Sampling

Read Samples from the Heap by Bernard Schütze

Read Taking Pictures by/about Barbara Kruger


Sherrie Levine, Fountain (Madonna), 1991 – this & this (optional)


How to write a dadaist poem



Museum of Endangered Sounds



J Dilla’s Donuts – some of the samples used here


3 Reasons Why Women Make the Best Remixers


internetpoetry


Dan Carter 3 MIN excerpt from Alison S. M. Kobayashi on Vimeo.


Laura Swanson’s Uniforms



highly recommended future / further viewing…

Color Adjustment (Film)
The Grey Video (Music Video)
The Ecstasy of Influence – Jonathan Letham (Harper’s Article)
The Death of the Author – Roland Barthes (Essay)
wonderful woman – dara birnbaum (Video)
Remix Theory (Website)
Man in the Mirror – Michael Jackson (video)
A User’s Guide to Détournement – Debord / Wolman (essay/guide)


lolz

Best Minimal Track Ever!!
Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett
Qaeda, quality, question, quickly, quickly, quiet
Conversnitch

got lolz? post them with your thoughts…

 

10 Thoughts

  • Will

    The creation of the dadaism poem was interesting. I like the introduction of contingency into art. Besides random reorganization, sampling can also take art and put it into a new context. This is seen in the Walker Evans photographs reproduced by Sherrie Levine. However, taking something from a new source and bringing it into a new context brings up issues of appropriation. In the final video artist Young Jean Lee talks about the process of representing identity.

    • Michelle

      I also thought the creation of the dada poem was really interesting. I never felt very comfortable with or totally understood the idea that “art doesn’t happen in a vacuum” until my studies in poetry deepened. I’ve always loved erasure poems and found poetry but I’d never really felt like I really had ownership over the pieces I created, until a professor explained to me that using the English language at all is choosing from a limited set of words, and abiding by pre-existing rules of grammar. Like a page used in an erasure poem, language comes pre-molded and impervious to our interventions. Poetry has a lot to do with learning to work with and around those barriers that language attempts to impose. These questions I’ve had regarding authorship/ownership and found materials remind me of what we’re studying today.

  • Liza

    I love this topic so much. First off, Donuts is one of my favorite albums ever. J Dilla was a complete sampling genius. Also just a general lolz, we literally talked about Dada in Modern Art yesterday and read the how to make a Dada poem in class, which is just a weird coincidence (we also talked about Sherry Levine in my photo class…there’s something in the freaking air). This made me think a lot about Dada in general, which was a movement that I never really loved when I first learned about it in class, but realizing the tools that we can use from Dada has really been beginning to excite me. I’m thinking of like Hannah Hoch’s work “Cut With a Kitch Knife…” and her use of images from the mainstream media in collage. While we’re pretty used to seeing collage as a way of making nowadays, this was a new method during this time period. She utilized these images that were recognizable and already had assigned meaning (signs, visual semiotics, it all comes back around…) and created a work that created new meaning. This is what made the work so compelling and provocative. Had she not used these images (not originally her own) the work would not have the same effect, especially during that time period.

    Dada opened up art to allow for different interpretations of what an original idea was and this gave artists a new freedom. It also was also one of the first movements to integrate art into life and vice versa: the world as a canvas, as a medium, etc. etc. And, by extension, art opened up to be more and more about IDEAS and because of this, it gave a new definition to the artistic genius. Or at least got people thinking about it.

    Appropriation, sampling, etc. brings about a lot of heated discussion that I think is really crucial for artists to engage in, especially now when there is SO much information (visual and non-visual) at our fingertips that we can (and I think should) use to create. But, at the same time, we have to be aware of what we’re doing to be “smart samplers”. I’m rabbling, but I think this is just a really important and relevant conversation to be having as artists right now. Sherrie Levine, for example, upsets a lot of people, and is praised by many many others for her appropriation of the work of others (most notably Walter Evans). To me, this all boils down to intention. Levine had a very pointed (and smart) intention with taking a photograph of a photograph and this is why I believe she’s successful. There are others that are less so and, to me, that boils down to INTENTION.

    Ok, I’m done. I love this topic.

    • Liza

      Ok, just read Kruger:

      the laboratorial or, studio versus certain productive or more clearly, reproductive procedures. As parody frees ceremony from ritual, so its ‘making alike’ allows for a disengaged (or supposedly) distanced reading. This strategy is employed by a number of artists working today. Their production, contextualized within the art subculture, frequently consists of an appropriation or ‘taking’ of a picture, the value of which might already be safely esconced within the proven marketability of media imagery. Using, and or informed by fashion and journalistic photography, advertising, film, television, and even other artworks (photos, painting and scupture),
      their quotations suggest a consideration of a work’s ‘original’ use and exchange values, thus straining the appearance of naturalism. Their alterations might consist of cropping, reposing, captioning, and redoing, and proceed to question ideas of competence, originality, authoship and property.On a parodic level, this work can pose a deviation from the repetition of stereotype, contradicting the surety of our initial readings”

      This speaks to what I was saying about intention. Kruger then goes on to talk about the power “people” might (and often do) give to the “original”. Also important to think about…

  • Susan Grochmal

    “the culture climate of an ailing postmodernity”

    Remixes are interesting- maybe the remixer heard something that the og artist did not – and heard a chance for possibility, it’s interesting to think about formulating and executing the idea because

    1. you have an idea
    2. you grow upon that idea but factors like mood when creating/ thinking / what the day has been like / your own personal sonar aesthetics, etc influence it
    – different people make different kinds of art, All people should make art because nobody has the same art if you believe in individuality, it is the expression of something inside that is hard to explain

    J Dilla rules

  • I know class is really soon but I can’t not comment about that “internet poetry” site.
    First of all, the macro of the man screaming with the text reading “you’re*” is by my friend Jordan and I read for the lit mag they started lol
    Second of all, WHY IS TEXT ON IMAGE SO APPEALING?
    It’s SO easy for me to get really excited about a poem when it’s text on image. WHAT’S UP WITH THAT????

  • Ori

    I really enjoyed some of the internetpoetry posts, especially the screenshots of poetic iPhone Notes. They made me feel weirdly reflective about all those little intimate moments we have with our everyday digital interfaces. It makes me curious about the nature of our relationship with all these screens and the hardware+software beneath their glossy surfaces.
    A lot of the works here also got me thinking about the fleeting nature of digital art. In the frenzy of news feeds and trending stories, what’s the proper venue for these works? Neatly organized on individual artists’ homepages? Scattered across Tumblr feeds and Reddit posts? Buried beneath the mass of YouTube search results? None of these works even have a definite home since they can be accessed and reproduced across such different contexts. I definitely think that the modes of distribution and consumption are just as much a part of these works as the media files themselves.

    • Amber

      True- I think about this a lot, how there are not clear pathways for video artists to present their work. Maybe I am underinformed, but I don’t know of very many accessible routes, but I guess that goes for a lot of art in general. I think because it is not static, the art viewing process functions as a time-based event, not something you can look at briefly and look away. I think this really impacts how we think about making/consuming video.

  • Amber

    I thought the why should women remix post was really interesting because of this quote:
    “We constantly compromise our politics to be entertained and thus, understand the complexity of being both a fan of pop-culture but also a critic of it at the same time”
    The idea of women (and other groups of people) using remixing/sampling as a way to take pop culture and its viewpoints and standards and make them more reflective of an individual’s desired world is the most compelling function of remixing for me. It is a way of world-building which is not purely creating new material but shifting perceptions of already existing worlds. I also agree with Susan that it is a way of putting your own self and personal temporal experience on an existing idea and in that process it becomes yourself/your own idea.

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