“Reconfigurable Culture of Contemporary Music”

An Interview With Aram Sinnreich

Reconfigurable Culture

“What we make of our culture is largely influenced by how we

make our culture.”

Each epoch in communication technology corresponds to a complementary set of foundational principles, social metaphors and institutional structures.

“Seismic Shift”

“The collection of new technologies that we generally refer to as "digital" or "new media" have given us an unprecedented power to capture, archive, share, and above all, edit and re-edit many of the elements of human expression.”

“the distinguishing feature of this new communications landscape is our ability to combine and sequence these atoms of expression at our will, I call this "configurability" or "configurable culture."

Plato

"The musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of the city's laws."

“Music has essentially been treated as a controlled substance in a broad variety of societies throughout history, from pre-Hellenic Egypt to dynastic China to America's antebellum south.”

“Music is like a schematic or operating system for consciousness”

“This helps to explain why social institutions so often attempt to control the shape and flow of musical expression: it is simply a case of one regulatory mechanism absorbing and exploiting another.”

Our reigning institutions are built on the once-firm ground of an atomistic, hierarchical society

a more modular and collective ethic inheres to the new communications framework, and that the metaphorical ground beneath our government, economy, and schools has eroded considerably in just a few short years.

Andrew Keen- “Cult of the Amateur” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

The_Cult_of_the_Amateur

This process is, in his words, "undermining truth" and "souring civic discourse." What's actually being undermined is a system that reserves the power to determine what is true and false for a privileged few.

And it is difficult for me to believe that the discourse we witness on Fox News or CNN could be made any more sour or less civic by the inclusion of a few million new voices to the conversation.

True or Not True?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2xT3URcaqw

http://www.popeater.com/2010/03/03/betty-white-death-hoax/

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061107151311AAitxZE

Why DJs? They were among the

first people to cope with the destabilizing influence of configurability on our understanding of culture and society. They can't help but break the rules, and they do it with such style!

DJ music--in its many forms--challenges dichotomies.

What is Authenticity?

“The difference between original and copy is key to our judgment of artistic merit, market viability and property rights.“

“While technically every sample is a copy of the work it was taken from, the resulting work couldn't exist without original creative input from the DJ.“

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs1bG6BIYlo

“Some Kid in his Bedroom”

This strange admixture of pride and deprecation, otherness and selfness, is astoundingly reminiscent of the "double-consciousness" that W.E.B. DuBois described as the cornerstone of the African American experience

Configurable culture is marked by "DJ consciousness," a state in which we are all now required to see (and hear) ourselves simultaneously from within and without, as both subject and object. This has its benefits and drawbacks; gone is the privilege of pure subjectivity

Women in Remixing Would you say there is a disparity? Why?

“the challenges configurable culture poses to our traditional understanding of what's known as the "modern individual" will undermine the male/female gender identity dichotomy much as it has opened grey areas between artist and audience, production and consumption, and so forth. “