rhetoric, writing, and technology

CCCC 2006

Since I've been working so much I haven't posted in a while. So I thought I'd go ahead and post my 4C's project since it is a multimedia piece and I had an artist statement written up already.

Rhetoric of Revolution (Open Hand Remix)

In 2005, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (NIN) put the first single from his new album With Teeth, "The Hand That Feeds," on his web site in Garage Band format so fans could download it and create remixes. The gesture was an attempt to extend artists beyond the control of corporate capitalism and into the open access practice of remix culture that is alive on the web. As the owner of his own record label, Nothing Records, Reznor is actually in a position to change the ways the recording industry approaches the Internet. Rather than sue music downloaders for copyright infringement as many companies have done over the past few years, Reznor is interested in participating in and fostering these new cultural practices. In short, Reznor recognizes that there are revolutionary changes on the horizon for the ways musicians interact with fans and the ways companies can be a part of that cultural exchange.

The album With Teeth became a critical and popular success, prompting MTV to invite NIN to perform "The Hand That Feeds" on the 2005 MTV Video Awards show. Reznor planned to display images of George W. Bush as a backdrop to the protest song. Once MTV found out, however, they refused to let NIN show any controversial imagery. Reznor dropped out of the performance rather than agree to censorship. MTV's political compliance runs counter to Reznor's open ethic and to the spirit of the song itself.

These events set the backdrop for "Rhetoric of Revolution (Open Hand Remix)." I decided to download Reznor's own remix of "The Hand That Feeds," which appeared on a Japanese import of the original single, and create a video montage of the sort that may have been shown if the MTV performance had gone forward. Downloading images collected from a Google image search, I use collage and juxtaposition to highlight and extend the lyrics of the song that critique the connection between politics and religion, the control these institutions have over individuals, and the desire for change that these forms of power produce.

In addition to playing with the imagery represented in Reznor's lyrics, "Rhetoric of Revolution (Open Hand Remix)" also puns on the hand and its relationship to rhetoric. While the open hand of rhetoric and the closed fist of logic from ancient practice is an underlying theme, my remix makes more explicit use of the contemporary importance of gesture. In a new media environment, gestures of the hand through mouse and pixel have developed renewed rhetorical significance. Following Deleuze, Ariella Azoulay writes, "The hand may be part of a real body, but it is also an organ floating in the world to which the individual is extending a hand, responding to its interpellation" (Death's Showcase). The hand becomes a body-without-organs in its own right that can enter into complex relations with technologies and material ecologies to express force in a world that is perpetually mediated.

"Rhetoric of Revolution (Open Hand Remix)" embodies both the technological as well as political senses of revolution inherent in Reznor's "The Hand That Feeds" and expresses a desire for both forms of change.

Posted by: bhawk at 13:11 | link | comments
responses, new media