There’s audience? no audience.
Voices in the head, Remix, Solitude
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(photo of a DJ by kirstiecat )
There’s audience? no audience.
Voices in the head, Remix, Solitude
.
.
(photo of a DJ by kirstiecat )
“Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own”, DJ Spooky
I thought this sentence was clear. But then, after thinking about it for a while, I concluded that it eludes me. I have several possible meanings with much more unanswered questions about its potential semantics.
Meanings
It can refer to the pessimistic Baudrillardian Integral Reality theory, in which anything is a simulacrum, a fake, including our “self”, our voice.
[OR]
It can be understood as an optimistic, web2.0 share-all style, in which the right to remix and to appropriate others’ voices goes mainstream.
Questions
– What is “My” voice? What guarantees the authenticity of a certain “Voice”?
– Remix: Given that the human history of ideas, progress, art, etc. is the history of Remix, i.e. the unexpected association of different, seemingly unrelated memes, should “remix” be classified as an authentic voice or an unauthentic one?
– What is different “Today”? Until Today, what kind of voice have we used – our own or others’?
– What is “Today” – where does it point to?
The sequel to this post is The Death of the Author; the Birth of the Voice.
DJ Spooky’s Rhythm Science has this track where the voice of William S. Burroughs is remixed. Obviously, the choice of text is significant. Here it is:
To achieve independence from alien domination and to consolidate revolutionary gains, five steps are necessary:
Space 1: Proclaim a new era and set up a new calendar
Space 2: Replace alien language
Space 3: Destroy or neutralize alien gods
Space 4: Destroy alien machinery of government and control
Space 5: Take land and wealth from individual aliens.
Reminder: State’s control is space-oriented.
So now we got Foucault, linked to Bey, who’s linked to Laswell and also to Burroughs, who’s linked to DJ Spooky, who’s remixing Laswell as well as Burroughs, and not any text of Burroughs, but rather a next-step-text, an how-to text that goes with the spirit of them all.
Photo by Michael Hoefner
If you look for it, you find it.
DJ Spooky that subliminal kid, was the first musician I encountered (over the virtualosphere) whose music is derived from deep philosophical strucutres. I first read DJ Spooky’s essays, then I listened to his music. DJ Spooky is a great philosophical mediator.
This is to say that I had my initiation. While searching for Hakim Bey, I stumbled upon a joint venture between Bey and Laswell (Chaos from T.A.Z). Then I checked out Laswell to whom I listened in those great acne days but not in the last decade or so, and I found this artwork named undocument.
Now, if you follow my other blogs, you know my sympathy to Dave Winer’s language tweaks, i.e. uncoference. The un- prefix has become, through Winer, a way to describe the matter and its anti-matter in a single word: it is a conference, but it is not what you would expect from a conference (it is a deconstructioned word).
And here’s what Laswell is saying about the music in undocument:
Realizations achieved in Bill Laswell’s domain are decontextualized and prepared for release into the world of chaos and chance. […]
These are source materials for the creation of modern music. Assimilate them, reprocess them, recombine them – the original intent of the sounds on this CD-ROM will disintegrate, as new meanings – your meanings – emerge intact.
It is fantastic: a form-less music; pure content kept in autonomous zones, to which anyone can apply a meaning. And still, like most of the paradoxial truisms, this formless matter is packed (i.e. subject to a form) in an undocument, which is and at the same time is not a documentation of all those matters. Probably, the meaning of undocument is that the packaging nevertheless keeps the autonomic nature of its embeddded content.
You can listen to a great sample, named dance at the bottom of this page.
“Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney, all these science fiction writers were engaging with trying to figure out how to think outside the box. The tragedy is that there is no outside the box. You’re just in another box, in another box…”, DJ Spooky’s Remixing the Matrix
You’re just in another box, in another box.
You’re just in another box, in another box.
You’re just in another box, in another box.
You’re just in another box, in another box.
Click the image to get to DJ Spooky’s collected Essays
Also, I find the following DJ Spooky’s observation a sort of an answer to those worries raised in earlier posts:
“Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together”
DJ Spooky, Rhythm Science