In contemporary practice, a remix, within an era of media convergence, can be understood in a variety of forms; musically in terms of sampling used in music production, (audio)visually in the form of a meme shared on social media or a mash-up video on YouTube. However, what these practices boil down to are a creative repurposing of an existing work – in essence, a copy. Borschke's engaging and insightful study addresses this concept historically and reveals how the discourse surrounding copy can be traced back to ancient times, raising questions of authenticity and consequently value, but also the ways in which popular conceptions of copies are intimately related to the technologies of (re)production and dissemination.
Copies can be seen as both independent instances and as things that share something in common with other things; however, the understanding of what constitutes a copy and what this means has both a social and material history. The author considers copy as a concept ‘in tandem’ with the ancient problem of universals but the development of technologies such as the printing press, industrialised reproduction processes and digitalisation of media ‘presents us with a different set of problems’ (p. 14). In enabling exact copies and not merely representation or imitation, the technologies of mass reproduction have enabled us to create new meanings out of things that are the same. Musical recordings as media artefacts present one example of how a historically situated instance can have complex interrelated trans-historical meanings between other similarly situated instances of playback. Whilst acknowledging the importance of social histories in the construction of meaning, Borschke integrates a materialist ontological edge in an attempt to reconcile the possibility that media objects are also ‘independent and autonomous’ in contributing to the construction of meaning ‘in some significant way’ (p. 24). To assume therefore that culture is simultaneously social and material raises the question of ‘why and when particular material configurations matter’ (p. 26). The digitalisation of the music industry presents an interesting intersection between the materiality and perceived immateriality of media artefacts in the digital age.
By providing a critical assessment of the rhetorical use of remix in discourse, the author illuminates a history in which the ‘usage and meaning of “remix” [has veered] away from its associations with the music industry and towards vernacular digital culture’ (p. 48). The author presents a number of challenges to the web utopian readings of remix as a case-in-point for copyright, as an antiquated legacy of analogue, requiring radical reform to keep up with the demands of the digital age without stifling creativity. Commentators such as Lessig (Reference Lessig2008) and Manovic (Reference Manovic2007) in pursuing an ideological agenda have elevated remix to a metaphor for free speech within cultural production and the digital realm. However, this book contends that this rhetoric removes remix from its origins in musical production in which use took precedent over meaning. One criticism of Borschke's argument would be a lack of consideration for the historical precedents of remix in its current rhetorical understanding across other forms of art or media. We can point to contemporary Post-digital artists whose use of remix as a form of creative repurposing of existing artefacts in the pursuit of a comparable agenda with those pushing for copyright reform as an example of the complexities of the study of social sciences; the popular repurposing and subsequent construction of further meaning or association of a word with arguably distinct cultural origins and the historicity of the concept itself.
This present publication sees that, in order to reach a greater understanding of the role copies play in contemporary composition, ‘we would do better to think not of their meaning but of their use’ (p. 70). Drawing upon two well-researched and considered case studies (Disco Edits and MP3 Blogs) Borschke identifies the analogue roots of these remix practices within a popular music context but also presents copy as a conceptual lens through which to view the transition from analogue to digital media and develop new understandings of the historicity of certain practices and how their form, value and meaning shapes and is shaped by technology.
The Disco Edit for example is a compositional form born in analogue and is an artefact ‘anchored in a culture of media use […] that owes its existence as much to the dancefloor as the studio’ (p. 78). By engaging with the media history of Disco Edits as a form of remix, Borsckhe reveals how the complex interplay of the materiality of specific media forms and technologies combine with social factors such as use and meaning to shape our understanding of a particular media phenomenon over time. Borschke reads into the persistence of vinyl records as a media form supposedly made redundant by the virtue of digital technologies freeing creative expression from the constraints of analogue (see Lessig, Reference Lessig2002, Reference Lessig2004). She argues that the continued use of vinyl in the digital age is due to its materiality as a fixed artefact and its utility throughout its social history.
The history of the development of dance music culture is intimately tied to the use of vinyl and turntables. DJs and producers as ‘expert listeners/users’ were able to first identify then exploit certain features in musical compositions that were seen to promote dancing in a nightclub situation using remix techniques shaped by the materiality of the media format (p. 81). Using dual turntables playing the same record in order to extend the drum break of a certain song or combining tape cuttings with formal and informal recording technologies to sample existing tracks are analogue practices central to the development of remix culture but have been made cheaper, simpler and more available through the digitalisation of music production. However, Borschke reconceptualises the so-called Vinyl Revival not as a resistance to digital culture but as a ‘digital tactic’, employed in a number of ways, firstly, as a material ‘commitment of one's own efforts, as well as a commitment to vinyl as a medium’ (p. 109). Releasing a record on vinyl today inserts the producer or editor into both the history of vinyl and therefore the history of dance music culture. Similarly, the increased surveillance of copyright infringement enabled through the digitalisation of media has repurposed vinyl and other analogue technologies as a ‘wedge against forms of power that might undermine creative intentions and innovative use’, thereby opening new channels for creative freedom away from the contemporary constraints of digital surveillance.
By drawing similar lines of comparison in the second case study between a phenomenon born digital (MP3 Blogs) and perceived aesthetic values of analogue folk culture (of the people, authenticity, etc.), Borschke is able to conclude that ‘in digital networks, where all cultural artefacts are materially the same, our romantic ideals about their production and meaning may become more important – thus we have brought our quasi-mystical relationships with artefacts, along with the pleasures we find in them and their contradictions, into the digital sphere’ (p. 163).
