without a loss of quality. This connection—improvement of the illusionistic dimension on the one hand, and improvement of the cut-and-paste possibilities on the other hand—was almost like a revival of the techno-political-aesthetic constellation of the initial montage euphoria. And here, too, the disempowerment of a long-dominant breed of artist was linked with the empowerment with new access to a very specific possibility of intervening at a low-threshold level. As is the case with montage, with sampling there is always the two-part situation that a new tool of the culture industry, a new technology makes an old generation of artists obsolete; at the same time, however, the promise emerges that a new generation of artists now not only has historically adequate access—with respect to the older generation— but also direct access, circumventing and counter to the culture industry. This dual construction is also present in the Soviet technology and montage euphoria of the 1920s. We have the equipment and are therefore on the one hand new, and on the other hand independent of the owners of the means of production. Here we again have the

trinity of aesthetic, technological and political progress.

Sampling and postmodernism

The historical sampling euphoria, which took place from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, was also accompanied by an idea of the adequacy of the cultural epoch and the technological tool: The sampler, which would soon be viewed and used as an electroquote machine, was regarded as a technology typical of postmodernism, as an ideal tool for the administration of inactualities. Here one can also recognize a parallel to the futuristic as well as the Soviet enthusiasm for the montage, where there was also a feeling for a close and genuine relationship between the historical project of communism (or fascism or World War I and its mechanized militarism) and the new artistic technologies. As was also the case to a certain degree with sampling, this feeling of course was based on the suggestive force of the effectiveness of technological interfaces and their supposed objectivity, which then always confirmed something cultural as historically true, as inevitable, or