FROM MTV ONLINE ON A.O.L. (11/27/97):


Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
by David Pescovitz

What do you do when it's all been done before? When you have something
subtle to say about what a Top 40 star isn't saying? When ugly truths in a
billboard are buried in glossy packaging? Cut and paste, pal.

It's known as artistic appropriation, or sampling. Take a bit of a song, a
picture, or a video, clip it out of context and place it into your own work
to make a political statement, a surly satire, or simply because it sounds
or looks cool. Be warned though, you could be committing a copyright crime.

Now there's a virtual gallery dedicated to this form culture
jamming--Detritus, <www.detritus.net> a new Web site "dedicated to recycled
culture."

The Bay Area band Negativland could be considered the Detritus poster
children. In 1991, the avant-garde satirists released the now-infamous
single "U2" full of funny samples of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm
Looking For" and Casey Kasem talking trash between tracks on American Top
40. The sampled stars were less than pleased, a costly legal battle ensued,
and the record itself remains a rarity. U2's protectors have since agreed
to return the rights to Negativland's recording, if Kasem agrees not to sue
Island Records. To hear what you're missing, the original audio art is
chronicled on Detritus. Copyright infringement or powerful parody? You
decide. (Negativland's latest release, Dispepsi, pokes fun at guess
who....)

Also up for download on Detritus is John Oswald's Plunderphonics disc.
Composed entirely of sampled sounds, "borrowed" from Michael Jackson and
the Beatles among others, Plunderphonics was given to libraries and radio
stations but never sold. Oswald encouraged listeners to tape it from the
radio, which is a good thing because in 1990 all undistributed copies of
the disk were crushed by the Canadian Recording Industry Association.

Besides risking legal hassles by archiving forbidden uses of found sounds,
Detritus is an online home for appropriation artists like Bob Ostertag,
Illegal Arts, and other "detrivores," defined as one "who takes
pre-existing materials, breaks them down, and uses them as building blocks
to form something new." Mix in interactive installations, pointers to
related links of "recombinant" works, and a reading list that includes the
likes of Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces and John Cage's Silence, and
Detritus becomes a community of criticism where culture is more than just
food for thought.

"A lot gets thrown away: the ribbons, the wrapping; culture becomes
garbage, or it dies, and rots behind the refrigerator. But the new fluffy
shiny stuff still gets churned out, and it gets forced between our teeth.
And we are told to swallow it," says designer Steev Hise on the Detritus
home page. "We will not swallow. We will chew, and then spit. We will play
with our food, and create something new and interesting from it."

David Pescovitz (pesco@well.com) is the co-author of Reality Check
(HardWired, 1996) and a contributing editor at Wired.