okay, i know. i said i was going to boycott the internet tonight, but i had to put this somewhere. i think i wrote this at like 3am the week before i left while jesse was sleeping in bed beside me. i'm about to break it up and cut and paste it into a million places. i probably don't agree with half the things that i wrote now that i've done more research, but i just thought it deserved to be published somewhere. midnight ramblings on a spinning planet. listening to the bell orchestra while high on coffee is the perfect combination for getting thesis work done.

yours truly,

elle.

p.s. does TIG have spell check now, or is that just the new firefox? either way estoy feliiiiiiz.

-=-=-=-=-


One of the main things that effects the pop culture of today is the element of the remix, a phenomena that gained reputation in the early 80's when Hip Hop and Electronic Music came into popularity. The remix goes beyond music, and basically is defined as the sampling and rearranging of texts. This is done with permission of the artists, or without, and through the advent of the copy and paste button has infiltrated all parts of popular media, from the Simpsons to club VJs . Through the remix we can take apart and breakdown popular culture, and through sampling rearrange traditional narratives. As the spread of the internet in North America allows an increase of bandwidth for media sharing, people are increasingly sampling media, and finding ways to distribute their remixed artwork. While each medium is effected by things in its own way, there are strong links that we can make to both Digital and Kinesthetic media, as well as how they internally relate to each other. Video, Digital Design, Hip Hop, and Capoeira all contain and carry on influences from other media. Marshal McLuhan (1964) posits that all existing media are combined remix's of other media which existed previously. For example the medium of print contains scriptural media, like manuscripts, as well as oral media, such as story-telling. Media contain other media embedded within their roots. All media is a remix of previous media and necesity. Capoeira emerged from the Afro-Brazilian slaves out of the necessity to fight the colonizer. Hip Hop contained the remnants of funk and soul. Live drums were replaced by turntables. It expressed the inner-city resourcefulness, the ability to take the resources available to one and transform it to create new structures of meaning making. This is a key concept of social semiotics, that all humans use the resources at hand to create meaning and order. Social semiotics can apply culturally, as it does to the arts, as well as education, or in other sectors such as architecture, sports, transportation, and anywhere in society where symbols are used to communicate. Usually systems operate on common meaning, and as such there is what's called a lexicon of symbols put in place in order to keep order. While some might say that conforming to these systems is oppressive but in reality we often adhere to semiotic orders without being conscious of it. For example what behavior is appropriate in say a supermarket, as opposed to a subway car. Symbols can be defined in terms of modes of gesture, colour, rhythm, or any other common themes. A prime function of semiotics is the collecting and indexing of symbols, and the consequential analysis of how they interrelate.

Digital media allows users to sample from different media through the network of the internet. ArtsBridge students can find images through internet applications like Google Image search and use keywords to help focus their ideas and draw on themes. An example of that is student Lativa and her collage on Katrina. In her video interview Lativa states that she does not know what she wants to do yet. The screen shows a blurred image that the other student named Ashley tells us is an image from Hurricane Katrina. Ashley extrapolates that from the key word Google search on "Hurricane Katrina" that maybe Lativa feels related to that situation; "It's a bad thing for people everywhere, like even here." By interpreting key words, plus the images displaced, Ashley was able to interpersonally relate her experiences to Lativa's choice of symbols in the development and exploration of her collage. In this way the medium of the internet channeled the students interests into a semiotic syntax, and through the sharing of Lativa's work she was able to get more ideas for her collage. By Juxtaposing the multimodal nature of digital media, Lativa and Ashley were able to relate their own stories, through the structure of the medium.