Moby - photo by Maurice Narcis
With the RE/Mixed Media Festival a week behind me and the ‘official’ post-mortem with the band a week ahead – I need to start recording the experience. Maybe it’s just snips of memory, conversations, thoughts or feelings that floated through. A lot ‘happened,’ but this festival was something that came together between the cracks – that became a living being with breath and movement and thought – when we weren’t looking… while we were occupied ‘doing’ everything that needed to be done. It’s the baby that started growing after a night that started with a feeling – one of love, we hope – who needs your attention every day before it comes into the light, but who you do not ‘know’ until that day it’s born.
This festival started with a feeling, really. One of love perhaps, sure, but it sits within me more as a feeling of nostalgia. I ducked into a dark screening room at the Museum of Modern Art last October, legs tired from standing, and sat on the carpeted floor hypnotized by the rhythmic opening and closing of ventian blinds in the 70′s experimental film by Bas Jan Ader. The nostalgia that welled from the hypnosis was for the little spaces where artists with nothing to lose (the only ones worthy of the name) could come for free and show and share and discuss and lose nothing. In other words, I wanted this little room to exist on my block, and they don’t any more. Conversations ran through my head, most with myself, but there was another one – the one where my friend Rob said that all the underground artists were now on YouTube, since all the real-life meatspace underground venues had slowly died away. All the artists I’ve ever cared about have been lo-fi artists, ones that use what’s on hand because everything is subordinate to the urge and fun of creation and budgets don’t come easy when you’re working at Kinko’s for a living. The name “Lofi Lounge” (later changed to LOFI) floated through and I grabbed it out of the air and I liked it, so I took it home and showed it to my friends. They liked it, too. And we wondered what it was, and how to give it life. A festival seemed like a good way to start – I think Bruce had the idea initially – a small, one-day event that we could invite our friends and local artists to, where they/we could show the little experiments they/we had been conducting at home. Expanding on this, I wondered out loud if anyone had ever done a remix festival that focused on creative appropriation *in practice*. One of my most frequent thoughts at the remix/copyright/free culture events I’d been at (only a handful at that point) was that there was a lot of talk about art, but not much art. This isn’t a criticism of those events, which I still love going to, more a moment of “how can we, as artists, contribute to this conversation?” At the same time, few of the artists I worked with cared much about copyright law or free culture – they don’t have to, appropriation in art and performance is almost taken for granted, and after all none of us had been sued, so what’s the big deal? To me, the big deal is that rules are getting made while we aren’t looking, and slowly these changes are chipping away at some basic truisms of art that keep it free. Since Biz Markie was sued by Gilbert O’Sullivan for the 1991 album that sampled the latter’s long-forgotten 70′s hit “Alone Again,” hip-hop hasn’t been the same – it lost a little piece of what made it unique, i.e. the freedom to sample, mix and scratch bits of culture into sound that burst out from between cracks in city sidewalks, a mutiny on overmediation, a true rebellion the likes of which we haven’t seen since puck rock, maybe not since Debord. So the idea came together to push these communities – the artists and the lawyers and the thinkers and the geeks – together in a hybrid event that would not only talk about art but celebrate it as well. I honestly couldn’t imagine why it had never been done before.
RE/Mixed Fashion Show
So there we set down this rocky road of creation that began with us just having to get along in the first place, enough to be able to stand each other’s presence each week, at least. We lost 2 of the original members within the first few weeks, and we still aren’t sure why but that’s what happens with these things. The group you end with is never the one you start with – never in my 22 years of producing has that happened, and this was no different. I brought a young designer on early in the process - someone I’d met at school and was so intrigued by her aesthetic I thought she’d make a great addition – she was involved in fashion and so through her, the idea for the fashion show was born. Not to disparage any 20-somethings out there, but producing is a LOT of work, and this young friend didn’t have the experience to know that the meetings and planning and networking and communicating can be fairly all-consuming, and she backed out about halfway through the process. In hindsight, I can’t blame her – what 24 year old wants their evenings and weekends consumed with such things? My regret, however, is that I *did* blame her at the time esp. as we were well into the new year, i.e. beyond simple planning and well into execution of many of our ideas. This caused me a valued friendship, and stress-related GI issues that lasted for the next 2 months. Eventually we found someone to replace her, an incredible artist named Elizabeth Pulos who stepped in and volunteered to shoulder the entire fashion piece on her own, which she did with little intervention from me or the rest of the core group. And the result was a beautiful thing to witness. I still cannot say I know what remixed fashion *is* – but the fun is in exploring the idea, not in coming up with answers.
Whenever you put two previously disparate things together, you can always expect some thunder. Initially, most people in the free culture scene were more than encouraging and excited by the idea of the festival, while many of the art stars I knew seemed confused as to why I’d be producing something like this (but encouraging nonetheless, as my friends and a group that’s known to love a good party.) The organizations especially were helpful and encouraging, but there was always a seed of worry in the back of my brain that we were doing something that was slightly counter to the party-line, whatever that might be. If this hadn’t been done before, surely there was a reason – and so all my dealings with the orgs were colored by an inner-feeling that we were somehow coloring outside the lines. My first taste of actual dissent came very late on the night before the festival. I had asked several of the video artists from the curated portion of the event to be judges for the ‘emerging artist’ competition later in the night. I had sent them all links to the videos they would be judging and four out of the five got their votes in at least a day or two before the event. The last one, sent me an email at 1am the night before the fest. It read:
Are these all by a bunch guys? Not a very good representation of the
vast array of styles of remix videos that are out there at all.
Honestly I kinda hate most of these, no hard feelings but these
represent basically all the stuff I’m trying so hard to work against
with my remix videos and advocacy work for fair use. Where are the
vidders for instance?
I would say my choices are…
1) XXXXX [edited out]
2 – 5) I can’t stand to watch all the way through.
What’s interesting is that of the ten videos he was asked to watch, 5 were by women and 5 by men – so both genders were equally represented. Not sure where he came up with “bunch of guys” theory, or what that was based on, but it was an erroneous assumption. The next is that he asks “where are the vidders?” Granted, there were only two vidders, per se. In common vernacular, a vidder is someone who creates “fan vids” or social commentary by appropriating and re-juxtaposing bits of popular movies or TV shows in new ways. I thought 20% was a pretty good representation. The rest of the videos ran the gamut from re-purposing old educational films to music video mashups to video collage based on found footage. Further, the videos were solicited via our website, and the ones chosen were an excellent representation of what we received. Unfortunately they did not conform to one individual’s narrow idea of remix or of some perceived “diversity” that he wouldn’t (probably couldn’t) explain. But it was in the sentiment that these videos “represent basically all the stuff I’m trying so hard to work against with my remix videos and advocacy work for fair use,” that I knew there would be issues with trying to mesh the free culture community with a community of artists. First of all, what does that even mean? Because you don’t like the videos, they are therefore “working against” fair use? I’d love to hear an explanation of this, but I know I’ll never get one. Second, statements like these are never made by artists, because artists know that art doesn’t do well with political agendas – or to be more clear: the moment a work of art’s agenda supersedes its aesthetic, it ceases to become art and should be defined as propaganda. The purpose of RE/Mixed Media was to work against this idea, to show that art appropriates and shares and grows without the need for an agenda – this is simply how art works. Our aim was to explore and push the boundaries of such rigidly held ideas of remix, to challenge ourselves to expand our definitions of what it is, has been, and could be. Perhaps the fellow in question saw this idea as a threat to his own work as it, to a large degree, renders him superfluous, and asks that he simply call himself what he is, i.e. a pundit, not an artist.
Because of this incident, I decided to amend my introductory speech the next day and threw in a bit about how it was best to look at the festival as a “lyric essay” which, according to John D’Agata, is when an essay “starts out as an essay and ends like a poem.” Remix was really a starting point for us – the purpose of the festival was not to directly promote a political agenda, but to add our voice to the ongoing conversation, a voice that doesn’t say “yes” or “no” but only says “look.” We started with the idea of remix and worked outward from there in the hopes that what we would end with was not a polemic, but a work of art, and in that I think we succeeded. But you could tell that the hard core political contingent was in the house. At one point in my talk, I made the analogy of big media being like the Deep Water Horizon oil rig, and artists being the oil spilling into the gulf. Man, you could feel the room bristle as I said that. I think some thought it was meant as a joke… but it’s not a joke, it’s a metaphor, and I think it’s an apt one, although perhaps a bit gauche.
Will Lee as Salvador Dali
The next bit of culture clash I felt at the event started during Ricky Powell’s slide show. I had invited my friend Master Lee, an old-school and highly respected downtown performer to portray Salvador Dali in the re-enactment of the 1936 screening of Rose Hobart, which followed Ricky’s set. What I didn’t know was that Will’s performance would start during Ricky’s slide show as a series of sophomoric heckles. Powell, whose set had gotten off to a rocky start to begin with, was thrown by this disruption that may have been in the spirit of Dali, but was executed without the requisite care for a fellow artist’s performance. His actual performance as Dali went much better, but I could sense the annoyance of the people in the presentation that followed him (a discussion on YouTube’s Content ID protocol), and the look on their faces that wondered what, exactly, they had gotten themselves into.
These wrinkles notwithstanding, I do feel as though the festival was a success. I was beyond pleased with the “Artists Only” discussion for which I was able to wrangle Moby as a panelist. I felt as though having him agree to do our little festival gave us a legitimacy with the press and the public that we may not have enjoyed otherwise. The day before the festival, Elizabeth Stark emailed me and told me that Eclectic Method were interested in performing at the show, but unfortunately we were unable to make it happen at the 11th hour. During my introductory talk, I looked down and saw Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid sitting in the front booth by the stage and I thought “hey, wow – this is really something, people that I respect and admire have actually come out of their own volition… I guess we really created something.” Later that afternoon as I was standing outside, Spooky actually came up and congratulated me on the good work, and suggested we talk at some point in the near future. This was thrilling to me, but not in a star-fucker kind of way. I have admired Miller’s work for years, from his Burroughsian writing in Rhythm Science to his sonic experiments with Yoko Ono, he’s someone who I think “gets it” from an artistic/cultural perspective – someone who creates good work and let’s that do the talking – so to have his endorsement and encouragement was amazing. Before he left, he gave me a stack of his newer books/cds/dvds which was, you know, awesome. Other good things: Josephine Dorado’s game culture panel, exposing machinima to a whole new crew; Steinski leveling up to a new generation of artists that are only recently familiar with his work; and of course the inimitable Sweatshoppe who, as much as I detest the phrase, take the art of live visual mixing to a “whole new level.”
Something else that was received surprisingly better than expected was the “Roots of Remix” video installation – 2 screens featuring examples of appropriation in art history and film, and one screen devoted entirely to the work of Negativland, a group of musicians and artists who have been doing incredible work with appropriated material since the 70′s. While most of the people at the fest didn’t bother to check it out (it was tucked away in a corner upstairs) the ones who did gave me very positive feedback. This is somewhat other than expected. Honestly, I had expected to take some criticism for the lack of cultural diversity – especially in the art piece. But this lack was intentional, as it makes clear that western art, as recorded by the historians, has a shocking lack of diversity. More than that, it demonstrates that cultural movements like hip-hop should not be treated as “the other” or an anomaly in art history when they are being criticized for sampling – in fact, they have more in common with older art movements than differences. Racism comes into play when hip-hop artists are called out for being theives when sampling actually has a long tradition in the established arts.
Ricky Powell
All in all, I’d say that that this attempted meshing of these disparate worlds was successful, but only as a phase 1. Certainly, there’s tons of work to be done, but I still carry the hope that artists and free culture people will find ways to continue to work together – the artists a little more enlightened about free culture, the free culture peeps about art, and the general public about both. That is the three-pronged goal of RE/Mixed Media Festival. See you in 2011.
