One of the people involved in the development of IBM’s visual communications lab is is Jesse Kriss who orginally made this excellent visualization of Remix/sampling cultures – another beautiful visualization built with ‘Processing’
This is perhaps a great example of visualizing a social creative network, although I was surprised to find the ‘dialogue’ of the sampling community mostly flowing one way….of course this visualization probably doesn’t recognize where the ‘sampled’ is ‘sampled’ so a sample of ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ ends up being attributed to James Brown’s ‘In the Jungle Groove’ – there is something interesting being ignored about the folding of histories here I think. Nice graph though. Along with the Fridg’t interface this is the second impressive dynamic graphic work I’ve seen using Processing. I have seen high end VJ visualizations built in Processing but not many instances where Processing appears as an open source substitute for the proprietary Adobe Flash.
In your comment about not ‘seeing the sampling of a sample’ is this simply because the visualisation only operates on one recursion? Could it theoretically show where someone has also sampled Public Enemy’s sample of James Brown, but simply doesn’t?
I guess I’m wondering if you are suggesting a problem with Kriss’ concepton of ‘sample’ – ie original/copy – or are you just saying the visualisation is limited but could be more recursive?
I guess I am saying that the two issues are inter-related/coextensive – how we visualize the network structures the way conceive of sample cultures – ‘conceive’ because the visualization structures our likely interactions with the network – and I see that as the primary issue with network visuality.
I am really using Kriss’s visualisation unfairly as a means of revisiting the problems I have previously written (and continue to write) about regarding the way the linear/planar/spatial metaphor upon which the web’s technical and governmental infrastructure was based folded via the very incipiency’s of interaction it provided into something more…well ‘dynamic’ doesn’t do it justice…’transient’ is more appropriate – tools were developed to account for this transience or ‘throwness’ that was occurring at the generative horizon of the web and the old ‘under construction’ signs we once saw everywhere were replaced with ‘always becomings’ – the web moved to the ‘edges’ and the stable center that was so carefully structured by administrators became a musty archive of the webs past. Metaphors have a mind of our own.
Because there is such a linear correspondence in the ‘History of Sampling’ (between sampled and copied – which are starkly opposed) we are drawn to read the graph as saying sample culture was a phenomena that ‘peaked’ in this stage (on the sampler axis) and which was mostly concerned with a nostalgic ‘return’ to ‘this’ peak period on the sampled axis. But of course a generation of artists and potential artists came to know Sly, JB, etc through Public Enemy; probably the ‘real’ reason for the corresponding peaks. But this level of recursion can’t be represented here. The development of Hip Hop as it opened this window on the past was influenced by the development of european electronica and its technology as well as a growing awareness and performative reclamation of the interconnectedness of a political/social/street/musical heritage. Remix/Sample culture is the a mnemo-technical re-synthesis of culture futures.
In order to show recursive folding-out of cultural histories the visualization would have to ‘grow another leg’ so to speak (or at least another axes) so that the network could be represented in a way that better illustrated this mnemo-technical virtualisation of culture futures that is performed in the act of sampling- sampling is less concerned with histories as it is concerned with the immediate opening onto a potential future.
Basically this is a history of samples and not a history of sampling…
not sure how I feel about this reply…anyway..something to think about.