Documenta: Remix

For me, one of the key, underlying ideas of Documenta's Paper and Pixels week was mutability. Words are mutable, the format they come in is mutable, the way they are interpreted or used is mutable.

One of the clever and potentially important functions built in to the Documenta Magazines Online Journal I mentioned in a previous post, is the ability for users to gather individual articles, arrange them as they like, give them a title, a description, and a cover image and then save and download them as a single PDF document. A customized version of the original. Mute magazine has a similar system that adds the possibility of users contributing their own discreet and mixable content through the News & Analysis section. We've seen similar book customization schemes like O'Reilly's SafariU and, most recently, DKs Eyewitness Travel Guides. And I was recently pointed to FLOSS Manuals which combines this PDF customization ability with a collaborative wiki. So, users can write/rewrite material in a manual which then becomes part of a remixing PDF system.

All these various systems are customization and change, but in a funny way, I think they're also fundamentally about capture and permanence.

The world is increasingly unbundled. Information comes in increasingly bite-size chunks and there are increasing numbers of those chunks.  Systems like these, that allow individual pieces of content to be aggregated and packaged, give bulk and volume to things that might otherwise get lost in the shuffle. They create information collaboratives. And because these collaboratives are built on discreet pieces, they can reform, remix, and reengage as appropriate. And because they're digital and flexible, pieces can live in several bundles at once, letting many facets of their meaning be explored simultaneously, and by the widest possible audience.