Cinemanhatta
Authors: Landers Sean Michael 
Published: May 2022

Both as a concept and a practice, remix has become enshrined in media theory and production. Using an existing creative expression as materials to produce a new creative expression, remix highlights how culture operates through a continual circulation of shared elements.  Remix reincorporates this practice into the present culture as an alternative to the dominant logic of the culture industries. 

However, as a useful principle applied in a general way, the specific cultural and historical conditions of remix’s origins become obscured and mythologized, obscuring how emergence and creativity function as part of culture in specific conditions.  Moreover, although we frame remix as an alternative or oppositional practice, it remains compatible with the logic of creativity as the work of the genius or auteurs.   It reinforces the idea of art as an expressive object that can be commodified for the consumption of an audience.

The time is right to rethink what the term ‘remix’ does and what it accomplishes.   Remix presents an alternative to the dominant mode of production, but can it offer a transformative opposition that not only remakes culture, but remakes the ways we make culture?   If not, what can? 

This presentation offers a complementary concept I call “recreative practice”, meant in the sense of re-creative (re-new-ing through creativity) as well as in the sense of recreational (“to refresh oneself by some amusement”).  It emerges from a synthesis of Dewey’s writing on the aesthetic experience (1934/2005), Williams’ theory of the residual, dominant and emergent (1977), and Barad’s call responsive/responsible theory (2012). 

The production of something that has never been is influenced by what has come before, and reception is framed by understanding of what is familiar to us.  Recreative practice recognizes that the production of aesthetic experience does not belong to a class apart – culture is ordinary, everyone is creative, and we are constantly generating and circulating culture.  Nor are theorists and artists exempt – we are inextricably entangled in the world we seek to transform, and our work, too, is part of a process of the everyday and the ordinary.

To further demonstrate recreative practice, I draw from my forthcoming dissertation, An Effective Dream is a Reality, as well as several years’ experimentation with algorithmic cinema.  I give this a focus through presentation of speculative project: Cinemanhatta. 

Cinemanhatta is a speculative proposal building on Manhatta (1921) as a foundation.  An antecedent of recreative practice, Manhatta drew on existing creative traditions in a way that created new possibilities for meaning-making and influenced the conditions for meaning-making itself.  Cinemanhatta honors that tradition and exemplifies recreative practice by proposing three interrelated projects, each inspired by a significant creative effort: Heidi Rae Cooley’s Finding Augusta and the accompanying Augusta App (2014), Perry Bard’s Man With A Movie Camera: Global Remake (2007-present), and Barbara Lattanzi’s HF Critical Mass (2002).   These projects work together to produce a material-semiotic performance of exchange and collaboration, using a set of recreative practices to construct a community of inquiry.