Lucio Spaziante

Remix-Remake

Sociosemiotics and replica practices

• Contemporary forms of media textuality are typical expressions both of globalization encounters and media crossings.

• Thus they lead us to reflect on producing and consuming texts, and on the use of contemporary semiotic analytical tools.

Modularity and matrix

• Our focus will be on multimedia and audiovisual medial forms

• built on repeated and varied modularities, • and on matrix owed to other media, such as

TV formats and other cases of seriality.

Hybrids

• Today, a key role in cultural production seems to be played by “replica practices”, considered as source of many trans-textual hybrids

• Those hybrids not to be treated only by means of categories of genre or as a simple tokens of ‘post-modern artifacts’.

What are replica practices?

• shared procedures of invention, • originated both from memories and

textual archives,• which embody consolidated practices of

production and enjoyment inside texts themselves

• Texts are fixed products, “attested” texts :• Practices are texts in action, processes,

interactions • Practices of reading something• Practices of use

Texts and practices

•Practices are able to reopen old texts, generating other new texts • On the opposite we find texts able to generate practices •Let’s think of something like matrice texts able to produce new versions, new connections

Texts and practices

• Texts are allowed to keep previous uses in their memories

• Texts are also able to act on memories • Mythopoiesis: remixes and remakes are

devices of generating classics.

Texts and cultures memories

Director’s cut & new editions

• Cultural industry shows a tendency to create and “discover”new classic texts, enriched with extras or outtakes, as new masterworks.

• From postumous cases like Touch of Evil director’s cut by Orson Welles (USA 1958-1999) until anniversary edition as 25th of The Clash London Calling.

Target - Source

• In replica forms we stand beside target texts that give values to source texts from which they come.

Example- Psycho: Hitchcock & Van SantIdentity or difference?

We can observe two complementary macro-tendencies:- continuity with past- tendency to differentiation

• Widespread intertextuality : “each text become a potential intertext in itself ”

• Intermediality: fragments and characters circulating across different media (literature, tv, film, games)

Toward Cultural Semiotics

Example : The Matrix

Replica as a Praxis

•The Matrix is not a sequel but a whole text which will be after divided

•composed of heterogeneous juxstapositions

•(kung-fu sets, western genre narrative structures, cyberpunk imagination, videogame rhythm, working on a modular standard of composition, playing on different media platforms, useful in the creation of clones.

From Cinema to Pop Music

• Starting from the field of cinema the perspective can be broadened to the whole audiovisual sphere.

• For example cases of reinterpretation as cover and remix (intended as intertextual productive practices coming from contemporary popular culture).

Pop music

• We find version of texts (re-playing, re-recording,reduction, adaptation, exc.) realized by the sameauthor

• Or, a reinterpretation (the so-called cover) whereyou have a new player that creates a new version(with different degrees of fidelity to original)

• Or, a remix, as to say a new intervention onoriginal material itself with reelaboration, alsoadding interpolations.

Version

Cover

Remix

Reference:

N. Dusi, L. Spaziante, Remix-Remake: pratiche di replicabilità, Roma, Meltemi, 2006.