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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathMontage/Sampling/Morphing
 
 
 
 
 

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underground hip-hop. We do not need to talk about the special cases such as drum and bass or the new digital, electronic music. In all of these cases sampling may play a large role as far as technology is concerned, and this is occasionally thematicized in the musical objects by artists who represent a self-reflexive or media-reflexive practice. However, it is only at a very general level that they are connected with the historical euphoria associated with the term sampling in the 1980s—similar to that associated with montage in the 1910s and 1920s—an artistic strategy as historical because it was technologically justified.

Image + Sound: Montage and Sampling

From an aesthetic, technological and historical point of view, each element must now also actually exist for this triad. It is undisputed that we are dealing with a new technology, at least with a new interface, and we also cannot deny that in each case there was a new art, new players, new practices—this is debatable, however, in the case of sampling. What was the historical development that sampling made reference to like montage to communism—or in the rare case to

 

fascism and militarism? I have already said that the postmodern, or postmodernism, could regard itself as thoroughly technologically objectified, but there was not necessarily a historical development such as communism or fascism; it was more of a cultural one that still required external justification.

For this reason, my suggestion would be another one: We have said that a central idea of the montage euphoria was precisely that one builds the world on a small and cultural scale like the Soviet Union was built on a large scale and traditional Europe was destroyed on the battlefields of World War I. By using a technically new tool, because it was less a new tool than a fundamentally different relation to material, montage conceived a new distance in a principally constructive and promising relation to the entire world, in a relation in which those who were not permitted to shape the world—something that the critique of contemporary culture wanted to have recognized in fact—that that which had once been the opposite of legitimate worldly possessions—appropriation, theft, the work of others—was now gradually being justified by

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