De DJ Spooky Interview with Carlo Simula for his book MILLESUONI. OMAGGIO A DELEUZE E GUATTARI (Cronopio Edizioni)

"The idea of the "remix" is pretty trendy these days - as usual people tend to "script" over the multi-cultural links: the economics of "re-purposing," "outsourcing" and above all, of living in an "experience economy" - these are things that fuel African American culture, and it's active dissemination in all of the diaspora of Afro-Modernity. My take on Deleuze and Guattari is to apply a "logic of the particular" to the concept of contemporary art. Basically it's to say that software has undermined all of the categories of previous production models, and in turn, molded the "computational models" of how "cultural capital," as Pierre Bourdieu coined it, mirrors various kinds of production models in a world where "sampling" (mathematical and musical), has become the global language of urban youth culture. Eduoard Glissant, the Afro-Caribbean philosopher/linguist liked to call this "creolization" - I like to call it "the remix." Philosophy is basically a reflective activity. It always requires a surface to bounce off of. We don't exist in a cultural vacuum...Essentially, for me, music is a metaphor, a tool for reflection. We need to think of music as information, not simply as rhythms, but as codes for aesthetic translation between blurred categories that have slowly become more and more obsolete. For me, the Dj metaphor is about thinking around the concept of collage and its place in the everyday world of information, computational modelling, and conceptual art. All of them offer exits from the tired realms of Euro-centric philosophy into some kind of pan humanism. That's why I like Deleuze and Guattari's work. Other figures from the European aesthetic realm like Ludwig Feuerbach (who promoted the idea of "humanism" in his works of the mid 19th century), Spinoza, and Giordano Bruno's exploration of Semiotics are also influences, but the basic sense of "rhizomatic" thought - thinking in meshworks, in nets that extend to other nets - it's the driving force of my music and art. I think it's a great place to start thinking about a philosophy of "the remix." The "remix" is about certain kinds of polyphony - it's about making multiple rhythms work together, synchronized, cut, pasted, and collaged. That's the real "abstract machine"..."