Notes on Remix Culture
For the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the market, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences).
Avante garde artists’ experimentations with both form and content function as a direct challenge to the ideological and political power of mainstream commercial cinema …no solutions or programmatic statements, but a series of intricate challenges, hints and coded messages, subverting both form and content… it is by definition an aesthetic and political movement… film is sacked, atomised, caressed and possessed in a frenzy of passionate love.
Amos Vogel (From Film As A Subversive Art 1974)
Vogel’s view of the future of mainstream cinema seems to ring true today in relation to the remix culture of social networking sites such as YouTube. Perhaps not entirely subversive in intent, millions of Vidders and remixers are deconstructing and envisioning their own personal takes on film, TV and other media forms in popular culture. Usually as homage to their favourite movies, bands or even TV commercials (caressed and possessed in a frenzy of love) or in other cases a parody or political message (subverting form and content) usually delivered tongue in cheek The ‘Born Digital’ generation are making their own TV from slices of other people’s work, remixing peer’s as well as commercially owned work. Are they Vogel’s (unknowing?) iconoclasts transgressing narrative modes, structures and visual convention? For this is the art of the common people, this is modern entertainment, an ever-changing production and consumption cycle where new styles are immediately critiqued by peers, imitated and devalued. This is art separated from the art world, often illegal in media usage and so widespread almost impossible to police.