In 1956, Guy Debord published «Methods of Detournement» where one reads:
«The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. (...) Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making new combinations. (...) Anything can be used. It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of these fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of ‘citations’.»
Godard joins Debord when, in the film British Sounds of 1970, he tells us in voice-over: «Often, class struggle is the struggle of an image against another image, of a sound against another sound.»
Logics of remixing, sampling, montage and association or relational methods are techniques that place the publication in a historical lineage and that imbue it of ideological, aesthetic, ethical or political principles. By cutting, commenting, merging, comparing, associating, we draw, read, collect, observe and build. Satiated with information but tired of dysfunctional hyperlinks, the connection between contents becomes as important as the contents themselves - the basis of a «culture of the use of forms»[1].
Footnotes
^ BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. (2005). Postproduction. Culture as screenplay: How Art reprograms the world. Nova Iorque: Lukas & Sternberg.
