REFF RomaEuropa FakeFactory (2010) [Italian]

The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment

Romaeuropa FakeFactory is an act of artistic and technological hacking, a platform for global discussion and a performance that, beginning in 2009, has dealt with the themes of active, critical and creative innovation, confronting the management of cultural and technological policies related to these areas. The story begins with the opening of the Romaeuropa WebFactory, a digital art competition launched in 2008 by the Romaeuropa Foundation (Fondazione Romaeuropa) and Telecom Italia. Oppressive copyright conditions, such as the unilateral transfer of the rights to the works submitted and a ban on the use of techniques like mashup, cutup, remix but conversely giving the Romaeuropa Foundation and Telecom Italia the right to remix the works, inspired the creation of a Fake capable of becoming a point for multi-disciplinary analysis of the possibilities offered by freely available knowledge, contents and resources: a chance to reverse the logic of the competition and bring to light the contradictions, limits and implications of such a typical, reactionary cultural policy.

“Remix the world! Reinvent Reality!” is one of the principal themes that has inspired the REFF, from an act of détournement and cybersquatting – that brought to life the creation of a remix skills competition determining in 2009 a reversal of the Romaeuropa Foundation and Telecom Italia’s policy on the management of intellectual property rights – to the presentation of REFF’s instances and methodologies to the Cultural Commission of the Italian Senate (Commissione Cultura del Senato della Repubblica Italiana), up to the current production of the REFF book, as a global effort to create a working business model that implements the concepts and demands expressed by the RomaEuropa FakeFactory. Supporters of the REFF are found all over the world: over 80 partners among universities, artists, academies, associations, hackers, researchers, designers, journalists, politicians, magazines, networks, activitst, art critics, architects, musicians and entrepreneurs together with all the people who share a belief that art, design and new technologies can unite towards a critical, yet positive vision of a world that can create new opportunities and new ways of being, collaborating and communicating.

English version to be published soon.

Authors
Publisher (Fake Press)
Publisher (Derive Approdi)

Foreword by: Bruce Sterling
Edited and produced by FakePress and Derive&Approdi
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.5 Italy.

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Fibreculture Journal 1-15 (2003-2009)

Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of information and creative industries; national and international strategies for innovation, research and development; education; media and culture, and new media arts.

What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix
Fibreculture 15, 2009
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Web 2.0: Before, During and After the Event
Fibreculture 14, 2009
Edited by Darren Tofts and Christian McCrea
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After Convergence: What Connects?
Fibreculture 13, 2008
Edited by Caroline Bassett, Maren Hartmann, Kate O’Riordan
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Models, Metamodels and Contemporary Media
Fibreculture 12, 2008
Edited by Gary Genosko and Andrew Murphie
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The Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture
Fibreculture 11, 2008
Edited by Andrew Hutchison and Ingrid Richardson
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New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies
Fibreculture 10, 2007
Edited by Adrian Miles
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General Issue
Fibreculture 9, 2006
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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Gaming Networks
Fibreculture 8, 2006
Edited by Chris Chesher, Alice Crawford and Julian Kücklich
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Distributed Aesthetics
Fibreculture 7, 2005
Edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson
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Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital Networks
Fibreculture 6, 2005
Edited by Andrew Murphie, Larissa Hjorth, Gillian Fuller and Sandra Buckley
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Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour
Fibreculture 5, 2005
Edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter
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Contagion and the Diseases of Information
Fibreculture 4, 2005
Edited by Andrew Goffey
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General Issue
Fibreculture 3, 2004
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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New Media, New Worlds?
Fibreculture 2, 2003
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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The Politics of Networks
Fibreculture 1, 2003
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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Fibreculture Journal: Internet theory + criticism + research
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/Open Humanities Press, Australia
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid: Rhythm Science (2004)

“Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that’s what I’m going to talk about.”
—Rhythm Science

The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science—the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, “the changing same.” Taking the Dj’s mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn’t stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist’s consciousness and the outside world.

Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona (“spooky” from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for “coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity.” For example: “Start with the inspiration of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes… What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density.” Or, for an online “remix” of two works by Marcel Duchamp: “I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material—with him rhyming!”

Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson (“all minds quote”), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. “The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce,” he writes.

Miller’s textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book’s motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld’s claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are “theoretical fetish objects . . . ‘zines for grown-ups.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
A Mediawork pamphlet
ISBN 026263287X, 9780262632874
128 pages

Hypnotext (Rhythm Science’s webtake by Peter Halley)

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PDF (no OCR; updated on 2013-1-23)