Art, Appropriation and New Media

Idea of Appropriation in the Digitized World

In this contemporary digitized era, Appropriation is a phenomenon that refers to utilizing old techniques and constructing a new ‘appearance’ out of it, appropriating material or technique for another or related context. Appropriation is an artistic and creative new media practice that serves as the content strategy for various purposes and projects. Some historical instances for the appropriation are Collage and Dadaism, the Sound Art, and Turntablism.

Art and Appropriation

The Collage and Dadaism are precursors to contemporary appropriation practices. The Dadaist movement refers to a movement of a revolt by certain 20th-century artists against smugness in traditional art and Western society. Their works, illustrating absurdity of purposeless machines and collages of discarded materials, expressed their cynicism about conventional ideas of form and their rejection of traditional concepts of beauty ("Dadaism - definition," 2013). Dadaist anti-art manifestations consisted of artworks made of rubbish, or out of random operations of chance. Around the same time Marcel Duchamp, often cited as the father of the post-modernism, introduced provocative artworks such as Readymade, which were frowned upon by the canon of artists consisting of re-appropriating urinal displayed as an artwork and naming it Fountain, thus challenging the avant-gardist of the time (Wood, 2003). 

Fountain, Readymade, Marcel Duchamp, 1917

The Dadaist movement got appropriated as a form of political commentary, using the activism in a form of cultural jamming: a movement that seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard “liberation” and trademark infringement (Harold, 2009). The group of activist tried to get their voice heard and bring the change for which old content had to be brought in and re-appropriated a new context for it to create certain meaning. For instance, appropriation of an image from the painting Grand Odalisque by Guerilla Girls (1989). 

Guerilla Girls, 1989

Guerilla Girls is an anonymous group of American art activists that used advertising as a means of drawing attention to their task by re-appropriating Odalisque’s face with a gorilla mask and quoting: “Do women have to be naked to get into Met. Museum?” Also, giving a statistical ratio of the number of female artists vs. male in order to raise havoc. The purpose was to bring attention to the female artist of color and exposing the domination of white males in the world of art.

Adbusters

Another example is Adbusters, a Cultural-jammers anti-consumerists campaign that published parodies of Ads in a form of collages. These ads were purposed to serve as rhetorical x-rays, revealing the true intentions of the advertisers. The effort by Adbusters became a common way for the “subvertisers” to talk back to a multimedia spectacle of corporate marketing by subverting the ads. The use of appropriation was for the ‘activism’ purposes to evoke awareness in the public.

Music, Technology, and Appropriation

A sound artist, John Oswald, an improvisational jazz musician and visual artist, coined the idea of Plunderphonics to describe his work: a form of sound collage that refers to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition ("Plunderphonics," 2013). In this sense, appropriation-based art embodies what can be considered as an appropriate reaction to the saturation of our lives with the images and sounds of popular culture.

Turntablism is another idea that falls under the domain of appropriation of technology. Turntablism is the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph turntables and a DJ mixer ("Turntablism - wikipedia," 2013). The artist plays a record like an electronic washboard with a phonographic needle produces sounds, which are unique and not reproduced—the record player becomes a musical instrument (Oswald, 2013). Janek Schaefer’s ‘Tri-phonic Turntable’ (1997), invented and built a 3-tonearm record player that plays up to three records at different speeds and levels, the purpose of which was to start manipulating old vinyl to make new music (Schaefer, 2013). One of the most interesting elements of Janek Schaefer’s work is how the idea of appropriation is not simply applied to the creative misuse of media content but to media technologies themselves, which helped him to appropriate his work of building a ‘new media artwork’. The turntable, for Schaeffer, provides not simply a means to repurpose-recorded content but as something that itself is to be appropriated in creative ways.

The appropriation of technology works by considering an existing interface and questioning its purpose, followed by brainstorming of other ways the interface could be given another purpose, hence ‘re-appropriated’. As a New Media practice, appropriation uses content and technology in new ways as a means to depict ‘creativity.’

References:

Adbusters: http://www.forbiddensymbols.com/wp-content/uploads/adbusters.png

Dadaism - defination. (2013). Retrieved from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Dadaism

Wood, Paul. Art of 20th Century: Frameworks of Modern Art. Yale University Press, 2003. Print.

Fountain Image: http://dotcomm.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Image2.jpg

Guerilla Girls: http://uh8yh30l48rpize52xh0q1o6i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/35447_0360981719317644_b.jpg

Harold, C. (2009). Pranking rhetoric "culture jamming" as media activism. The Advertising and Consumer Culture, 349.

Plunderphonics. (2013). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plunderphonics

Turntablism - wikipedia. (2013). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turntablism

Oswald, J. (2013). The official global dj ratings. Retrieved from http://dj-rankings.com/resources-70

Schaefer, J. (2013). Tri-phonic turntable. Retrieved from http://vimeo.com/23556662