Remix It Yourself. A Do It Yourself Ethic

Abstract

Within the transformation of the spectators’ role, the crucial passage is from a view of art as object to one of art as relationships network, or simply as network. It is in fact this very passage that creates the conditions for the users to intervene, personally or collectively, over the creation of an artistic product. This point is crucial in many authors attempting to reconstruct the history of the liberation of the users from the, mainly modernist, condition of passive fruitors of cultural objects. What these excursus are lacking is another history, that of do it yourself meant not as an artistic, hence elitist, practice, but as a mass phenomenon. In this frame of reference, it is easy to notice how from the Fifties the desire to regain possession of a more direct relation- ship with things spreads, a desire that leads the Western workers to perform a series of activities without the help of professional workers and – mainly – without specific knowledge.

The attitude towards do it yourself is nowadays transformed into that of remix it yourself. The imperative of contemporary age is in fact to revise personally the huge amount of sources one is able to access, using the available tools.

The paper will try to address questions such as: is there any sense in making, as many do, a clear distinction between the activity of the amateurs and that of the professionals? What interests lie behind the continuous enhancement of the “creative existences” made possible by the spread of new technologies?