Gibson promotes
recombinants- where samples of various works are cut out of found compositions and recombined in new works. With recombination, meaning becomes
a matter of adjacent data, of relationships between elements of data. The process of recombination is becoming more important than the object (the record, the product) thereby created at a given moment.
Last modified: 2011-3-24
Reference: William Gibson, God's Little Toys - Confessions of a cut and paste artist, Wired, 2005-7
wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/gibson.html
Referrer: the art life
Notes
In writing Naked Lunch, William Burroughs pulled apart other writers' text into fragments and recombined these fragments in new contexts to evoke new meanings. Whether or not it is plagiarism, recombination can be creative and need not result in imitating the artists quoted.
... Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers' texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the '40s and '50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me. ... Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all.
Meaning arises from the adjacency of data - words combined into sentences, sentences combined into texts, images adjacent to text, images adjacent to images. Interesting and unexpected meanings can arise when elements are deliberately combined out of their original context.
Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard used collage/recombination. Text recombination was facilitated by the cut-and-paste feature of computer text-editors.
Burroughs' methods, which had also worked for Picasso, Duchamp, and Godard, were built into the technology [computer text editing] through which I now [1980s] composed my own narratives. Everything I wrote, I believed instinctively, was to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, seemed a matter of adjacent data.
Gibson's 1980s narratives referenced (emulated, were inspired by) collage artists such as Joseph Cornell, a US artist who created assemblages - art objects made up of found objects. In Gibson's Bridge Trilogy, an urban neighborhood accretes itself, collage-like, to an abandoned (San Francisco Bay) Bridge.
...exploring possibilities of (so-called) cyberspace, I littered my narratives with references to one sort or another of collage: the AI in Count Zero that emulates Joseph Cornell, the assemblage environment constructed on the Bay Bridge in Virtual Light.
Jamaican DJs used recombined snippets of recorded music into new songs, or new versions of old songs. The difference or similarity between two versions of the same song, or between two songs considered to be more distinct, being a matter of difference or similarity in their components and how they are combined.
Meanwhile, in the early '70s in Jamaica, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry, great visionaries, were deconstructing recorded music. Using astonishingly primitive predigital hardware, they created what they called versions. The recombinant nature of their means of production quickly spread to DJs in New York and London.
By deconstructing narratives, songs, etc into elements that can be recombined in new ways or placed in new relationships, culture becomes more participatory. With appropriate technology, audiences can use snippets to create their own combinations. Future literature and music may become loose collections of elements which audiences can recombine to create new meanings.
Our culture no longer bothers to use words like appropriation or borrowing to describe those very activities. Today's audience isn't listening at all - it's participating. Indeed, audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical.
An audience that consciously reads text, music (etc) as a set of elements that could be lifted out and recombined with other elements, is arguably more (mentally) active than one who merely takes in the original combination as it stands. Experiencing the whole as well as appropriating the parts is obviously a more complex activity. But what if you appropriate the parts, and experience, not the packaged whole, but any number of hypothetical whole as you recombine the parts in your mind?
The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital. Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?).
So instead of the record industry, we'll have the recombinant industry.
To say that this poses a threat to the record industry is simply comic. The record industry, though it may not know it yet, has gone the way of the [traditional] record. Instead, the recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries. We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going.
Comment: But what's the business plan for a recombinant industry?
The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore's graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with game engines (Quake, Doom, Halo), the whole metastasized library of Dean Scream remixes, genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek or Buffy or (more satisfying by far) both at once, the JarJar-less Phantom Edit (sound of an audience voting with its fingers), brand-hybrid athletic shoes, gleefully transgressive logo jumping, and products like Kubrick figures, those Japanese collectibles that slyly masquerade as soulless corporate units yet are rescued from anonymity by the application of a thoughtfully aggressive "custom" paint job.
Comment: The recombinant industry would consciously sell you elements that you can recombine yourself, or assemblages that you can take apart and recombine, or software to help you do it on computer.
The audience, not the producers, own the words, the music.
"Who owns the words?" asked a disembodied but very persistent voice throughout much of Burroughs' work. Who does own them now? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it - yet.
Comment: No one owns the words, or even the phrases (ignoring trademark restrictions). But elements above a certain size (slabs) fall under copyright. I could take a William Gibson novel, cut it into bits and reuse them. But if the bits are above a certain size (eg word count), then Gibson will ask me to go and write my own novel.
New technologies emerge and we plunge into them and the changes they bring. Legislation catches up later.
We seldom legislate new technologies into being. They emerge, and we plunge with them into whatever vortices of change they generate. We legislate after the fact, in a perpetual game of catch-up, as best we can, while our new technologies redefine us - as surely and perhaps as terribly as we've been redefined by broadcast television.
Comment: Gibson's point has bite when new technologies and practices render old distinctions (and old legislation) obsolete. If the viewers/listeners see/hear only elements, which they recombine in their minds in any number of way, without even experiencing the movie or song as any kind of unified whole, then the business plan becomes: sell recombinant kits, and let creators post their compositions online for others to watch/listen to for free.
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