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sampling gave way to the use of in-house beats in thewake of stricter copyright enforcement for samplesthat overtook the music industry.

While Public Enemy has continued to generaterecordings over their twenty-three year career, othergroups like the KLF failed to survive the shift todigital media. In his forgotten history of the KLF,McLeod calls them the first recording group tochallenge paradigms of ownership and authorshipbefore a broad audience, noting that "[t]heir brief butubiquitous f)opularity obscured a radical and hilari-ously subversive critique of the culture industry."The KLF had several cheesy UK hits that exten-sively sampled popular songs, but Americans mightremember their 1991 hit, "Justified and Ancient,"recorded with country music legend Tammy Wynette.After being voted Best British Group in 1992, theyset fire to their earnings, realizing that their attemptto subvert pop from the inside was an impossibletask. Whereas Public Enemy found a raw energy indigitally sampled sounds that supported their critiqueof racial injustices, the KLF found a void—accordingto McLeod, they insisted that music sampling tookthe "magic and mystery" out of collage, althoughpractitioners such as Girl Talk, as detailed in the

collection by label manager Philo T. Famsworth,continue to use extensive, uncleared samples.

The essays in Cutting Across Mediashowcase issues that appeal to a range

of theoretical and practical fields.

By highlighting this recording industrycontroversy. Cutting Across Media draws out issuesof authorship, ownership, intent, and audience thatimpact a broader range of collage and appropriationpractices. The book's other essays—too numerousto discuss in this limited context—focus on topicssuch as the culture-jamming of public advertisementsand intertextual practices in narrative and poetry.Furthermore, the collection makes readers questionwhy some instances of collage and appropriation areconsidered more illegal than others. To this end, Jona-than Lethem offers a writer's perspective. McLeodinterviews Lethem, followed by Lethem's mash-upessay, "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism,"as the book's concluding chapter. In the interview,Lethem remarks that "cash on the barrelhead"determine why literary appropriations, such as those

of Kathy Acker, can proceed to some extent withoutlegal challenge, as opposed to the much large-profitimplication of sampling in the music industry.Further, Lethem stresses the importance of the "gifteconomy" in art practices, insisting that artists stopsubscribing to "implicit claims of originality" abouttheir work.

The essays in Cutting Across Media showcaseissues that appeal to a range of theoretical and practi-cal fields—media and communication studies, digitalhumanities, law, writing, art and music—while alsoattending to the open-ended questions surround-ing cultural production and copyright law in thedigital age. The book's relevance lies foremost inthe fact that collage and appropriation art practicesare becoming more and more common, especiallyin digital media. As a result, we must consider thepolitical and cultural implications of contemporaryartworks. We need to reflect on who actually ownsthe myriad of images, sounds, and texts residing onour hard drives, not to mention all around us, as weredefine older concepts of ownership.

Christine Masters Jach is a PhD student in PurdueUniversity's rhetoric and composition program.

Remixing AntarcticaGretchen E. Henderson

THE BOOK OF ICE

Paul D. Miller

Mark Batty Publisherhttp://markbattypublisher.com

128 pages; cloth, $29.95

"[T]ruth itself is a remix," writes Paul D. Miller(aka DJ Spooky) in his new project of projections.The Book of Ice. The book is one element of a hexago-nally amplified process that led Miller to Antarcticafor four weeks in late 2007 to sample that landscapeand remix it: sonically, graphically, scientifically,cinematically, emotionally, paradoxically. Embeddedwith graphs and graphic design (maps, charts, blue-prints, timeline, diagrams), archival and contempo-rary photographs, multimedia content ranging fromshort symphonic films to downloadable propagandaposters (accessed through Quick Response, or QR,codes that can be scanned with a mobile device, likethe black-and-white boxes at the start and end of thisreview), interviews, and preface by the noted physi-cist, Brian Greene: the "book" of ice encapsulates atruth as much as ice is able —thawing as we speak.

Ice derives from the Old English "is," Millertells us, and from the outset, we feel The Bookof Ice is more verb than noun, less stagnant thankinetic, less object than subject: undergoing shiftingsubjectifications. Miller describes the continent asa cracked mirror held up to ourselves, a projectionsurface not only visually but also aurally: to see andto hear. "[A]ny sound can be you," he writes, as if thelistener/reader/viewer is an instrument being tuned

by and tuning the continent through interdependentplanetary motions, not unlike the antiquated notionof the Music of the Spheres.

The Book of Ice doesn't resemble the environ-mental writings of Henry David Thoreau, EdwardAbbey, or Rachel Carson, yet it belongs in thatlineage, remixing advocacy and awe into a kind of"visual hip-hop" and "info-aesthetics," engagingwaxing and waning technologies that spin our ideasof landscape, if not the landscape itself—the idea ofAntarctica, unreachable to most and melting—intoa white noise that overpowers the calving, cracking,crystallizing sounds that dissipate into a semblance ofsilence, the sound of science, buzzing in our brains.

A tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it.Does that mean it doesn't exist? A continent meltsaway at the bottom of the planet but nobody hearsit. Does that mean it doesn't exist?

The Book of Ice remixes advocacyand awe into a kind of visual

hip-hop^' and '^info-aesthetics.^'

The Greeks named antarktikos opposite of theArctic {Arktos being "The Bear"), although theynever visited—like many of us whose notions ofAntarctica bear themselves out along the surfaceof our imaginations. Our concept amalgamatesby degrees of separation: from near-death tales ofexplorers like Shackleton and Scott, to penguinspenguins penguins, complicated by films like WernerHerzog's Encounters at the End of the World (2007).Miller goes over the edge, remixing these and more,diving into an archive that plays back: ice's molecularstructure and sonifications, "coUateralized debt,"Fluxus to Afrofuturism, colonization to consumer-ism, Ice-T to a water bottle factiously labeled "100%Pure Melted Continent." Played out through hisacoustic palate. Miller apf)eals to a lineage of musicinspired by landscape (from the works of John Cageto Ralph Vaughan Williams to Cornelius Cardew) tocompose a score about the plight of our planet andour (in)ability to listen, think, act.

Known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid(a moniker that dates from college, adopted fromSigmund Freud's notion of "the uncanny," how"people assign qualities to objects around themthat may not exist"). Miller works as a composer,multimedia artist, and writer. His works haveappeared internationally in galleries, museums,and venues including the Whitney Biennial, VeniceBiennial for Architecture, and Andy Warhol Museumin Pittsburgh. He conceived of The Book of Ice as onecomponent of a larger multimedia portrait of a rap-idly transforming continent, and the accompanyingsymphony. Terra Nova, was commissioned by BAMfor the 2009 Next Wave Festival and debuted at the2008 Democratic National Convention. His earlierbooks include Rhythm Science (2004) and SoundUnbound (2008) (both from MIT Press), as well asthe cinematic Rebirth of a Nation, a remix of D.W.Griffith's infamous film. Among current projects.

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Miller is establishing a contemporary arts center inthe South Pacific on the island nation of Vanuatu.

Miller's new book is only one translation of"a text given to us by the planet to decipher." Thephysical object of the book represents a digitalinterpretation of live music, which is the thawinglandscape. Performed as QR codes remix filmson a virtual stage, actual pages (dis)engage black-and-white bar codes and bar lines of Westem staffnotation, ballooning and mutating whole notes andthought bubbles, as "disturbances" visually amplifyour inherited conundrums, begetting questions withmore questions: opening into an "open work" (toquote Umberto Eco), open-sourced, paradoxical, andhybrid. Miller relates this process back to DJ culture,which he says is "not about the production of objects"but rather "continuous transformation.. .in total flux."Colliding through collage, a shrinking, uninhabitable,nationless continent comes to embody our culturalcommons. The Book of Ice is the tip of that iceberg.

Throughout this dynamic, buoyant andborrowing tract (printed elegantly in crisp, cooltones of aqua, black, and white). Miller accountsfor everyone in the world who is being affected by

Antarctica—from Ethiopia to Brazil to China to theUS—most of whom will never see the continent. Inthe fictional revolution that manifests as his "Mani-festo for a People's Republic of Antarctica," we allbecome citizens of the ice. "[A]ny sound can be you,"echoes Miller. Like military sonar is throwing whalesoff their migratory routes, a concert is happening withinstruments that we can't effectively hear. Affectingus, and more: these instmments, in many cases, notonly are tuning us; they are us.

Boxed as a book. The Book of Ice feels short,wanting to be unpackaged, as it leads a reader/viewer/listener beyond actual and virtual pages andback again, constellating pattems in a crystallizingparadox where absence is more than presence, so wemust connect the larger world back to that culpableand vulnerable space that each of us inhabits. Towardthe end of the last film. South (II), the subtitle reads:"The script has been erased!!!" By this point, wehave grown accustomed to the triplicate exclama-tions, just as we have grown accustomed to thejuxtaposed past-and-present images of disastrouslymelting glaciers—but here, they are appearing anddisappearing in a new context, as Miller builds us a

memory palace out of the future of the past. By offer-ing this cracked mirror, this projection surface (thatis a kind of "frozen music," to use Johann Wolfgangvon Goethe's description of architecture). The Bookof Ice succeeds in thawing us out, encouraging usto engage, view, listen, and remix what is invisiblein our midst, constantly being (re)written as "a textgiven to us by the planet to decipher."

Gretchen E. Henderson is a Mellon PostdoctoralFellow at MIT. She is the author of On MarvellousThings Heard (2011) and Galerie de Difformité(2011), which invites participation in its materialand conceptual deformation.

Freedom: A Novel (I Stole That Title)Jessica N.A. Berger

RE:TELLING:

AN ANTHOLOGY OF BORROWED

PREMISES, STOLEN SETTINGS,

PURLOINED PLOTS, AND

APPROPRIATED CHARACTERS

Edited by William Walsh

Ampersand Bookshttp://ampersand-books .com

296 pages; paper, $17.95

When we imagine collaborative fiction, ourromantically trained minds drift towards visionsof "A"uthor merging with "A"uthor. Perhaps thesescribes pass the page back and forth; perhaps theytake a chapter here and trade for a chapter there;perhaps they email passages, scroll back overtext already written, or slice and dice with wordprocessors and X-ACTO knives at one another'scompleted, collected texts. When this romanticizedAuthor is forced to compromise and work in a mutualpartnership, they do so with the great responsibilitythat comes with being a keeper of meaning. We

symploke"One of the liveliest literary journalsaround, publishing work that's consistentlyat the edge of current thinking."

-John Frow, University of Edinburgh (UK)

Forthcoming issue:Hunger

http-^www.symploke.org

do not (or, at least, most do not)imagine collaborative writing asexisting in the realm of fan fiction,pop culture detritus, and extendedappropriations of characters swipedfrom eighties cartoons and DavidLynch. Yet, Re .Telling fire walksus that way, down a green pipe toa bonus level of short stories andpoems that work collaborativelynot with a single "other" mind, butwith long-deceased personalities,the characters they created, theworlds they imagined, our concep-tion of these places and things,our immediate understanding andknowledge of their existence, and,essentially, culture as a whole.

The idea is an intriguing one,and the anthology plays out like agreatest hits album for those booze-soaked evening readings brought toyou by literary hipsters crammedinto whatever urban bar was will-ing to cut a deal and offer cheapbeer. Chances are, if you've been toenough of these events, you'll finda piece mimicking that referentialbit of post-ironic crowd pleasinghere. That is to say, the collabora-tive efforts of these pieces extendbeyond a one-sided partnershipwith an invented persona and intothe performative arena. The piecesin Re .Telling are written, if not tobe read aloud, to at least engage with their intendedaudiences in a wink wink, nudge nudge manner. Youwant to be in on the joke (even if it's not a particu-larly amusing one); you want to be able to rattle offthe deeper meaning behind its playful approach topre-existing pop/literary norms; you want to be ableto smile to yourself and judge just how aware of itsown artifice the piece in question is.

Of course, that enjoyable artifice can, in largedoses, become ever so slightly trying and too-sweetlysmug. Re .Telling is a product with a hook, a rather

gimmicky sell that lures you in with promises ofrewritten fairy tales and easily digestible dosesof literacy. It asks you to geek out; sometimes itdemands it. Where we begin with a tale of gamer iconMario in existential crisis ("He dies until he runs outof lives and then he waits for God to say Continue.He waits for a long time and so he knows that Godis frustrated with him), we progress swiftly into awho's who of familiar names, faces, and places. This

Berger continued on next page

Siptiinlur-Oitobir 2(MI Page 13

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