A brief presentation of a semiotics of media case history.

1. Lucio Spaziante
Remix-Remake

2. Sociosemiotics and replica practices
• Contemporary forms of media textuality are
typical expressions both of globalization
encounters and media crossings.
• Thus they lead us to reflect on producing
and consuming texts, and on the use of
contemporary semiotic analytical tools.

3. Modularity and matrix
• Our focus will be on multimedia and
audiovisual medial forms
• built on repeated and varied modularities,
• and on matrix owed to other media, such as
TV formats and other cases of seriality.

4. Hybrids
• Today, a key role in cultural production
seems to be played by “replica practices”,
considered as source of many trans-textual
hybrids
• Those hybrids not to be treated only by
means of categories of genre or as a simple
tokens of ‘post-modern artifacts’.

5. What are replica practices?
• shared procedures of invention,
• originated both from memories and
textual archives,
• which embody consolidated practices of
production and enjoyment inside texts
themselves

6. Texts and practices
• Texts are fixed products, “attested” texts :
• Practices are texts in action, processes,
interactions
• Practices of reading something
• Practices of use

7. Texts and practices
•Practices are able to reopen old texts,
generating other new texts
• On the opposite we find texts able to
generate practices
•Let’s think of something like matrice texts
able to produce new versions, new
connections

8. Texts and cultures
memories
• Texts are allowed to keep previous uses in
their memories
• Texts are also able to act on memories
• Mythopoiesis: remixes and remakes are
devices of generating classics.

9. Director’s cut &
new editions
• Cultural industry shows a
tendency to create and
“discover”new classic texts,
enriched with extras or outtakes,
as new masterworks.
• From postumous cases like Touch
of Evil director’s cut by Orson
Welles (USA 1958-1999) until
anniversary edition as 25th of The
Clash London Calling.

10. Target - Source
• In replica forms we stand beside target texts
that give values to source texts from which
they come.

11. We can observe two complementary macro-
tendencies:
- continuity with past
- tendency to differentiation
Example- Psycho:
Hitchcock & Van Sant
Identity or difference?

12. Toward Cultural Semiotics
• Widespread
intertextuality : “each
text become a potential
intertext in itself ” Example : The Matrix
• Intermediality:
fragments and characters
circulating across
different media
(literature, tv, film,
games)

13. Replica as a Praxis
•The Matrix is not a sequel but a whole text which
will be after divided
•composed of heterogeneous juxstapositions
•(kung-fu sets, western genre narrative structures,
cyberpunk imagination, videogame rhythm, working
on a modular standard of composition, playing on
different media platforms, useful in the creation of
clones.

14. From Cinema to Pop Music
• Starting from the field of cinema the
perspective can be broadened to the whole
audiovisual sphere.
• For example cases of reinterpretation as
cover and remix (intended as intertextual
productive practices coming from
contemporary popular culture).

15. Pop music
• We find version of texts (re-playing, re-recording,
reduction, adaptation, exc.) realized by the same
author
• Or, a reinterpretation (the so-called cover) where
you have a new player that creates a new version
(with different degrees of fidelity to original)
• Or, a remix, as to say a new intervention on
original material itself with reelaboration, also
adding interpolations.

16. Version

17. Cover

18. Remix

19. Reference:
N. Dusi, L. Spaziante, Remix-Remake: pratiche
di replicabilità, Roma, Meltemi, 2006.