This is a blog post by Lev Manovich. He does a good job of defining what remix culture is, and how it has become massively pervasive. It is interesting to see how the idea of taking a piece of a time-based medium and breaking up its linear nature really became popular with music, specifically electronic music from the 1980’s. However, I disagree with Manovich’s notion that “remix” is not ontologically preceded by “quoting”. The two seem intrinsically connected and it is merely the addition of technological devises that provided a level of quoting that was so effortless that rather than quoting or paraphrasing the work, it was directly appropriated.
In fact, film remixes had previously been done, by filmmakers like Bruce Conner. Conner’s films dance on the edge of quoting a remixing. Take for example his 1963 Report in which he remixed footage from the Kennedy assassination. Found footage film artist had been quoting for a long time, and as soon as they were able to reproduce their own footage (by means of contact or optical printing or even re-photography off of a tv screen) they moved from a quoting phase and into a remixing phase. Granted, it took the artist a much longer amount of time to remix without the aid of editing software, but I believe the theory was still there. By 1978 Bruce Conner had made Mongoloid which is great example of remixed and quoted footage. While I accept Manovich’s idea that quoting and remixing are indeed different from one another, I believe that remixing was a direct historical descendent of quoting.
