·~{dRNn}~·

It does not matter, quién escribió el presente texto
porque él belongs to the past, Its real owner,
que es lo único que perdura inmanente, el pasado.
Though it has many version and interpretations,
in one of those I can be recognised.
En uno de esos espejos I appear within the crowed
landscape of a latinoamerican city.
With that barahunda de gente comparto language and some traditions
like taste for coffee, dramatic ends and the monarchy of rice in our dishes.
No sería exagerado to say all they live in me y yo vivo en ellos in constant flow.
You might not see me pero si pones más atención, you shall notice me.
And a new version de mi mismo would be created.

I wrote the previous text during Mark Amerika‘s seminar “There must be a creative alternative” in Bremen. Some questions arose during the first minutes: What does mean “source material”, where do come your sources from, is there an original source?

These are hard questions specially in media practice, where the source is a readymade object and no one can assure the completely originality of her/his sources. I suggested that source materials, regardless its origin, are values imposed by the one who chose them as source materials. If so, there should be a “choosibility” as intrinsic property in any object that can make it more or less interesting for a subject. Any object is susceptible of having such a property, but it just becomes a source material once has been used for any specific purpose. Can we imagine a source material without having been used?. The source material feature is capable of triggering new beginnings, new paths either of subversive, diversive or inverse nature.

When I refer  to objects I mean anything that exists outside a subject and can affect its perception (material objects), but as well anything that results of mind’s work: methods, tactics, strategies, ideas, beliefs, knowledge (non-material objects).  Taking this wide definition for object we can give the source material’s value to any of them and as a consequence of that we could mix and combine them into new objects. Cultural progress depends extensively on that assumption, we live in constant state of remixing and recombining source material in order to produce new objects. These objects might be new forms, new contents, existing contents into new forms, new contents in existing forms, new contents into new forms.  Working in such a way would mean a translation of forms or contents, treating them as living and malleable matters rather than dead ends.

Remixing, recombining, remediating all forms appears as a constant post-production state, it seems that the digital object brought it and made it evident by slapping it to our faces, discovering that history of mankind is a flow of revaluing ideas, objects, experiences as source materials for producing a next generation of things. Think in the Romans, they used the classical Greece as source material and mixed it with other source materials to develop what we call the Roman classical culture, they were later re- mixed, layered, interpreted, re-… and we keep doing so, assigning/adding the source material value in different forms and levels to all surrounding objects.

The opening text a remix of a suggested source material by Borges: Borges and I