10 assumptions on sampling culture

• The term sampling characterizes the neural, technical and social condition of media culture and, as a double structure, it is inherent both in an industrial and informational outside world and in a cognitive inner world moulded by the media.
• Sampling implies semiotic polyvalence, chronological simultaneity, and spatial parallelism, the result being mixtures, new structures and new contexts subjecting the order of things and the self as well as the relationships and communications between humans to a universal re-editing.
• Sampling, as an accurate method of segmentation and restructuring, goes hand in hand with the analogue and digital segmentation and standardization of the world. Thus the transformation of culture into techno-culture is effected and thus the actual process of civilizing the mechanical initiated.
• As a cultural technique sampling is based on standards and archives, yet it acts as a compost heap of the historical, the images and the medial conditionings, and it also functions as a catalyst breaching and transforming pre-cast types.
• Sampling is an archival technique freeing us from the dungeon of history. It supplies us with updates and it guarantees that we do not remain a replica of the historical and traditional but that a permanent adjustment to the present and to a possible future may take place.
• Sampling transforms the idea of authorship, disrupts concepts of copyright and private property.
• Sampling opens up a trans-disciplinary horizon of symbol production.
• Sampling provides instruments for the handling of complexities that intercalate, as a meta-structure, not only the technical, economical, and political in order to lift them out of their stasis and to present them as being contingent, i.e. changeable and shapeable.
• Sampling is not an expression of a culturally instantaneous state of no beginning and no end in which everything given simply is and where something “new” may be combined only within the limits of those pre-determined guidelines. It is more than just a conservative strategy to ransack archives and recycle them: sampling goes beyond the scope of an ars combinatoria.
• Sampling does not remain within the frame of predetermined options, materials and information but carries within itself the potential for innovation and emergence.