Replay Compiler / Tweaklab [booklet + DVD], ISBN 978-3952285930, 2012, English
The fourth volume of Compiler is dedicated to the multiplicity of reuse practices in audiovisual artworks produced with digital tools, interfaces and paradigms. The development of this attitude was once the preserve of artists, though in the second half of the 00s social media and the phenomenon of the instant celebrity increased the contribution of amateurs, leading to various aesthetic reconceptualizations such as the notion of “post-digital”. The selection documents how visual sampling has become a street phenomenon able to reach a critical mass of practitioners more efficiently than audio sampling. The videos here plunder content from every source, mixing, sequencing and cutting with an almost absolute lack of prejudices and standardized categories. Most of the time the cut makes it impossible to date when videos were created, giving them a special quality, although material from the eighties, for example seems to be in vogue, as well as weird amateur internet videos. Hip-hop generated a whole generation of unsophisticated musicians sampling and rhyming, many of whom produced a few demos and then stopped – something which connects to the current over-production of videos hosted on YouTube. In parallel, independent hip-hop artists have produced innovative experiments that have shown how to think outside the box using the same tools. Compiler 04 gathers a similar roster of artists, using material “found” in one way or another, defining new prototypes for “sampling” and reassembling.