Dr Jaime Tsai presents a lecture on the specifically Australian remix work of Sydney artists Soda_Jerk (Dominique and Dan Angeloro) and Joan Ross. Soda_Jerk’s remixing of American film and television challenges the neo-liberal corporatisation of culture. Collapsing generations, cultures, and styles, and testing the limits of copyright law, Soda_Jerk’s videos resist the corporate ownership of everyday life by creating new fictions with characters derived from collective memory.
Joan Ross remixes early colonial paintings and imagery derived from contemporary life into irreverent narratives that contest the institutionalised ‘truth’ of Australian settlement. Reframing settlement as theft, Ross uses digital piracy to revise colonial history. In a demonstration of Dadaist solidarity against the art market, both Ross and Soda_Jerk disseminate their work online, where it is always free and remixable.
Tsai explores the history of the remix, from the Dadists, who used collage, photomontage and chance poems to sabotage the materials of the bourgeoisie through to the present day. Tsai argues that in the post-truth contemporary world, creative reformulation has moved into the digital sphere.
Dr Jaime Tsai is a lecturer in Art History and Theory at the National Art School.
Image: Soda Jerk, The Was (still), 2016, digital video, 13:40 minutes. Image courtesy the artists
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