CCTP 725
Cultural Hybridity:
Remix Culture


Fall 2009

Professor Martin Irvine

Required Books:

  • Philip Smith and Alexander Riley, Cultural Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. [ISBN: 9781405169073]
  • Klaus Honnef, Pop Art. NY: Taschen Books, 2004.
  • Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol: Commerce into Art. NY: Taschen Books, 2000.
  • Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2004.
  • Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
  • Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Melange. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
  • The Photo Book. New York: Phaidon Press, 2003 and reprints.
Recommended Books:
  • David Campany, Art and Photography. New York, Phaidon Press, 2003
  • Uta Grosenick, ed. Art Now Vol. 2: Artists at the Rise of the New Millennium (New York: Taschen, 2006). ISBN 978-3-8228-3996-6
  • Regis Debray, Media Manifestos. Trans. Eric Rauth. London and NY: Verso, 1996. ISBN: 1859840876.
Course Procedures and Requirements:

This course will be conducted as a seminar, and students will work together to make new discoveries about the seminar themes, which are always ongoing and developing in real time. Grading and evaluation will be based on weekly student seminar reports, weekly contributions to a course Wiki, seminar discussions, and a final Wiki individual mixed-media article/essay project.

Student Presentation Schedule, Fall 2009

Click on the + / - to expand and collapse weekly units
1 Introduction: The "Always Already New" and Cultural (Re)Mixing [−]

"I'll play it for you first and tell you what it is later." --Miles Davis

Introductory readings

Class Discussion & Examples:

Introductory Examples
from art, music, popular culture, movies, TV, photography, post-photography

 

Music
Art & Photography
New Photography
Popular Culture
Film Examples
Bill Laswell: Wiki | Website | Interview on career | Gerhard Richter: Resources | Image Index | In Artcyclopedia Adam Fuss: Fraenkel Gallery Exhibition | Info DJ and MC mixing and mash ups: Grandmaster Flash to DJ Spooky Blade Runner

Thievery Corporation : global digital electronic remixes

website | ESL Music

 Cindy Sherman: Images on Masters of Photography site | Artcylopedia | Image index | Nicholas Kahn & Richard Selesnick: Apollo Prophesies: Liftoff-II, Detail 1, Detail 2 | City of Salt Book | Irvine Gallery site | Artists' Website Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) | Irvine Gallery site

Akira
Ghost in the Shell
The Matrix series
Amon Tobin: Website | Ninjatune site | Chuck Close: photo-realism: images | movie clips   Wooster Collective, NY: Pop and Street Art Collective Sin City
Polar Express
300
New music source sites: !K7 | Ninjatune | Epitonic |      

Avatar

Key Concepts
2 Core Theory Readings, I [−]

Key concepts from Postmodernism, Postcolonial theory, and Globalization theory:

pastiche, irony, parody, sampling, collapsing hierarchies, horizontal vs. vertical analysis, merging popular and high culture, global and international merging of cultures, global marketing of cultural goods.

The Post-postmodern?

Taking the "postmodern condition" as a given and creating new hybrids disassociated from the modern-postmodern arguments and oppositions. Movement from grids to networks and complexity.

Readings and Sources

Lecture Notes & Discussion Topics: PoMo to Globalized Complexity Networks

Further Reading:

Discussion of examples of postmodernism and post-postmodern culture

  • Madmen: What genre is this? Retro-sendup, period drama, soap opera, nostalgia? History as a style.
  • Wangechi Mutu: post-postmodern post-globalization artist?
  • A chain of post-Matrix simulation states movies: Gamer (trailer) | Surrogates (trailer)

 

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
3 Core Theory Readings, II [−]

The Status of the Image and Image-Making Technologies:
The Contemporary Image is Always Already a Hybrid

 

Discussion Topics

Hybridity in all forms is also part of the ongoing question of the status of images and cross-mediation of visual content (representation of "the same" images in multiple media forms):

  • How do we receive and understand images in all media that have no necessary connection to a referential world outside of the image?
  • Why are photography/video/film-based images given the code of "reality," some assumed direct relation to something outside the image that it represents, refers to, depicts?
  • How much of our image-world or visual culture has no connection to non-mediated world?
  • How does the current mixed source and cross-mediation environment encourage hybridity?

 

Readings and Sources

Lecture Notes:
Presentation on the the Status of Images: Statement, Representation, Reference, Sign, Image

Exempla

  • Las Vegas: Pure Realization of Simulacra and the Hyperreal?
  • Of course, the porn industry embraced the simulacral hyperreal first!

Photography and Video

Film and Television: Visualization and the Hyperreal

  • CNN and the televisual: TV images as hyperreal
  • "Reality" TV shows; American Idol
  • The Matrix series
  • Post-photography photography, post-film cinema (virtual cameras, optical flow technology, 3D virtual imagery)

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
4 Hybridity in Visual Media: Intertextuality to Intermediality [−]

Key Concepts and Learning Objectives: Ideas of postmodernism are closely linked to the concepts of dialogism and intertextuality. Intertextuality should now be redefined for contemporary media studies as intermediality, or the ongoing dialogue among many kinds of cultural expressions in any medium. A new work emerges within a network of prior and contemporary works, and we interpret expression in a variety of genres that cut across our popular media--TV, Web, books and magazines, art works, music.


Dialogism/Intertextuality Readings

Intertextuality: Intersection with Appropriation, Remix, Postproduction

 

Film and Video Exempla

Lecture and Discussion Notes

Reading and Resources

Student Group Presentation

Key Concepts
5 Introduction to Pop and Appropriation Art: Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol [−]

Pop art appeared at a moment when high and low ("popular") culture were circulating in new ways through the mainstream media and in galleries, museums, and art discourse. The era from c.1960-c.1972 saw explicit remixing, hybridization, and appropriation from all sources in art, music, design, and graphics.

The remix of materials, mediums, sources, genres, traditions, histories, and subcultures that are part of the Pop Art story provide an important case study, and an influence on ways of working that extends through today.

Warhol and other Pop artists raided the "cultural encyclopedia" and presented new kinds of imagery and works in a "high art" context that had never been done before. The rest is (our) history.


Reading and Resources

  • Honnef, Pop Art, 6-26; sections on Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol
  • Background readings for art and cultural history: first definitions of "Pop Art":
  • Warhol Museum: PowerPoint presentation (Pop art background)
  • Working with the idea of "the cultural encyclopedia" (Umberto Eco):
  • Useful current reviews and criticism on pop art exhibitions:

Exempla/Sources

Lecture and Discussion Notes:

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
6 Andy Warhol: Icon of the Hybrid Artist: Theory and Practice [−]

Camp meets postmodernism: pop, combining high and low visual culture, new materials in the artworld

  • Camp always creates hybrids: deflations of high (straight) culture, drag, sexual cross-overs in new forms.
  • Susan Sontag, Notes on Camp (1964; reprinted in essay collection, Against Interpretation, 1966).

Reading and Resources

Plenty of videos about Warhol on YouTube (Andy would have loved it!)

  • From the PBS Modern Masters Series: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 (Billy Name and Solanis shooting) | 10 (after shooting) | 11 | 12 |

Discussion: Selected works by Warhol

Screening: Chuck Workman, The Life and Times of Andy Warhol - Superstar (1990). (Info: IMDB)

  • "Andy made fame more famous." Fran Lebowitz

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
7 Outside is Inside: "Street Art," "Outsider Art," Graffiti, Illustration, Graphics [−]

"Pop art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside." --Andy Warhol


Discussion Questions

  • How did "street art" and "graffiti art" become recognized cultural categories? What are the current hierarchies and categories of all this work inside and outside the established art world?
  • How does the "outside" become a privileged category "inside" the established art and media institutions?
    • Media coverage, rebel artist persona's, identity politics, art world institutions.
    • "Street cred," "authenticity," outsider status.
  • How do the people and genres continually cross-over institutional boundaries? Multidimensional cultural categories and differentiations, cross-category sourcing for hybrid art forms.
  • Post-Everything art since 2000: "high" and "low" culture categories also subverted in the "low-brow" and "no-brow" art movement (John Seabrook's essay on "nobrow" from The New Yorker, 1999).
  • How is street art a form of Post-Pop: beyond, after, "pop," but possible only through the cultural preconditions and new market categories assumed since Pop.

Sources and Readings:

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
8 International Pop, Anime, Japanese Pop [−]

Anime and Manga: Examples of Contemporary Developments in the Genre

Japanese and pan-asian anime and manga have now produced an international pop animation style.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Original and Part 2, followed by the TV series, Stand Alone Complex
  • Appleseed: Directed by Shinji Aramaki. Hybrid anime, composition with photography of scale models, computer graphics, 3-D animation rendering, digital editing; also hybrid story elements, Japanese and Western classical mythology, quotes from everything from Bladerunner to the Matrix series, anime rendering of "bullet time."
  • Appleseed: Ex Machina: Produced/Co-Directed by John Woo, Directed by Shinji Aramaki. Further hybrid development of the theme and ideas with new 3D animation technology and digital motion capture from live actors. References all prior SF, anime, and the John Woo style of action movies.
  • Cartoon Network: Adult Swim: US reception of anime inspired animation and cartoons

Resources and Background:

Japanese Pop and Contemporary Art as Paradigm for the Internationalization of Pop

Recent Japanese Pop Art is both a fascinating ongoing hybrid experiment and a major influence on the international art market and art world in general. Takashi Murakami and his studio (with proteges like Takano, Aoshima, and "Mr.") have been the most influential. Examine some examples as case studies for things going on around the world.


Murakami's Art and Context: The Philosophy of "Superflat" (1999-2001)

Murakami's Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture (2005) (Exhibition and Book)

Takashi Murakami, his studio, and art entrepreneurship (2004-present)

© Murakami Retrospective @ MOCA-LA-Geffen Contemporary: Follow the Money and Symbolic Capital

© Murakami is made possible by endowment support from the Sydney Irmas Exhibition Endowment. The exhibition and publication are made possible by generous support from Maria and Bill Bell. Major support is provided by Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. Generous additional support is provided by Steven and Alexandra Cohen; Kathi and Gary Cypres; Gagosian Gallery; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami; The Norton Family Foundation; Dallas Price-Van Breda; Janet and Tom Unterman; Ruth and Jacob Bloom; Marianne Boesky; David Teiger; The MOCA Contemporaries; The Japan Foundation; and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.

Images of Murakami's Art Works

Yoshitomo Nara

Aya Takano

American Post-Pop Pop: Jeff Koons:
Hybridity, Irony, Satire, Humor, and the Art Market

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
9 Photography: Introduction to the Defining Medium of the Contemporary World [−]

Overview of highlights in the history of photography

From optics to pixel grid:

Photography has always required hybrids: the invention of photography was optics + chemistry = photographic image. Today there is a shift in thinking with photographic images: from what the lens "sees" (principles of optics, focus, perspective, light sources), and metaphors of capturing, registering, mechanical means, to what a screen can display (digital pixels, imitation of camera lens point-of-view, focus, and perspective).

Now many images are made to look photographic, and are still called "photographs," whether a lens, or many lenses, were used in the making of the image.

Intersections of technologies and institutions:

Photography has always been linked to developments in technology for the film medium and cameras as light capturing devices. But the interesting history is found in the many conceptual uses of photography, the institutions and social organization of the medium, and the mass adoption of cameras in the middle class for "taking pictures" of family and domestic life.

What important ideas can we extrapolate from the history of photography, early cameras to digital cameras and camera in phones (iPhone)?


Readings and Sources

  • Early encoding of photography: photography as an index of reality, photography and truth (documentation, evidence). Early photographs and other arts: early photographs imitated paintings and theatrical staging for making images "pictorial".
  • Introduction to Photography (Powerpoint) (Irvine)
  • Examples from The Photo Book (Phaidon Press, 2003): Note genres and photo technologies
    • See: Abbe, Ansel Adams, Atget, Barnard, Bellocq, Brady, Brassai, Cartier-Bresson, Daguerre, Doisneau, Durieu, Eakins, Eisenstaedt, Fox Talbot, Hill and Adamson, Hine, Horst, Karsh, Lange, Lissitzky, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Muybridge, Nadar, Negre, Rosenthal, Sander, Southworth and Hawes, Stieglitz, Tripe, Turner, Weegee, Weston
  • Key Issues in Modern Photography: Making a Photograph vs. Taking a Picture (Irvine)
  • Photography Resources Site (Irvine)

History of Photography Sources

Introductory Theory and Statements on Photography

Video documentaries of prominent photographers and their processes and medium:
Sally Mann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, Nan Goldin (begin and continue in the following week)

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
10 Photography to Post-Photography: Contemporary Photography and Hybrid Media [−]

Overview of Important Directions in Photography Today & Exemplary Artists

Some observers and theorists of photography and film are talking about our current era being "post-photographic": we live in a culture trained to read photo-produced images (and images as judged or assumed to live up to photographic expectations), yet many of the images we experience every day imitate photographic features without being produced by (or solely by) a device with a lens and recording medium. What are the implications of living "post-photographic"? Is this an extension of the notion of the hyper-real? With photographic "realism" still providing the codes for "the real"?

  • The Changing Status and Function of Photography in Art Institutions
    • Sign of the Times: New gallery for modern and contemporary photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: News | Met Press Release |

Readings, Sources, Theory

Discussion of leading photographers and multiple category cross-overs

Fashion Photography, Advertising, Art: W Magazine and Cross-Over Art

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
11 Music: Post-Digital, Post-Globalization Genre Mixing [−]

Remix and Hybridity as the Foundation of Modern and Contemporary Music

 

Remix and hybridity in music involves issues at multiple levels simultaneously:

1. At the macro-cultural level: "remix culture" and hybridity as the normal, living context of cultural production, which is now rendered more visibly as such through the digital media platform.

2. At the level of technology platforms: recording and performance equipment, technologies and instruments, software & hardware, networks. The implications of the digital media platform for music, and the ongoing hybridization of forms, genres, sounds. Sampling, remix of sources in both studio recordings and live performance.

3. At the level of the cultures and sub-cultures of music production, styles, and genres: the remix and collage aesthetics of blues and jazz, electronic and digital music composition from the classical and "high" music culture traditions, hip-hop and the global hip-hop diaspora, reggae and dub music, disco and club music, global hybrid forms.

4. At the level of globalization, information flows, and the DNA of a networked world: Multi-sourcing of music post-globalization, hybrids of sources and digital sounds, horizontal recombinant DNA of contemporary music, real-time awareness of musical forms from cultures and sources all over the world. A networked urban phenomenon: music produced in global information cities, dense nodes of cultural information and remixing, distributed via the Web and Internet file sharing.

5. At the level of political economy, cultural goods, intellectual property, and the economic models for the production, ownership, distribution, and use of digital music: the ongoing debate about copyright, consolidation of "copyright portfolio" media corporations, Creative Commons and alternative legal and rights models, alternative distribution and licensing models.

We can only hope to introduce some of the interesting topics in points 2, 3 and 4 in this unit. Other issues can be pursued later.


Demonstration and Performance in Class:

  • Yoko K: Electronic/digital music composer and performer. A live demonstration and performance of her compositions, instruments, software and digital platform.
  • See: Yoko K and Aphrodizia site | Myspace page with streaming music samples

Background Sources for Electronic, Digital, and Remix Music

Readings:

Some Exemplary Musicians and Music Labels


Kraftwerk: Kraftwerk site | Wikipedia info | Youtube videos ESL (Eighteenth Street Lounge) | ESL Artists: Thievery Corporation | NPR interview | Youtube videos
DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) Amon Tobin | Click on Media/Videos | Ninjatune site for Amon Tobin
Ninjatune site  

 

Music Industry and Production Info

Internet Radio

Contemporary Music Theory

Playlist

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
12 Peter Greenaway: The Pillow Book, Hybrid Film, and the Body as Medium [−]

Writing on the Body, Film of a Book, and the Body as Text or Writing Medium

Greenaway has been making fascinating "hybrid" cinema for over 15 years. The Pillow Book allowed him to combine new film technologies (film window within the main film frame for contrasting two narrative time sequences) and a film whose subject matter was writing, sex, the body as text and instrument of desire--the word made flesh made film.

"...this notion of the skin was as an open palimpsest on which to write." --Peter Greenaway, interview in Salon Magazine

"I wanted to make a cinema of ideas, not plots, and to use the same aesthetics as painting, which has always paid great attention to formal devices of structure, composition and framing." -- Peter Greenaway

Greenaway Sources

Body|Writing|Word and Flesh

  • Compare: Whitney Museum exhibition: Skin is a Language: January 12, 2006-May 21, 2006
    The largest organ of the human body, skin is also the one with which we are most intimate, even as it presents the exterior of our self to the world. Skin is a Language explores ways in which artists use skin, literally and metaphorically, to examine a diverse array of social, physical, and cultural phenomena. Featuring sculpture, drawing, photography, and prints from the permanent collection, the exhibition includes works by Bruce Conner, Ellen Gallagher, Félix González-Torres, Nancy Grossman, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Jasper Johns, Annette Lemieux, Glenn Ligon, Catherine Opie, and David Wojnarowicz.
  • Shelley Jackson - Ineradicable Stain (body-text-art project)
  • Lee Wagstaff (tattoo art on the body of the artist) | Artist's website
  • Tattoo history, demographics, and background on The Vanishing Tattoo site.
  • Shirin Neshat: calligraphy on the body, women as sites for inscription: TIME photo essay
  • Zhang Huan at the Asian Society: "The body is proof of identity; the body is language."

Student Group Presentations and Wiki content discussions

Key Concepts
13-14 Final Project Presentation [−]

Week for individual research and office hours.

Presentation and discussion of final projects

Final project instructions

Key Concepts
Martin Irvine, 2005-2009
eMail
Homepage
  

Creative Commons License
Cultural Hybridity: Remixing Art, Music, Culture by Martin Irvine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.