rip/mix/burn
The phrase "rip, mix, and burn" is a direct reference to the practices of copying and mixing music. One “rips” music from its original context (e.g. on a CD you bought at a store), “mixes” it with other content, and then “burns” it onto another CD as an “original” composition. The topological unfolding of thought is a similar process in which cognitive content is “ripped” from materiality via sensory organs, “mixed” with other content including memory, and “burned” into language at the conscious level. Much like the selection process in which one chooses songs to rip for mixing onto a CD, sensory information is also selective, though obviously not consciously selective. That is, our sensory organs pick up a certain band of light and sound; our attention is brought to some objects and not others. In this chapter, I am going to argue that the compositional process, like the topological thought process in which it participates and like the technological process of rip, mix, and burn in which it also participates, functions in a similar way. I am then going to return to this issue of copyright and plagiarism and reinterpret these concerns from this new perspective on composition.
While rip, mix, and burn refer specifically to the generation of computer music files, here I will explore these as more abstract processes. Ripping is a process of copying, quoting, or citing. It is the slicing of material from one context and its insertion into another. As I will discuss, this process creates conditions for the spread of contagions; that is, by ripping two or more pieces of media open and inserting them into one another, one creates the possibility for information to flow from one into the other causing mutation. This is akin to the process by which multiplicities mutate, which I discussed in the previous chapter. In this way, ripping leads into mixing, whereby the contagion spreads from the immediate site of the rip through the intersecting media. This proliferation typifies the mixing process as the multiplicities mutate and unfold in a fractal-like pattern. Eventually this proliferation slows down and the multiplicity returns to a relatively stable state; the mixing is done. At this stage, the composition is burned. The burning process is one of involution, that is, one both of shrinking but also involvement. Literally, the file size shrinks through a process of data compression. Also the burned file can be made accessible on the informational network, where the process may be reiterated. It is certainly possible to view the burned file as a finished product that might be copyrighted. However, technically the process can be stopped at any moment and the existing text copyrighted; notes I write on a cocktail napkin are copyrighted. In compositional terms, the burned file is simply a site for ripping in an ongoing iterative process.
In the next three sections I examine these compositional processes—ripping, mixing, and burning—and their associated effects/affects—contagion, proliferation, and involution. Specifically, I take up Gregory Ulmer’s use of the saprophyte (or mushroom) as a mechanism of ripping-contagion, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome as mixing-proliferation, and Derrida’s hérrison (or hedgehog) as burning-involution. By linking these concepts the text articulates intersections between technical and theoretical discourses, allowing their singular affects to spread through one another, resulting in a mutated composition: that is, the text pursues its own ripping, mixing, and burning. Following that, I discuss the pedagogic implications of this process in relation to Ulmer’s textbook, Internet Invention.
The compositional process I am describing is the same whether one is producing an experimental video or an office memo. It is not a deterministic process and is completely abstracted from the content of the composition, much like the multiplicities I described in the previous chapter are separate from the materiality that unfolds from them. That is, just as a singularity that draws materiality into states of lowest energy might unfold both soap bubbles and salt crystals, these compositional processes might unfold, in a non-deterministic way, into a wide range of media depending upon the other materials and multiplicities with which they intersect in the compositional process. That said, understanding the operation of these multiplicities opens the opportunity to engage strategically with their affects. In addition, this compositional process of ripping, mixing, and burning allows us to rethink how we teach composition and how we might incorporate new media into it.
Next: ripping.contagion.mushrooms