’ (705). Since the 1980s, the ‘lifetime exploitation’ requirement within post-mortem publicity rights has been on the decline. At the time of writing, only the state of Utah mandates that in order to descend to airs, the publicity right must have been commercially exploited before death (McCarthy § 9:15). More broadly, it is notable that only two US states do not recognise the descendability of the publicity right at common law (McCarthy § 9:19). [4]

White v Samsung Electronics (1992): indicia of identity and the parody defence

This case raises significant issues of remixing celebrity production in the public domain. If the ‘right of publicity protects the commercial value of a person’s identity’ (Unfair Competition), how should law define the scope of identity? Furthermore, how will the law decide when a particular identity has been recognised and, therefore, liability triggered? In White v Samsung Electronics these questions were explored through an action brought by well known US game show host, Vanna White, over an advertising campaign for Samsung electronic products. The print advertisements attempted to convey the products’ longevity by placing well known figures in futuristic settings together with humorous predictions. However, unlike the other celebrities in the campaign, White neither consented to nor was renumerated for these publications. The particular advertisement at issue depicted a robot posing alongside a game board that was ‘instantly recognisable’ as the original ‘Wheel-of-Fortune’ game show set (1396). The robot was dressed in a blonde wig, gown and jewellery that was ‘consciously selected to resemble White’s hair and dress’ in the long running series (1396). The advertisement carried a caption that read: ‘Longest-running game show 2012 AD’ and, as Kozinski J put it, ‘perhaps failing to see the humour’ White sued (1514).

Since the case arose under Californian law, both statutory and common law publicity claims were available. Under § 3344(a) of the Californian Civil Code, a cause for action will exist against ‘any person who knowingly uses another’s name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness … for purposes of advertising or selling … without such person’s prior consent’. Unfortunately for White, the District Court found that because Samsung had not used White’s name, likeness, voice or signature, it did not infringe on her statutory right. Her common law claim similarly failed because it could not satisfy the test established by Eastwood v Superior Court, namely ‘appropriation of plaintiff’s name or likeness’. On appeal, the decision was reversed in relation to the common law claim. In relation to Eastwood, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that ‘the common law right of publicity is not so confined’ (1397) and hence there was scope beyond the ‘name or likeness formulation’ for the appropriation of identity that Samsung had achieved. The decision significantly expanded the indicia of identity to cover appropriation through ‘impersonation’ or any other means by which to ‘evoke’ identity: ‘It is not important how the defendant has appropriated the plaintiff’s identity, but whether the defendant has done so’ (1398). With Kozinksi J dissenting, the Ninth Circuit rejected a petition for rehearing en banc and on remand a Los Angeles jury found for White and awarded her $403,000 in damages (McCarthy § 4.86).

In his vociferous dissent, Kozinksi J argues the decision is a ‘classic case of overprotection’ and, more worryingly, warns that expansion of the right

impoverishes the public domain, to the detriment of future creators and the public at large. Instead of well-defined, limited characteristics such as name, likeness or voice, advertisers will now have to cope with vague claims of ‘appropriation of identity’ claims often made by people with a wholly exaggerated sense of their own fame and significance (1516).

Kozinksi J also expressed concern over the failure of the defendant’s parody defence. Samsung argued that their use of Vanna White’s image constituted protected speech in the form of parody, citing as authorities successful defences used by Hustler magazine and Drake Publishers defending as parodies their appropriations of famous identities in advertisements. The majority decision, however, did not accept these authorities had been even ‘remotely relevant’ since the former were involved in ‘poking fun’ whereas Samsung was a ‘true advertisement’ and the parodic, ‘spoof’ aspect was ‘subservient and only tangentially related to the ad’s primary message: “buy Samsung VCRs”‘ (1401). In response Kozinksi J asked ‘so what’? (1591). He pointed out that although commercial speech may attract less protection under First Amendment rights, it remains protected ‘nonetheless’ (1591). Commercial parodic speech may perform a valuable social and political role and the right to ‘mock for fun as well as profit’ should be protected (1521). Similar arguments were expressed by Alarcon J in his partial dissent from the majority opinion of the Court of Appeal, which, he said, had given the parody defence ‘short shrift’. Finding the case law relied upon to be ‘unpersuasive’, Alarcon J points out that the parodic advertisements used by the magazines, also involved a ‘purely commercial purpose of selling soft-core pornographic magazines’ (1407). [5]

The decision in White is said to have ‘elicited a storm of controversy over its expansive application of the right of publicity’ (Dawson, 2001: 643). Relevant to this paper on the conditions of possibility for image remix, is the criticism voiced by those arguing that failing to recognise a parody exception threatens to impoverish the public domain. Gretchen Pemberton, for example, suggests the case represents a dangerous precedent, effectively creating ‘a new cause of action against those who parody celebrities’ (99). Instead, Pemberton argues that publicity rights ought to protect parodic use of celebrity image in much the same way as US copyright and trademark law recognise parody as fair use. Pemberton’s critique has clear implications for parodic celebrity remixes. I am thinking here, in particular, of the plethora of Tom Cruise parodies circulating thru video sharing websites together with the notoriously litigious Church of Scientology (Denton, 2008; O’Connell, 2008).

In this section we have traced the evolution of the publicity right in US law, paying particular attention to its origin within privacy and uncertainty in its subsequent treatment though the courts. We examined the right’s scope by reviewing key decisions, the test for identification and possible exceptions to infringement. This provides a useful context from which to examine the Australian approach to protecting celebrity image. Such an examination is valuable since personality rights have recently attracted considerable attention with regard to the Australian media (Tyacke and Walker, 2007), and a number of commentators have called for Australia to adopt an ‘American Style’ right of publicity (e.g. Bowman, 2003; McMullan, 1997; Ralston, 2001).

Section Two: Australian Legal Approaches to the Protection of Celebrity Image

Although Australian law has no direct equivalent to the US right of publicity as a discrete cause of action (Bowman, 2003: n 104), unauthorised use of celebrity image has been protected through a number of statutory and common law provisions including: the tort of passing off; sections of the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) (TPA); copyright and trademark infringement and the tort of defamation. However, as we shall see there are differences between the approaches of the two jurisdictions.

Broadly speaking, the Australian approach to the unauthorised use of celebrity image through the doctrines of ‘passing off’ and the statutory provisions of the TPA, is underpinned by a focus on misrepresentation and misleading or deceptive conduct. This situation contrasts with the US conceptual framework where the focus centres on the proprietary nature of the personality right and, therefore, the cause of action is triggered by ‘taking of property’: there is not the same requirement to prove public deception and misrepresentation (Zapparoni, 2004: 697). In other words, Australia does not grant to celebrities the right to ‘own’ their personality insofar as they ‘do not own the commercial value of their personality’ (Weathered, 2000: 161). As Peter Heerey puts it, ‘Australian law holds there is no property in character or personality’ (Heerey, 1999: 10). In common with the US, however, is a rhetorical focus on what has been called the ‘fruits of labour’ argument (Nimmer, 1954: 216), that is, the ‘economic welfare’ of the particular identity controlling ‘commercial exploitation of personal features which … result from his/her labour’ (Richardson, 2007). Also comparable is the availability, though applied with limited success, of a ‘parody’ type defence. This section traces the development of Australian law for the protection of celebrity image through key illustrative decisions.

A   Passing Off and the TPA

The classic formulation actionable through the common law tort of passing off is one in which a trader is representing his or her goods as those of someone else. The elements required for establishing a cause of action were articulated in the Advocaat case by Lord Diplock in what has been identified as the ‘modern starting point’ (Catty, 1993: 293) for understanding the tort of passing off. In this case, five required characteristics were defined:

a) a misrepresentation;

b) made by a trader in the course of trade;

c) to prospective customers or ultimate consumers of goods or services supplied by him or her;

d) which is calculated to injure the business or goodwill of another trader;

e) which causes actual damage to business or goodwill of the plaintiff

(Venootschap v  Townend).

The common law tort of passing off together with its allied statutory provisions of ‘misleading or deceptive conduct’ under the TPA have been the ‘primary means’ for celebrities to seek protection for unauthorised use of their image (Tyacke and Walker, 2007: 15). [6] Although there are significant procedural and conceptual differences between the two avenues, legal consensus exists that the similarities between the actions justify their joint discussion. Indeed, ‘almost all actions for passing off are brought in tandem with an action’ under s 52 and/or s 53 of the TPA (Richardson, 2007).

Radio Corporation v Henderson: (1960) ‘common field of activity’ unnecessary in passing off

Henderson has been credited with providing the ‘first real judicial recognition of the practice of character merchandising’ (Ricketson, 1990: 193) and for establishing a clear ‘affinity’ between Australian law and the right of publicity (Ralston, 2001: 10). Action was brought by two well known professional ballroom dancers, the Hendersons, for unauthorised use made by a record producer and distributor of their photograph for the cover of a ballroom dance record. Although the pair was not identified on the cover, they were recognised by witnesses familiar with ballroom dancing. Moreover, it was established by expert evidence that the photograph suggested they ‘had endorsed or sponsored the record and had been remunerated … for their photograph being used’ (Radio v Henderson 626). On appeal, the NSW Supreme Court found that passing off had occurred because consumers within the relevant market for the record would assume the cover illustration ‘indicated the plaintiffs’ recommendation or approval of the record’, and the defendant had wrongfully appropriated the plaintiffs’ professional or business reputation ‘by falsely representing that the plaintiffs recommended its product’ (622).

In relation to the development of actions for false celebrity endorsement, the decision’s significance concerns the issue of a ‘common field of activity’. This element had been established by the UK case McCulloch v Lewis in 1947. At trial, Sugarman J followed McCulloch and held that ‘it is essential to show a common field of activity in which, however remotely, both the plaintiff and the defendant are engaged’ (Radio v Henderson 627). The appeal upheld the trial result, but on different grounds. It was not necessary to establish a common field of activity, ‘in which the activities of A and B conflict’. Of critical importance for the protection of image rights, courts following Hendersonrecognised that the ‘lustre of a famous personality’ (Irvine v Talkspor) provides to the market a crucial advertising tool and, moreover, that the ‘common field of activity’ test was not best suited to regulating the increasing power of this sector.[7]

Newton-John v Scholl-Plough (Australia) (1986): Maybelline case and disclaimers

In this case Australian pop singer Olivia Newton-John brought action for passing off and breaching s52 of the TPA against cosmetic company Maybelline for the unauthorised use of her image in advertising. The advertisement in question carried a colour photograph of a young woman, bearing a ‘considerable likeness’ to Newton-John. Indeed this model had answered an advertisement placed by Maybelline for a Newton-John ‘look-alike’ (233). The advertisement included a ‘disclaimer’, stating in ‘very large and striking letters’ the phrase: ‘Olivia? No, Maybelline’. Newton-John’s grievance was that, despite the disclaimer, the prominence given to the photograph of the model and the fact that Newton-John’s name was mentioned twice would lead readers to assume that she had some type of association with the advertisement. Although Burchett J found there was a clear ‘inference’ that there had been an ‘appropriation of the appearance’ of the plaintiff and, further, there was a possibility of ‘subliminal’ deception, Newton-John was unsuccessful in her claim for an injunction. The disclaimer provided grounds for dismissal. It ‘tells even the most casual reader, at even the first glance, that in fact it is not Olivia Newton-John who is represented in the advertisement’. The court could not find evidence of the required deception on the part of Maybelline owing to the disclaimer. The cosmetic company may have ‘made use of’ Newton-John’s ‘reputation to the extent of gaining attention, but not to the extent of making any suggestion of an association’.

While this case suggests the efficacy of disclaimers to avoid legal action in ‘personality’ advertising, this is not always a reliable strategy (e.g. Twentieth Century Fox v SA Brewing). In any event, such defences have attracted criticism on the basis that what is at stake for the celebrity is not misleading or deceptive conduct that would be ameliorated by a disclaimer but, rather, ‘something closer to a “taking without permission”‘ (McMullan, 1997: 86). More generally, such arguments can be used to suggest that Australian law requires stronger protection for celebrity rights since to succeed in the available actions requires a certain degree of artificiality. In passing off, for example, showing ‘misrepresentation’ does not always capture the plaintiff’s complaint.That the public might be confused about the false endorsement of a product is not of itself the complaint. Rather, the celebrity may wish to be paid for their ‘implied support’ of the particular product (Bowman, 2003: 7).

Pacific Dunlop v Hogan: expansion of ‘misrepresentation’

Although there are a number of significant personality and merchandising cases which could be considered in relation to passing off or the TPA, [8] Pacific Dunlop v Hogan is useful to understand the expansion of passing off. It is also worth contrasting with Maybelline, since their facts were ‘largely similar’ (McMullan, 1997: 87) yet the judicial outcome was not. This apparent unpredictability has led some commentators to call for a US style publicity right. (eg McMullan, 1997; Bowman, 2003).In a leading Australian character merchandising case, Paul Hogan sued for passing off and misleading conduct under s52 of the TPA. His complaint concerned unauthorised advertising that Dunlop used for one of their products, Grosby Leatherz shoes. The TV advertisement presented a parody of the well known ‘knife scene’ from the film Crocodile Dundee, the lead character of which was played by Hogan in a manner that was ‘largely an extension of his own personality already widely known through television commercials’ (Pacific Dunlop v Hogan 14)

The advertisement depicted a look alike dressed as Paul Hogan’s character, Mick Dundee, and wearing Grosby Leatherz shoes (Hogan v Pacific Dunlop 409). Instead of saying ‘that’s a knife’, as in the original film, the Hogan character declares to the mugger ‘you call those leather shoes? Now these are leather shoes Grosby leather soft comfortable, action packed leather’ (410). The defence attempted to avoid infringement by ‘miscalling’ theadvertisement a parody. It was difficult to parody a parody Burchett J reasoned: the ‘essence of Mr Hogan’s performance is parody, which can hardly itself be parodied, at least by what would be more accurately described as a parasitic copy — parasitic because its vitality is drawn entirely from the audience’s memory of the original (Pacific Dunlop v Hogan 47). At trial, Gummow J found there was a ‘real likelihood that a substantial number of viewers would have responded to the advertisement’ on the basis that Hogan had ‘some association of a commercial nature with the production of the advertisement’ or with the shoes (Hogan v Pacific Dunlop 426). On that basis he found both passing off and misleading conduct had occurred under s52. The decision was upheld by majority in the Federal Court.

The significance of this case for character merchandising is that it made more flexible the test for establishing misrepresentation within an action of passing off (Ricketson, 1990: 196). Rather than require an overt connection be drawn between the personality and a commercial product, Hogan established that the peculiar nature of character merchandising depended for its success on subtle processes of association. As Burchett J explained, the ‘whole importance of character merchandising is the creation of an association of the product with the character; not the making of precise representations. Precision would only weaken an impression’ (Pacific Dunlop v Hogan 46). Furthermore, law should appreciate the subtle processes in order effectively to regulate the marketplace: ‘it would be unfortunate if the law merely prevented a trader using the primitive club of direct misrepresentation, while leaving him free to employ the more sophisticated rapier of suggestion, which may deceive more completely’ (Pacific Dunlop v Hogan 46).Commentators have read the Hogan decision in varying ways. Scott Ralston, for example, argues the case demonstrates that courts are straining toward an American style right of publicity. As he puts it, ‘the search for a misrepresentation is sometimes artificial’ since it ‘disguises what the courts are really looking for’. Indeed, perhaps a quasi publicity right is already in operation: ‘The Federal court may be, in substance already applying a right of publicity-style approach’ (Ralston, 2001:10). Similarly, Hazel Carty suggests that the decisions in Henderson andHogan demonstrate that Australia has ‘developed a publicity right’ from the former case and, in the latter, has established ‘the equivalent right for proprietors of characters’ (Carty, 2003: 293). Megan Richardson and others, however, suggest that what is being illustrated is a judicial recognition of the subtlety involved in the business of personality or character merchandising, and therefore, greater flexibility offered in dealing with the semantic range of misrepresentation (Richardson,2007: 27).

B   Further protection of image rights in Australia:  Copyright, Trade Marks and Defamation

Although passing off and the relevant provisions of the TPA have been the central legal instruments for protecting personality or character merchandising, there are further statutory and common law mechanisms briefly to consider.

Copyright Certain areas of intellectual property lend themselves conceptually to protecting the exploitation of the celebrity personality (Heerey, 1999: 15). When considered as a right of reproduction, a cause of action could be brought under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) against, for example, unauthorised merchandising (Richardson, 2007: 29). However, the limiting factors need to be acknowledged, namely that copyright subsists in the physical expression of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works or other subject matter rather than in the persona, image or nickname of a person. Furthermore unless a person holds copyright they cannot prevent a work being reproduced or published even if it includes their own image (Alderson, 1997: 4) Thus copyright has been of ‘limited utility’ in regulating personality rights in Australia (Ralston, 2001: 9).

In Telstra v Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance (‘Goggomobil’), for example, Telstra was unsuccessful in their copyright claim against a car insurer for use made of the advertising character, ‘Mr Goggomobile’, which had been created for Telstra. Telstra sued in passing off, misleading or deceptive conduct and copyright in relation to advertisements that Shannons produced which had ‘reprised the character’ (71) from Telstra’s own advertising. They used the same actor as in the original campaign and, according to the court, retained all the features of the Telstra advertisement ‘that made it famous, popular and instantly recognisable’. Although the court decided in favour of Telstra on the grounds of passing off and the TPA, the copyright action failed because, while the offending advertisement conjured up the Telstra advertisement and its ‘ideas or concepts’ it did not ‘reproduce a substantial part of the substance or expression of the “dramatic” events comprising that advertisement’ (48). Goggomobil demonstrates the difficulty of bringing copyright claims to protect character or personality merchandising. Derivative or spin off advertising, as Therese Catanzariti Oppermann points out, which’merely includes some of the characters or some of the events of the original, or a film which is “inspired by” another may not infringe copyright’ (16).

Trade Mark

Trade mark law may also provide an avenue for the protection of character merchandising or personality rights, especially since the reforms enacted in the Trade Marks Act 1995 (Cth). In brief, these reforms shifted the focus from one where the mark acts as a ‘badge of origin’ to an indication of ‘authorised licence, sponsorship or approval’ (Black, 2002: 103). This shift is important in relation to the exploitation of celebrity personality because the nature of celebrity endorsements means that often ‘the celebrity will not be connected in any way to the source or origin of the product’. (Weathered 163). Having to establish that a trade mark indicates the origin of a product in order to qualify for the granting of a trade mark, would not pose a difficultyfor those class of personality endorsements used by Paul Newman, for example, when ‘his face on the label and his signature clearly act as a badge of origin by indicating the source of the product’ (Weathered, 200: 167). However, this statutory provision offered little scope for protecting against unauthorised exploitation when the personality merchandising ‘carries images that are not used in order to indicate the origin of the goods but simply for their own innate appeal’ (Bowman, 2003: 9). In addition to relaxing the ‘badge of origin’ threshold, the 1995 Act also broadened considerably the categories registrable for a trade mark. The criteria for a registrable trade mark were a ‘device, brand, heading, label, ticket, name, signature, word, letter or numeral’ to which were added in the 1995 Act, any ‘aspect of packaging, shape, colour, sound or scent’ (Trade Marks Act 1995 [Cth] s 6).

DefamationAnother legal action to note in relation to personality rights is defamation. The sources of law for defamation in Australia are found through state statute and common law, which is now largely uniform. However, prior to reforms effective from January 2006, the varied law throughout Australia was ‘extremely problematic’ for national media (Butler and Rodrick, 2007: 28). To the extent that defamation protects reputation rather than a proprietary interest in the commercial exploitation of image, defamation is, perhaps, more similar to protection offered by passing off than it is to action under copyright or trademark law. Arguably, however, it is a narrower form of protection than passing off since to succeed the action must establish the public would think less of a person in connection with the offending published material (Bowman, 2003: 8). A personality who wishes to control the use of his/her image in relation to an unauthorised commercial association, for example, could not look to defamation for protection if the endorsement or association does notlower reputation (Catanzariti, 2002: 139). However, protecting endorsement or merchandising capacity may not be the only concern for a public figure. In Ettingshausen v Australian Consolidated Press, for example, a famous rugby player sued over naked photographs of him published in the magazine HQ. Ettingshausen’s argued his reputation was harmed because the public would assume he had consented to the publication of a ‘lewd’ and ‘indecent’ photograph of himself. Although the trial had a complex procedural history, much of it concerned with damages, Ettingshausen was successful in his claim, with defamation providing some control – or at least recompense for – the use of his naked image. [9]

In this section we have examined the main causes of action for the protection of celebrity image in Australia. Although Australia has no distinct right of publicity, there has been significant judicial consideration of the commercial and social power of personality merchandising. However, existing actionshave certain limitations. In summary these constraints relate to establishing misrepresentation within passing off; the idea/expression dichotomy within copyright law; meeting the ‘use as a trade mark’ test within trade mark law; and the limits imposed by the requirement for harm to reputation in defamation.

A case recently before the courts is a useful point on which to conclude this section since it draws together a number of the actions discussed above. In Bingle v Emap Australia, Australian model Lara Bingle brought action against the publishers of men’s magazine, Zoo Weekly, in relation to their use of topless photographs of her posing on a beach, the images carrying the quite shocking caption, ‘I’ll make you come’, presumably a ‘witty’ comment on her promotional work with the Tourism Australia advertisement that asked ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’. Bingle sued for misleading conduct under theTPA; passing off; copyright infringement and defamation. Echoing Ettingshusen, Bingle claimed that the publication included an imputation that she was ‘the sort of model who would allow herself to be photographed for a magazine scantily clad and making an overtly sexual invitation’.  While Bingle consented to posing for the original photographic shoot, she did not condone their publication in the magazine or associated promotions.  This is the sort of dispute that could have implications for the development of Australian ‘personality rights’.

Conclusion: Debates about the Public Domain and the Protection of Celebrity Image

According to McCarthy the time for debate is over, in the US at least. As he puts it with characteristic zeal: the ‘initial phase of questioning what the right of publicity is, and whether it should exist at all, has passed into history’. (McCarthy § 1:34). Michael Madow, however, with equal conviction, threatens to ‘rain hard’ on McCarthy’s ‘parade’ (Madow, 1993: 134). These two legal scholars represent distant points on a spectrum of analysis about the validity and efficiency of the right of publicity. This debate, however, is not limited to the United States with similar arguments occurring in comparable jurisdictions. [10] Australian legislators and courts have regularly been called upon to consider the implementation of a US style ‘right of publicity’. Michael Bowman, for example, is representative of these calls when he writes that ‘clearly many courts in Australia feel that the law should protect against the misappropriation of one’s personality’ and, based on passing off decisions that find misrepresentation or misleading conduct, ‘it is evident that the public assumes such rights already exist’. Like McCarthy, Bowman declares ‘the debate about whether they are necessary would already seem to be concluded’ (Bowman, 2003: 9). Similarly, Ralston evaluates the Australian protective regime for image rights as ‘relatively meagre’ in contrast with the US jurisdictions (Ralston, 2001, 8). Others however, view the Australian approach more positively. David Caudill, for example, argues that contrary to popular academic opinion, the ‘US right of publicity is not as strong as celebrities and professional athletes would like’. Furthermore, ‘Australian’s protective alternatives to the right of publicity’ may in fact ‘accomplish as much’ as the US approaches to publicity rights (Caudill, 2004: 263).

Caudill raises a key issue at stake in the debate surrounding the scope of protection afforded to image rights when he observes that ‘both the property right and the privacy right remain in play in various judicial opinions concerning the right of publicity’ (Caudill, 2004: 267). As discussed, conceptual and legal tensions involved in this so-called divide have been a major point of contention in the literature on regulating celebrity image. Legal judgments such as those in White demonstrate, as Rosina Zapparoni explains, the ‘difficulty courts have in balancing the private property interests of individuals with public access to cultural forms where the property in question is human identity’ (Zapparoni, 2004: 713). In relation to public domain arguments and the ‘labour’ of celebrity production, the rationale advanced for a model of publicity rights based on the proprietary interest in personality often draws on Lockean labour theory. Briefly put, this position argues that entitlement to property flows from labour invested in its creation. The extrapolation to publicity rights is that a celebrity has a proprietary right in their image because of the labour invested in its creation. According to Nimmer this is a ‘first principle of Anglo-American jurisprudence’ and so should protect ‘persons who have long and laboriously nurtured the fruit of publicity values’ (Nimmer, 1954: 216). In Australian debates the majority of those arguing for a distinct right of publicity, use this as the rationale. Ralston, for example, suggests that the ‘celebrity deserves to be rewarded’ for the skill and labour invested in their persona (Ralston, 2001: 10).

A weakness in this argument is its implicit assumption that the image of a celebrity is due to solitary labour. Determining the ‘author’ of celebrity is complex since the star image may be authored, as Rosemary Coombe enumerates, by ‘studios, the mass media, public relations agencies, fan clubs, gossip columnists, photographers, hairdressers, body-building coaches, athletic trainers, teachers screenwriters, ghostwriters, directors, lawyers and doctors’ (Coombe, 1998: 94).  Moreover, Madow suggests that the ‘labour theory’ rationale for publicity rights is an ideological assumption originating from the market of celebrity management itself. He writes ‘the notion that a star’s public image is nothing else than congealed star labor is just the folklore of celebrity, the bedtime story the celebrity industry prefers to tell us and, perhaps, itself’ (Madow, 1993:183). Recent media research supports this view, notable in the increasing number of works which concentrate on the production of celebrity rather than, as had been the case, on the textual analysis of celebrity image, often divorced from economic bases of its creation.  The consequence in recognising the multifarious nature of celebrity authorship is, for a number of commentators, to locate any proprietary right of publicity within the public domain. Recognising the complexity of socio-technical patterns of labour, Kembrew McLeod comments that:

because mass-media audiences are not lifeless, it is no surprise that people draw on … images and texts to actively make sense of their own lives and the world that surrounds them. But “right of publicity” law centralises the celebrity’s decision-making power in determining what he or she “means” to an audience by allowing that celebrity the ability to decide what parts of his or her image to magnify, what parts to distort, and what parts to delete  [however] the celebrity is no more the author of his or her image as it is reconstructed within popular culture than is the fan, whose intertextual associations work to construct meaning for an individual and a community (McLeod, 2006: 656-661).

While critics such as Madow and Coombe advance erudite and cogent arguments for the restriction on the US style publicity right, they do not capture what we might call the ‘D list problem’. We could return to the Bingle case to understand the complexities and to some degree, the shortcomings of the arguments against a publicity right. With all due respect to Ms Bingle, she is not quite an A list celebrity. She is not yet someone who the public has authored in quite the same way as is the case with, for example, Madonna. We cannot easily, therefore, apply the same model that Madow does in relation to the public domain and the ownership of image:

a celebrity like Madonna cannot say of her public image what the carpenter can say of his chair: “I made it.” And because she cannot say this of her public image, she cannot lay a convincing moral claim to the exclusive ownership or control of the economic values that attach to it (Madow, 1993:196).

Although the cause of action for Bingle was in relation to commercial appropriation of image, that was not the entire scope of her complaint. [11] Merely because the public has, to a limited degree perhaps, helped author her image does not justify the manner in which Zoo Weekly treated it. While the parties involved in the defamation action appear to have settled the more general point raised by the case in terms of the ongoing debate over publicity rights might usefully be put as one of ‘personal dignity and autonomy’.  In her sophisticated reconciliation of the bifurcated nature of the debate, Haemmerli argues that we need to recast the strict dichotomy that exists between, on the one hand, a pecuniary, proprietary right of publicity and a personal, non-pecuniary right of privacy on the other hand. She does not view as mutually exclusive these rights nor does she argue for the abolition of one in favour of the other but, instead, suggests the publicity right itself contains ‘both an economic and an autonomy function’. Countering the argument advanced by Madow she reasons that:

The public (or audience’s) investment or participation in the creation of a celebrity’s fame does not necessarily imply an entitlement to use of the celebrity’s identity. Identity remains something intrinsic to the individual, subject to individual control as an autonomy-based property right, no matter what or who has affected its level of fame (Madow, 1999: 423).

Haemmerli’s arguments seems particularly well suited to apply to the Bingle case where, surely, what is at stake is something like ‘dignity’.  As noted above, seeking financial relief for possible damage to revenue does not solve the problematics of this case, which, considering the specific caption used by Zoo, involve quite an abusive treatment of Bingle’s personal dignity.

In recognising a dual nature to the right of publicity – that is an infringement should be actionable to protect both commercial, public interest as well as personal private rights – Haemmerli advances an argument echoing the concerns of contemporary media theory on how celebrity functions within the public domain. These critical perspectives focus on the dynamic relation between celebrity/persona and audience/author suggesting the fields are not, as was once held, completely distinct. Indeed, as this paper has argued, the operation of the celebrity image within commercial, cultural and legal settings, demonstrates that the power of celebrity depends on how this complex interplay is negotiated.  However, during the paper I also pointed out that aspects of the celebrity image, as it is reconfigured through multiple socio-technical platforms, represent a challenge for judicial, legislative and cultural reform. Such reform, operating at both the statutory and symbolic levels governing the circulation of celebrity image, must take seriously the materialities of law. Too often, across institutionalised media theory, law is represented as a question of compliance: a copyright template tacked to a course outline, for example, or the habitual dismissal of law from the critical field of textual analyses, effected by the deployment of terms such as ‘legalistic’; terms intimately embedded in the language of compliance. These rhetorical strategies render law immaterial. However, as argued by the editors of a special issue of Cultural Studies devoted to ‘The Politics of Intellectual Properties’:

intellectual property law matters, materially (since) it disturbs material and epistemological boundaries, recodes existing significations and patterns of information flow, and helps to actualise nascent modes of thought, conduct, affect, expression and embodiment (Striphas and McLeod, 2006: 121-122).

By examining in close detail the judicial treatment and legislative developments of the US ‘right of publicity’ and comparable regulatory frameworks within Australia, I have insisted on the specificities of legal production that structure the materiality of law.

Author’s Biography

Esther Milne teaches in Media and Communications at Swinburne University, Melbourne. She researches celebrity production within the socio-technological contexts of law; and the history of networked postal communication systems. Her forthcoming book, ‘Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence’, will be published by Routledge in 2010.

Notes

[1] Following Rosemary Coombe, unless otherwise stated, the terms ‘persona’, ‘image’, ‘identity’ and ‘personality’ in relation to the term ‘celebrity’ designates a range of character indicia including visual, verbal, aural, graphic and pictorial. See Rosemary J Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law(1998) 335 fn 5. [back]

[2] Two notable exceptions: John Frow, ‘Elvis’ Fame: The Commodity Form and The Form of the Person’  Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7 (1995):131-171; and Kembrew McLeod, ‘The Private Ownership of People’ in Marshall (ed), The Celebrity Culture Reader (2006). [back]

[3]  Pavesich v New England Life Ins Co 50 SE 68 (1905) and Lugosi v Universal Pictures 160 Cal Rptr 323 (1979) (holding that heirs of the actor who played Dracula could not inherit his publicity rights). [back]

[4] New York courts do not recognise a post-mortem right of publicity and have ruled there are no common law rights of privacy or publicity in New York (McCarthy § 6:73.). See also the recent decision concerning estate of Marilyn Monroe in which a New York court ruled ‘publicity rights’ did not survive her death. Shaw Family Archives Ltd. v. CMG Worldwide, Inc., 486 F. Supp. 2d 309 (2007). [back]

[5] A parody defence to publicity rights infringement has had varied treatment in US courts. For judgments where a parody defence has succeeded see Cardtoons LC v Major League Baseball Players Association 95 F 3d 959, 972 (10th Cir, 1996); Burnett v Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp 2007 WL 1662343 (CD Cal 2007); and, although more properly a trademark infringement case, see Mattel Inc v MCA Records Inc 28 F Supp 2d 1120 (1998). [back]

[6] See also Moorgate Tobacco Co Ltd v Phillip Morris Ltd (1984) 56 ALR 193 which ruled out a ‘tort of unfair competition’ for Australia and, effectively, made stronger the need to rely on passing off and the TPA for the protection of celebrity image. [back]

[7] However, as Wickham v Association of Pool Builders (1988) 12 IPR 567 demonstrates, it is not possible to claim unequivocally that Henderson completely removed the ‘common field of activity’ from the tort of passing off. [back]

[8] See eg Hogan v Koala Dundee Pty Ltd (1988) 20 FCR 314 (Paul Hogan successfully sued retailer for using a koala dressed to resemble his Crocodile Dundee character); Hutchence v South Sea Bubble Co Pty Ltd (1986) 6 IPR 473 (music group INXS were successful in their action against  a company selling unauthorised images on t-shirts; disclaimer that the t-shirts were ‘bootleg’ was not sufficient protection for defendants to avoid infringement of passing off and breach of TPA); 10th Cantanae Pty Ltd v Shoshana Pty Ltd (1988) 79 ALR 299 (well known reporter, Sue Smith, failed in her claim for passing off in relation to the use of her name in a video advertisement);  Talmax Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Ltd [1997] 2 Qd R 444 (Olympic swimmer, Kieren Perkins, was successful in his passing  off claim against Telstra for use they made of his image in relation to their advertising); and Sony Music Productions Pty Ltd v Tansing (1993) 27 IPR 640 (Tansing defended a passing off action by use of a disclaimer on bootleg Michael Jackson CDs). [back]

[9] For a detailed review of the case, see David Rolph, ‘Dirty Pictures: Defamation, Reputation and Nudity’ (2006) 10Law Text Culture 101. [back]

[10] See for example the  discussion concerning the Canadian situation, Flagg; discussion concerning the UK, Simon Smith, Image, Persona and the Law (2001). [back]

[11] The defamation claims were heard in December 2006 where Edmonds J dismissed Emap’s motion to strike out claims that Zoo Weekly was an “obscene” and “smutty” publication. However, no further judgments or reports have appeared, suggesting to case has been settled, perhaps confidentially, by the parties. [back]

References

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Catty, Hazel. ‘Character Merchandising and the Limits of Passing Off’, 13 Legal Studies (1993): 289 – 307.

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Coombe, Rosemary J. The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation and the Law (Durham: Duke,1998).

Dawson, Dawn. ‘The Final Frontier: Right of Publicity in Fictional Characters’, University of Illinois Law Review (2001): 635-668.

Denton, Nick. ‘Church of Scientology Claims Copyright Infringement’, Gawker,

January 16^th 2008, http://gawker.com/5002319/church-of-scientology-claims-copyright-infringement

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Flagg, Mitchell A. ‘Star Crazy: Keeping the Right of Publicity Out of Canadian Law’, Intellectual Property Journal 13 (1999): 179-236.

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Frow, John.

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Haemmerli, Alice. ‘Whose Who? The Case for a Kantian Right of Publicity’, Duke Law Journal 49 (1999): 383 – 474.

Heerey, Peter. ‘Character and Personality: Where to for Protection in the Intellectual Property Area?’ Intellectual Property Forum 39 (1999): 8.

Kitzmann, Andreas. Saved From Oblivion: Documenting The Daily From Diaries To Web Cams (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

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McCarthy, J Thomas. The Rights of Publicity and Privacy (looseleaf).

McLeod, Kembrew. ‘The Private Ownership of People’ in Marshall, P. David (ed.). The Celebrity Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 649-665.

McMullan, J. ‘Personality Rights in Australia’, Australian Intellectual Property Journal 8 (1997): 86-95.

Madow, Michael. ‘Private Ownership of Public Image: Popular Culture and Publicity Rights’, California Law Review 81 (1993):127-240.

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Cases

10th Cantanae Pty Ltd v Shoshana Pty Ltd (1988) 79 ALR 299.

Bingle v Emap Australia (No 1) [2006] FCA 1704 (8 December 2006).

Burnett v Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp 2007 WL 1662343 (CD Cal 2007).

Cardtoons LC v Major League Baseball Players Association 95 F 3d 959 (10th Cir, 1996).

Eastwood v Superior Court 149 Cal App 3d 409 (1983).

Erven Warnink Bestolen Venootschap v J Townend & Sons (Hull) Ltd [1979] AC 731 (Advocaat case).

Haelan Laboratories Inc v Topps Chewing Gum Inc 202 F 2d 866 (2nd Cir, 1953); cert denied 346 US 816 (1953).

Hogan v Koala Dundee Pty Ltd (1988) 20 FCR 314.

Hogan v Pacific Dunlop (1988) 83 ALR 403.

Hustler Magazine v Falwell 485 US 46 (1988).

Hutchence v South Sea Bubble Co Pty Ltd (1986) 6 IPR 473.

Irvine v Talksport [2002] 1 WLR 2355.

LL Bean Inc v Drake Publishers Inc 811 F 2d 26 (1st Cir, 1987).

Lugosi v Universal Pictures 160 Cal Rptr 323 (1979).

McCulloch v Lewis A May (Produce Distributors) Ltd [1947] 2 All ER 845.

Martin Luther King Jr Center for Social Change Inc v American Heritage Products Inc 296 SE 2d 697 (1982).

Mattel Inc v MCA Records Inc 28 F Supp 2d 1120 (1998).

Moorgate Tobacco Co Ltd v Phillip Morris Ltd (1984) 56 ALR 193.

Newton-John v Scholl-Plough (Australia) (1986) 11 FCR 233.

Pacific Dunlop v Hogan (1989) 87 ALR 14.

Pavesich v New England Life Ins Co 50 SE 68 (1905).

Presley’s Estate v Russen 513 F Supp 1339 (DC NJ, 1981).

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Talmax Pty Ltd v Telstra Corporation Ltd [1997] 2 Qd R 444.

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But here I am, the man
Who started it all, and I’m glad,
‘Cause I’m number one, original,
I know I’m bad

‘I’m Real’, James Brown

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the James Brown song ‘I’m Real’ (1988) features the man himself lending a vocal turn (or two) to the track. The song contains numerous lyrics regaled from James Brown’s earlier hits (including ‘Make it Funky’ (1971)) and also James Brown vocal samples from ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ (1970) and ‘Get on the Good Foot’ (1972). This chronologic duality is the starting point of the problem that concerns us here. Funkalicious.

The question is simple (even if the answer is not). Why sample James Brown’s voice when the man himself was in the studio recording a vocal? What purpose could it serve, especially when he was already replicating moments from previous hits? During the 1980s, the rise of hip-hop altered the landscape of American popular music. Sampling became a common formal technique, and the music of James Brown was arguably the predominant catalogue source for samples used. James’s frustration at being ‘replaced’ and having his work overtly plundered is evident in ‘I’m Real’. Here, he attempted to out-manoeuvre his new rivals by sampling his own work, thus asserting his status as original author of the sound snippets that were being frequently employed without direct acknowledgement. As the originator, Brown’s ploy was in part to educate fans of hip-hop who may have unknowingly encountered elements of his music, but who remained unaware of the contexts from which those sounds were garnered. The central questions I pose here focus on what the choice to sample himself reveals about Brown’s status as a Soul legend, and whether the contemporaneous James could sincerely live up to the mythic status inherent to the message of ‘I’m Real’ given its self-conscious form. This confusion appears to be an extension of Walter Benjamin’s conception of déjà vu as an acoustic effect – ‘the cool tomb of long ago, from the vault of which the present seems to return only as an echo’ (Benjamin cited in Breyley, 2009: 145) – only here the slippage between past and present is quite literal, involving the discordant imbrication of two divergent temporal states. Via a detailed investigation of the song ‘I’m Real’, I will probe Brown’s playful employment of his own past. His gambit, I will argue, may be read simultaneously as testament to his own glory, and as a signifier that the excesses of egotistic auto-projection were always more distant than they first appeared to be.

‘I’m Real’ is one of Brown’s later 80′s singles, following hits such as ‘Living in America’ (1985). So, the vocal references represent his glory days, especially in the face of these newer, glossily produced numbers – which are a far cry from the raw soul of ‘Please, Please, Please’ (1956). Ironically, the use of sampling represents this ‘progress’ formally, indicating advances in recording technology (arguably at the cost of the music itself). Papa’s got an old bag – and one is expected to be familiar with some parts of it. James was past his prime by this stage of his career. Thus, it makes sense that he would reference his back catalogue while still viable as a charting artist – before he was left ‘outta sight’.

But maybe he could only make this career extension because (ironically) he was regularly sampled in music of the period – as George Cole avers, ‘Brown is one of the most sampled artists in the history of hip-hop music, with more than 650 samples taken from just a dozen of Brown’s tunes’ (Cole, 2007: 327). So, in sampling himself, it appears that he was playing the same game as his hip-hop successors, proclaiming that he was really ‘Real’, or at least better than those who paid tribute to him (the ‘copycats’ in his terms). This is certainly how Rickey Vincent reads the song, stating that ‘James Brown finally responded to the barrage of “biters” who would nibble on his rhythms in…”I’m Real”‘ (Vincent and Clinton, 1996: 87). The 1980s rap scene was an era dominated by large gold medallions, a trait later rejected by numerous artists including Chuck D of Public Enemy, who associated the trope specifically with an insecurity of identity. He critically summarised the preoccupation thus, ‘I got to get a gold chain or I got to get a fly car in order to impress a sister or whatever, in order to impress myself, in order to make people feel good about me’ (Chuck D quoted in Keyes, 2004: 172). This superficial bolstering of self was (and arguably still is) a central trope of hip-hop identity, although such an over-exertion of the fundamentally fragile self is not just played out in physical terms. As Geoffrey Sill points out, ‘there is a marked component of self-aggrandizement and epic boasting in rap’ (1993, 60). If hip-hop has been associated with exuberant posturing to one’s own brilliance, this may have proven an apposite milieu for Brown’s reclamation of the music scene. Who’s the man? Well, surely it is the ‘Godfather of Soul’, the ‘teacher’ (as he so modestly put it). Who could ask for mo’ funk for their money? Yet, as I will go on to demonstrate, this equally seems to mask an ambivalence that makes the Brown persona an unknowable non-space, despite (or indeed because of) the overt designation of how “James Brown” signifies as a figure of musical influence.

One of our ways into this debate should be to pay attention to the motivations behind sampling in the period, and why Brown was such an influential figure. As John Scannell notes, ‘Brown’s resistance to the orthodox…appeal[ed] to the egalitarian musical outlook of a new generation of…DJs and dance music producers’ (Scannell, 2009: 122). While sampling became part of pop music’s evolution, it also had an important social function. Taylor observes that ‘in hip-hop…sampled material to this day tends to be used either as a homage to musical forbears, such as…James Brown, and/or it’s used as a way to establish a kind of musical community’ (Taylor, 2000: 149). Of course, Brown’s use of self-sampling does attempt to establish a communal relationship in the sense that it speaks back to his imitators, and places himself firmly at the apex of the musical hierarchy. Brown, after all, was required to pay tribute only to himself. Where other artists may have used sampling to honour Brown’s influential past, they also (perhaps accidentally) replaced him by regarding him as a legend (of the past). ‘I’m Real’ then acts to assert that James was still a going concern at this stage, entering into a dialogue with the musical forms of the moment.

Other artists used James Brown samples to indicate that he formed part of their roots, one that they had to directly acknowledge through extraction – the implication being that they could not replicate or supersede such material. The problem again then is in Brown’s intentional misuse of the technique, coupling literal sampling with his reproduction of past vocal motifs. His attempt to recreate those moments of past vocal greatness (‘papa’s got a brand new bag’, and so forth) suggests that he was still very much able to produce such material, and thus did not need to use samples. In utilising both present and past in one continuum, he may have been attempting to close the gap, suggesting that there was no noticeable distance between these two states. In that sense, the sampling is not redundant per se, but an excessive self-tribute that works to playfully bolster the self, as well as arguably maintaining a parodic, self-reflexive awareness of the previousness of that greatness. This at once situates him as the origin-point, while also pointing to the potential fragility of that position.

One of the complexities of this stance arises from the lyrical content of the song. There is, according to ‘I’m Real’, ‘nobody out there good enough to take the things’ Brown has. Except maybe the tense of this sentence is wrong – coming after a lengthy spell in prison, perhaps he should have been referring to those things he ‘used to have’. This is certainly the implication inherent in Daddy-O of Stetsasonic’s observation that sampling ‘was mutually beneficial to both the sampler and sampled, as it revived the careers (and bank accounts) of outmoded and pensioned-off musicians, predominantly the Godfather of Soul’ (Daddy-O, quoted in Bernado, 2007: 152). Brown’s jibing lyric ‘better take my voice off your record ’til I’m paid in full’, hints towards his acknowledgment of the economic dimension here, especially since this line is coupled with the handing over of cash in the music video that accompanies ‘I’m Real’. Yet it equally seems to dismiss hip-hop artist’s desire to ‘pay’ homage to their influences, or at least discredits such attempts. Brown’s version of ‘paying dues’ necessitates the maintenance of his success over his hip-hop protégés in the musical hierarchy (rather than the literal paying of royalties). Ironically, James’s cribbing of their new style, albeit influenced by the soul he ‘invented’ (as he puts it in the lyrics of ‘I’m Real’), was to give him his last chart single success. The self-destructiveness of this decline is meted out again in the music video where Full Force retrieve the James Brown records the DJ-wannabes are playing, and snap them – destroying Brown’s own back-catalogue. Maybe Brown’s claim that there was ‘nobody out there good enough to take the things I have’ was erroneous because he did not bargain on himself being ‘good’ enough to have ever had a firm grasp on them.

But what exactly was he claiming that he was better at? I am sincerely hoping that ‘it’ was not using samples, because ‘I’m Real’ really does not do that very well. One would be forgiven for breaking out in a ‘cold sweat’, or ‘getting up’ on the bad foot on hearing this particular number. Maybe the ‘it’ inquestion was being James Brown (aka the Funkmeister General). However, in order to make this case, he had to embellish his fading self by culling parts of his previous SuperBadness, proving that he was not that good at that either. Perhaps he was aiming his message solely at the ‘copycats’ (even if doing so entailed the need to replicate his own material), rather than attempting to re-conquer the charts. Brown’s own declaration that ‘”I’m Real” is the biggest record I’ve had in 15 years in the United States’ may be read as a statement of surprise given that the contemporary audience ‘had him playing hits he recorded 25 years ago’ (Jet, 1988: 60).

This is a crux-point of ontological confusion – in asking the contemporaneous James Brown to recreate moments of past glory, the audience of 1988 were denying the current greatness of his musical talent in search of something no longer strictly present. Again, we may wish to draw direct parallel tothe motivations of sampling. Mark Katz states that:

Even if the sampled musicians were to perform their chopped and looped parts in concert (an unlikely prospect!), they themselves could not exactly reproduce the original…even if it were somehow possible to recreate the samples, to do so would be to miss the point…it is the sample – not the live performance – that is the real thing (Katz, 2004: 154-155).

Again then, we are faced with the problem of James re-enacting himself, both in the studio and in concert. Such a disregard of temporal change (on behalf of both audience and performer) leaves us with a situation of horrific potential.

One means of seemingly easing the problem of anachronistic semi-present James Browns is to treat the technique as an extension of his musical milieu, his ‘willing embrace of “illogic” in the face of a dogmatic image of musical thought’ (Scannell, 2009: 120), and his persistent demands on bandleaders to make ‘something out of nothing or something out of any combination of things’ (Wesley, cited in Scannell, 2009: 119). Sampling himself then appears to fit the same logic of musical construction that entailed precisely the (re)combination of disparate and unexpected elements that was central to Brown’s musical oeuvre. Alternatively, we may read it as a joke of sorts, although it does not strictly follow that the use of sampling/repetition of his own lyrics was a self-reflexive ‘ironic thang’. Sure, there was always a sense of humour in his swagger, not least in his onstage dying/resurrection routine (documented in Wolk, 2004: 92-3). But was he being humorous, or was this indicative of egotism? If we read Brown as playful instead of simply narcissistic, the song’s statement ‘I know I’m bad’ takes on entirely different connotations, even if this particular single was one Lazarus-style re-entrance too many. Indeed, the self-praising lyrics may be too extreme to be taken seriously. His accusation that his rivals ‘steal my rhythm and my style, and you think you’re god’ suggests that his style and rhythm make him the god that they want to be (as if, by mimicking his position, they now believe themselves to be at his level). Rather than taking this too gravely, it may be indicative of Brown’s self-referential sensibility, in which ‘surface’ in privileged ‘over depth, and play over seriousness’ (Prior, 2009: 81).

At first it may appear that ‘I’m Real’ was not intended as a pun because the irony is missing, but the case may not be as direct as this. Let us briefly sojourn to look at a previous single to illustrate my point. ‘Too Funky in Here’ (1979) was the perfect opportunity for an ironic treatment. He could have made it an operatic ballad, or taken on some other form that was not at all funky, suggesting that he was so funky, that it is beyond our ability as listeners to distinguish what is or is not funk anymore. After all, if anyone could have re-investigated the parameters of what funk was, it should have been the Godfather of Soul. But, alas, ‘Too Funky’ is…well…just funky enough (I do not suppose it would have been so successful if it had been entitled ‘Adequately Funky’, or ‘My Funk will Suffice’ though). Of course, we may wish to read this song in another sense – its central conceit hinges on a dualism of form (Funk music) and linguistic play (funky meaning “smelly” – including Brown’s calls for ‘air freshener under the drums’) that can be interpreted in a number of ways. It can either be read as a matter of self-mockery (as in “my music stinks”) which directly tempers the self-praise he embodied in his status as legend. After all, Brown’s band-mates often criticised James’s ‘musical shortcomings’, and he displayed a ‘frank ambivalence toward[s]‘ the ‘distinction between “good” and “bad” musicianship’ (Scannell, 2009: 118,123). There is every chance then that this auto-commentary was inextricable from Brown’s lyrical opus as an extension of his self-interest. Alternatively, and in a similar sense to ‘I’m Real’, it may be an accusatory statement. In this light, the song declares that the contemporaneous musical climate is in need of change (‘open up the door y’all!’) because the market has become saturated with imitators. If that was what he meant by it being ‘too funky in here’, the implication is that (as commander of when the atmosphere has exceeded its funk-potential) he was still the controlling force central to the debate.

The problems we have so far encountered – of past versus present and a potentially humorous or critically ironic version of excessive self-grandeur – are equally articulated in ‘I’m Real’s promotional video. The video begins with a variety of James Brown impersonators practicing together at ‘Copycat Studios’, while DJs gasp in awe at finding a James Brown LP to spin. From the start then, even before Brown and Full Force enter to bring ‘the payback’, this is framed as a world entirely revolving around the Brown persona – as if ‘Copycat Studios’ does not have anyone else to mimic. It should not surprise us that the Brown-ego should infect the environment of the video, as the lyrics explicitly tell us ‘this is my world’. Thus, walls are lined with his pictures, and people on the street corners hold and point to posters of his visage.

Importantly, this also connotes that he is current, ‘street’, and still of relevance to ‘the people’ in a profound way (unlike, presumably, those anonymous copycats). This connection with the streets is magnified by his line ‘can I take it to the bridge?’ being met by Full Force’s specification – ‘yeah the Brooklyn bridge’. Furthermore, the city is tied directly into a melding of past and present. A monochrome shot of the Apollo Billboard advertising ‘James Brown and the Famous Flames’ is intercut (sampled and re-organised) with the same sign (this time in colour, thus signifying the present) advertising ‘James Brown and Full Force’. Crucially, both images have been filmed in the present, evidenced by surrounding detail that remains unchanged across the shots, one simply being rendered in black and white. The confusion between past images and present ones is thus further problematised, making a reinvention of the past in the present seem all the more implicitly plausible. The world infected by Brown’s multi-temporal personae, rendered via visual sampling, manifests Michel Foucault’s vision of the ‘accidental, transformational and discontinuous in the “profusion of entangled events” that constitutes “the world we know”‘ (Foucault quoted in Breyley, 2009: 148).

Later in the video, the impersonator we met in the opening sequence is stripped of his wig and jacket. These superficial markers designate ‘James Brown-ness’ in this climate, and only draw attention to James’ own façade of that same ‘James Brown-ness’ elsewhere in the video. That the lyrics discuss ‘steal[ing] my arms and my legs’ while the viewer is shown the limbs of the impersonator blurs the line between ‘genuine’ and ‘fake’ even further. Thus, it becomes thematically difficult to separate the original Brown from his replacement, and this is the logical result of sampling given Nick Prior’s observation that ‘if the digital sampler was postmodernism’s musical engine, then hip-hop was its recombinant form, and the erosion of divisions between original and copy the celebrated consequence. Pop music had become an engorged repository of itself’ (Prior, 2009: 81, my emphasis). Brown enacts exactly this self-reflexivity through his over-wrought persona.

This displacement is manifested elsewhere in the video for other means. The video ends with a lacklustre band (notably all white, which may provide another critical commentary on the 1980s music scene in a racial sense) performing ‘Please Please Please’ in the most uninspiring fashion they can, their manager asking for ‘more of that James Brown mystique, magic, zeal, conviction’. Again, aggrandisement of the Brown persona is key, even though James himself is only present off-camera as teacher (he suggests that the ‘kid’ needs ‘more soul’). Here, his usurpation and absence from the musical scene appears to be inevitable, his physical disappearance meaning that his didacticism has to live on through the sound of his voice alone, reminding us that his recordings have been a prevalent influence on the musical climate during his incarceration prior to this single.

Another kind of displacement is employed via visual sampling. Over the lyrics ‘I’m number one, original’, we are treated to images of James performing as a young sensation in the early 1960s. In the same way that the vocal samples juxtapose temporally divergent versions of the same man, his youthful stage presence is directly compared to his older self strutting awkwardly (even back-sliding into a member of Full Force at one point). Moreover, just as Brown does not live up to his previous status as a dancer, he also singularly fails to lip sync with the recorded vocal (perhaps he should have changed the lyrics of the song to read ‘I ain’t taking no lip…synching lessons’). If this is intentional, it may be read in several ways – firstly, it may be a dig at those that have to utilise his recorded voice instead of their own, and this is augmented by shots of the DJ who mouths along to the sample ‘J-J-James Brown’ throughout the video. Secondly, it may take a swipe at the trend for lip synching in pop music during the 1980s, implying that the technique is inauthentic compared with the talent and effort of Brown’s youthful stage performances (which are directly shown in the video). Finally, it may be read as a mode of further accentuating the gaps between the physical presence of Brown himself in 1988, and the recorded instance of his vocal performances (for which he will be remembered), which in some sense transcend time, blurring with and becoming indistinguishable from the past.

Let us return to this formal issue as raised by the recorded song then. The problem remains: why use a sample instead of the real James? Even if past his prime, the Sex Machine frequently impersonates himself throughout the song (‘can I take it to the bridge?’). The combination of this imitation alongside the presence of the Real voice of James Brown-past simply makes permanent a testament that he was releasing material as a shadow of his former self. Furthermore, there is an inherent problem with the song being entitled ‘I’m Real’, when relying on these sound-bites. It is not that it is not “really” James Brown that we are listening to, but that the sample (contextualised beyond his previous glory), although authentic, is somehow less ‘Real’ than the James recording live in the studio. Yet, arguably, the use of the sample is more genuine than the impersonation of his previous self. That is to say, the authenticity of the sample itself is not in question. It is certainly more contextually honest than the ‘past-it’ James pretending to be himself as a younger man (although this continuation of his career on the basis of his past glory could be deemed as exemplifying this same issue).

The argument is not one regarding the use of samples against live music, more of context and motive. Sampling, especially the looping of sound, can produce new and unexpected re-imaginations of those sonic instances, not least in combination with other sampled sounds. The loop allows the presence of recognisable rhythm in its conformity to a time-schema (a tempo, and the limits of the sample-loop). This is no less true when sampling is used in conjunction with live musicians. However, the difference between live music and sampling is not one of ease, it is one of rhythmic structure. The looping of sound creates its own ordinances of rhythm through repetition. Live musicians seek to perform a rhythm, and this performance is at the whim of the individual musician’s ability to accurately enact that moment. Of course, when it has been recorded, the moment is made permanent, and once that is the case,those moments can be re-investigated through their deconstruction and recontextualisation via sampling. This is especially true in Dance culture, where remixing has become a normative technique (Hull, 2004: 61) that allows artists to release multiple reinterpretations of their own work (Prior, 2009: 82).

So what is the problem with Mr. Brown doing the same? Well, for a start, Dance music is most often constructed from samples and sound-bites in the first instance, even if they are created by the artist themselves. So, the form itself invites remixing without re-performance per se. In the case of the indiscriminate littering of vocal catchphrases in the face of a new live performance, as found in ‘I’m Real’, the problem is not so much ethical as uncanny. It concerns the plundering and resurrection of a now absent, yet strangely present and disembodied James Brown. The ‘Real’ crux is where there is a collapse of space and time. Here, James inhabited the studio with his auditory doppelganger, a version of his selfhood that was no longer present (he proved it by replicating it). Just because that previous selfhood has been committed to tape, DAT, vinyl, or CD, and thus made permanent, it does not make the conflict between two anachronistic James Browns any less problematic – it only exacerbates the issue. This is especially true as, for the most part, he was re-performing these catchphrases live in the context of the new song, rather than sampling them all (would this have been worse?).

Maybe this song was intended as a direct formal critique, attacking ‘discourses of authorship and authenticity’ inherent to ‘pop’s sense of itself as trading in talent and originality’ that in part hinges on ‘the immediacy and presence of the live performer’ (Prior, 2009: 81). Brown’s hyperbolic image may be read as having reached its peak in the context of ‘I’m Real’ as part of an über-critique of popular music that was entirely in keeping with his earlier creativity. Also, innovations in musical technology (from microphones and the phonograph, to digital sampling) have been historically met with criticism and misunderstanding because they so often appear to undermine ‘ideas of the unique performance and presence of the body’ (Prior, 2009: 86). However, rather than being part of Brown’s musical masterplan, it is more likely to be part of his experimental outlook or talent for ‘naively employing’ techniques and musical tropes to ends ‘for which they were never intended’ (Scannell, 2009: 130).

Perhaps the problems ultimately stem from the song being so ironically titled – although re-titling the song ‘I Was Real’ would introduce another set of problems. Alternatively, there is a distinct possibility that the predicament is sourced in the on-stage routine of collapse-and-return he so often performed as a young, vital man, but was unable to continue into his old age. The feigned heart-attack or collapse would have been an inappropriate stage device for James to enact during performance in the years before his death, simply because of the threat of its authenticity – that it might be for ‘Real’. Maybe I cannot let go of the fact that James himself starred in the BMW sponsored short film Beat the Devil (Tony Scott, 2002), in which James is depicted as having originally made a Robert Johnson-style pact with Lucifer to obtain his talent, and then has to challenge the Prince of Darkness (played by an exuberantly camp Gary Oldman) to a car race in order to gain eternal youth, and return to a state of his former prowess. It should be noted that throughout the film his lines were predominantly culled from his song lyrics, extending the playfulness located in ‘I’m Real’. This performance, 14 years after ‘I’m Real’ graced the charts, may have been the key indicator that the single (and the Godfather of Soul persona) always was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. We might even read this role as a retrospective revision of a previously sincere statement of (arguably misplaced) self-confidence in his return to the music business after his incarceration. Alternatively (and most cruelly), one may interpret this as the final manifestation of Brown’s lack of self-awareness – that he believed himself to still be the ‘teacher’, even when occupying the mythic space that only legends (inherently of the past) can.

In avoidance of such a judgement, I am more inclined to insist that the problem lies, in essence, with the paradox of recontextualising the permanence of a past moment. Prior’s observation that in the evolution of electronic music ‘the synthetic sign had replaced the organic referent to become the “real”‘ (Prior, 2009: 81) is particularly apt, especially given the contemporaneous issue of James’s organic decline from the stasis of former glory manifested by his recorded and hauntingly still-present self. As ‘I’m Real’ was released over two decades ago, the clash I have been examining seems to be all the more persistent. Its stasis ensures that the conflict of temporally divergent James Browns is becoming ever-distant from the listener’s contemporary replaying of that recorded moment, stressing the permanence of the problem. Yet, whenever the hit is returned to, the listener is faced afresh with the impossibility of two ever-absent Browns simultaneously inhabiting a shared time-space. Despite this paradox, the song itself remains tangible or ‘Real’. In case one needs convincing, (the now sadly deceased) James is still ready to tell us so, many times. His ‘reality’ is stressed by his multi-chronological presence, however arbitrary its implementation may appear to be. Mother popcorn, y’all.

Author’s Biography

Steve Jones attained a doctoral degree for his thesis Selfhood as Instance of Horror: Ontology, Ideology, and Narratives of Body-Terror from the University of Sussex, England, where he teaches within the department of Film and Media. His research interests include Horror film and literature, pornography, gender studies, feminism, post-structuralism, discourses of the body, and existential philosophy.

References

Bernado, Shawn. ‘Eric B. & Rakim’, in Mickey Hess (ed.) Icons of Hip-Hop (Westport, CN: Greenwood Publishing, 2007).

Breyley, Gay. ‘Music as a Model for Postmodern Textual Analysis’, New Formations 66 (2009): 144-157.

Cole, George. The Last Miles: The Music of Miles Davis 1980-1991. (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2007).

Hull, Geoffrey P. The Recording Industry Second Edition. (London: Routledge, 2004).

Jet. ‘James Brown Survives Troubled Marriage and Personal Problems with Hit Album, Successful Tour’, Jet 74.23 (1988): 58-60.

Katz, Mark. Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

Keyes, Cheryl L. Rap Music and Street Consciousness (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

Prior, Nick. ‘Software Sequencers and Cyborg Singers: Popular Music in the Digital Hypermodern’, New Formations66 (2009): 81-99.

Scannell, John. ‘James Brown – The “Illogic” of Innovation’, New Formations 66 (2009): 118-133.

Sill, Geoffrey M. Opening the African-American Mind: Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Higher Education (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993).

Taylor, Timothy D. ‘Music at Home, Politics Afar’, in Case, Sue Ellen, Case et al. (eds). Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2000).

Vincent, Rickey. Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996).

Wolk, Douglas. Live at the Apollo (London: Continuum, 2004).

Psycho maniac interblend, shoot it up!

Ever since punks were spotted walking through the rain soaked dystopic future streets in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner(1981), a certain image of punk has been associated with ‘the future’; a kind of futuristic punk chic that also clearly owes something to the future agro of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the Class of 1984 (1982), where punks ruled the roost in a high school teen movie set in the year of Orwell’s famous novel. We also recognise the post apocalyptic mohawked road warriors of Mad Max 2 (1981) and not to mention countless other mid-eighties sci-fi video fare, where the futuristic punk with heavy eyeliner and day glow hair has made an appearance.

The images of this punk-inspired look from an already exhausted dystopic future must have activated the imagination of Tony James, the guitarist from UK punk band Generation X. While Malcolm McLaren is often credited for shaping the image of UK punk in the form of the Sex Pistols, it was Tony James who reshaped and re-fitted punk into a remixed, recombinant new wave Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

These days Sigue Sigue Sputnik (SSS) are often ignored and relegated to the receiving end of jokes by smug comedians who make fun of the 80s, citing the likes of Flock of Seagulls and bad 80s hair. Even back in 1986 TheNew Musical Express in particular seemed to loath SSS. Perceived  as a giant manufactured media hoax, a scam, a vacuous collection of fashion models posing as musicians, ‘WOULD YOU PAY &#1?$3&* 4 MILLION FOR THIS CRAP?’ screamed one NME cover in February 1986. SSS deserve more credit frankly. Their music and media constructed image was highly unique and perverse at the time and can be identified as one of the critical morphologies of an unacknowledged micro history of remix and sample culture.

James was clearly influenced by McLaren’s own manipulation of the media and Situationist sensibility. With a high dose of camp humour and cynicism James set to work on what was to be the ultimate remix band of the 1980s. With the Sex Pistols iconic call of ‘No Future’, SSS was a look and music of the future beamed back in time, Terminatorstyle, to the present of 1986. It is Bladerunner in particular, with its massive billboards, future product placement, Tokyo inspired neons, faceless multi conglomerate corporate interests and advertising for off-world colonies, whereSSS could very comfortably find themselves.

Taking their name form a mid 80s Russian street gang meaning ‘burn burn satellite’, SSS was a satellite transmission of a multitude of signals. Their moniker of the sputnik, an off- world defunct Russian satellite transmitting and receiving information, is entirely apt for SSS. Images and messages from the past are picked up and remixed in the future via satellite communications for consumption in the present. There is also something appropriate and fitting in the origin of the band’s name being derived from a Russian street gang laundering  stolen money, which seems to sit so well for SSS. The notion of stealing, appropriating and re-using the material of others for their own purposes. It comes as no surprise given that one of SSS’s many media catchphrases was ‘Fleece the world’.

Indeed everything about SSS was about remixing pre-existing genres, fashions and iconography.  They are the bastard child of Ziggy Stardust  and David Bowie’s Starman. SSS was the band who fell to earth to an unsuspecting public, their overloaded image of excess literally cannibalised from a vast range of others. They were a a hyper bricolage of drag queens, T-Rex and glam rock, to Mad Max and the quiff and pelvic gyrations of a futuristic Elvis, IDmagazine fashion spreads and New Wave hair- gelled gender – bending she males, to Russ Meyer’s oversexed Ultra Vixens, to Japanese manga and anime, to John Waters, and Divine and Jayne Mansfield, to the video game Hacker, to 50s rocker Eddie Cochran, the trash culture of The Cramps and to the cable TV pirate and sci-fi sex.  Like classic rock on retro radio stations, the references and combinations just keep on coming.

Death wish crazy, crazy

SSS represented a certain look of punk inspired glam taken to its logical conclusion, appropriating the hacker, the information pirate and the video nasty along the way. This was futuristic cyber punk with an extreme appetite for pop culture. Inspired by the comic book sci-fi fictions and themes of a post apocalyptic society, overpopulation, the breakdown of institutions, to multi-national corporations controlling the populace to wanton mayhem, destruction and ultra violence.

The often tired and overused icons of remix culture, from Elvis to B grade movies were given the Sputnik overhaul, no longer appearing as appropriated imagery of cool and camp kitsch. This was sci-fi Elvis 1990, Elvis reinvented into the future as if he had survived all those fried peanut butter sandwiches. A steady diet of early VHS and Betamax sci-fi movies helped pave the way for members of SSS to appear like they had just walked off the set of the 80′s post apocalyptic sci-fi exploitation flicks mentioned previously.

SSS were possibly one of the first pop culture incarnations of cyberpunk in all its clichéd, overstated and over saturated glory, the children of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). SSS plugged into the obsessions of early technological developments from portable VHS video cameras and recorders, brick sized mobile phones to Atari computer games, Sony walkmans and of course the sampler. In their own way SSS were precursors to the contemporary fixation and insatiable appetitive for all things digital. Their modus operandi was consistently to appear on the cutting edge of everything before it happened.

SSS positioned themselves as ultra capitalist, satirical media whores giving new meaning to the word hype. They bizarrely and self consciously fused their own image with super, over hyped corporate advertising and capital expenditure [The hype around SSS at the time was that they signed a contract with EMI for 4 million pounds in 1986]. SSS conflated both the real and a more playful futuristic scenario, in which the corporation controlled and over determined every conceivable emergent youth subculture, as commodified, pre-packaged, and force-fed to the consumer.

SSS produced the ultimate remix album of 1986,  Flaunt it.  The vinyl LP was packaged in a box that resembled more a futuristic Japanese toy, [labeled 21st century toy] than a music album. If SSS looked like no other band, their album also didn’t look or sound like any other album. Auctioning off space in between tracks for advertising, Flaunt itcontains ads for ID Magazine [with it's own slogan 'A cliché crush up of the 21^st century', perfectly describing theSSS recombinant sensibility] and studio line from L’Oréal. In vinyl space they didn’t sell to advertisers SSS put together their own mock adverts next to brief interstitials and corporate messages from Sputnik headquarters:

Sex, technology, excitement, records, films, products, real estate and video games, Sigue Sigue Sputnik provide all this and more. Let Sputnik world enterprises handle your ultimate fantasy, for further information contact the Sputnik corporation…Pleasure is our business (Flaunt it)

Firebomb boogie dance on dance on

Tony James’ initial plan for SSS was never to actually play and release music, but simply to insert themselves into the hype machine that was the UK music press at the time. The idea of a virtual band that existed only through its media constructions is fascinating considering this was the mid 1980s. SSS were Ziggy-inspired future legends, cyber punk superstars for the new millennium who could barely play a note. However after James assembled the members of SSS based on their appearances, they quickly coined the phrase ‘The fifth generation of Rock and Roll’ and went about fusing their overloaded image with a sound to match the hype.

SSS famously edited a VHS mash up of  found video material to accompany their first demo Love Missile F1-11, producing a remix of The Terminator Desperate Living, Assault on Precinct 13 and other assorted sci-fi movies and material from TV, complete with dialogue and gunfire from the original footage. A move that set the tone for the SSSsound, which heavily re used and appropriated material via the first generation of samplers. Their use of the sampler and its stuttering, repetitive sequencing is so overused on Flaunt it that the album almost functions as a technical demonstration of the sampler itself.

In 1985, TV and movie references went flying from spaghetti westerns to Dirty Harry as the explicit use of the sampler could be heard in the tracks of ex Clash’s Mick Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite (BAD). It’s no surprise that Jones was instrumental in refining the sputnik sound.  He apparently gave Tony James a Roland Synth guitar (renamed Space guitar 2000) that could trigger a sequencer which helped lay the foundations for SSS. The sampler is of course the perfect technology for SSS, for they were exactly that – a sampler, a technological device for digitally recording and sampling pre-existing sounds made flesh. The samplers in the mid 1980s were particularly appropriate, since their limited sampling capabilities of only a few seconds, gave way to a barrage of sound bites, micro samples and blip verts. SSS’s own brand of music, had something also in common with that other underrated remix artist of the early 80s - Adam Ant and his branding of his own ‘ant music’. SSS played self consciously in 1986 with what music would sound like coming out of a nightclub in the 21st century.  Like Kraftwerk, their brand of futurism extrapolated the present and the past into the future.

SSS’s sound also clearly owes a great deal to the New York No Wave  of Alan Vega and Martin Rev’s Suicide. So much so, in fact, that many of the songs on SSS’s Flaunt it almost appear as if they are channeling and remixing Rev’s distorted, repetitive drum machine.

SSS were part of that other technological revolution in the early 1980s, video. The ability of early VHS recorders to record, overdub, erase and re-combine broadcast TV seems to infuse much of the SSS mindset. Like experiencing cable TV for the first time with its hundreds of potential options, possibilities and re-combinations. SSS fell in love with the new electronic landscape. Cable, broadcast, pirate and Sputnik TV, SSS were indeed a hijacked satellite transmission from another time and place.

To complete the hybridised mash up that was SSS, disco producer Giorgio Moroder produced Flaunt it, who was known more for his driving, pulsating disco anthems such as Donna Summers I feel love. Moroder, also well known for his film soundtracks, approached Flaunt it like an unfolding sci-fi movie sound score starring SSS. Much of the publicity at the time for the album saw SSS in ads for constructed and fictitious sci-fi movies. Just like their visually overloaded image, SSS’s mutant strain of new wave Electro Disco No wave Pop Punk Glam provided a juicy cross section of musical styles and subcultures happening all at once. Just as SSS were all about representations, their music too attempted to represent as many genres as possible.

This idea of multiple references occurring simultaneously is at the heart of the brilliant perversity of SSS. It is this inventive intertextual, hyper mixed- sampledelica and the spaces which it produces in between, through an onslaught of pop cultural signposts, that guarantees such a dense and hybrid offspring. Everything, every move, every sample, every outfit is a reference, is a signifier of something else. With lyrics on Flaunt it that sound more like provocative pop advertising slogans, High tech sex and rockets Baby, Intravenous USA , hips and lips and beauty queens, SSSinserted themselves into the vernacular of sub cultural catch phrases and future speak of 1986.  Apart from lyrics,SSS delivered out the sound bites for the media in the form of Pure sex, pure style, The future is now, I am the ultimate product! Affordable firepower!

Excessive, and hysterical, everything came under fire for SSS, from the image of the band, to record companies, to music, to branding, to the video clip and marketing. Their video clip for Love Missile F1-11 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk30a0qsVIk) sees members of the band arriving in Limousines together with their clip for 21^st century boy which sees them leaving the scene in their sputnik helicopter in an overblown image of superstardom. The sale of sputnik T-shirts and paraphernalia, all before anyone had heard their music, was based on how they appeared in the press. SSS was remix before remix, before there was a name for this thing called sample culture. They anticipated YouTube mash ups and the ‘digital revolution’ with its oversold and over hyped ‘must have’ accoutrements of iPods, mp3′s, laptops and iPhones. SSS were the greatest parody of the digital revolution before it even happened.

SSS’s obsessive appropriation and recombinant hyper mix approach, was perhaps a sign of the heady days of the 1980s where notions of original authorship took a backseat to the collision and implosion of disparate cultural forms reconfigured and rearranged into new combinations. True to their name SSS was a satellite that eventually burnt out and existed only for a brief moment, releasing only one more album with the original lineup, ‘Dress for Excess‘ (in 1988). However SSS have now bizarrely reformed in a variety of incarnations and permutations, one version in the late 1990s with Sputnik: Next Generation and again in 2001 with the perfectly titled SSS album Piratespace. In 2003 the remix came full circle with David Bowie undertaking a cover of SSS’s Love missile F1-11.

SSS have also have undertaken – you guessed it -  a number of remixes of other artists works.  In 2004, sputnik vocalist Martin Degville formed Sputnik2  a solo project  with a variety of other collaborators. Finally in 2002 SSS’sLove Missile F1-11 was featured in the video game Grand Theft Auto; a fitting choice for the leaders in grand theft audio.

At times SSS now receive the ‘they are so bad they’re good’ variety of critical appraisal, reducing them to 80′s kitsch and bad taste. However this is missing the point entirely. The perception and appreciation of SSS has shifted over the years, from outright derision by the musical press to critical acclaim. As one NME writer in 2001 put it:

‘The year 2001, horror of horrors, actually finds the group strangely  relevant. By some time-lapse glitch in the universe, the world that Sputnik  foresaw has come to pass and their revenge, while sweet, has a sad undertow.’ (Dele, 2001)

In 1992, U2 toured the world with the Sputnik-inspired series of concerts, Zoo TV. Appearing very much like it was 1986 and SSS were at the helm, including hyped up pop slogans, cannibalised satellite TV broadcasts and sensory overload all of which was very reminiscent of SSS.

SSS were indeed ahead of the game, as their official Sputnik website exclaims, ‘History will prove us right’. They need to be written back into history in the context of contemporary remix culture. It is with hindsight some twenty years later that the real importance of SSS can now be seen and heard. A Google search for SSS reveals a vast collection of information and fan sites devoted to the group. Indeed It was many of these fans which inspired James to reanimate the sputnik Frankenstein monster in the late 1990s. In their own way, SSS have found their ultimate home as a digitised entity, forever re-circulating in orbit in cyberspace.

Author’s Biography

Ian Haig works at the intersection of visual arts and media arts. His work explores the strangeness of everyday reality. His practice focuses on the themes of the human body, devolution, mutation, transformation and psychopathology. He lectures in Media Arts in the School of Art at RMIT University.

References

Fadele Dele, ‘Sigue Sigue Sputnik: 21^st century boys: The best of/Piratespace’, NME, 12 February, 2001.

Sputnik World website,http://www.sputnikworld.com.

New Musical Express, http://www.nme.com.

‘What the reader sees will not be what he hears’

James Joyce may have said this of Finnegans Wake

‘Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on a while. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then write a bit…’

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981:65

Script Don’t get me wrong. Australians make a lot of very fine and worthy films. In the torrid vernacular of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia The Movie, Crickey, you’d have to be a drongo not to know that Aussies make a shitload of bloody ripper flicks – strewth, they’re bonza mate, they’re really fair dinkum yarns with the best scenery and actors and stories that this bloody great big brown land has to offer. They’re absobloodyfuckinlutely faaaaannnntastic. Mate. Cobber. The only problem is nobody actually seems to want to see them. Now, none of the following will be news to most of you but for the sake of the argument let’s look at some figures. Australian-produced feature films have accounted for an average of just 5.1 per cent of gross takings at the Australian box office in the past 15 years. That’s $511 million out of a total of $10.5 billion. Only once in that period did the Australian share reach 10 per cent and that was in 1994, and largely due to the success of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding. In 2001, a record $63.4 million was spent at the box office on local features, including Moulin Rouge, Lantana, The Man Who Sued God and Crocodile Dundee in LA, but this still represented only 7.8 per cent of the total box office for that year. In 2007, the Australian box office share was 4 per cent (that’s $36 million), a decrease from 4.6 per cent (or $40 million) in 2006. Of the Top 50 films in Australia of all time, ranked by total reported gross Australian box office as at January 2008, only 5 were Australian: Crocodile Dundee, Babe, Happy Feet, Moulin Rouge and Crocodile Dundee II. Australia has now joined this list. To date, it’s grossed $A36.78 million at the Australian box office. Since it’s release late last year, Australia has overtaken Babe’s long-standing box office figure of $A36.77 million set in 1995, and is surpassed only by Crocodile Dundee’s record $A44.7 million set in 1986. Not withstanding this, Australians do seem to make a lot of good films that unfortunately seem to fail at the box office. You just have to watch the self congratulatory, nauseatingly feel good, look at us mum aren’t we clever AFI Awards ceremony with its bevy of “international” stars who are just so glad to be home to know that there are many critically acclaimed Australian films doing the rounds at any given time. The problem is that very few Australians have actually seen them. Which of course leads us to ask, and it’s a question that has been asked ad nauseum in the Australian media much to the disdain of Australian filmmakers, what’s the point of a national cinema if the nation actually isn’t interested in it. Forget about making an impact on the rest of the film going world (and, as Phil Brophy sagely points out, the international market cares as much about you as you do about Finnish historical drama), if a national cinema is meant to be telling Australian stories for Australian audiences so that we can see our national identity reflected back to us then does that mean we’re a bunch of crocodile hunting, cattle droving transvestites who raise talking pigs and cute dancing penguins and who secretly desire to live in a garret in Paris while they go blind on Absinthe and eventually die from tuberculosis or maybe anorexia? According to Robert Miller, a self described ‘film industry insider who has just managed to get over his heroin addiction, lives with his gay Indigenous lover and their adopted, mentally handicapped Lebanese daughter in a prejudiced outback town, that, through a series of misadventures will learn to love them shortly’, the blame for the failure is threefold. Australian films are failing to connect with audiences, they’re poorly marketed to the Australian public and they mostly pander to critics who prefer films that are worthy rather than entertaining. He argues:< There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with making “worthy” films about “serious” subjects. I think that’s fine if you have a real industry (not one almost entirely subsidised) that produces a good mix of artistic and commercial movies. But if “worthy” is all we’re making, the well is poisoned. A situation is created where most of the cinema-going public consider the “made in Australia” tag to be a setback. The term “Australian film” unfairly becomes synonymous with “pretentious wank-fest” (which would in turn make the AFI awards the great incestuous industry circle-jerk). If you’re going to drop $16 on a ticket, do you want to come out of a cinema feeling worse about yourself and your country than when you went in? (Miller, 2008) Good question. If you’ve spent all day working on the production line at Holden in Broadmeadows, wondering if you’ll have a job next week and who’s going to pay the mortgage, do you really want to go and see a film that makes you feel crap? But I think his second point is more telling. Apart from Australia (the movie not the country) when was the last time you saw an Australian film marketed on Australian television for any length of time and with any kind of panache. For all the angst ridden criticism levelled at Luhrmann over the content of his film, and there has been plenty of it, more Australians have seen his film than have seen most of the rest of the Australian films made in the last 12 months put together. This is despite reviews of Baz’s film like Peter Conrad’s in The Monthly which self indignantly complains: What should have been a vindication for our undiscovered country has turned out to be a calumny; instead of signalling our proud independence, the film portrays us as timid, imitative colonials, still searching for an empire to which we can belong. The blame needs to be shared around: the failure of Luhrmann’s Australia is Australia’s failure too. (Conrad, 2009) This! from a man who has spent the last 30 years teaching at Oxford University. Now I’m not saying that Australia is a great film. But really what do we actually expect from Australian films. As Phil Brophy points out in his review of the film: “Australia is inevitably an easy target – but using a narrow-gauge shotgun is an ineffective critical strategy when aimed at the nationalist mirage within which Australian cinema’s self-image has shimmered for over quarter of a century. A wide-spray Uzi handled by a blind drunk is a better tactic. Don’t shoot the film or the filmmakers: shoot the whole context within which they are positioned.” (Brophy, 2009) This got me thinking. What if we were to apply Luhrmann’s clearly successful marketing strategy to a film that, while successful in relative terms, still made 13 million dollars less on worldwide release than the Australian Tourism Export Commission put into Baz’s film. Wolf Creek opened on 151 screens around Australia on November 3, 2005 and, considering the mere 1 million dollar budget used to make the movie, went on to be a financial success. It was also nominated for numerous awards, including 7 AFI awards, 5 Inside Film Awards and the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. An amazing double whammy for an Australian film. For those of you who haven’t seen Wolf Creek, here is a short précis. Three young travellers set out from Broome to travel across the top end of Australia to Cairns. The two women, Kristy and Liz, both British, and their male companion, an Australian named Ben, stop at a meteorite crater called Wolf Creek. There is some romantic intrigue and then their car breaks down. They’re rescued by a seemingly benign outback type called Mick who tows them to his camp with the promise of fixing their car and getting them back on the road. Turns out he’s not as benign as they thought and what follows is described by critic Roger Ebart as ‘a sadistic celebration of pain and cruelty’. In what is clearly an homage of sorts to Tobe Hooper’s classic horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the not so benign Mick, after drugging his young victims, then proceeds to attempt to torture, mutilate and dismember them. Needless to say, the car never gets fixed. Wolf Creek is a well made genre film that Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw described as a “swaggeringly nasty film which deserves an audience outside the horror fanbase”. (Bradshaw, 2005) What sets Wolf Creek apart from other genre films, however, is director Greg McLean’s canny use of local character to make this not just a horror film but a distinctly Australian horror film. The landscape, the characters, the tourist culture, local crime stories and outback mythology are all used as narrative building blocks. As Jim Schembri rightly argues in his review of the film ‘It’s solid proof that genre, when used skilfully, can enhance rather than obliterate a film’s cultural fingerprint.’ (Schembri, 2005) And as an Australian film that could be read as offering an antidote to the patronising tendency to romanticise aboriginal culture in Australian film, Wolf Creek also shows us the dark face of the outback mythology of the benign laconic bushman. As one indigenous critic, Tyson Yunkaporta noted, ‘the larrikin exterior is stripped away to reveal the hideous doppelganger lurking beneath Australian identity…the audience are unaware of the shadowy Mick Dundee doppelganger that lingers at the core of their identity, pricking their conscience and giving them the heebie-jeebies at the thought of being stranded alone in the haunted outback, alone with the truth of their ancestors and the angry spirits of murdered Aboriginal multitudes’. (Yunkaporta, 2006) So what might an Australia style marketing campaign look like when applied to Wolf Creek? Well, first you’d need a major investor like ATEC. But I’m not sure how they would respond to ads like this. Australia Wolf Creek Australia Wolf Creek Australia Wolf Creek Maybe a merchandising strategy like that used so successfully by other horror films like these. In fact, I whipped up a few of my own at home. But in keeping with the car breakdown theme, I though the RACV might make a good partner. They have a long association with horror and suspense as the following clearly demonstrates. And I was surprised to find that the RACV were in fact already one step ahead of me Clearly what Australian national cinema needs is not more Aussie stories about Aussie heros and outback adventures – they just need a cracking good ad campaign.

Inscription How does one link the different registers within which critique is possible – in which ‘research functions, by way of allegory, as the inventio for an expressive text (thus producing both scholarship and art)’? (Ulmer, 1991) This question lies at the heart of any attempt to understand reflexive remix practices as research and research as a mode of reflexive remix. [1] It was also the driving force behind the “paper” I delivered at the B for Bad Cinema Conference at Monash University which sought to explore questions of national identity, genre filmmaking and national cinema. [2] The “paper” took the form of a multi-channelled media performance, in defiance of (and with the full intention of disrupting) the tendency at such academic events to deliver in person a mode of writing that only distinguishes itself from other kinds of academic writing by virtue of being ‘read aloud’. This writing (the writing that you are reading now, whenever that may be) takes place both before and after its own inscription as an event, as the performance of what was written and which can be viewed (performed, read) again in this space as a supplement to its performance. It is not meant to explicate that performance but rather to draw attention to its status as, what Greg Ulmer has named, a discourse of “immanent critique” – ‘a reasoning capable of operating within the machines of television and computing, in which the old categories (produced in the book apparatus) separating fiction and truth are breaking down.’ (Ulmer, 1991) Similarly, the “paper” of which this writing speaks was itself driven by the same desire to work through the problem of what happens to criticism when it embraces reflexive remix, not as an object of study, but as a legitimate critical strategy within academic discourse. Following Ulmer’s remixing of Derrida’s ideas regarding grammatology, the performance of the “paper” makes use of the figure of the mise en abyme – a ‘reflexive structuration by means of which a text shows what it is telling, does what it says, displays its own making, reflects its own action’. (Ulmer, 1991) In doing so, it is capable of exposing the ideological quality of the research drive, the will to power in knowledge. A conference paper traditionally attempts to display the presenter’s mastery of a field of research, to present “findings”, to attest to the presenter’s status as “expert”. [3] This “paper” takes the ready-made topics for debate about national cinema and national identity as a starting point to demonstrate the recursive nature of such discussions and their almost inexorable critical status. It playfully remixes current discussions of these issues, not in an effort to resolve them but to make something new with them – to solve them in the sense of the term that derives from the Latin word solvere (to loosen, release, unbind). In this sense, where the will to power in knowledge manifested in academic research is usually driven by an ideology of mastery (to command, to demonstrate supremacy in order to gain authority or dominion), the driving ideological force behind the “paper” and reflexive remix practice in general is comedy, an incongruity or contrast in the object, and a shock or emotional seizure on the part of the subject. The use of the joke as a scholarly tool and as a key driver of reflexive remix culture responds to the tendency within academic writing (and culture in general) towards what Ulmer (and others) describes as ‘the melancholy seriousness that has been associated traditionally with the emotional experience of academic work’ and the ‘nostalgia that Jameson and others have identified as the predominant emotion of culture in the period of late capitalism.’ (Ulmer, 1989: 61) [4] Ulmer is drawing here on Jacques Derrida’s observation that claims to neutral objectivity rest upon the authority of the scientific model of knowledge which aims to exclude the non-serious (Ulmer, 1989: 61). However, this ideological exclusion of the non-serious, the jest, the pun, the joke, cannot be kept on the borders of critique without exposing the contradiction inherent in the claim for seriousness that this model of knowledge purports to uphold. Derrida writes: The necessity assumed by classical theory of submitting itself to the very normativity and hierarchy that it purports to analyse, deprives such theory of precisely what it claims for itself: seriousness, scientificity, truth, philosophical value. Because (…) theory claims to be serious, it is normed by part of its object and therefore not impartial. It is not scientific and cannot be taken seriously. (Derrida, 1977: 211) Derrida is not of course saying that we shouldn’t take theory seriously. He is merely demonstrating that the exclusion of the non-serious, the joke, from philosophical discourse cannot be logically sustained. Wittgenstein, too, suggested ‘that the “wit” in his name might lead us to expect that a good philosophical work could be written that consisted entirely as jokes’ (Ulmer, 1989: 62) If we consider the etymology of the word “theory” from its Greek origins in theorein, which means “to look at” and its frequent association with spectatorship, as in “looking at” a theatre stage, then reflexive remix practices, which often rely heavily on the joke to make sense of them, could be said to perform legitimate scholarly critique. They treat serious ideas by way of the jest. The “paper”, as an example of reflexive remix, also draws on Marshall McLuhan’s articulation of the power of analogy and the analogical mind to reinvigorate critique through the restoration of arts of exposition and interpretation (grammar) and persuasion (rhetoric) to a trivium dominated by logic (dialectic), which he began in the Nashe thesis, and which formed the basis for many of his future works.[5] McLuhan believed that the truth or non-truth of an assertion is, in the mind of the analogist, inextricably linked to the ways in which that assertion is made. This transgresses a ‘fixed set of co-ordinates that most educated Westerners have inherited from Aristotle’. (Kuhns, 1996) For McLuhan, truth to the analogist is a creative act: ‘a ratio between mind and things, made by the shaping imagination’. (Kuhns, 1996) In other words, the performance of the “paper” is not adorned by rhetoric and exposition – they form an integral part of its argument. But this can be said of all writing as Derrida designates it: And thus we say “writing” for all that gives rise to inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural “writing” (…) All of this to describe not only the system of notation secondarily connected with these activities but the essence and content of these activities themselves. (Derrida, 1976: 9) The application of rhetorical strategies and the careful consideration of the manner of exposition in terms of the performance of the “paper” do not come after the meditation on the dialectics of the argument. This is what McLuhan meant when he spoke of the power of the analogical mind to reintegrate the trivium under electric conditions. The ‘shaping imagination’ of the analogist recognises the interdependence of grammar, logic and rhetoric in the delivery and reception of persuasive arguments. And he anticipated, along with Derrida, an ideo-picto-phonographic writing that could not only draw upon multiple writing instruments – the word, television, cinema, computing technologies and so on – but could draw on gesture and oratory and the use of rhetorical tropes such as allegory, hyperbole, paradox, alliteration, pun, enigma, satire and invective. Dismissed as superficial (as in ‘to be found on the surface’) in traditional scholarly writing, rhetoric and exposition assume their position alongside dialectic in helping us to convey and make sense of complex ideas in reflexive remix practices. Donald Theall, speaking about the work of Joyce (whose writing is also remixed throughout the writings of both McLuhan and Derrida), alludes to this when he discusses ‘the poetic’ in Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture and Communication. (Theall, 1995: 11) The poetic, as Theall uses the term, refers to inventive cultural productions whether they are achieved in language, another medium or a mixture of media. While recognising the ambivalence that permeates all intense poetic activity throughout history, Theall argues that [t]he poetic emphasis on the complexity of assemblage, with its corresponding intensity (for the poetic work embraces a complexity of the surface and a density of the depth of the work), generates new ways of seeing, sensing, and understanding. Since the poetic work invites discussion, judgement, and understanding rather than closure, it permits exploration and evaluation; it may even have a value when the artist is a conscious propagandistic agent. (Theall, 1995: 243-244) This precisely conveys the work that the performance of the “paper” as reflexive remix and reflexive remix practice in general seeks to do. If academic activity is meant to not only open up new ways of seeing, sensing and understanding the world but to also propagate those ideas (at a conference, on a Youtube channel, in an academic journal), then this “paper” makes and marks a gesture towards that ambition. ‘In the beginning was the gest he jousstly says…’ James Joyce, Finnegans Wake ‘The death of the book is not the end of language: it continues’ John Cage, For the Birds Author’s Biography Lisa Gye lectures in Media and Communications at Swinburne University. Her areas of research interest include social media, remix culture and cultures of production. Notes [1] I’m using Eduardo Navas’ idea that remix can be categorised in three ways – extended remix, selective remix and reflexive remix. The latter ‘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.’ http://remixtheory.net/?page_id=3 [back] [2] B for BAD cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value conference, Monash University, Melbourne, April 15-17, 2009. [back] [3] Interestingly, the etymology of the work “expert” is derived from the Latin experientia which derives from the Greek verb peirao (try, attempt, test, get experience) from which we also get the word “pirate”. [back] [4] Ulmer also quotes Michel Serres – ‘At its birth, knowledge is happy, delivered natively from all culpability. It is perhaps happy by nature. However, in the institutions which direct it, exploit and transmit it, for the individuals it overwhelms it fosters in fact the death instinct. Throughout my youth I believed I discerned on the walls of amphitheaters or on the brows of the learned the hideous word – sadness alone is fruitful. How the change came about I don’t know. By whatever means its own nature might be restored it is urgent on pain of death to respond to this question.’ (Quoted in Ulmer, 1989: 61) [back] [5] McLuhan, Marshall The place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time Phd Thesis, Cambridge University, 1943 (unpublished). [back] References Bradshaw, Peter ‘Wolf Creek review’ The Guardian, 16 September, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2005/sep/16/3 Brophy, Philip ‘Targeting Australia: Comment on the film by Baz Lurhman’ Real Time, No. 89, Sydney, 2009. http://www.philipbrophy.com/projects/rstff/Australia_C.html Conrad, Peter ‘Gone with the Wind:An Australian Fiasco’ The Monthly, February, 2009 http://www.themonthly.com.au/epublish/1/46 Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) ____. Dissemination Translation, Annotation, and Introduction by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Athlone Press, 1981). ____. Limited Inc trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Ebart, Roger ‘Wolf Creek review’ http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ article?AID=/20051222/REVIEWS/51220004/1023 Kuhns, Bill. ‘The War Within the Word: McLuhan’s History of the Trivium’ McLuhan Studies 1:1, 1996. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss1/1_1art6.htm. McLuhan, Marshall. The place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time Phd Thesis, Cambridge University, 1943 (unpublished). Miller, Robert ‘How Many Aussie Movies Did You See This Year?’ New Matilda, 31 December, 2008. http://newmatilda.com/2008/12/31/how-many-australian-movies-did-you-see-year. ____. ‘Dropping Box Office Bombs’ New Matilda, 2 January, 2009. http://newmatilda.com/2009/01/02/dropping-box-office-bombs. Schembri, Jim ‘Wolf Creek review’ The Age, November 3, 2005. http://www.theage.com.au/news/film-reviews/wolf-creek/2005/11/03/1130823331626.html. Theall, Donald. Beyond the Word: Reconstructing Sense in the Joyce Era of Technology, Culture and Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1995). ____. James Joyce’s Techno-Poetics (University of Toronto Press, 1997) . Ulmer, Gregory. Applied grammatology: post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, c1985). ____. Teletheory : grammatology in the age of video (New York : Routledge, 1989) ____. ‘Grammatology Hypermedia’ Postmodern Culture 1:2, 1991. http://serials.infomotions.com/pmc/pmc-v1n2-ulmer-grammatology.txt. ____. Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore, John Hopkins U.P., 1994). ____. ‘One Video Theory (Some Assembly Required)’ in Penny, Simon Critical Issues in Electronic Media (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995)

Screenshot: ‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop (Episodes 0-2)’ (2007-08) Soda_Jerk

Pop Art’s ability to mash highbrow and lowbrow culture paved the way for Pop Tronic’s essentially mono-brow outlook… Pop Art strayed from Pop Tronics by whoring itself to generative creative arts such as painting. This violates the Zero Originality Clause of Pop Tronic which states “Under no circumstances must the Pop Tronicist stray from the sanctioned triad of operations: Copy, Cut and Collage.” (Soda_Jerk, 2009)

1.

In this article I want to reflect briefly on a number of themes to do with the cultural modulation of post-digital remix culture in the context of Australian contemporary art. In particular, I focus on some key figures who have contributed to a particular aesthetics and politics of audio-visual remix. In linking these artistic precursors to current forms of remix, I want to draw out some of the differences and specificities of ‘local’ versions of a phenomenon that is often figured as a ‘global’ and not especially variegated practice. I argue that this identifiable history of Australian media artists working with found film footage and the appropriation of televisual sources finds its ultimate expression in contemporary practices of remix that both connect to and remain distinct from global remix. In particular, I suggest that the ‘zero originality clause’ proposed by the artistic duo Soda-Jerk is a logical outcome of the more provocative strategies employed by a range of Australian artists during the 1980s and 1990s.

My interest here is in the particular historical development of an Australian remix practice that leverages the personal recording and public distribution systems made possible by the intersection of distinct technical/cultural systems. Since the 1960s, a significant number of Australian artists have used the cathode ray screen and the institutions of television as a particular kind of source material for visual artworks. The tele-cine practice of many Super 8 filmmakers in the 1980s can be seen as an extension of this earlier practice. The appearance of low-cost VHS viewing, recording and distribution systems in the same period gave rise to new ways of engaging in the flow of images and sounds that were circulating in the cultural sphere. More recently, the social practices surrounding the domestication of video have coupled with the increasing availability of digital video systems, allowing artists to process and reconfigure audio-visual material in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Screenshot: ‘Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ (2002-2006) Soda_Jerk

At the same time, I am interested in matching this techno-cultural realm with the discourses of appropriation that were circulating in the fields of contemporary art in Australia at the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. This is particularly resonant in the neo-pop writings and provocations of Paul Taylor in Melbourne, and in the works and ideas of some members of the Sydney Super 8 Group. While there are many others who engaged in similar discourses during the 1980s, I limit my discussion here to these two particular instances.

For Taylor, the contemporary artist’s ‘wryly sophisticated … quotation from the past … detaches itself from its cultural history and inspires instead a pleasure in its dislocation… In turning to the echelons of popular culture as a major artistic source and in an adoption of bricolage or surreptitious quotation as a basic structure’, contemporary Australian artists could inhabit a ‘second degree’ realm which for Taylor represented the most striking and vital aspect of contemporary art practice in the early 1980s. (Taylor, 1984: 159) This contradictory pleasure in dislocation, erasure and detachment (by way of the triad ‘copy, cut and collage’) is arguably at work in many of the remix artists I refer to in this article.

2.

Before I turn to the specifics of Australian remix, I need to sketch out some of the general conditions that characterise remix culture and certain aspects of the history of video art. Today it has become commonplace to say that the explosion of remix works is due to the unlimited potential of computers to read, write and redistribute a wide variety of media.  In this sense, all of the systems of distribution, viewing and production have converged in the form of the personal computer. According to Lawrence Lessig, in this new ecology of read-write media, anybody can ‘remix, or quote, a wide range of “texts” to produce something new… The quotes get mixed together. The mix produces the new work — the “remix”.’ (Lessig, 2005 69) While this is largely true, it tells us little about how emerging forms of digital video (and of remix in particular) are either distinct from or related to earlier forms and socio-cultural contexts or artistic practice.  Nor does the discourse of convergence tell us how they connect to the specific cultural practices of particular regions or periods.

Lessig in particular has done much to advance debates about the legal and technical frameworks surrounding the explosion of remix culture. His most recent book on the subject, Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy, goes some way to delve into the cultural conditions of remix. Quoting the British artist Candice Breitz at length, Lessig focuses in on what Breitz calls the ‘absorptive logic’ of creative practice:

Artists who work with found footage, for example, blatantly reflect on the absorptive logic of the creative process. But I would argue that every work of art comes into being through a similar process, no matter how subtly. No artist works in a vacuum. Every artist reflects — consciously or not — on what has come before and what is happening parallel to his or her practice. (Lessig, 2005; 8 )

Screenshot: ‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop (Episodes 0-2)’ (2007-08) Soda_Jerk

This absorptive process pre-supposes an engagement with not just cultural meaning, but its codification as well. As Eduardo Navas puts it, ‘no matter what form it takes, the remix … depends on recognition of a pre-existing cultural code. The audience is always expected to see within the object a trace of history.’ (Navas, 2008) These cultural codes are central to the intelligibility of cut’n'copy works. The remixer attends to and depends upon the succession of generations who have contributed to the production of works and to the circulation of meanings associated with (popular and unpopular) cultures — especially as we find them in their recorded formats. Privileging the fragment over the whole in a persistent and sustained fashion, audio-visual remixers fashion new works out of the core components of older pieces. Their meaning and use is largely determined by the extent to which audiences can connect to the cultural codes that artists absorb and re-animate.

While the act of borrowing is a basic organisational strategy for remix practice (as it is for other artistic practices), an essential aspect of this strategy is to do with the dynamic dialogue that takes place between audiences and producers across diverse historical and cultural frameworks. (Amerika, 2009; Adema, 2008; Barth, 2000) The multi-authored entry on remix in Wikipedia reveals that this approach ‘points to ways of working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered, multi-referential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts’. We can see this especially in audio cultures, whose recombinatory logic has been adapted in different ways by audio-visual culture. (Miller 2004; Adema, 2008) To quote DJ and theorist Paul Miller, this networked creativity could be thought of as ‘cybernetic jazz’:

Sampling is a new way of doing that’s been with us for a long time: with found objects… The mix of the old associations. New contexts from old. The script gets flipped, gauges evolve and learn to speak new forms, new thoughts. The thought becomes legible again … [like] jazz, cybernetic jazz, nu-bop, ILLbient — a nameless formless, shapeless concept given structure by the rhythms. (Miller 2004, 22)

Such a conceptual bass-line could also be traced through the European avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, the Situationists’ strategies of détournement, through William Burroughs’ cut-up works of the 1960s. While these disruptive artistic practices challenged the assumptions of mainstream cinema and culture, they did not directly threaten their hegemony. However, as audio-visual ‘objects’ are transferred into digital formats, archives and networks, these same strategies enacted in the networked digital realm do pose a significant challenge. Private corporations, public institutions and content-producing artists are all involved in a new set of questions concerning the ability to sample, quote, and remix in the context of the read-write world.

Screenshot: ‘Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ (2002-2006) Soda_Jerk

3.

While we don’t know how current struggles over copyright and the technological ability to copy and re-use practically any digital file will end up, it is clear that the stakes of remixing are high. (See Lasica, 2005for an excellent account of the corporate tensions between Hollywood, Silicon Valley and prosumer production.) Matt Mason uses the term ‘Punk Capitalism’ to describe this ‘new set of market conditions governing society. It’s a society where piracy, as the co-chair at Disney recently put it, is “just another business model.” A society where the remix is changing the way production and consumption are structured, rendering the nineteenth-century copyright laws we use obsolete.’ (Mason, 2008)

Although they are integrally connected, the current flashpoints surrounding piracy and re-use of AV materials tell us little about the cultural practices that underpin the debate around remix. The source materials for remixers are in fact ‘everywhere’ (in a philosophical and literal sense) and hence are implicated in a broad range of systems that exceed the commercial ones designated in most debates about copyright and control. As Mark Amerika puts it, ‘the sum total of source material everywhere is never finally summed up, as there is always the next instance or occasion of becoming that our bodies faithfully execute (remix, postproduce) without our even thinking about it, even though an experiential version of the thought itself may cross our minds.’ (Amerika, 2009)

The history of video art sits oddly with the emerging logic of remix as defined thus far. While there are many instances of video artists who use appropriation and cut-up as part of their aesthetic repertoire (e.g. Christian Marclay, Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordan, Dara Birnbaum, Antonio Muntadis, or George Barber), the present retelling of this history in books and its presentation in museums, galleries and art events is often disconnected from the far-reaching changes underway in today’s networked media world. This is worth noting, as it is quite different to the approach of early video artists to information networks.

Screenshot: After the Rainbow (2009) Soda_Jerk (Post-production with Sam Smith)

When artists first took to making video in the 1960s, its radical form and function was often predicated on the ease of access to the means of production. For a couple of thousand dollars anybody could buy a portapak and start making videos. As Kate Horsfield reminds us in ‘Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art’, groups such as the Radical Software collective of the 1970s saw beyond this to another immense shift in political and cultural power:

Power is no longer measured in land, labour, or capital, but by access to information and the means to disseminate it. As long as the most powerful tools (not weapons) are in the hands of those who would hoard them, no alternative cultural vision can succeed. Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, other alternate systems and life styles will be no more than products of the existing process. (Horsfield, 2006: 9)

We have to remind ourselves that this was written in 1970, to remember that the radical approach to the emergence of the ‘information society’ has been a long time coming. In the 1970s and 1980s, it was the one-way ‘tube’ of commercial mainstream television that artists felt needed to be busted by video practice. And while the dissemination of video art in alternate information structures has certainly been growing and transforming over the past thirty years, the reconfiguration of television as a one-way read-only communication device was high on the agenda.

At the end of the 1960s, video artists proposed a radical approach to the emergence of the ‘information society’. They saw the potential for far-reaching changes to mainstream media models. With their focus on process over products, their ‘alternate cultural vision’ was squarely aimed at disrupting the easy fit between the read-only communication networks of broadcast television and the circuit of commodity-consumption. In the 1970s and 1980s, video art practice sought to challenge the one-way tube of commercial television. According to Stephen Jones, Nam June Paik’s reformulation of the tele-visual image was made possible by his manipulation of their internal circuitry, a literal disassembling of TV’s image. ‘Paik undermined the illusionistic function of television by literally tearing it apart and re-constructing it into forms whose potential would be realized over subsequent decades. Thus it becomes clear that video art is the disassembly of television — reverse engineering the code of the culture machine and uncovering its intention.’ (Jones 2008, 84)

Screenshot: ‘The Invisible Man’ (work in progress) Soda_Jerk

The rise and fall of the video festival circuit and the organizations devoted to the preservation and distribution of video art made perfect sense in this context. But despite all the valiant efforts to distribute alternative videos by alternate means, their impact was stunted by the physicality of the networks. The video image may have been wrenched from its commercial televisual framework, and broken out of it’s domestic box, but the objects [tapes] and viewing contexts remained. Under the conditions of digital reproduction and distribution via the internet, these limitations have been significantly reduced.

I would argue that the most radical proponents of video art were always concerned with critiquing the source materials of ‘mainstream culture’ and establishing alternative networks of communication based on Paik’s principle of ‘open circuits’ and ‘participation TV’ (Horsfield, 2006; Jones, 2008). An understanding of this historical context is helpful in highlighting the potentials to be found in today’s web-based networks that privilege ‘sharing’, ‘participation’ and ‘openness’. The sample-based remix culture of contemporary AV practice forms one of the important links between earlier frameworks for ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ culture with contemporary social and technological frameworks. As Helle Porsdam reminds us, the ‘reader becomes the writer in the world, and the writer becomes a reader. For as cultures get spread without a distributor standing in the middle, the way cultures get made and remade changes.’ (Porsdam, 2006: 18)

The open source movement and Creative Commons protocols currently represent the most developed alternative to corporate modes of production and distribution. Using distributed, shared and non-proprietary tools artists might well achieve the alternative networks of distribution envisaged by artists since the 1960s and now mutating into their broadband offspring. The radical challenges to television, art and culture made by video artists in the 1960s and 1970s hence find their echo today in the principles of remix, Free Software, Open Source, Creative Commons, Open Content and other emerging principles of participatory culture.

Screenshot: ‘Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ (2002-2006) Soda_Jerk

4.

At this point I’d like to return to the way that Australian media artists have been engaged in found-footage strategies — as evidenced by work made over the past three decades and included in the 2006 retrospective exhibition ‘SynCity: Remixing three generations of sample culture’. Presented by d/Lux Media Arts with the Australian Centre for Photography and curated by Mark Titmarsh, the exhibition and catalogue presents an important compendium of works and writings associated with the rise of remix culture in Australia. This set of resources demonstrates how emerging forms of digital video and remix relate to certain aesthetic forms of Australian artists in the 1980s and 1990s.

While SynCity dates the precursors to contemporary remix to the early 1980s, there is a pre-history that is worth mentioning here. Before remix emerged as an identifiable practice, video artists had used a variety of media-specific source materials for their own evolving purposes. In Australia, the earliest video works dislocated AV materials from their initial screen-base by way of re-recordings from video screens and television monitors. According to recent research done by media artist and historian Stephen Jones, the ground-breaking work of Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski was generated by means of recording the output of television screens as early as 1962, when he ‘began fiddling with an old TV set. He found he could introduce extra contrast and put the picture out of alignment and out of synchronisation. These experiments led to his interest in electronic images and, in 1962, to his first development of ‘electronic painting’ by photographing the manipulated television screen.’ (Jones, 2009) While not at all a found footage strategy, his work points to the direct manipulation of television as both signal and object.

This disassembly and manipulation of the television set certainly ran parallel to the well-known work of Nam June Paik, but it also connected to another approach to the making of electronic images from the stuff of television. David Perry’s Mad Mesh from 1968 similarly was created from faulty components in an ABC television camera, transforming the clear signal of broadcast into “a sort of formless irregular moiré pattern … [and] mesh patterns combined on the film’ (Jones, 2008: 88).

This practice of pointing a camera or other recording device towards a screen to produce second-degree images and sounds may have been unusual in the 1960s, but by the early 1980s it became common practice in Super 8 filmmaking and video art practice. As television signals reached saturation in domestic contexts, consumer quality video recording devices began to augment the practice of artists and independent filmmakers. The appearance of VHS and Betamax video cassette recorders into the domestic market in the early 1980s gave artists new opportunities to work with found footage and re-filming techniques. It also marked one of the turning points in copyright debates about fair use. The so-called Betamax case in 1984 is often hailed by activists as the Magna Carta of the technology age — and Hollywood is still looking for ways to overturn the decision. (Lasica, 2005: 110)

In the independent media art context however, the VCR and the cathode ray tube presented readily available source materials for second-degree art practice. Both film and televisual programs could be recorded in an unprecedented way, and many artists began to use their growing private collections as part of their own work. ‘Using refilmed fragments from broadcast television and personal archives of video taped “moments”, Metaphysical TV was created by a handful of artists form around 1982 until 1989.’ (Frost, 2006: 28) While the group was never really formalised, it included Mark Titmarsh (who termed the coin in his 1986 article ‘Metaphysical TV or how to make film with the hammer’ in Sydney art theory publication On the Beach), Gary Warner, Michael Hutak, Stephen Harrop and Andrew Frost.

Screenshot: ‘Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone’ (2002-2006) Soda_Jerk

While the works of Metaphysical TV were not always made entirely form found footage, this  Super 8 appropriation technique can also be found in the video practice of artists such as Philip Brophy, Ian Haig, Ian Andrews, Greg Ferris, and Severed Heads. The ease with which large portions of film and television could now be cut and reassembled into new forms gave rise to a wide variety of cut-up and collage forms that relate directly to contemporary remix practice. While the technological enabling device of the VCR and video monitor made this new practice possible, these works were also modulated by a culturally specific aesthetic position that valued the dislocative power of quotation and bricolage as means of engagement in artistic practice. Philip Brophy quoted by Paul Taylor in 1980 puts it this way: ‘I feel you can’t make anything without it having meaning that is already there. You can’t really do pure things because you’ve got a whole history behind you. In that sense its redundant for us to bother…’ (Taylor, 1984: 167)

5.

I want to focus this discussion now on the practice of two Sydney-based remix artists heavily featured in SynCity.  Working exclusively with found material, Soda_Jerk (Dan and Dominique Angeloro) follow the post-pop line and amplify it to its logical conclusion. Their video projectPixel Pirate 2: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone (2002-2006) is an hour long narrative remix video comprised entirely of samples pirated from over 200 existing film and music sources. Made in collaboration with Sydney artist Sam Smith Pixel Pirate 2 is a sci-fi /biblical epic/romance/ action flick that raises many questions about copyright law and the logic of remix.

According to a catalogue essay by Dan Angeloro, ‘what was once conceived as a tactical assault on commodity culture has for many, become a commonplace way of consuming culture. While most visual remix artists continue to ask themselves “why remix?”, online remix culture seems to have deleted that question with a simple “why not”.’ (Angeloro, 2006: 25)

Why not indeed. This inversion of the question is highly (re)productive. The concept engineer Kodwo Eshun has suggested that remixers are the sex organs of the sample: that by copying and consuming media we help it to multiply and disseminate.  While it can be argued that there is cultural bias against the cut-up techniques that find their way into contemporary art and pop culture (samples are seen as easy rip-offs), remix can also be framed as continuation of the audio-visual reconfigurations that characterise post-pop, Super 8 and video art practice in Australia. Like Philip Brophy and others in the 1980s, for Soda_Jerk the sampled image/ sound contains the germ of an idea that comes from a particular cultural moment. Once it is sampled, captured, it can be mutated into something new. They playfully refer to this practice as Pop Tronics in their tongue-in-cheek manifesto cited at the start of this article. This is precisely how their Zero Originality Clause functions.

Screenshot: ‘‘The Phoenix Portal’ (2005)’ (2002-2006) Soda_Jerk

In the video work, The Phoenix Portal, (also made in collaboration with Sam Smith in 2005) the River Phoenix of the film My Own Private Idahois made to time-jump back to 1985 in order to visit his younger self in the film The Explorers. In this sense, Soda_Jerk engage in a process that they refer to in the language of time travel. According to an interview conducted with the author, ‘When you rent a video or DVD you are essentially hiring a fragment of alternative space-time and creating a portal between this other-time and the present. And if you’ve seen the movie before, then those viewing time-zones are also switched on.’ For Soda_Jerk, celebrity ‘childstars’ have the potential to generate even more of a temporal mash-up because the passage of real time is inscribed on their bodies as they age over the years in front of the camera.

Ever since Vannevar Bush came up with the idea of a universal globally accessible library of everything that could be recorded, searched by his Memex system and then amplified to the ‘reader’, the idea of the hyperlinked media archive has been steadily expanding. Archives, collections, and holdings all used to be highly restricted in terms of physical access. Private holdings of VHS recording, Blockbuster and now the availability of vast amounts of film and television via legal and illegal methods has significantly changed our relationship to these cultural objects. As Helen Garvery has suggested, remix videos on the web (like her example of scrapbooks from the 19^th century) are the result of elaborate circuits of recirculation. ‘Even when copyright locks down the right to reproduce texts, readers have the option of moving those old texts to new contexts, creating a new tier of private circulation: clipping texts out of newspapers, pasting them into scrapbooks, or today into Web pages, and circulating this new compiled version.’ (Garvery, 2003: 208)

At the same time digitization comes bound up with erasure, disappearance and loss. Digital archives are proliferating, but can they contain all of history? One way to understand the project of Soda_Jerk is in terms of a subcultural preservation-as-erasure. There is a bent kind of historiography at work in their engagement with remix culture. But Soda_Jerk also like to think that the potential reality of time travel means that the remix artist is not only preserving a record of culture for future generations, but also for those of the past.

While the legal definition of ownership of digital images and sounds is extremely problematic, remixers turn such concepts upside down. You should only ‘own’ an archive say Soda-Jerk, ‘in the sense of “girlfriend, you own it”, and not in the sense of an exclusive claim on shared culture’. As a remixer, you ‘own it’ when you use the sample in a way that is worthwhile. It’s about knowledge and threading up connections between shared culture and audience. According to Soda_Jerk, ‘the randomness of sampling means that you can’t help but develop a kind of obsessive gambling mentality. It’s addictive. Sometimes you might go through ten videos in a night without finding anything of use, and another time you might land a few gold samples in a period of minutes. If we faced up to the insane amounts of wasted time involved with sample-hunting, we’d never be able to go through with it. So instead, we endorse the delusion that the jackpot is always just about to drop.’ (interview with author)

The practice and process of remix artists like Soda_Jerk emphasises the participatory nature of engagement with AV culture as it defines itself through its existence in all kinds of private and public archives and networks (from Blockbuster to Bittorrent). As Darren Tofts succinctly puts it, their ‘distributed and relational modes of art represent different ways of conceptualising communities, but they do so at the expense of some historically entrenched assumptions to do with the social nature of participation in the artifacts of cultural production.’ (Tofts, 2005)

6.

Videos circulate and are remixed, mashed up and broadcast over the web at an ever-increasing rate. They are being blown-up, torn apart, ripped, mixed and burned to such an extent that there is no going back to the stability of analog media forms (if ever there were such a state). If images and sounds are coming unstuck, they also open up a new space for the renegotiation of their associated history and critical context. In this sense, the old televisual models have indeed been ‘totally busted’ by the movement towards user-generated video inaugurated by video art of the 1960s, found footage artists of the 1980s and remixers of the 1990s. This same process has also extended into myriad online experiments that allow users to upload, download, edit and remix a wide variety of audio-visual materials.

In an insightful review of Mark Amerika’s book Meta/Data, Andrew Murphie notes how such ‘frameworks for writing, reading, publishing and distribution have multiplied into a seeming infinity. It becomes possible to write, even more than the French New Wave with their cinema-pen, with images, sounds, text and code. More importantly, one can write with the bleeds between them. Writing itself expands to encompass the act of living in the new social networks.’ (Murphie, 2007: 36)

The digital era hence shifts the emphasis from modes of production to modes of circulation and re-sourcing. In this sense, a dynamic history of remix needs to capture the miscellaneous bits that ‘bleed’ our memories, archives and works. Under such a rubric, the emergence of remix culture can be seen and defined as a never ending story, in which (digital) culture colludes with acts of erasure even as it reinstates disappearing fragments of AV culture.

Screenshot: ‘Picnic at Wolf Creek’ (2006) Soda_Jerk

In the Australian context, dislocation, detachment and erasure can be seen as some of the hallmarks of remix video, found footage, and sample-based practice. As theorist Ann Finnegan notes, remix video ‘owes as much to erasure and an original transformed into a psychic underside as it does to the collage idea of building things up. Less a postmodern collision or ironic juxtaposition of elements, scratching … accommodates a steady bleeding through of an ‘original’ understory to the dominant canopy.’ (Finnegan. 2006; 41)

Following on from this, we could say that remixers work both for and against collective forgetting by engaging in transformative acts that scratch away at collective memory. The remix artist’s wryly sophisticated engagement and detachment from their cultural history inspires a pleasure in its dislocation. This contradictory pleasure in dislocation, erasure and detachment is arguably at work in many of the remix artists I refer to in this article. Here, the differences and specificities are not so much to do with the ‘absorptive logic’ of the creative process. Instead this partial history of Australian media artists working with remix and appropriation of televisual sources both connects to and remains distinct from the characteristics of global remix, the logical outcome of the more provocative strategies employed by a range of Australian artists during the 1980s and 1990s.

Author’s Biography

Ross Rudesch Harley [aka stereopresence]  is an artist, writer, and educator in the field of new media and popular culture. His work crosses the bounds of media art practice, cinema, music, design, and architecture. Ross is Professor and Head of the School of Media Arts, College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales.

References

Adema, Janneke. ‘Schyzophonia. On Remix, Hybridization and Fluidity’, Open Reflections blog (2008),http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/schyzophonia-on-remix-hybridization-and-fluidity/.

Amerika, Mark. ‘Ocean of Data’, Professor VJ blog (2009), http://professorvj.blogspot.com/.

Angeloro, Dan. ‘Thoughtware: contemporary online remix culture’, in SynCity: Remixing three generations of sample culture (Sydney: d/Lux/Editions, 2006), 18-25.

Finnegan, Ann. ‘Acts of Erasure: The psychoanalysis of sampling’, in  SynCity: Remixing three generations of sample culture (Sydney: d/Lux Editions, 2006) 40-45.

Frost, Andrew. ‘Intelligent Dolphin: From metaphysical TV to remix culture’, in  SynCity: Remixing three generations of sample culture (Sydney: d/Lux Editions, 2006), 28-40.

Garvey, Helen. ‘Scissorising and scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century reading, remaking, and recirculating’, in Gitelman, Lisa and Pingree, Geoffrey (eds.), New Media 1740-1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 207-229.

Horsfield, Kate. ‘Busting the Tube: A Brief History of Video Art’, in Horsfield, K and Hilderbrand, L, (eds,)  Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalogue of Video Art an Artist Interviews (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 7-17.

Jones, Stephen. ‘Participation TV: Notes on Early Australian Video Art’, in Video Logic (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008), 83-99,

Jones, Stephen. ‘Light becomes the medium’, Meanjin 68.1 (2009), http://meanjin.com.au/editions/volume-68-number-1-2009/article/light-becomes-the-medium/.

Lasica, J.D.  Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005).

Mason, Matt. The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture is Reinventing Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 2008).

Miller, Paul. Rhythm Science (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004).

Murphie, Andrew. ‘Extreme writing: digital lifestyle practice’, Realtime 80 (Aug-Sept 2007): 36.

Navas, Eduardo. ‘The bonds of repetition and representation’, Remix Theory (2008), http://remixtheory.net/?p=361.

Porsdam, Helle. Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006).

Soda_Jerk. ‘This is pop tronic’ (2009), http://www.sodajerk.com.au/sj/poptronic.html.

Taylor, Paul. ‘Australia “new wave” and the “second degree”‘, in Taylor, Paul (ed.). Anything Goes: Art in Australia 1970-1980 (Melbourne: Art & Text, 1984).

Tofts, Darren. ‘Tch tch tch & beyond: anticipating distributed aesthetics’ fibreculture 7 (2005),http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue7_tofts.html.

Quoting from his own short story ‘Death of the Novel’

Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before. The only thing that’s sure is that we move, and as we move we leave things behind–the way we felt yesterday, the way we talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back. (Sukenick, 1981: 35)

The quote comes from ‘Death of the Novel’

a fictional short story by Ronald Sukenick

to introduce his artist essay ‘The New Tradition’

which is collected in the groundbreaking

anthology of artist poetics entitled Surfiction

The New Tradition (Sukenick used to tell me)

is the one we’re always on the cusp of inventing

by strategically moving beyond literature per se

For those who may not have encountered

this kind of literary thinking before

this is what the rivals of traditional literature do:

they take on traditional literature so as to destroy it

and in the process remixologically inhabit

its historical body while pushing tender buttons

all along the way (remixology is a way of

intervening or hacking into the transmission of

traditional media discourse and empowers artists

to renew all discourse)

so that they can then revitalize its power

as a renewable form of energy in nature

They do this by breaking down its material components

into a potentially rich heap of source material

that they can then re-embody in whatever

formal experiment feels natural to them

at any given time in history

Think of it as compostproduction

where the leftovers of literature past

get reconfigured into innovative forms of art

meant to breathe life into an always on the verge

(of dying)

creative life force struggling for survival

(Sukenick’s last collection of short stories

was entitled Doggy Bag [1994])

The Remixologist’s mantra?

Source Material Everywhere

Until recently the Narrative Form

Most Likely To Succeed in the Creative Destruction of Literature

was unquestionably The Novel

in fact

it’s been this way for centuries

but are things about to radically change and

what are the indications that these changes

are already well underway?

Sometimes we literary-minded remixologists

find ourselves innovating the mediumistic qualities of

the form we are working in without even necessarily

thinking about it (this happened to me when I was writing

my first novel — The Kafka Chronicles — I was completely

unaware of a so-called ‘New Tradition’ and was just writing

the only way I knew how to which was to sync my unconscious

with the narrative tracing of a trance ritual in transfigured time

What manifested itself out of this trance ritual

was something that resembled a ‘novel’

but that was itself a kind of anti-novel

i.e. a work of art contained in book form

that used narrative and poetry and typography

not to mention visible language and sound art

to creatively de[con]struct the novel form it was inhabiting)

Other times we who create innovative works of remix art

are fully self-conscious of the rival lineage we spring forth from

and knowingly take on other remixological styles just to see

what happens when we move inside other writers’ bodies (of work)

This is when remixologically inhabiting

the spirit of another writer’s stylistic tendencies

or at least the subconsciously imagined writerly gestures

that illuminate their live spontaneous performance

feels more like an embodied praxis

An embodied praxis where the vocal intonations of

the artist are used as source material to discover

new aesthetic facts

And what is a writer anyway?

The lyrical conceptual poetic narrative movements

come in wildly assorted forms

everything from dance to cinema to performance art

to the scribbling of pen or pencil on paper

But for now let’s stick with literature

For instance I remember a passage from Sukenick’s

Down and In: Life in the Underground

where he self-consciously (and remixologically) inhabits

the style of Norman Mailer circa Armies of the Night (1968)

It dawned on Sukenick only much later when he read Mailer’s book Armies of the Night, about the 1967 Justice Department and Pentagon demonstrations, that Mailer, by his own third-person account of himself, is no mere mimic but is a multiphrenic with a handy miscellany of personalities. Mimicry by itself was an impulse that Sukenick could well understand and sometimes justifiably indulge, as here that of the book in question, since such imitation, properly executed, brings along with it an intuitive comprehension of the ideas, attitudes, and modes of feeling that produced the style of expression at hand. (Sukenick, 1987: 236)

We can also see this kind of well executed stylistic mimicry

being expressed in Amerika’s second novel Sexual Blood

which was nothing if not a remixological inhabitation of

the style Count Lautréamont (aka Isadore Ducasse)

initiated with his acerbic Songs of Maldoror

where Amerika knowingly and even greedily

pla(y)giarizes Lautréamont’s own pla(y)giaristic style as source material

Why did he find it necessary to pla(y)giarize

Lautréamont’s style as source material?

You’ll have to ask Amerika that question

I (on the other hand) am now recalling

how my late colleague Kathy Acker

once told me that she took on the body-language of

Hawthorne Faulkner Rimbaud and Verlaine

to name just a few

as a way to embody their spiritual unconscious

thus becoming the literary version of

this remixological figure I am proposing

i.e. the artist-as-postproduction-medium

Postproduction mediums working with new media technologies

are developing (multiple/hybridized/integrated)

daily practices as an alternative approach

to the regimentation of consumer bureaucracies

(perhaps we could call it an epic struggle

one the creative or hacker classes

continually commiserate over as a kind of

informal unionization that collectively

accumulates into some kind of bargaining power

i.e. the radical spirit of ‘always becoming’

a postproduction medium?

How do artists leverage this instinctive creative process?)

PP mediums play out their performances-to-be

on whatever compositional playing fields

they happen to be (re)cycling through when

caught in the heat of postproduction

(think of it as developing an economy of motion

targeted at turning the body into a renewable energy source)

To paraphrase Vito Acconci

that playing field would be

the ground of the moment

not one they would have to dig themselves

out of continuously but one that they would

act on as part of their constructed persona(s)

moving through the networked space of flows

The list of ‘co-’ postproductions by artists and writers

creating with the renewable tradition is long

The novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern

took this writing with or ‘co-’ postproduction process

to its stylistic extreme when as a young man

he began literally writing out by hand

the works of Edgar Allen Poe

The Yes Men remixologically inhabited

the World Trade Organization website

and birthed the gatt.org site which then fed

into many remixological performance art spectacles

at major international economic summits

that were then remixed yet again into

the The Yes Men movie where you can see their collaborative

‘cut and paste as you go’ methodology hybridize

net art performance / fashion design / art / fiction / hactivism

For the work Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix)

the art-collective I belong to (DJRABBI.COM)

took Guy Debord’s original scrambling of propaganda noise

from the days of May ’68 and détourned the détourner

generating random video imagery by cutting and pasting

key phrases from his own ‘postproduced’ essay

as search terms in Google Image Searches

while also mashing up an alternative détourntablism

with some of the audio productions he participated in

even overwriting the English subtitles in his SOS film

as a way of translating his monotonous Marxist voiceover

into a more self-contradictory new media manifesto

that highlights ‘the flickering other we love to hate’

If an embodied digital flux persona performing

their daily practice as an artist-medium

becomes a kind of compositional instrument

acting on whatever ground is available

then we may also view them as a kind of

remixological body electric

affectively mixing their source material

body-image to body-image

via an oscillating string of excitation modes

accelerating on the edge of a ‘forever composition’

that is then experienced by the artist-medium

as the ongoing becomingness of postproduction

This ongoing becomingness of postproduction

catapults the artist-medium further into the Infinite

that unidentifiable space of mind where

the unconscious projections of near future events

always keep us on the cusp of what it is

we are in the process of creating while experiencing

this all-over-sense of ‘being in perpetual postproduction’

even as our ‘novel togetherness’ smudges together

with what we used to think of as simply being

in production…

As an ‘always live’ networked performance artist

who willingly constructs digital flux identities

for my role-playing personas to circulate in

I uncontrollably / unconsciously create a poetics

that highlights what David Antin refers to as

the ‘cargo of memories and attendant dreams’

as prime source material to remix into my narrative trajectory

But as I conduct these on-the-fly remixes

using my various portable / digital apparatuses

to capture the data points of my Source Material Everywhere

while affectively assembling the flickering images

that swarm my every move

it becomes clear that there is no choice in the matter

the choice has already been made by my biological condition

I have become and am always becoming a postproduction medium

Compostproducing the present

into an ongoing sequence of intense aesthetic experiences

that simultaneously historicizes my performance

as a ‘durational achievement’ playing out its creative potential

is what it means to be avant-garde

(to sample the title of one of Antin’s talking books)

in that it never feels as though I am emptying myself

into the blank canvas of the global future

as much as it feels like I am compostproducing

a Totally Other digital art persona

who is both ahead of his time and of his time

but also fully engaged with intuitively selected bits of data

sampled from the past and utilized as source material

in the postproduction processes of the ‘always live’ remixologist

Antin has little use for any detailed account of

a so-called tradition even an avant-garde tradition

or anti-tradition tradition:

[T]he tradition will resolve itself in the present [...] and all you have to do is find it / but if you don’t it will find you. (Antin, 1993: 56)

But then the question emerges

‘Whose avant-garde tradition?’

The renewable tradition is part of

an open source lifestyle practice

and is available to all

As Burroughs writes:

Cut-ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. (Burroughs and Gysin, 1978: 31)

Acker would embody the spirit precursors of

Hawthorne Faulkner Rimbaud and Verlaine

as part of her intense investigation into

writing as an extreme force of (h)activism

In an essay she titles ‘Critical Languages’

where she is transcribing her presentation

on ‘[t]he nature of art in a degenerating polis

inimical to all but its own centralized power’

Acker addresses a group of writers whose

work centres on contemporary art criticism

She meets them head on by saying:

I want to talk about the body and languages of the body. Which art criticism has denied. And about what art criticism could come out of the languages of the body. (Acker, 1997: 89)

At which point she starts riffing on a list of

possible body languages that she would prescribe:

1. The languages of flux. Of uncertainty in which the ‘I’ (eye) constantly changes. For the self is ‘an indefinite series of identities and transformations.’ (Acker, 1997: 91)

She also lists the languages of wonder

materiality and play – but:

8. Above all: the languages of intensity. Since the body’s, our, end isn’t transcendence but excrement, the life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.

9. The only religions are scatology and intensity.

10. Language that forgets itself. For if we knew that chance governs us and this world, that would be absolute knowledge. (91-92)

‘Language that forgets itself’

resonates with Nam June Paik’s form of ecstasy

where ‘a mystic forgets himself’

while unconsciously triggering

body languages out of principled uncertainty

Paik’s notes on ‘Experimental Television’

were written around the same time of

his first-ever 1963 video art exhibition in Wuppertal

an exhibition entitled ‘Exhibition of Music – Electronic Television’

and these handwritten notes were encased

in a long glass box as part of a re-installed version of

this legendary exhibition in Bremen, Germany in 2005

These notes feature an excerpt that truly connects

with my recent discoveries in the emerging fields of

hyperimprovisational new media art & performance

where the artist as postproduction medium

taps into the unconscious flow detonated by the trigger-inference

before conscious thought steps in and derails

ones signifying momentum . . .

In ‘Experimental Television’ Paik refers

to the word ‘ecstasy’ (which is held up

at the top of the page by clawing quotes)

by writing immediately below it

to go out of oneself…

and then continues with the following

bullet-pointed words and phrases:

* completely filled time

* the presence of eternal presence

* unconscious, or super-conscious

* some mystic forgets himself (goes out of oneself)

* abnormal

* the world stops for three minutes!

where the trick for stopping the world

(and this is the exact same phrase used

in Carlos Castenada’s Journey to Ixtlan

where the trickster-shaman Don Juan advises

his young disciple on how to trip/drift through life)

is to always stay a half a second ahead of the game

creating on-the-fly DO-IT-YOURSELF MANIPULATIONS

of all of the source material you have at your disposal

Experiencing these transformations outside of time

is the only way to achieve absolute knowledge

as an intensely rendered aesthetic fact

In this regard I can use my own inhabitations

as an example of transforming remix practice

into unconscious / experiential knowledge

Much of what I write when composing my fictions

including the ‘Distributed Fictions’ planted inside META/DATA

inhabits the early developments of Laurence Sterne

(and in particular his work Tristram Shandy)

as well as the aforementioned Lautréamont

(all of what little he wrote)

For those who follow such things

this will make perfect sense

since one of these writers

is the Godfather of digressionary

[hyper-textual] fiction (Sterne)

and the other is the Prince of Pla(y)giarism (Lautréamont)

a pseudo-autobiographical fiction style / remixologically inhabiting the body language / an ancient form of ‘realtime’ manipulation

Sukenick himself would be quick to point out

Henry Miller as the Godfather of

a pseudo-autobiographical fictional style

that leads the disappearing writer into

acts of creative composition that samples from

the data of unconsciously generated experience

accumulated in the practice of everyday life

and that by manipulating these sampled bits of data

into pseudo-autobiographical fiction

one is capable of producing new forms of knowledge

that (and this is me talking now)

the reader then attempts to mirror

by tracing the movement of the body language

embedded in the textual apparatus

we are perpetually postproducing when reading

For example reading Henry Miller novels

while moving through the streets of New York City

as a foot messenger in the 1980s

was a way for me to learn

how to embody my own pseudo-autobiography

as source material for future fictional remixes

In an email dialogue I had with Sukenick

a few years before he passed away in 2004

he said that ‘Miller was the one who woke me up

to the fact that words on the page can be

a vital extension of the life of the writer

and therefore of the life of the reader.’

The pseudo-autobiographical experience of

remixologically inhabiting the body language

as well as the spiritual unconscious of those

who we eagerly interact with via their work

is part of a larger attempt to correspond

with the rich resources of our precursors

in acts of performative postproduction

To develop a mutually beneficial co-responsibility

with those in the rival tradition who came before us

is to simultaneously pay homage to while expand out of

the discoveries they had already made themselves

via remixologically inhabiting their prior sources

If Borges is correct in suggesting that we all

quite literally create our own precursors (Borges, 1964: 199-201)

by embodying their source material without

either their or our knowledge while creating

then these remixes could be considered

part of a larger biological imperative

providing sustenance for the future viability of the species

A primary issue Sukenick and I always traded notes on

was how can the vitality of writing as an art form

survive in electronic/networked environments?

or when things got really dark

Is human culture preformatted

to kill literature as such and

what then will it mean to be

what we now still call a literary artist?

We were not overly concerned about

saving literature for literature’s sake

The important thing is to annihilate

the important thing (wrote Sukenick

in his ongoing work The Endless Short Story)

and we knew via our experiences

as writers practicing how to become postproduction mediums

that just saving our own asses by expanding

the concept of writing so that it too could infiltrate

and have influence on the emerging digital culture

was and still is our only way O U T

That is to say as interdisciplinary media artists

who formally experimented with language

we were going to write the only way we knew how

i.e. through a constant oscillation

between improvisation and revision

digression and pla(y)giarism (hyperimprovisational remixology)

and if literature wanted to come along for the ride

then (conjuring the spirit of Mailer circa Armies of the Night)

The Novelists would not stop it from doing so

The bottom line for type A metamediums

addicted to the rush of becoming

just-in-time skywriters operating on autopilot

while navigating the restless skies

was that as long as we were left to our incandescence /

our satori / our hallucinatory language adventures

then literature was always welcome to join us at its own risk

As much as we would be happy to kill it on our own terms

(after all this was not a job for Corporate America and its Cable News /

Hollywood Sensationalism / Fakebook Culture –

No, killing literature was a job for The Novelists!)

we must accept the fact that it (Literature)

has earned our respect just for having survived this long

and like your rich old man with shiny new tooth implants

champing at the bit of careening post-careerism

if it is hungry for more historical relevance

then so be it

We will even acknowledge its tough guy stubbornness

till the day it dies (just ask Mailer, R.I.P.)

Still there are many ways of out-surviving literature per se

while expanding the power of writing to hack

into the abyss and transform the world

and this will always be the mission of

the zealous participants in the rival tradition

Taking on the stylistic writing gestures of

other artists and then remixologically inhabiting them

in some ancient form of ‘realtime’ manipulation

requires practice (and here I cannot help but think of

some musicians and athletes who always seem

to find that necessary physical and psychical balance

while engaged in their well-choreographed

scenes of experiential play

perhaps this ancient form of ‘realtime’ manipulation

is an unconscious process of intuitively making

the right move at just the right time

as when the famous American quarterback

Joe Montana asked to describe his ‘play’ on the field

once said ‘I am an unconscious while playing’

and is not necessarily something one learns

but anticipates as part of their active methodology

for example when the jazz musician Ornette Coleman

asked to elaborate on how one can learn to play like him

he matter-of-factly states

‘I didn’t know you had to learn to play;

I thought you had to play to play’)

Moving in and out of these ghost tendencies that

mark the outlines of a body language once performed

by another artist of the past also necessitates

a certain amount of lived experience –

experience at remixologically inhabiting

the spiritual unconscious of another body language

whose code has been transmitted to our own

neural network for postproduction processing

Is this not how we become postproduction mediums?

The bottom line is that

to remix Miles Davis

sometimes it takes a long time

to become a postproduction medium

(Davis once said ‘Sometimes it takes a long time

to play like yourself.’)

I think of it as an enduring embodied praxis

i.e. where the gesture of writing embedded in muscle memory

enables the postproduction artist to intuitively

mirror the neuron activity of the ones who came before

something that feels like a deep interiorization of

someone else’s creative rhythm mediumistically

syncing with whatever filters one turns on

at any given time during the remix performance

What I learned from Sukenick and Acker

for example

came both from being with them in person

as well as reading them from a distance

Reading their body language and moving through their books with them

kept me on my game as did engaging with them in person

or via email dialogue so that we fed off each other

kicking up more spurs of intersubjective codework

to illuminate our collaborative sets with

‘You’re on fire,’ Acker told me in the first email

I ever received from her (she was right – and knew it)

We may have been individuals in pursuit of

our own form of writerly nirvana

but collectively we were also always in pursuit of

‘that final “race to the wire of time”‘

(to quote LeRoi Jones writing about Kerouac’s

spontaneous bop prose style)’[1]

For now

I’m still in the race

but these artists were the ones who taught me

how to haunt the texts that came before me

even as these same texts haunted me back

Think of it as literary hauntology

i.e. the conjuring of ghost-note tendencies

but with a twist: by mediumistically transcoding

the resonant styles inherited from

the Rival Tradition in Literature

contemporary remixologists simultaneously

carry on the next phase of a more digitally-inclined

Renewable Tradition

(a ‘next phase’ that opens itself up to

the hacking priorities of other remixologists

who are positioning themselves to carry on this same tradition)

By replacing the ‘new tradition’ in writing

with a formidable ‘renewable tradition’ in

electronic remixology or what Gregory Ulmer calls “electracy”

(the meeting of electricity and literacy) (Ulmer, 2005: xxiii)

we open up future channels of distribution

that are fueled by ‘renewable energy sources’

that come directly from the artist-mediums themselves

and can begin imagining how the future forms of

fiction(al) performance might emerge as ‘hybrid vehicles’

to transport our digital personas in

(and in this regard let’s not forget that ‘Prius’

means before or first and so plays right in to

our avant-garde reckoning with innovation

as it applies to all things clever and entrepreneurial

but that also emerge out of necessity

as part of a pragmatic survival strategy

in the degrading environment that is gasping

for whatever oxygen there may be out there)

If there were an Academy Award for

Best Remix Persona in A Divination Role

one would have to consider Burroughs

for The Lifetime Achievement award

His entire scramble-the-code methodology

was grounded in derailing the predetermined self

Burroughs demonstrates to us how he plays

the pre-Internet remixologist circa 1960:

[...] I took a short passage of my recorded voice and cut it into intervals of one twenty-fourth of a second on movie tape — (movie tape is larger and easier to splice) — and rearranged the order of the 24th second intervals of recorded speech. The original words are quite unintelligible but new words emerge. The voice is still there and you can immediately recognize the speaker. Also the tone of voice remains. If the tone is friendly, hostile, sexual, poetic, sarcastic, lifeless, despairing, this will be apparent in the altered sequence. (Burroughs and Odier: 1974: 178)

American Pragmatism at its best

The DJ scratches The VJ scrubs

the net artist / computer programmer hacks

and the literary provocateur Burroughs scrambles

Burroughs: ‘Pick a card, any card.’

Professor VJ: ‘I’ll take mine scrambled.’

Burroughs then charts out an imaginary large festival of

scramblers working with A/V devices who would first of all

hack into entertainment products since ‘in fact entertainment

is the most promising field for cut-up techniques.

Imagine a pop festival like Phun City…’ (Burroughs and Odier, 1974: 184)

and before you know it

he’s drawing up a blueprint for a live A/V Hackfest

so as to ‘lay down a grid of sound over the whole festival.’ (Burroughs and Odier, 1974: 182)

The jam session would not be with a list of performers

on stage playing before the crowd

In Burroughs’ festival the hacker audience

would produce the event itself and

it would take place ad hoc

in this massive field of play (literally ‘car park,

a camping area, a rock auditorium, a village with booths

and cinema, a large wooded area.’) (Burroughs and Odier, 1974:184)

Everyone would be equipped with tape players /

video recorders / prepared and unprepared

source material / projection screens etc.

Fast-forward to 2009 and Burroughs’ Phun City Project

is already happening in Virtual Reality Land

via cut and paste / mash-up culture

yet under the guise of freeform remixology

where an efflorescence of postproduction artworks that

are now being released over the networks

by the digital personas who create them

blends with the fusion of horizons

a networked art scene depends on

for its ongoing cultural sustenance

(‘for such a fusion of horizons to occur,’

writes the late intermedia artist Dick Higgins,

‘the reader or listener must have some consciousness of

sher [sic] own horizons in order to have something to blend with…’)

And that brings us back to scratch one –

that is: How does a contemporary remixologist

create a sense of measure that stylistically

blends with the fusion of horizons?

How would a contemporary remixologist

divining their own just-in-time context

for the compositional playing field of the moment

jump-start a renewable tradition made out of all of

the ‘renewable energy sources’ (i.e. artist-mediums)

signaling from the past / present / future?

That is to say

(borrowing lingo from the jazz scene) -

how do you account for ones remixological chops?

One way to measure remix chops

might be via generational influence

i.e. intensity of influence across generations

Renewable energy sources back to the future?

It’s cosmic

Cosmic inflation snapping back to haunt us

in a way that gets our creative attention

Professor VJ [me-myself-an-Eye]

feels compelled to ask

in a momentary fit of multiphrenic distortion:

‘How can artist-researchers developing

new practice-based initiatives in remixology

turn the immediate future into a renewable source of

“energy” that fuels their unconscious readiness potential?’

Success in this area of practice-based research could lead

to the artist becoming a valuable postproduction medium

running (as Henri Michaux suggests)

… at full speed, in all directions, into the memory, into the future, into the data of the present, to grasp the unexpected, the luminous, stupefying, connections. (Michaux and Ball, 1997: 212)

In the heat of developing

an applied remixology

these luminous connections are intersubjective

part of a spontaneous jam session

with the Source Material Everywhere

indicating the rise of digital socialism

as collectively generated autofiction

or creatively dispersed bio-formalism

It is out of this collectively generated

and always-in-the-making autofiction

that artist-mediums contribute to the unfolding of

an ongoing co-poietic process of mutual becomingness

one that feeds off of the renewable energy sources

their remixological practices turn to for future sustenance

so that they can then generate novel forms of life

that are at once of their time and ahead of their time

A tradition worth renewing if ever there was one.

Author’s Biography

Mark Amerika is a profesor of digital art at the University of Colorado in Boulder where he is developing the TECHNE practice-based research initiative. http://www.markamerika.com/bio.html

Notes

[1] LeRoi Jones, who changed his name to Amiri Baraka, published his ‘Letter to the Evergreen Review about Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose’ in 1961. ‘The actual experience of this “race” is experienced only by the writer,’ writes Baraka, ‘whose entire psyche is involved and from whence the work is extracted. And no matter how much we “identify” or are extended by the work, it remains always a work and not ourselves. [...] only the writer is “relaxed and said” [Kerouac]; the reader is finished, stopped, but his mind still lingers, sometimes frantically, between the essential and the projected, i.e. what we are and what the work has made us, which is the writer’s triumph.’ The essay was reprinted in Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (New York: Viking, 1992), 352-53. [back]

References

Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work: Essays (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997).

Antin, David.  What It means to be Avant-garde (New York: New Directions, 1993).

Borges, Jorge Luis, Yates Donald A., and Irby, James E. Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1964).

Burroughs William S., and Odier Daniel. The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 1974).

Burroughs, William S., and Brion Gysin. The Third Mind (New York: Viking Press, 1978)

Federman, Raymond. Surfiction: Fiction Now … and Tomorrow (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1981).

Higgins, Dick. Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).

Michaux, Henri, trans. David Ball, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

Sukenick, Ronald. Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York:  Beech Tree Books, 1987).

Ulmer, Gregory. Electronic Monuments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

Borges, ‘Kafka and His Precursors’

Many happy returns

It became a minor phenomenon during 2007. By September 2009 it was a virus out of control. Described in Wired as a ‘popular internet meme’ (Wortham, 2008), the obsessive serial mash-up of a key sequence from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film of the last days of Adolf Hitler, Der Untergang (The Downfall), is suggestive of the cultural logic of the contemporary formation known as remix. Remix culture is comprised of what could loosely be termed amateurs and professionals engaged in the practice of creatively re-using found material. The distinction is useful in identifying the aesthetic and material differences between dedicated intermedia remix artists (Negativland, Martin Arnold, Craig Baldwin, Soda_Jerk), artists who incorporate elements of remix into a broader audiovisual practice (Philip Brophy, Candice Breitz, Christian Marclay, John Zorn) and the vernacular audio-visual mash-up/remake/dub/scratch aesthetics associated with a broad range of online practices. The domestication of audio-visual literacies in the digital age has meant that the processes of sampling, editing and compositing – once the province of dedicated adepts – have become second nature for a generation weaned on computers and digital technology. Audio-visual remix attests to a utilitarian competence in ‘writing’ for the communications paradigm of the internet and networked conditions that Gregory L. Ulmer famously termed ‘electracy’; a concept that prioritises the notion of the ‘remake’ and the use of found material (Ulmer, 1989, 1994, 2005, Tofts, 1996). As well, this pervasive cultural competence (in Chomsky’s linguistic sense of the term) attests to the dramatic distribution of the material means of production into the hands of consumers. [1]

The Downfall meme is a portrait in miniature of the doxa of contemporary remix; namely, the collaborative, socially-networked taste for creatively manipulating work made by someone else. These received ideas presume the assurance of an invisible yet simpatico audience of like-minded, DIY-capable remixers alive to the vertiginous pleasure of knowing that anything labeled a remix is one file in a conjugate (yours, mine, ours) Shareware .zip archive of infinite re-use. In other words, an assurance of many happy returns. [2] The Downfall meme is a weird internet event in that it has garnered the kind of concentrated anticipation on a singular event usually associated with cult television series, or, more distantly, the narrow band era of broadcast television (see Palmer, 2008). As remix artist and theorist Dan Angeloro has suggested, we are witnessing a ‘popular movement of incredible momentum – the copy/cut/paste logic of contemporary internet culture’ (Angeloro, 2006: 20).

The morphology of remix

The Downfall is also a weird remix event in the way that every online mash of Joe Pesci’s ‘Do I amuse you?’ shtick from Goodfellas is not. Pesci’s menacing rhetorical question is sampled across a diverse range of deliberately incongruous contexts from Sesame Street to The Flintstones. The humour of the remix, as satire or parody, is predicated on the principle of inappropriate juxtaposition; a trope that is arguably best witnessed in the ultra lounge covers by Richard Cheese of grunge and especially hard core songs, such as Slipknot’s People=shit or The Prodigy’s Smack my bitch up. But let’s face it, the sound of Pesci’s sublimely foul-mouthed imbroglio of violence spoken by Elmo or one of the Angry Alien Bunnies makes for good ‘water cooler’ conversation, but it hardly contributes to or advances the long cultural tradition of re-use. This tradition has been extensively discussed elsewhere (Evans, 2009, Navas, 2006, Chang, 2006, Miller, 2004, Baldwin, 1995, Jameson, 1991 inter alia), however some of its more familiar phenomena include contemporary DJ/VJ culture, 90s data hacking and culture jamming, 80s appropriation art, hip hop and sampling, 70s funk, 60s pop art, Dada and Surrealism, literary modernism, the Renaissance, Shakespeare, the Homeric rhapsodists… so it goes.

The Downfall and other collective remix subphyla such as ‘literal version videos’, film trailer re-dubs, scratch video, re-edits and machinima all evidence a perversely myopic form of relational aesthetics that is unrehearsed, ongoing and self-organising. The collective and accretive nature of such collaboration is motivated by the desire of its decentred community of consumers to contribute productively to a generative, networked folk art; an unspoken ethic of sharing in which borrowing, copying and otherwise plundering someone else’s work constitutes a gesture of sharing within a kind of digital potlatch or gift economy. The idea of the potlatch is also useful in signifying the sense of excess associated with both the sheer volume of remixes and remixers, as well as the sense of surpassing the achievements and giving of the previous contributor. In this online remix reveals a conspicuous and persistent creative one-upmanship, the desire to evidence greater ingenuity and invention than what has come before.

The repetitive re-working of the same sequences from particular films or other media is also akin to the restrictive, Oulipean context of working within a defined, narrow field of possibility. This virtuoso, rule-governed challenge associated with the Workshop for Potential Literature is very much in evidence in The Downfall archive, which is focused around re-interpretations, or rather alternative scripting of a persistent sameness. If Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais are unlikely patrons of contemporary remix, then Benoît Mandelbrot is clearly its CEO. We can ascribe to the systematic repetition of the same scene or sequence in so much remix the fractal process of self-similarity, whereby an organism or system is made up of replications of itself. [3] Consistent with the principles of deconstruction, iteration features prominently in fractal geometry to account for minute transformations of difference within processes of self-similarity (Mandelbrot, 1983). The fractal mechanics of ‘iterated function systems’ may well be the key to re-defining the diachronic cultural history of remix prior to its synchronic, contemporary idiom.

In The Downfall genre this iterated function system predominantly takes the form of a short but intense sequence (there are the odd exceptions to the rule). It features Hitler (Bruno Ganz) receiving news from his senior generals that the war is lost, momentarily reflecting on its consequences before launching into a fit of enraged apoplexy in which it is declared that suicide is preferable to surrender: Aristotelian pity and terror in three minutes and fifty seconds. [4] While the potential for remix under such fractal conditions is infinite (as conditioned by the principle of iteration as alteration), it is of necessity limited or multiplied by the degree of imagination and invention evidenced in the remix. That is, the most memorable examples self-consciously foreground the precise synching of scenarios that uncannily fit and at the same time queer the mise en scéne of the original text. They are humorous because of the realisation that the alternative scenario could be text rather than copy-text, humorous also because it is not. [5]

Two examples of this deceptive aesthetic rhythm of continuity and disruptive contrast are worth noting. Soda_Jerk’s Dawn of Remix scratch video (2004) seamlessly transforms Stanley Kubrick’s apes from the opening sequence of 2001 into a rap posse bustin’ rhymes to the tune of L L Cool J’s ‘Can’t live without my radio’. Philip Brophy’s Evaporated Music 2: At the Mouth of metal (2006-2008) eviscerates the sound from teen bands performing in wholesome American TV series, such as California Dreams, then, with a malevolent surgical exactitude, replaces it with a death metal score. Both works reveal how appropriation—as opposed to expropriation— is and has always been a legitimate poetic or inventio for the creation of new work (see Barth, 1967, Eco, 1982, Collins, 1995, Armand, 2009). Most online remix, however, simply goes through the motion of doing a remix: hence our sub-titular qualification of ‘imprecise’ and disagreeable’. They fail to memorably stand out from the crowd and thwart the expectation of encountering something out of the ordinary—the imperative, surely, of any remix aficionado or media scholar armed with a search engine. This leveling out of banal variations on a theme is an instance of the dissolution of distinctions that Takashi Murakami invokes in his category of the ‘super flat’ in relation to the visual arts (Murakami, 2003). Accordingly, treatments of the same scene from The Downfall are preposterously (and infuriatingly) varied, ranging from Hitler ranting about the selection of the 2009 All Australian AFL team, the death of Michael Jackson or the election of Obama, to finding himself banned from Xbox Live, having his car stolen, problems with his internet access and, ultimately, reacting to the Hitler remix genre itself.

Make it New!

Recent formations such as The Downfall meme can best be regarded as formalist ostranenie, the defamiliarisation of the notion of re-use as the condition of all textual forms. From poststructuralist notions of alterity and intertextuality to structuralist concepts of narratology and the law of genre, cultural artifacts are iterations of other iterations. It is in the very logic of textuality to remake something from permutations of lexical items within specific generic paradigms. The cornucopia of mash-ups, trailer-hacks and re-edits on sites such as YouTube and Google Video are governed by the same linguistic laws of metaphor and metonymy, substitution and combination, paradigm and syntagm as novels, films, operas and computer games (we might also include sculpture, architecture, music, ballet, manga, visual art, etc.). But from the more pressing contemporary perspective of issues to do with copyright, fair use and creative commons, a historical conception of creativity as re-use suggests that we have always already had access to a ‘common wealth’ of intellectual property— history, in Emily Apter’s words (with McKenzie Wark’s Hacker Manifesto in mind) as an ‘open-source utopia’ (Apter, 2009: 94). This view is consistent with Ezra Pound’s modernist call to arms to ‘Make it New!’ at the start of the twentieth century. For many years literary historians presumed that Pound was advocating radical, avant-garde experimentation. For Pound, however, it was the duty of the modern artist to re-work the cultural traditions of the past, to re-make them (‘it’) anew in a contemporary idiom. Arguably the most allusive writer in the Western canon (no mean feat during the time of Joyce and Eliot), Pound constructed his own idiosyncratic tradition, an imagined cultural lineage that included Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Sapho, Homer, Confucius and the French troubadours of the fourteenth century; an eclectic set that most contemporary DJs would struggle to mix down.

But even more profoundly than the choice to draw from the deep well of the already said, the well itself— as utterance, discourse, communication, mediation, the history of representation —implies as its very condition a rhythm of call and response, as in jazz. Dizzy Gillespie was conscious of the consequences of this when he observed that ‘when we borrowed from a standard we added and substituted so many chords that most people didn’t know what song we were really playing’ (Gillespie and Fraser, 1979: 209). Paul D. Miller’s (aka DJ Spooky) concept of ‘rhythm science’ presumes this recontextualising of utterance that precedes your own, articulating in his book of the same name a ‘compositional strategy’ of improvised permutation (Miller, 2004: 20). And so, too, Jacques Derrida was slave to the rhythm in his discussion of the myth of Echo and Narcissus in Kirby Dick’s and Amy Ziering Kofman’s 2002 film Derrida. Le philosophe sits in a hotel room in front of a mirror in a Paris studio being filmed by a film crew being filmed by another film crew. He is immediately self-conscious of this multiplication of the scene:

Speech is what’s taking place here right now. There’s a mirror. I’m speaking. There’s a camera. You pose a question, I repeat it. So I’m acting as both Narcissus and Echo at one and the same time. (Dick and Kofman, 2005: 94)

If we re-cast Charlie Parker as Echo to Dizzy Gillespie’s Narcissus, Derrida’s account has the one repeating the end of the other’s phrases in a syncopated groove, blowing changes such that

in repeating the last syllables of the words of Narcissus, she speaks in such a way that the words become her own. In a certain way, she appropriates his language… In repeating she responds to him… She speaks in her own name by just repeating his words. (94)

This repetition with a difference (Gregory Bateson’s ‘difference that makes a difference’) is the ontology of remix, what free jazz hep cat Ornette Coleman famously called ‘something else’.

Consistent with this be-bop grammatology of all forms of expression, we should refrain from continuing to partition online remix as a distinctive “Web 2.0” instance of textuality as enunciation squared. With Mandelbrot’s iterated function system in mind, not to mention Bolter’s and Grusin’s remediation (Bolter and Grusin, 2000), we should think of it as a reflexive, stylized foregrounding of the reusable poetics of all forms of cultural production. Contemporary remix, then, is less a decisive, á la mode practice of copy-text, than a Baroque moment in the history of culture as remix more broadly.

Should Auld Acquaintances Be Forgot?

In Angela Ndalianis’ Introduction to Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, the term ‘Baroque’ is historicised as a pejorative historical impulse, an attempt to dismiss ‘art or music of extravagance, impetuousness, and virtuosity’, and ‘possessing traits that were unusual, vulgar, exuberant, and beyond the norm … a degeneration or decline of the classical and harmonious ideal epitomized by the Renaissance era’ (Ndalianis 2004: 4-5). If the neo-Baroque discussed by Ndalianis and Omar Calabrese (Calabrese, 1992) persists in large-scale technological marvels, spaces and media, it stands to reason that the extravagance, impetuousness and virtuosity of smaller scale works such as dorky online video remixes, sound collages or pointless Photoshops could and should be interpreted through such a historical filter.

This, on the surface of things, is more plausible than sidelining these endless abyssal zones in favour of an art historical discourse that privileges the monied artist cultures and the easily expressible. Much like Web 2.0 ‘open’ democracy projects, which are now only ‘open’ to abuse by public relation ghouls, the rhetoric of contemporary aesthetics has been more geographic than aesthetic or polemical. Hitler’s thousand and one Downfalls are surely dislocatable from their historical significance – but more in the sense of a painfully dislocated shoulder or muscle than an ephemeral drift from station to station. There, and not there, haunted but already always exorcised. The indolence, negativity and yes, stupidity of much online remix culture requires the same register of historicity as the formal questions about a networked, post-networked or ever-shifting identity.

‘Cui bono’? To whose benefit indeed. For whom is the rhetoric of remix weighed so heavily on its formal implications? The recent interest in the categories of the hauntological and speculative realism by critics such as Graham Harman (Harman, 2009), Quentin Meillassoux (Meillassoux, 2008) and others has provoked higher stakes for media discourses, by which they impress upon scholars and readers enquiries that return us to the ‘not this again’ un-returnable; class, power, people. The Auld Acquaintance, as Borges wrote in ‘Kafka and His Precursors’, can’t ever quite be forgot, but certainly will come under pressure from the present as much as the past (‘each writer creates his precursors’ [Borges, 1999: 365]). These images and sounds taken up for reuse are still past even as they are presented. In Oblivion Marc Augé notes that ‘the definition of oblivion as loss of remembrance takes on another meaning as soon as one perceives it as a component of memory itself’ (Augé 2004: 15), as the auld and the neu take on radical repurposing. Augé explained further:

Remembering or forgetting is doing gardener’s work, selecting, pruning. Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower. Those plants that have in some way achieved their destiny, those flourishing plants have in some way forgotten themselves in order to transform: between the seeds or the cutting from which they were born and what they have become there is hardly any apparent relationship anymore. In that sense, the flower is the seed’s oblivion (Augé, 2004: 15).

Cui Bono, then, as the fetishisation of the archive? Dylan Trigg would argue similarly that ‘instead of an ethical demand towards continuity, let us place memories in ruin’ (Trigg 2006: 12). Ruination and decay, if we think of them through that never-present Baroque, raise these stakes in a way the sober mechanisms of the data collector and the ‘synergy’-hunting new media autist were never interested in. ‘In the docility of ruins, preservation is enforced as the justified response … this ethics is only tenable so long as reason is said to be sovereign’ (3). But reason is not sovereign. The rhetorical strategies of the past decade that promote a hypertrophic archive impulse— a principle of keep everything, connect everything— has served us very well. The public aspects of this argument, exemplified perhaps by Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006) have made broad inroads into the necessary torsions between commerce and the commons. Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (2005) was more pointed, alerting us to how ‘we are less and less a free culture, and more and more a permission culture’ (Lessig, 2005: 3). Remix culture engages with questions of ownership quite naturally, but in terms of a positive rhetorical statement for cultural researchers, it benefits to also draw down some thick description about what precisely is being remixed, by whom and for what purposes. More pointedly, then, to also look outside the arts communities and look how high or low the stakes of our atomised cultural forms are becoming.

If copyright had become the big threat for remix culture by the beginning of the decade, it would become clear that by its end that the defense and adoration of the archive had mutated. Fascination with the network metaphor has turned into an obsession; consider our (in)ability to wrestle down the concept of the ‘network culture’, a cottage industry of publication and intellectual labour that has acted on the formal problems facing humanities research just as much as the broad changes brought about by interconnectedness. Blending the histories and discourses of both the form and content of remix remains vital to our capacity for critique.

The intellectual work on ‘network culture’ is also an act of violence on framing devices that came prior to it; it deletes as much as it creates, prunes as much as it flowers. Accordingly, we need to broaden and historicise the debate beyond the current tenor of ‘social media’, ‘participatory culture’ and ‘copyright wars’ (Lessig, 2008). Thankfully, the doxa is supple enough in most places to allow for the common to grow muddy, strange flowers to grow and animals to grow fat. Remix culture appeals to us because it is precisely just a moment too late for its discussion, the wave has moved on and the Rhetoric Safari conceives of culture in ways that overarch the remix. Rather than argue for the urgency of this issue of Fibreculture Journal, the editors wish to pause, rewind and record over the apparently urgent question of what is remix and ask instead ‘What Now?’

H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘mocking and incredible shadow out of time’ might have destroyed all hope (Lovecraft 2005: 323), but perhaps this is a way to consider what a culture of remix performs out of the past— a mocking shadow that curses, then recurses all those impossible-to-escape shadows. Remix culture is best understood by remix performers and artists, but due to their visibility rather than a position of privilege. By the same impulse, discourses about what occurs in the occluded miasma of cultural activity (the cheap and nasty Windows Movie Maker uploads to Youtube) provide the grist for our mill. Form and content still require careful attention and their own careful historical action from those engaging with intellectual enquiries, however we choose to position ourselves in regard to high and low, cool and warm, work and network. After James Brown, then, hit the rewind button on the One and hit it hard.

In his scriptible persona of Professor VJ, Mark Amerika riffs on the verbal funk of George Clinton to ‘remixologically’ displace the concept of the ‘new’ to the ‘renewable’ in relation to the historical body of literature. ‘The Renewable Tradition (Extended Play Remix)’ is a prose-poem manifesto for the becoming of the artist as ‘postproduction medium’ in the age of the digital apparatus. If ‘Information wants to be free’ was the catchphrase of the hacker 80s, ‘Source Material Everywhere’ is the moniker of the ‘remixological’ present.

Ross Harley picks up on a ‘conceptual bass-line’ in historical attitudes to appropriation and traces its reverberation through a range of practices of Australian audio-visual remix. In ‘Cultural Modulation and the Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art’, this vibe resonates through the experimental movements of the Sydney Super 8 group and the emergent video art scene of the 1980s, finding its ultimate expression in the ‘zero originality clause’ of post-digital remix collective Soda_Jerk.

Lisa Gye‘s ‘How can you be found when no one knows you’re missing?’ explores the nationalist hysteria surrounding the position of the Australian film industry and the doublespeak by industry and academic narratives that circulate within it. Twin narratives of ideological fantasy and reflective fiction manipulate nationalist sentimentality while refusing to confront history. Gye’s exposure of this double helix is explicit in twinned essays that remake, rather than attempt to make sense of, these competing positions.

Ian Haig’s ‘Sputnik Baby’ reflects on the band both very much before and well after their time, Sigue Sigue Sputnik. A debateable musical legacy notwithstanding, Sputnik made visible the elementalism and archive fever of the 1980s. Pop culture’s re-arrival into itself, that daunting sense of coming back to (the) futurism, was how Sigue Sigue Sputnik were elevated from cynical marketing conflagration to one of remix’s most complex micro-histories.

Steve Jones’ essay ‘James Brown, Sample Culture and the Permanent Distance of Glory’ takes us through the recombinatory history (and histrionics) of the Minister of The New New Super Heavy Funk, the Real Superbad, The Hardest Working Man In Show Business. The stakes of imitation and reformation of soul and funk were explicitly woven into and through Brown’s performativity and self-production, which take on historical value for contemporary sampling and referentiality.

Esther Milne’s ‘Materialities of Law: Celebrity Production and the Public Domain’ positions that elusive nexus of culture, the public person, as a means by which ephemerality and materiality put demands on law. Examples are drawn from cases of celebrity endorsement, defamation and rights to publicity cases that have drawn the lines between a person and their image. Milne’s close analysis of the legal materialities grounds a discourse and history of celebrity and raises the stakes for discourses of celebrity remix.

Craig Saper, in ‘Materiality of a Simulation’ rewinds the clock to postulate a poetic anachronism in which Bob Brown’s 1931 ‘Reading Machine’ introduces the scratch technique of hip-hop as a mechanism for de-naturalising the act of reading. Usurping DJ Kool Herc by forty years as the inventor of shig-shigi, Brown anticipated a mode of reading as scanning that would come to make sense in the age of electracy; the corollary of which, of course, is that we need to re-write turntablism as a branch of grammatology.

Editors’ Biographies

Darren Tofts is Professor of Media & Communications, Swinburne University of Technology. He is the author of Memory Trade, Parallax and Interzone and the co-editor of Prefiguring Cyberculture and Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix. http://www.darrentofts.net

Christian McCrea is a theorist working in the Games and Interactivity program at Swinburne University. He has researched and taught in fields relating to cinema, culture, games, art, technology, aesthetics and politics.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Rosie Cross [geekgirl].

Notes

[1] We have deliberately avoided usage of the dreaded neologism ‘prosumer’. A more palatable analogy, again following the lead of Ulmer, is the diffusion of a general literacy akin to the shifting of power over the craft of hieroglyphics away from the priestly class to a wider community in Predynastic Egypt. For the record, the writer Mark Dery asks, ‘is there a more appalling word than Blog’ (email correspondence with Darren Tofts, June 2006). The answer is yes and that word is ‘prosumer’. [back]

[2] Imre Salusinszky observed of this superfluity that ‘if everybody who has devised a parody of this particular scene from Downfall had to quit, world employment statistics would register a dip’ (Salusinszky, 2009). [back]

[3] The literary critic Hugh Kenner took a similar approach to the modern novel. Drawing on general number theory, Kenner argued for a concept of art as a closed field of possibility, a language game of infinite permutation within a finite lexical set (Kenner, 1962). [back]

[4] Suffice to say that in the sanctioned masquerade of speaking of others speaking that is contemporary remix culture, this summary of The Downfall was gleaned from the Internet Movie Database. No first hand encounter with the actual film occurred during the writing of this Introduction. [back]

[5] This realisation of could be and is not presumes the familiarity with and recognition of an original referent being remixed (see Navas, 2006). The opposite is of course true, whereby encounter with the remix precedes any familiarity with the original. [back]

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