The Death of the Audience...

Gibson

I found the most compelling part of Gibson's "God's Little Toys" to be his argument that audience, like record, is an artifact of the past, and that we are moving away from the idea that we are passive recipients of media and, instead, are becoming active participants in its creation.  I am a big fan of King Tubby, of the idea (if seldom the reality) of fanfic creations, of machicema, and the transgressive beauty of "soulless corporate units" transformed into works of art by individual intervention.  I would like to believe Gibson's vision is a true one.

But it begs the question, as did much of DJ Spooky's work for me, about how we generate new source material in a world in which art is primarily done through remixing.  There is a vast catalogue, of course, of cultural material to draw from at what Gibson calls this "peculiar junctire, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist."  But what happens to the process when the object ceases to exist?  What is it's base, where is the shared cultural knowledge that allows us to understand the meaning of the pieces that have been pasted together?  Is there a danger here that, to borrow from They Might Be Giants, art will become "a snake head eating the head on the opposite side?"

Doesn't the recombinant need the record as a place from which to start?  And if the process never stops long enough to generate an object, how do we communicate meaning to one another?

Goldsmith

I have a hard time reconciling Goldsmith and Gibson.  Goldsmith seems to be saying that sampling is an unexplored literary practice, and yet we have Gibson's wonderful examples.  We have appropriation of Greek myth by the Romans--maybe the ultimate literary remix--and we have Jerome Rothenberg's "Horse Songs."  We have the allusion, that limited borrowing of phrase or image meant to infuse our reading of a new work with our reading of an older one.  And we have all those reimagined texts-- Mary Reilly as a take on Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Wicked as a remix of The Wizard of Oz.  I don't see the hole in literary practice that Goldsmith is suggesting.

Nor did I ever fully grasp the point of his exercise, and I was a little troubled by its elitist overtones.  He spent a year ridding himself of all creativity by doing exactly what the hordes of workers (mostly women) who earned their living in typing pools used to do all day every day:  retyping text that had little or no value, certainly as creative capital, and largely even as corporate record.  This is evidenced in how little they were paid.  In what way does his exercise render their work even more meaningless?  Is he suggesting that this work also somehow "cleansed" them of all creativity?  What does this suggest for the people in similar jobs today:  data entry clerks, for instance, who type meaningless strings of numbers into spread sheets day in and day out.  

What makes the retyping of the New York Times any different than that, except for the self-congratulatory tone of Goldsmith's own writing about the typing?  I fail to see the difference, and thus also fail to see the point.

    

Ooh... Spooky!

Miller's text is dense in the same way the listenings on the CD are dense... and in this way, I think, pose the same risk that we will designate those elements that signify for us with the properties of "voice," allowing the others to be relegated to the role of "noise."  It is with this in mind, and with an awareness that what has signified for me may not be at all the entirety of what Miller intended for me to hear, that I pose these questions.

 

1.  Miller writes, "The basic idea is to use the digital to try and make a bridge between the interior and exterior... (W)e are able to send our visions and ideas in ways our ancestors would have thought were god-like (16)."  Given this concept of Dj culture as that which allows interiority to become shared, public experience, I am surprised at Miller's continued insistence through out the book on the ideas of creativity and of some persons, but not all persons, as artists.  These words, which are heavily laden with their history of allowing for criticism--for the determining of "good" and "bad" art--seem to me to be in opposition to the idea of the interior exposed.  Are we really meant then, in what Miller calls the "current" age, to judge one another's interiority?  Does the act of participating in the cultural move toward these "shared hallucinations" require us, then, to begin to craft an alterity that has artistic merit?  This seems to me to open the door to a very dangerous kind of elitism in which critics become the gatekeepers, monitoring who may join in the "shared hallucination" and who must simply continue to stand outside of it as a consumer.

 

2.  Miller writes, "To name, to call, to upload, to download... So I'm sitting here and writing -- creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed geographic regions --- reflect and reflecting on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapdily moving into what I like to call prosthetic realism.  site and sound, sign and signification:  The travel at this point becomes mental... it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the art piece (85)."  It seems to me that much of Rhythm Science is an act of prognostication, and attempt to guess at the impact of borderless information, as much as it is a work of description or a manifesto.  Rhythm Science brings to mind other mixtures of the digital and the musical... Jaron Lanier's interactive dance floors and walls (which never really worked when they were at Click and Drag in New York, but which maybe actually work now), Laurie Anderson's Big Science (which has always worked), and even the eery sound of the Theremin.  With the exception of Anderson's ground breaking music, the other two experiments never got much past being cultural curiosities.  

 

While it seems undeniable that everything will change, and that digitization will be part of that change, I’m unpersuaded the Dj culture is a catalyst of that change instead of simply an artifact of it.  I am unsure exactly where Miller posits the enduring value of Dj culture, or of how this culture avoids becoming so endlessly self-referential—as future generations have nothing to sample but the already-sampled, reforming it through their own lenses, but still stuck with the source material?