I’ve had some intermittent fun with the New Forms Festival here in Vancouver over the years. Kinski were kind enough to melt my frontal lobe, and I had fun at Art Camp last year doing the cassette shuffle with Draggin and James.
This year’s event obviously aligns with a lot of the stuff I’ve been puzzling over lately:
Re:Use, encompassing a wide variety of artistic and intellectual practices including, but not limited to, sampling, collage, remixing, and appropriation. Whether it involves the recycling of equipment and changes in its function, the reprogramming of material, the sampling and mashing-up of sounds and images or the rethinking of ideas, the notion of re:use encapsulates the continuous growth and change in media and electronic arts.
Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to do something with this provocative post by Rick Prelinger for some time… For now, an outline and a recommendation to read the elaborated version will have to suffice:
1 Why add to the population of orphaned works?
2 Don’t presume that new work improves on old
3 Honor our ancestors by recycling their wisdom
4 The ideology of originality is arrogant and wasteful
5 Dregs are the sweetest drink
6 And leftovers were spared for a reason
7 Actors don’t get a fair shake the first time around, let’s give them another
8 The pleasure of recognition warms us on cold nights and cools us in hot summers
9 We approach the future by typically roundabout means
10 We hope the future is listening, and the past hopes we are too
11 What’s gone is irretrievable, but might also predict the future
12 Access to what’s already happened is cheaper than access to what’s happening now
13 Archives are justified by use
14 Make a quilt not an advertisement
