Latent Remixability

In the early days, photography was solely predestined for the photographer. This skilled worker governed both the analogue camera as the development of its negatives. The dawn of the digital age introduced a less labor intensive way to produce a photograph. Anyone who could handle a digital camera, computer and a printer is able to be a photographer and reproduce pictures. The conventional developing process is replaced by a digital one and the barriers of the extensive analogue process are gone… right?

Digitalizing infrastructures and universalizing protocols will result in the fact that numerous devices can communicate with one another. An universal language which is based on binary code. This has advantages for distribution, speed and the amount of information send, but has also implications. A reduction of an analogue to binary code will influence form, purpose and content of the archetype. From 2003 to 2008, Sony BMG had to deal with different lawsuits regarding a policy to secretly implement rootkit software for customers of their content to prohibit its reproduction. Secretly implementing information which alters its manifested purpose is related to what I have coined: ‘latent remixability’. Issues that I am going to scrutinize in my thesis are the layers behind latent remixability. How does latent remixability fit into contemporary society? Which roles do new cultural forms play? What does copyright and original content actually mean within the era of endless reproductivity and endless remixability? How does this fit into a Foucauldian or Deleuzian perspective, or both, and where does Alexander Galloway come in?

In the following months as my thesis will continue to shape, I will keep blogging on this topic. For my research I still have to do some interviews. I am planning to interview Lev manovich and Lawrence Lessig on Twitter, So, if you have any suggestions or questions? please let me now…