Rip It Up. DIY Networks and Mimetic Desire
Cut-ups and Glitch Theory in Networks of Remix Culture
“Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind.
We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”
— Rene Girard (1961)
Sneakers and wrist watches are markers of status, showing adoption of particular references to associated groups. In his 1961 book, “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,” philosopher Rene Girard introduced the theory of mimetic desire, explaining how attraction to objects are often copied from others. His theory suggests an interplay where our attraction to specific items is less about their intrinsic value and more about their role as symbols in a network of competing desires within the broader culture or within subcultures. This speaks to the value of social currency and collective influence.
Prior to the digital era, specifically related to the period before the proliferation of personal computers, physical distribution networks or hubs such as the record stores, hair parlors, coffee houses or boutiques played a critical role in shaping the evolution of subcultures. Vinyl record shops supported the dissemination of music but within a society of physical presence and live engagement, AKA “hanging out” that allowed secondary bi-products such as mixtapes to flourish. Memetic desire and the transfer of products symbolically associated peer groups flourished as a form of cool hunting.
The components of personalization seen in flyers, band pins, sticker art, and mixtapes, which are characterized by their curated and handmade nature, emerged as direct opposition to the mass-produced and formulaic approaches of mainstream media programming.
On premise DIY printed materials found in shops could be viewed as a remix of samples. Materials with collage techniques had legacies related to the Dadaists and later William S. Burroughs with his “cut-up” method in the era of the Beats.
In the late 1950s, amidst the Beat Generation era, William Burroughs was introduced to the cut-up method by Brion Gysin, a painter and writer. Gysin was influenced in this technique from Dadaist poetry and after slicing through a pile of newspapers, noted how the rearranged snippets inadvertently formed new phrases and concepts. Burroughs embraced, perfected, and actively promoted this approach, utilizing it as a method to explore the subconscious impact on language.
The cut-up method challenges the linear conception of narrative and the singular, authoritative voice of authorship. This technique anticipates the digital age’s remix apparatus, particularly artificial intelligence’s ability to automate reference and recombine with generative mashups.
During the height of the Beat era (1950s-1960s) and the Dada era (1916–1924), analog networks both structured and spontaneous — were crucial in disseminating ideas about sampling, remixing, and various fragment oriented recombination methodologies. The Beats network of exchanges, which included cafes and performance venues, facilitated the spread and intermingling of ideas among authors, artists, musicians, and performers. Physical congregation enabled the exchange of live response and dissemination with recorded artifacts ranging from small press pamphlets to live sound recordings of performance representing the aura of the scene.
The compositional language of the random, cut-up, and fragmented symbolized the psychology of authenticity in social tribes can be seen in expressions of graphic design style of David Carson in the 1990s and later in motion media design direction of Kyle Cooper title sequence to the film “Se7en”.
David Carson distilled the sunny discord of SoCal congregational subcultures in surfing, skateboarding, and beach lifestyle through his collage approach to typography in Ray Gun, Beach Culture, Transworld Skateboarding Magazines.
Kyle Cooper’s title sequence for the film “Se7en” (1995), expressed cinematic cut-ups characterized by its rapid montage of images that include layering of typography in notebooks, rearrangements of scraps and the act of composition with razors in the interplay of slices of skin and paper. The emergent creative composition technology of the 1990s opened up the recontextualization of cut-ups as a symbol with ties to the simulated idea of the analog distilled through digital apparatus.
The movie “Se7en” explores narrative themes that represent societal detachment expressed through visualizations of psychological discord. Throughout the film, detectives investigate crime scenes that are depicted as performance art by a lone nihilistic psychopath. This portrayal uses reassembled elements to mine the symbolic language of collage on artful crime scenes. In this case symbols of a maladaptive outlet are imagined through destructive and fragmented compositions. This turns the lens of the legacy of cut-up from its roots in creative subcultures to a reframing of society’s distrust and paranoia of outsiders and loners and the growing power of anonymity in a transitional moment of the emerging digital age.
Glitch Theory is perhaps the best inheritor of the legacy of the cut-up method. It explores the aesthetics and significance of unexpected errors or faults in digital systems that produce unintended effects, such as visual distortions, dissonance, or malfunctions. Unlike traditional perspectives that view errors as broken elements to be fixed, Glitch Theory embraces these imperfections, finding value in the accidental and the unpredictable. At the heart of the memetic perspective is the idea that certain “memes,” propagate through cultures in a manner akin to the biological transmission of genes. Glitches, within this framework, act as potent memetic artifacts. They are capable of capturing attention, invoking reflection, and spreading across social media networks. The visual and auditory discord of glitches makes them memorable and easily shared, characteristics essential for effective memetic transmission. In digital video, for example, glitch aesthetics rapidly proliferate across social media platforms, inspiring others to remix the glitch, thus acting as a vector for resampling collaborative spread.
Glitch Theory and the cut-up legacy emphasize the importance of community hubs in the evolution and interpretation of their subjects. Their supporting networks not only spread deconstruction as a stylistic effect but also engage in the substance of interpretation, attributing to them meaning that reflects broader societal concerns, from the anxieties of surveillance capitalism to the celebration of entropy and authenticity.
Citations and References
Aharoni, Tali. “When high and pop culture (re) mix: An inquiry into the memetic transformations of artwork.” New Media & Society 21.10–(2019)
Betancourt, Michael. Force Magnifier. Wildside Press LLC, (2020)
Burroughs, William. The Ticket That Exploded. Grover Press (1987)
Fano, Stuart Generative Systems and Chance Operations in Motion Design Atlanta, Georgia : Savannah College of Art and Design, (2020)
Kratky, Andreas. “Poetic Automatisms: A Comparison of Surrealist Automatisms and Artificial Intelligence for Creative Expression.” International Conference on ArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation. Cham: Springer International Publishing, (2021)
McLeod, Kembrew, and Peter DiCola. “Creative license: The law and culture of digital sampling.” (2011).
Miller, Arthur I. The Artist in the Machine : The World of AI Powered Creativity. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Mit Press, (2019)
Milner, Ryan M. The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media. MIT Press, (2018).
Navas, Eduardo. “Remix theory: The aesthetics of sampling.” (2014).4–5
