時尚界的"混搭"也就是另一種創造
Ninety-seven years ago, a young French artist walked across Manhattan into 118 Fifth Avenue, an outlet for J L Mott Iron Works. Perhaps tickled by the prank he was about to play, Marcel Duchamp purchased a Bedfordshire urinal. Returning to his studio, he signed it on the rim, “R. Mutt 1917”, and gave it a title: “Fountain”. The date - a day late, perhaps? - was April 2.
97年前，一位年輕的法國藝術家穿過美國紐約市的曼哈頓，走進J•L•莫特鐵製品廠(J L Mott Iron Works)位於第五大道118號的一家銷售店。馬塞爾•杜尚(Marcel Duchamp)也許正爲他要玩的惡作劇開心不已：他買了一個貝德福德郡小便池。回到工作室後，他在小便池邊上籤署了“R. Mutt 1917”的字樣，併爲這個作品起了個名字——“泉”(Fountain)。那一天的日期是4月2日。Duchamp's “Fountain” vanished almost immediately; perhaps thrown away, perhaps smashed to pieces by the outraged committee at the Society of Independent Artists, which had opened an exhibition to all comers only to find Duchamp calling its bluff. Yet as we know, the story does not end there.
杜尚的《泉》差不多很快就消失了，也許它被扔掉了，也許被獨立藝術家協會(Society of Independent Artists)怒不可遏的委員們打成碎片了——該委員會爲所有提交作品者舉行了一次展覽，卻遭到了杜尚的公然挑戰。不過，正如我們所知道的，故事並未到此結束。“Fountain” was copied: 15 replicas adorn art galleries, each endorsed by Duchamp. But more interesting are the transformations of “Fountain” that produce something new - for instance, Andy Warhol's “Campbell's Soup Cans” or Pablo Picasso's “Bull's Head”, to say nothing of the idea that a work of art could be just that: an idea.
《泉》被複制了：共有15件複製品，被各個畫廊收藏，每件複製品都是由杜尚授權制作的。不過，更有意思的是，《泉》的變形形式帶來了一些新的東西——比如安迪•沃霍爾(Andy Warhol)的《金寶罐頭湯》(Campbell's Soup Cans)和巴勃羅•畢加索(Pablo Picasso)的《牛頭》(Bull's Head)。且不提“一件藝術品就是一個創意”這種觀念了。
It has become fashionable to assert - as the writer and director Kirkby Ferguson has done in his films - that “everything is a remix”. All creative acts, he says, copy, combine and transform earlier ideas. It's a convincing thesis. Gutenberg's printing press was inspired by a wine press, while Apple's Macintosh borrowed from Xerox's Alto, Nirvana's “Smells Like Teen Spirit” transforms a riff from Boston's “More Than A Feeling” and George Lucas's Star Wars owes a debt to Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress.
如今，聲稱“一切都是混搭”——正如編劇兼導演柯克比•弗格森(Kirkby Ferguson)在其電影中所做的那樣——已經成了一種時髦。弗格森說，所有創作行爲都是對先有創意的複製、結合和轉變。這是一個有說服力的論點。古登堡(Gutenberg)印刷機的靈感來自葡萄酒榨汁機，蘋果(Apple)的麥金塔電腦(Macintosh)借用了施樂(Xerox)阿爾託(Alto)的創意，涅槃樂隊(Nirvana)的《少年心氣》(Smells Like Teen Spirit)把波士頓樂隊的《超越感覺》(More Than A Feeling)中的一個重複段落做了變形，而喬治•盧卡斯(George Lucas)的《星球大戰》(Star Wars)構思來源於黑澤明(Akira Kurosawa)的《戰國英豪》(The Hidden Fortress)。But what is it about an idea that makes it remixable? It's worth distinguishing between an idea that provokes lots of derivative work, and one that inspires something new and exciting. “Fountain” did both but perhaps there's a trade-off between fecundity and the ability to inspire original successors. “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band has been much sampled but hardly inspired a generation in the way that the Velvet Underground did.
不過，到底是什麼令一種創意可以混搭？在這裏，應該區分兩種不同創意，一種創意引發一系列衍生性作品，另一種創意則能啓發某些新的激動人心的東西。《泉》兩種特點兼而有之，但也許在衍生性和啓迪原創繼承者的能力之間有所取捨。非凡邦戈樂隊(Incredible Bongo Band)的《阿帕奇》(Apache)曾被大量借鑑，然而它並未象地下天鵝絨樂隊(Velvet Underground)那樣啓迪一代人。Andres Monroy-Hernandez, now a researcher at Microsoft, and Benjamin Mako Hill, a hacker and researcher at the University of Washington, have conjectured that there may be a “remixing dilemma“: the elements that encourage people to appropriate and adapt a previous work are, alas, not conducive to originality in the new work.
微軟(Microsoft)研究員安德烈斯•蒙羅伊-埃爾南德斯(Andres Monroy-Hernandez)和黑客、華盛頓大學(University of Washington)研究員本傑明•馬科•希爾(Benjamin Mako Hill)認爲，或許存在一種“混搭困境”：早先的藝術品中鼓勵人們借用並修改的元素，不利於新藝術品的原創性。Mako Hill and Monroy-Hernandez suggest that an idea that is fairly simple, that comes from an already-famous creator, and that is itself a remix, will tend to spawn many imitators. But these are precisely the qualities - moderate simplicity, notoriety and being part of a chain of remixes - that might reduce the originality of further derivative work.
馬科•希爾和蒙羅伊-埃爾南德斯提出，如果一個創意相當簡單，來自一個已成名的創作者，而且本身是一種混搭，那麼它很可能催生許多模仿者。然而，可能正是這些特質（適度簡約，名聲響亮，而且是某個混搭鏈條的一環）可能會降低衍生作品的原創性。Mako Hill and Monroy-Hernandez have tested their hypotheses in one particular setting, Scratch, a child-friendly programming language with a strong community. Scratch programmers are encouraged to share their programs and to use those of others as a basis for further work. A rich dataset is available, allowing the researchers to compare the complexity, popularity and (to some extent) the originality of programs shared on the site.
馬科•希爾和蒙羅伊-埃爾南德斯以面向兒童的編程語言Scratch爲對象，測試了自己的假說。Scratch具有強大的社區支持，編程者被鼓勵分享他們的程序，並被鼓勵利用他人程序作爲進一步開發的基礎。該語言提供了一個海量數據集合，令研究人員能夠比較網上所分享程序的複雜度、受歡迎程度，以及（在某種程度上）原創性。In Scratch, there does seem to be a remixing trade-off: more famous community members find their work remixed a lot - often in trivial ways; the same is true for already-remixed projects. But the trade-off is less apparent on the important metric of complexity. More complex programs are remixed more often, yet also with more originality, than simple ones. This is surprising given the conventional wisdom in open-source software that it is best to release simple, early versions to encourage the community to improve on them.
在Scratch中，混搭似乎確實存在取捨：比較有名的社區成員的程序被混搭了許多次——往往是以瑣碎的方式；那些原本就是混搭的項目也存在這種現象。不過，在複雜度這個重要指標上，這種取捨表現得不那麼明顯。比較複雜的程序被混搭的次數更多，而這些混搭也比簡單程序更具原創性。這一點讓人意外，因爲在開源軟件領域有一種“傳統智慧”：最好儘早發佈簡單的早期版本，鼓勵社區加以改進。Then again, Duchamp's idea could hardly have been simpler - and nobody could suggest that subsequent artists have ignored it.
可話說回來，杜尚的創意恐怕簡單得不能再簡單，但沒人敢說後代的藝術家忽略了它。
