On the other hand, what seems to be happening is that the "users" themselves have been gradually "modularising" culture. In other words, modularity has been coming into modern culture from the outside, so to speak, rather than being built-in, as in industrial production. In the 1980s musicans start sampling already published music; TV fans start sampling their favorite TV series to produce their own “slash films,” game fans start creating new game levels and all other kinds of game modifications. (Mods “can include new items, weapons, characters, enemies, models, modes, textures, levels, and story lines.”) And of course, from the verry beginning of mass culture in early twentieth century, artists have immediately starting sampling and remixing mass cultural products – think of Kurt Schwitters, collage and particularly photomontage practice which becomes popular right after WWI among artists in Russia and Germany. This continued with Pop Art, appropriation art, and video art.
Enter the computer. In The Language of New Media I named modularity as one of the principles of computerised media. If before modularity principle was applied to the packaging of cultural goods and raw media (photo stock, blank videotapes, etc.), computerization modularizes culture on a structural level. Images are broken into pixels; graphic designs, film and video are broken into layers. Hypertext modularises text. Markup languages such as HTML and media formats such as QuickTime and MPEG-7 modularise multimedia documents in general. We can talk about what this modularisation already did to culture – think of World Wide Web as just one example - but this is a whole new conversation.
In short: in culture, we have been modular already for a long time already. But at the same time, “we have never been modular” - which I think is a very good thing.
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