11.01.06 Scrambeld? HaCkZ!, stream of mash up consciousness.
According to its author, the software artist Sven Koenig, Scrambeld?HaCkZ! is a useful tool aimed to infringe copyright. Konig claims that intellectual property is a misconception deeply conflicting with the principles of any cultural production because it is completely negating its collaborative nature. This is the reason why, fascinated by Napster and its successors, and interested in artistic and social strategies of appropriation like bastard pop and mash up, the Swiss artist has created the conceptual software sCrAmBleEd?Hackz, 'a 'Realtime-Mind-Music-Video-Re-De-Construction-Machine'. The machine is a software which basically consits of three modules: a pre-analyzer, a database and a synthesizer. Using the pre-analyzer its is possible to automatically split up an arbitrary amount of audiovisual material into small meaningful snippets. For each of those snippets its properties are extracted and saved in a database according to their signatures. The synthesizer analyzes an audio input stream, which can be other music or just human voice, deconstructing it and comparing any snippet with those stored in the database, looking for the most similar ones. What is generated is a an audiovisual stream of consciousness, typical of the MTV generation used to think of music in images. The applications are different, from interactive installations to video remix, but the most exciting is the live performance where video scratching becomes a composition of concrete musical memories.
Valentina Culatti