Rythm Science by Paul D Miller

It is interesting how Miller starts off by saying "Once you get in the flow of things, you're always haunted by the way things could have turned out". This is extremely applicable to my life, because I am always thinking back upon events and imagining how my life would be different if things had gone differently. This opens up the idea that we "remix" just about everything in our daily lives. When reassessing my actions, I suppose I am remixing all the different ways the scenario could have played out. Spooky defines rythm science as "a catalogue of undecided moments at the edge of my thinking process". You never know what is going to happen next or how things are going to play out to effect other things.

Spooky suggests that we may think we are entirely dependent on technology now, but in the future people won't consider technology as something they rely on, they will simply know it as their everyday life. Already technology has remixed itself into our everyday way of living, through computers, cell phones, internet, music, art, etc. Every aspect of life can have a technological side. Spooky says DJing allows you take the best of whats out there and mix it together to create something new and fantastic, but it seems as though in this day and age we can remix all kinds of things and make them work for us. For example I am remixing right now by taking Spooky's thoughts and my own thoughts to create a new theory on remixing. He says "rhythm science makes possible a music of permutation that tries to convey a sense of how conceptual art, contemporary technology, and timeless idealism might function together today". This covers just about everything I am learning in all my studies here at CU, and describes how the different areas of my education often flow in and out of one another. As an art student we are constantly discussing concepts and how we can "remix" a theme into a piece of artwork, and in this class we talk about how art and technology interact.

"DJ's have so many cultural products as material they are more willing to create psychological collage space". I love that he uses the term collage here, for remixing anything technically makes it one big collage. I think that the idea of mixing old and new comes to play here, for the book mentions how remixing can help one relive a personal experience. A certain song is coming to mind, where Ray Charles' "Georgia" lyrics start off slow and sweet, and then a beat drops and contemporary rapper Ludacris jumps in with the drop of the beat. This combination of sounds and culture creates a brand new sound and songs like this have taken over the music scene of my generation.

I am currently taking history of Jazz and I was surprised when Spooky referenced how in Jazz they use a call and response method. I never thought about this as the fundamentals of remixing but I guess even in the oldest forms of Jazz this could be considered a way of remixing because just like Ray Charles and Ludacris, two people yelling back and forth creates a new idea.

I think sampling and remixing in the music world is a really unique way to keep the music realm moving forward because after centuries of making music one could say there is nothing left to create, when using the conventional ways of making music because everything has already been done. With sampling and remixing there are endless possibilities of what could be combined to make something new. This could apply to art works as well, because in modern times it is very hard to come up with something original because so many things have already been done, but if you remix art there are so many new possibilities.

The idea of a DJ is interesting because they have the ability of staying ambiguous, much like users online have the ability to stay ambiguous. Because DJs often do not use their own voices, they can anonymously create music and send it into the world without being seen if this is what they choose. The DJ Deadmau5 stays ambiguous by always performing with a giant mouse head so no one can see his face. Although his face has been seen and is not completely kept a secret, generally when we think of this artist and his music, we think of the mouse head, and not of the actual human face that lies beneath. This goes back to the idea of creating something new, or becoming a new character that has never been done before. This makes the artist appear more creative and more memorable which are two themes which are also desirable when making music or art.