tate.org.uk: In context of the d_culture Online Panel Discussion and Public Forum, this archive of Diedrich Diederichsen sets out an historical perspective on the evolution of Sample Culture from the 1920's to the 1990's.
Since the advent of collage in the early twentieth century artists have sought to reprocess cultural residue from the past to create new systems of representation. Emerging forms of art practice increasingly cannibalize fragments of sound, image, music, dance, and performance to create new spaces of possibility. These hybrid projects use sampling, collage and recombination to generate live or time-based events that complicate our notions of time and space, artist and audience, virtual and actual.
Whereas much of the discourse around sampling still relies on theories of appropriation developed twenty years ago, sampling can be distinguished as a distinct aesthetic strategy, and one more relevant to many cultural practices today. Sampling both quotes and challenges notions of authorship, originality, and intellectual property, while creating new narratives and new ways of reactivating the cultural archive, and representing the everyday.
Diedrich Diederichsen was [the editor] of German music magazines Sounds and Spex and is one of the most important critical voices internationally on art, music and pop culture. Professor at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart and at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, he is a frequent contributor to Artforum and Texte Zur Kunst. He has edited Yo! Hermeneutics: Black Cultural Criticism/Pop/Media/Feminism and Loving the Alien: Science Fiction, Diaspora, Multi-Culturalism.
