[rumori] mining for data

Steev [rumori] mining for data
Fri, 1 May 1998 11:51:33 -0700 (PDT) (00894077493, Pine.LNX.3.95.980501105427.20090A-100000ATflotsam.detritus.net)

On Fri, 1 May 1998, Boster, Bob wrote:


>I'm loosely involved with the zine Stay Free which focuses on

yay! Stay Free is cool!


>Advertising and Marketing and is edited by Village Voice advertising
>columnist Carrie McLaren. Carrie's excellent column at
>http://www.villagevoice.com/ink/news/17mclaren.shtml speaks cogently
>about issues of advertising appropriation.

what an excellent article! At the end she comes very close to sounding
like John Cage:
"maybe we should...just start recording the fax machine and listening to that. With so many
forces competing for our ears, we're only going to
find music where it is least expected."
this seems like the only escape. Stop listening to music. Make life
music. Or, stop listening to commercials. Which is what i
mostly do.

But sometimes it's unavoidable. I only watch about 2 hours of TV a
week,but that's still too much to avoid seeing things like "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb in a VW ad. (interesting footnote: someone told me that the version of the song in the commercial is a new one, with a
different female voice recreating the sample ["the sky was big and blue and there were little fluffy clouds..." etc etc] because they couldnt get permission to use the sample, even though they bought the rights to the
song - an interesting example of "Nested Sampling" or whatever we should call it. I don't know if i beleive that story, though. Can any one
confirm it?)


>It occurred to me that on more than one occasion I've been constrained
>by not wanting to use a given sound source because of it's advertising
>association (foremost was the Iggy/Stooges cut that Nike brilliantly
>abused a few years back, but I later came up with a reason to use that
>incorporated that association as well).

that sounds clever. Too detournments for the price of one!! cool.


>Just wanted to see if people had similar experiences and maybe develop a
>list of stuff that we've been shunned away from as a result of
>advertising associations for Carrie to run as a sidebar in an expanded

For me, advertising that uses a piece of culture just serves as another
flag that that piece of culture is "used up" or "over recycled." Similar to the idea that sampling James Brown is passe.
For instance when Burroughs showed up in a Nike ad a few years ago
I knew once and for all that the time for sampling Burroughs was over,
if it wasnt over already years before that.

Of course all recontextualisations contain multiple connotations, and the
connotation that dominates depends on the viewer. I guess this is
basically the Deconstructionist line of thought - the text depends on the
reader. When a commercial appropriates something, it means that
that "text" gains another possible "reading". At LEAST one more.
I don't know, this brings up a really interesting train of thought. I'm
torn. Its both an opportunity for us "culture jammers" and also it makes our jobs harder. And I'm sure it will only get worse.
What this is doing, in the long run, is making all signs
even more arbitrary. What happens when every symbol means so many things
that it means nothing? This is another symptom of the end of history...

smh

Steev Hise, Would-be World-Wide Web Wizard (WWWWW)
steevAThise.org http://www.cyborganic.com/people/steev new recycled art site: http://www.detritus.net -----------------------------------------------------------------
"Music involves living, its not just the execution of sounds in space." -Anthony Braxton
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