1900-1940
1906-1919
Cubism: An art movement that purposefully ignores the traditions of perspective and naturalistic representation through a variety of tactics, including showing multiple views of a subject simultaneously. Two cubist artists, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, are credited with developing what we now know as collage, which is the act of combining a variety of materials, not just fine art supplies, to create compositions. An example is Picasso’s Still Life with Chair Caning (1912).
1920’s
The Jazz Age. Jazz music includes standards that are performed again and again by many different ensembles, and improvised jazz solos often navigate towards recognizable melodies, too.
1915-1924
Dada: An art movement focused on anti-war and anti-materialistic middle-class ideas. These artists worked in a wide variety of media from performance to poetry, photography, sculpture, and more. Dada is important to remix culture because it resulted in the readymade, which is a manufactured non-art object that is altered, perhaps only slightly, to reframe it as an artwork. Marcel Duchamp created some of the first readymades, his most famous being a urinal on its side, titled Fountain (1917). Dada also helped create the photomontage, which is a composite photograph made of various other photographs that have been cut and pasted to create a new composition. Hannah Höch’s Das schöne Mädchen [The Beautiful Girl] (1920) is an example of photomontage. Dada artists Tristan Tzara and Kurt Schwitters also pioneered early cut-up methods by cutting the words from World War I propaganda and rearranging them by chance, rendering them nonsensical.
1928
Magnetic tape was invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in Germany. This was a vital step towards remixing because it allowed for cutting and rearranging pieces of sound, whereas previous audio recording technologies, such as wax cylinders or vinyl records, were not able to be physically remixed in this way.
1930’s
American folk singer Woody Guthrie appropriated common and recognizable folk melodies and changed the words to fight for workers’ rights.
1935
The first audio recorder using magnetic tape, the Magnetophone K1, was debuted at the Berlin Radio Fair in August[2] This invention allowed remixers to incorporate their own sounds, rather than being restricted to pre-recorded sounds.