The Robot Does Not Exist: Remixing Psychic Automatism and Artificial Creative Intelligence

In the just-published Remixing Persona: An Imaginary Digital Media Object from the Onto-Tales of the Digital Afterlife, artists Mark Amerika and Laura Hyunjhee Kim perform as MALK, a new media remix band that ruminates on the post-digital life of the traditional scholarly book. Working against the concept of an e-book, the publication includes an original music video titled the Digital Afterlife as well as a downloadable PDF that the artists refer to as an imaginary digital media object (IDMO). The work has been released as the inaugural publication in the new MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series with Open Humanities Press. For this special issue of Media-N, MALK proposes their next IDMO track by focusing on the relationship between AI-generated forms of remix and artist-generated forms of psychic automatism. The experiment will start with the artists improvising a cluster of hand-drawn charts that conceptually blend their musings on what they refer to as “future forms of artificial creative intelligence.” The language in these charts will then serve as source material to input into an advanced Generative Pre-trained Transformer to trigger source material for a new music video and an adjoining PDF. Our question is whether the Generative Pre-trained Transformer as an advanced yet still essentially weak AI can co-write the artists’ IDMO as they address issues related to their research into psychic automatism and artificial creative intelligence.

The City in the Age of Remix

As a method of cultural production and communication, remix has permeated the way the social space is perceived, conceived of and lived. Physical social space is captured, constructed and mediated with digital tools and by a multitude of users. The explosive use of cultural software and social media is actively shaping the experience of architectural and urban space. Smart city movement proponents advocate for a kind of participatory decision-making in cities that is akin to digital social space dynamics. Within the architectural practice, the space is first produced as a digital remix. The social space, both online or offline, physical or digital, crowdsourced or expert-designed, is socially produced as a collective assemblage of the fragments of digital images. This essay aims to outline four trajectories by which physical (architectural and urban) social space is intertwined and remixed with digital (social media and the web) social space, and the broader implications of such cross-hatchings. Additionally, this paper aims to bring this term to architectural and urban discourse. Positing that remix has become the dominant model of spatial production in the contemporary world, what are the implications of it for the social space and for the public?

Imagining a Borderless Future: Methodologies for Multimodal Remix in Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem

Flags and national anthems, as symbols of the nation state, frequently rely on music, lyrics and visual design to enlist and manipulate emotional bonds. Can these same tools be used, alternatively, to disentangle connections to our concepts of country, notions of borders or even the idea of the nation state itself? This is the question at the core of Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem, an interdisciplinary remixing of the lyrics and music of 195 countries’ national anthems and their corresponding flags to create a body of poetry, music and videos. In an era of increasing closed-door nationalism, this article proposes that remix strategies can be used to unravel our concepts of nations, which traditionally magnify differences between countries and overemphasize a false sense of uniqueness, and to point instead to the interconnectedness between populations. In this context, remix strategies become a model for a future imaginary, a world that emphasizes the interdependence of beings and spaces that transcend established geopolitical boundaries. Through the case study of Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem, I argue that remix strategies are particularly well suited as an aesthetic structural tactic for engaging with pressing issues where intertwined and entangled futures are at stake.

Funes the Crate Digger: AI, Perception, and Recall

This essay is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story about Funes, a young man with perfect perception and recall. His stunning archival ability allowed Funes to create a shorthand system for creativity, a “rhapsody of unconnected words” to stand in for his archive of memories: “Anything he thought, even once, remained ineradicably with him.” There is similar malady today, a cultural hyperthymesia, a fetish for the archive. Information is recalcitrant and will not disappear, which cheapens the value of information while amplifying the need for human attention. The art of searching through the information rapids, then, depends upon elimination perhaps more than retrieval. Human curators with inclinations toward perception and recall are needed to filter through this influx of information rather than permitting the reliance upon algorithms by default. This essay theorizes the remix artist as a Borgesian Librarian, a curator of archived information fragments. Through the process of “crate digging,” remixers find long-forgotten samples of music and then exploit their allegorical potential. Like Funes, remix artists have an uncanny ability for perception and recall. Unlike Funes, rather than perceiving their talents as a curse, remix artists are model curators, exemplars of how to filter and make meaning from information overabundance. To illustrate these points, I will address the crate digging on display in two essential remix albums, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… and J Dilla’s Donuts.

My Work is Yours to Do What I Want

My Work is Yours to Do What I Want narrates the trajectory of two companies, one of them actual (Best Made Co.), and the second (Re Made Co.), an artwork posing as a company that uses remix to strategically confuse, conflate, and disrupt consumer culture. Re Made appears to be an online company founded by the fictitious character Peter Smith-Buchanan, and selling $350 hand-painted plungers. The entire event of Re Made offers an alternate universe—both digital and real—for Best Made Company, which was founded by (the real) Peter Buchanan-Smith, and specializes in $350 artisanal axes. Like a cloned twin or digital virus, Re Made and Buchanan-Smith mimic Best Made and Smith-Buchanan. If Best Made posts a decapitated pig’s head with an axe in its mouth on social media, Re Made’s BBQ pig gnashes a plunger on Instagram. When a New York Times feature refers to the Best Made axe as “manly,” a divergent NYTimes article heralds the masculine plunger. Peter Buchanan-Smith declares the axe to be “embedded in men’s DNA,” and Smith-Buchanan proclaims the plunger an extension of men’s bodies. The real Peter Buchanan-Smith emails Re Made’s CEO Peter Smith-Buchanan insisting he stop this plunder of reality. Acting as Smith-Buchanan’s intern, I (the female creator of the artwork) reply. Best Made’s lawyers send Re Made’s lawyers a 32-page cease-and-desist documenting the paths converging too closely for their liking. Just as the artwork Re Made uses remix via a media-based platform to intentionally confuse “original” content and appropriated material, My Work is Yours to Do What I Want playfully narrates the impulses and parasitic manipulations

Borges on Bifurcation: Remix at the Interstices of Art and Life

This paper utilizes “The Garden of Forking Paths” as a starting point to explore Borges’s concept of bifurcation and how the act of decision-making in everyday life is closely associated with similar theoretical themes in the Deleuzean notion of multiplicities. These topics then scaffold a self-reflective review of major events from D’Alessandro’s life that have shaped her past, present, and likely future. The personal and transformational experiences featured in this case study demonstrate how remix can be embraced as a broad definition and philosophy for life.

Proclamations and Paraphernalia: #Bellwether, Editor’s Notes, and the Art of Remixing the Political Document

In 2016 I created an installation entitled #Bellwether, which was a visual exploration of social media content surrounding the 2016 United States presidential primaries, focused specifically on voters in Ohio. Over the course of a year, I collected more than 14 million public Twitter posts that referenced the candidates by name, and repurposed the design of their campaign merchandise to reflect voter sentiment, replacing the curated messaging that they were pushing into the political sphere. After the election, I collected public data from Trump’s administration—including tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account, executive orders and memoranda and transcripts of interviews and news conferences—and edited the text of the US Constitution from his perspective, using the data to justify changes I made to the original text. I presented the final work in the form of a Presidential Executive Order, mirroring everything from typography to paper choices to the leather holders in which Executive Orders are publicly presented after signing. This creative study explores the lessons learned from these two projects; specifically, I examine the appropriation of political design and its signifiers. I argue that by manipulating and subverting this visual language, the work attempts to counter monolithic narratives perpetuated by dominant political systems, while illuminating the effects of media, technology and the Internet on our perceptions of the government and those who serve in it. By employing alternate historical narratives, the speculative nature of these works also offers a way of imagining a more nuanced approach to current political analysis and meaning-making.

Forking Paths in New Media Art Practices: Investigating Remix

This special issue of Media-N on contemporary approaches to remix was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a recurring point of reference in the development of media culture. Prior to terms such as new media, digital art, media art, and remix, Borges’s narrative exploration of bifurcation as a means of reflecting on the possibility of multiple simultaneous realities with no clear beginning or end has offered a literary and philosophical model for creative uses of emerging technology throughout the twentieth century. The essays included in this special issue provide a glimpse into the relation of Borgesian multiplicity and remix as an interdisciplinary methodology.

Case Study: Remixing Knowledge with Layered Intelligences

The case study of Degenerative Cultures explores how the layering of different forms of logic offers an opportunity for rethinking our human systems and hypothetically remixing the epistemological roots of society—through interventions into our technological systems. In Degenerative Cultures, the living organism Physarum polycephalum partners with an artificial intelligence that compiles and corrupts an archive of human texts. In the iterative art installation, which incorporates the growth cycles of microbiological organisms, protists as well as fungi cover up and effectively remix human texts. Human knowledge, contained within the philosophy books used in the project, becomes the substrate for organic growth. The living organisms grow over an actual book, and the AI, referred to as a “digital fungus,” corrupts texts on the Internet. The artists’ experiment, which links microbiological growth logic to artificial intelligence, is one step in rethinking how human knowledge may become layered and ultimately corrupted and rerouted—a forking of sorts—through integration with nonhuman logic systems, including microbiological and artificial intelligences. By orienting this work to remix theory, the article offers the hypothesis of a multispecies recombination that could, in utopian terms, reformulate the epistemological basis of modernity. In order to pursue this hypothesis, the art collective Cesar & Lois asks what role remix plays in the ongoing emergence of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

12 Remixes

In this piece I apply various literary remixing techniques to an article by the critic Edward Picot, written about a remix based sound art project I undertook over a year in 2011-12. I intend the end result as commentary, research and minor literature.