Source Material Everywhere
E-book Link for Mobile and Flash-less Devices
Kate Armstrong
About the Work
Print book
5.5″ x 8.5″
110 pages
Edition of 1
Source Material Everywhere: a remix collects the Wikipedia entries for the three terms -“Source”, “Material” and “Everywhere”- and compiles them into a printed book in an edition of 1.
Commissioned by Mark Amerika as a response to remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) this work responds to one of the book’s central ideas. In Amerika’s book, “Source Material Everywhere” might be the world, the medium, the material, even the spiritual centre, and is fundamental to his investigation of relationships between the materiality of culture and the sources and structures of the creative act.
Collecting the aggregated materials of Wikipedia on these three terms– themselves telescoping outward into thousands of philosophical, scientific, and pop cultural references, sources and citations – Source Material Everywhere: a remix is a deliberately singular object that emerges as a specific instantiation out of a sprawling, networked process.
Artist’s Statement
The whole idea of remix is predicated on what is mixed as well as what is created through that process. It was interesting in this project because the source material for this remix is in fact a book (by Mark Amerika) and that the book itself is investigating these ideas (of what is mixed and what is created). You can easily go bananas trying to sort out questions of origin in discussions like this but what was interesting to me fundamentally was the way that the idea always reaches way way out (into materiality, the many, the world, systems of meaning) and then contracts way way in again (to the singular, the output, the media file, the performance). I thought it would be interesting to look at wikipedia as a mode for this project because it is sprawling and networked and such a big example of “the many”, and then to try to take that and bring it in again to an austere, single, black object, a book in a print edition of one.
Bio
Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist, writer, and independent curator. Her interdisciplinary practice merges networked media, written forms and urban experiences and engages with open forms of experimental narrative that bring poetics and computational function together in physical or network space. In the past this has taken a variety of forms including net art, psychogeography, social media platforms, drawings, and books. Recent exhibitions include Akbank Sanat (Istanbul), Prairie Art Gallery (Grande Prairie) Pace Digital Gallery (New York), Rhode Island School of Design Gallery (Rhode Island), IAO Gallery (Oklahoma City), Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts (San Francisco), ISEA (San Jose), Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Vancouver), and Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius).
Armstrong has lectured and held workshops on location-aware and participatory narrative at venues including the Tate Britain, Banff New Media Institute, the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies, and Time’s Up in Linz, Austria. She has written for P.S.1/MoMa, Blackflash, Fillip, SubTerrain, Granville Magazine, and the Kootenay School of Writing, contributed to DAMP: Contemporary Vancouver Media Arts (Anvil Press, 2008), and is the author of Crisis & Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture (Michigan State University Press, 2002). She is a founder of Revised Projects which is currently managing a satellite artspace for the Goethe-Institut, and she is developing new work for a commission from Turbulence with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Links
http://www.revisedprojects.com
