[photo: timsnell]
A detrivore takes pre-existing materials, breaks them down, and uses them as building blocks to form something new." This quote lifted from detritus.net succinctly sums up the core activity that goes into remixing. To remix is a process: it is an activity, to be deployed as a verb and not a noun. In remixing, one acts upon existing cultural materials pilfered from the vast landfills of the already mixed and mediated landscape. Remix actively negates claims of originality and origin, and equally does not aspire to any finality or final work. By the very logic of the process, any remixed material can itself be submitted to further reworkings in the heap. This jumbling, sampling, splicing, recombinant activity is based on ideals of impurity - a state in which there is neither any "pure" original content at the beginning, nor any "pure product" down the line. Trace elements always abound. The remix embraces and celebrates hybridity and contamination.
From Samples From the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture by Bernard Schütze in HorizonZero 08: Remix. [via remix theory]
