User:Andre Castro/research/1.2/Canopy-draf01

Thinking Through Images

1. Please summarize your project and describe how it fits into the project area you’ve designated (300 words max):

Mp3s Are My Salesman

3rd Draft - 09/02/2012

What

Mp3s Are My Salesman consists of an investigation on music blogs, written by individuals who make available to online users tracks from long out-of-print vinyls and cassettes, ranging from 1970s Thai and African pop, to obscure new age soundscapes *. The investigation will be centered on the motivations that drive these blogs' authors to spend large amounts of time digitizing their analog music archives and making them publicly available.

How

Mp3s Are My Salesman will depart from the questionable premiss that these blogs attempt to creates the conditions for the "original" records and cassettes to become collectors' items. Under such hypothesis these records and cassettes' digital incarnations, circulating freely online, become promoters, strategically aimed at increasing "originals" value. Worthless mp3s (accompanied by descriptive texts and cover images) become the salesmen of the "original" obsolete media of music distribution. Through attentive observation of this online phenomena, interviews with blog owners and users, and by drawing parallels to online institutional archives Mp3s Are My Salesman will attempt to access the validity of such statement and shade light on other motivations behind these online activities.

Why

The motivation for this project lies in great part in my work as a sound artist, in which I have been employing field recording and found radiophonic sounds. Such practices are not that distant from the appropriation and recombination of existing compositions. Why then should one be more legitimate than the other? Why is musique concréte considerate composition and slowed down hip-hop songs by DJ Screw simply as remixes? What if we extrapolate these debatable notions to other realms of cultural production.

• Important to discussion the dualist position which we currently inhabit:
  • faced with the desire to access and possess digital culture objects (such as mp3s, film's mp4s, e-books), while at the same time we still want to hold the physical objects, the rare vinyl record or beautiful hardcover book.
  • And what is it that makes a physical mass produced object reclaim the status of original, while is digital counterpart is seen as a replica?

OLD

why

I believe such research to be relevant and worth undertaking since such online activity is not solely relevant to the music field, but to contemporary culture at large. Topics such as the notion of original, the creation and access to audiovisual digital archives, and appropriation as a creative practice inevitably come into questioning when we begin to make close and attentive readings to this phenomena.