Amen

I had originally posted this youtube clip to the class ning site, but decided to take it down and put it here so as not to impose on prof. Hanley's e-space.

The video, I think, responds via a real world scenario to some of the issues that The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 addresses.

The clip essential deals with a six second drum break that has become a "ubiquitous piece of the pop-culture sound-scape." My initial inclination to post this clip came from the notion in Digital Humanities that "intellectual property must open up, not close down the intellect and proprius."

As the digital world opens up what might be called digital venues, cultural landscapes, sound-scapes, and intellectual niches, have become available to such a large audience that appropriation of certain clips of those scapes is inevitable. This leads, of course, to a great deal of interaction between art, ideas, and culture, and the consumers of those things. As the video suggests, this sort of interaction and appropriation is an essential part of the creative process, and, one could argue an integral part of the intellectual process as well.

Indeed, one could even suggests that this type of appropriation is the precise type of "curation" Humanities 2.0 is advocating. In the case of the Amen Break, a piece of music history from 1969 was taken, sampled, interacted with, presented to people and made new. The prolific remix of the break into hiphop and other electronic music forms was in fact a sort of interactive curation, with producers acting as both curators and artists. Nate Harrison's video is another type of interactive curation, one that considers the break being curated from social, fiscal, political, and historical points of view, and this interaction was written down, videoed, pressed onto a dub-plate, and so on. One could even say I am actively curating all of the above information by posting it on this blog, by writing and thinking about it, and by sharing it with you.

I suppose an interesting question might be: Who, in terms of the rhetoric of Humanities 2.0, was the initial curator of the break? Was it the Winstons, who, by their initial creating of the song Amen Brother, initiated the curation project that would not interactively be taken up again until the sampling culture of hip hop and electronic music hit the scene? Was it the first hip hop producer the actively sample the break? Was it Nate Harrison who put all the pieces together?

And what does this mean for intellectual landscapes? Does this appropriation of received ideas really lead to something new, or is it mere exploitation? Is the type of curation done by Nate Harrison, in which he acknowledges the Amen Break as part of the "cannon" of the pop-culture sound-scape, any different from a university that acknowledges say Pamela as an integral and essential part of what we now call the novel? Is Humanities 2.0 anything more that a rhetorical slight of hand which is merely sampling tradition Humanities ideologies? Is it something more?