Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Manovich 3.13: 2ManyDJs

In "From Object to Signal" Manovich concludes with the concept of the mash-up created by the club DJ. These songs were released (underground) by DJs and made into videos by fans. They do not employ compositing, but they do employ the "temporal montage" (148) and make apparent the lack of "spacial montage" especially since the two audio artifacts are simultaneous and their video is seamlessly combined and the accompanying video bounces between the two. As videos, these lack a cohesion that the audio tracks alone possess. This speaks, I think, to the fact that these were made as club songs by professional DJs, and presented, secondarily, as literal video representations.



1 comment:

  1. What is interesting about the first song is how the DJ was able to layer the voice over the orignal song "Teen Spirit", I think (?) so that you could hear Kurt Cobain's guitar in a way that kept the originality of the song, but blended the other pieces/ voices of the other artists. Just like you said, being authored by DJ's, the music is better than the video in how well it is constructed. But, the same idea applied to video is not as seamless. The construction of each media effects the experience and whether or not we are authentically entertained.. It is difficlut to "maintain a psychological distance from the cinematic narrative" (146) when we are not convinced by it's construction. So, if the video is cheesy, it affects the song. The DJ is most effective when he can blend seamlessly, just as the cinematographer is most persuassive with a seamless video.

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