Thesis Advisor: Grant Watson

Thesis: To Publish an Unoriginal Thought / Towards a Proximate Remix: On Authorship, Collection and Remix in Artistic Practice

July 2022

Abstract

With this scroll of ideas and practices I look into collecting and re-use in art and art-related practices, with a (not exclusive) focus on publishing. I use the figure of the DJ to think through questions around ethics and politics of the ‘remix’, drawing extensively from several art practices and its surrounding discourse, including my own. The text takes a rhizomatic approach and is in itself a remix of sorts, flowing in and out of topics, encounters and theoretical musings. The writings set out an aesthetic of clutters and linkages, and propose an attention, a slowness, through the act of multitasking. Because “consumption is simultaneously also production,” and the separate artistic product is always already a conglomerate, I circle around these main questions: How to activate a collection? How to publish an unoriginal thought? How can one remix ethically? To make sense of these questions I look at, amongst others, notions of relationality, critiques of the remix, authorship and the alias, citing and referencing, and the urge to collect. Finally, the text outlines a proposal for a remixing (or curating, or organising, or publishing) practice that operates in proximity and collaboration.

Author: Jan Pieter t'Hart