This week, I am proud to be guest-tweeting for Mark America’s remixthebook (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, I posted a piece on the remixthebook site. remixthebook and its attendant activities situate the mash-up as a defining cultural activity in the digital age. With that in mind, I tried to go back to the writings above and update them using pieces of relevant things I’ve written since. If you will, my post is a metamix of thoughts and things I’ve written about remix in the past decade and a half or so, pieces which also represent material from my other book-in-progress, Hip-hop Theory: The Blueprint to 21st Century Culture. It’s a sample-heavy essay that aims to illustrate the point.

Here are a few excerpts:

Culture as meaning-making requires participation. In addition to the communication processes of encoding and decoding, we now participate in recoding culture. Using allusions in our conversation, writing, and other practices engages us in culture creation as well as consumption. The sampling and remixing practices of Hip-hop exemplify this idea more explicitly than any other activity. Chambers wrote, “In readily accessed electronic archives, in the magnetic memory banks of records, films, tapes and videos, different cultures can be revisited, re-vived, re-cycled, re-presented” (p. 193). Current culture is a mix of media and speech, alluded to, appropriated from, and mixed with archival artifacts and acts.

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We use numerous allusions to pop culture texts in everyday discourse, what Roth-Gordon calls “conversational sampling.” Allusions, even as direct samples or quotations, create new meanings. Each form is a variation of the one that came before. Lidchi wrote, “Viewing objects as palimpsests of meaning allows one to incorporate a rich and complex social history into the contemporary analysis of the object.” It is through use that we come to know them. Technology is not likely to slow its expanse into every aspect of our lives and culture, and with it, the reconfiguration of cultural artifacts is also not likely to stem. Allusions – in the many forms discussed above and many more yet to come – are going to become a larger and larger part of our cultural vocabulary. Seeing them as such is the first step in understanding where we are headed.

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Rasmussen wrote, “there is no ‘correct’ way to categorise [sic] the increasing diversity of communication modes inscribed by the media technologies. Categories depend on the nature of the cultural phenomena one wants to investigate.” Quotation, appropriation, reference, and remix comprise twenty first century culture. From our technology and media to our clothes and conversations, ours is now a culture of allusion. As Schwartz so poetically put it: “Whatever artists do, they are held in the loose but loving embrace of artists past.” Would that it were so.

The whole post is here.

Many thanks to Mark America and Kerry Doran for the opportunity and to everyone else for joining in on the fun. Here’s the trailer for the project [runtime: 1:21]:

The book was originally published in 2007, which makes it a rare, paradoxical and infinitely fertile cross between sort-of-contemporary cultural critique of the present and near-prophetic time-capsule of the recent past, swiftly fluttering across disciplines and ideologies to deliver a powerful cross-pollinator of modern intellectual and creative curiosity…

The time elapsed since the book’s publication makes it particularly fascinating to reverse-engineer how the ideas in recent popular books by these thinkers originally germinated…

Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.

You can read the full write-up here. Many thanks to Maria for the kind words and attention, and to my man Jeff Newelt for making the connection. These two truly get it, and it’s inspiring to have connected with them.

As always, Follow for Now is available from Powell’s, Amazon, on The Kindle, at various retail outlets, and from its very own site.

In his defense, the man has been busy with several records by him and his friends (Rob Sonic, DJ Big Wiz, Kimya Dawson, et al.). Here’s the latest from Hail Mary Mallon, which consists of Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic, and DJ Big Wiz: “Smock” (Live from the Burgundy Camry), directed by Alexander Durrant, Justin Metros, and Rico Deniro [runtime: 4:44]:

You’re right, Roy, you’re hopeless. Hopelessly obsessed with a time in your sport that died a long time ago… — McGoo

Roy Christopher executes a Backwards Elbow Glide at a Jacksonville NBL contest circa 1990. (photo by Peter Cowley)

The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was in the ’80s. Given the proliferation of technology into every aspect of our lives, that’s not much of an insight, but hear me out. In addition to the lack of dope video games, the riders of thirty years ago were also missing out on the parks. There were like three ride-able skateparks in the whole country. Now there are at least that many in every city of any size whatsoever. Where the past was spent riding curb cuts, banks, walls, streets, and backyard ramps, today the terrain consists of those as well as many human-made options. It makes for different riding, different tricks, and different values.

We are pleased to inform you that Ogilvy has selected your session, “Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices are Divisive”, as one they would like to graphically record at the event.

What does this mean exactly? This means an artist will visually document your SXSW panel session in real-time, and then share their interpretation via Ogilvy’s online channel and with limited-edition prints in the SXSW Trade Show Day Stage. Ogilvy is only able to provide this service for a very limited group of panel sessions, so it is quite an honor to be selected.

More information on this program, along with examples of work from all the talented artists involved, is available on their site. I love these live renderings and am super stoked to have been selected for this.

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Here’s one by Heather Willems from the Ogilvy site:

Here’s the excerpt that features me running my mouth:

“Having a beer with someone is still one of the most connecting things you can do,” agrees Roy Christopher, a communication studies doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. Still, he says, “the nature of being human is having technology.” Christopher is currently writing a book about human relationships with technology, which he’ll discuss in his panel, Disconnecting the Dots: How Our Devices Are Divisive. “Every new technology falls on a continuum between obstruction and augmentation,” he says, and as such it poses unexpected paradoxes. For instance, “Everyone says ‘location doesn’t matter’ – but it makes location all the more important because you can choose to be anywhere.”

Admittedly, that last insight is not mine. Nicholas Negroponte pointed that out in his book Being Digital (Vintage, 1996). I’ll claim at least the synthesis of the rest though. I’m anxious to talk about this stuff at SXSW Interactive and in the new book.

Many, many thanks to Nora Ankrum and The Austin Chronicle for their time and attention.

Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse — intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist — is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

While I can’t completely agree with such a dismal view of contemporary society, I couldn’t state my purposes as a writer any better than that.

The Medium Picture is a history of the future of our relationship with technology. Technological mediation has changed and continues to change our relationships with each other, our information, time, space, and ourselves. It isn’t going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to become more pervasive. The Medium Picture explores these relationships at all levels, from language and literature to television and cell-phones. It’s about mediation, not just technology: It’s about the ripple, not the rock. That is, it’s about the process we undergo with our tools and toys. It calls attention to the effects of ever-expanding mediation and urges the reader to be more mindful of what constitutes authentic experience. It isn’t about relying on technology less, but it is about what relying on it means.

Given their commitment to critical and engaged theoretical reflection, I am happy to announce that I signed The Medium Picture to Zero Books.

Thank you all for your continued interest and support,

And many thanks to the early readers of this material. I’ll never remember everyone, but here are some helpful folks who read early drafts of the proposal and gave invaluable notes and advice: David Patterson, Mark Wieman, Alex Burns, Steven Shaviro, David Barker, David Miller, Matt Schulte, Kristen Sensenig, Matt Bialer, Rebecca Oliver, Kasey Pfaff, Micheal Schandorf, Doug Sery, Erik Davis, John Brockman, Max Brockman, Jason Weidemann, John Oakes, and Doug Rushkoff.

Here are the details from Sandy:

I want to formally invite you to the opening of my first group exhibition of the year Storytelling at the L. Nowlin Gallery here in Austin. This exhibit, curated by the Austin Photography Group, features 40 Austin photographers and opens next Saturday, January 15th from 6-8pm. I shall be showing a piece from my Black Friday series from 2009.

Here’s a preview of the show. See you all there!

Smithereens collects 19 Steve Aylett stories including ‘The Man Whose Head Expanded‘, ‘The Burnished Adventures of Injury Mouse’, ‘Voyage of the Iguana’, the last ever Beerlight story ‘Specter’s Way’, ‘Horoscope’, the prophetic ‘Download Syndrome’ and the closest thing Aylett has ever written to a traditional SF story, ‘Bossanova’ (featuring a robot and two spaceships!) There are also animal-attack-while-writing reminiscences in ‘Evernemesi’ and top-of-the-line declarative bitterness in ‘On Reading New Books’. Snails, whales and cortical drills. Aylett’s last collection. Steve Aylett has been described as “utterly original” (SFX), “the most original voice in the literary scene” (Michael Moorcock), “an unstoppable master of space and time” (Asimov’s) and “the coolest writer alive today” (Starburst).

All four of Aylett’s “Accomplice” books in one volume. Revised. With introduction by Michael Moorcock. New preface. Weird graphics.

Starburst Magazine has called the books “a hugely impressive example of outrageous literary wit and uncommon good sense, demonstrating once more that Aylett is the coolest writer alive today”. SFX has called them “Bizarre, innovative and utterly original”. Collecting the titles Only an Alligator, The Velocity Gospel, Dummyland, and Karloff’s Circus, The Complete Accomplice follows the simple Barny and his friends through the intertwisted power manipulations of Accomplice, a zone where hell’s defected demons discover they can never match or out-do humanity when it comes to spectacular dishonesty and evasion. “Something this rapid shouldn’t be so intoxicating or so dense with ideas. It’s a roaring, groaning perpetual motion machine decked out as a fun fair attraction. Read it and you’ll need resuscitating” - 3:AM

There’s also a new edition of The Inflatable Volunteer out now from Raw Dog Screaming — the first publication of the book in the US, a new book called Rebel at the End of Time out soon from PS (UK), Novahead (follow-up to Slaughtermatic) out early 2011, and the aforementioned Lint Movie. For all the latest, check out Aylett’s website.

I was excited for this session, mainly because doing stuff and being happy are two major challenges!  Roy Christopher gave a laid back presentation that basically went through some ideas on how to keep your focus and try and stay happy while actually getting things done.

Roy covers a lot of the information that was in his presentation on his own blog right here so we won’t go over all of that however some of the things we really took away from the session:

1. Roy was a competitive Rubik’s Cube Player (established geek cred for sure!)
2. Find people who have done what you want to do and emulate them
3. Feed and water your mentors- let people know you respect them and why
4. Save your own story
5. Keep a journal
6. Keep a promise file
7. Get organized
8. Trust your curiosity

You can read the post here.

Many thanks to the folks at Raise and Geekend 2010.