Category: Sonic Thinking and Doing

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees sampling and collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant. 
 
 In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.

Vicki’s work was technically good and humorous in a witty kind of way.

I asked Vicki about the politics of her work. I was interested in what she would say on her opinions regarding copyright and if she had ever gotten in trouble for it.

She said that she tries to keep out of the political side of her work. I found this slightly frustrating personally as in my opinion her work shows the connection of creations and is against copyright but at the same time she then tries to be neutral perhaps in order to still maintain permission to use material in her work. Her work seems to be more of a commodity than something radical, where I believe it’s roots lie. Maybe I’m just being a bit mean, what isn’t entirely intentional – I think her work is entertaining and the majority have lots of effort put into them.

___________

I have previously read about plunderphonics and names like John Oswald and Negativland.
The term Culture Jamming was coined by Negativland member Don Joyce:

“As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skillfully reworked billboard… directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large.”

Culture Jamming itself is routed in the Situationist International theory of détournement – the idea of turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself/ countering the recuperation that occurs in mainstream culture.

Over the week I returned home for a couple days and picked up an old Roberts R606-MB radio (c.1974) that was collecting dust in our old chicken storage barn.

Listening to the radio made me think about the following things.

• The detachment of physicality (regarding modern digital media) and nostalgia
• The lack of ‘purity’ in the medium and how it effects the listing experience

When listening to the radio, if you intend to listen to a certain broadcast, you are fighting a battle to maintain and find that perfect frequency. Much of what you hear is not what you actually intend to listen to, but is the signal noise of surrounding frequencies.

With digital media, we (generally) take it for granted that when we press play the audio will be flawless, of high quality and will not degrade over time.