Stack Your Roster | Sent from my iPad by Bas Relief
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All visual compositions by Charlotte Forbes. Of her contribution to Sent from my iPad she writes, “the playful ethos of this specific project informed the way in which i engaged with my own collection of dormant photographs. the process of creating new configurations with existing images is akin to musical sampling. these images are evidence of a developmental stage in collage and mark-making where the task at hand is a quest for cohesion and balance through the juxtaposition of situationally unrelated images.”


Using public domain footage, Zachary Goldberg-Mota partook in Sent from my iPad by producing the video below for the final song of the project’s album component. Please find information on the video’s source material in the bibliography/sample guide here.


Of his contribution to Sent from my iPad and Things in General, Zachary writes, “image is constantly in the process of commodification, and we as media consumers, in turn, exist within this process. we act to at once define, consume, alter and be altered by, our media (or image) landscape.


your moral compass; your accent; your vocabulary; your preferences; your ethics; your ego — the combined sum of the cultural parts that make up your character is built by the synthesized collage of the particular media system you were raised within.


despite how much of it you actually perceive, you are constantly being advertised to; your attention (an ancient commodity) is constantly being jockeyed for. everything, down to the minutia of interests, habits, tendencies and quirks that make you a (semi) individual human, has been or is in the process of being bought, sold, and bought again.


globalization has effectively rendered these factors worldwide phenomena, and we, participants in the contemporary globalized consumer economy, as every day actors; fleshy vehicles for furthering these effects.


we are all the combined sum of our wants — our purchases, our attentions, our images; we are all constantly bought and sold.


some things to know about me — i am:

○tristate-area american


○middle class





Sent from my iPad

by Bas Relief

released February 14, 2016

images and source photographs available here

bibliography/sample guide available here

project files available here


A recent study showed that a majority of Americans polled believed it was “not acceptable” to forfeit personal information in return for free access to a social media platform which then uses that same personal information to create targeted advertising. So why is it that a nearly equal majority of Americans use Facebook, perhaps the leading entity in the commodification of personal information? Simply, we have allowed invasive technologies to permeate our lives without much regard for how or to what ends they work. But that’s not to say it’s incumbent on us to seek this knowledge. Rather, it is the responsibility of powerful companies like Facebook and Google to provide us with accessible resources which elucidate their practices, especially when they rely on us to provide their business model. Admittedly, Facebook does provide a pretty walkthrough on its privacy guidelines (prettily buried in the site), but one would be remiss to trust that as an ultimate source. For instance, in 2010, an Austrian law student discovered that the depth of the data Facebook had compiled on him exceeded 1,000 pages, which even included deleted content.


Consider that every node of your activity on the internet can be monetized by the arbiters of the infrastructures which facilitate this interactivity. This monetization, whether of communications metadata or your Liked pages, exists solely to entrench these modes of interaction, thereby empowering those who oversee the interaction. As Astra Taylor advises in her 2014 book, The People’s Platform, “Many of the Silicon Valley enterprises that have been variously presented as technologically innovative and exciting — not just Google but also Yahoo!, AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, Tumblr, Pandora, and so on — depend almost entirely on the advertising dollar, if only by commodifying and monetizing the attention of their users and their personal information.” All of your activity which takes place within this infrastructure (i.e. that of the major social media players) directly contributes to the hegemony thereof, precisely because the activity itself is the commodity from which the aforementioned corporations draw the majority of their profits.


This prevailing model takes obvious cues from abusers of copyright, such as major record labels and publishers. Both contexts require some sort of personal forfeiture while acquiring access to some form of service or potential benefit. Where Facebook requires your personal information, you gain access to a network. Where a record label holds the rights to the recordings of your music, you (hopefully) gain access to money, or perhaps a wider audience, as well as ostensible protection from plagiarism. In both situations, the forfeiture of personal works or information is effectively an exchange of rights for permissions, ultimately bolstering the power that facilitated the exchange.


Given the exploitative nature of this framework, our intention is to transparently sample copyrighted material that we may demonstrate the cultural malleability, corporate futility, and artistically stifling nature of capitalist machinations such as fair use, while simultaneously offering what equates to a free and open source project. Ideas such as fair use, while permitting a degree of “fair” access to a work, only serve to acquiesce to the greater power structures here in play. Likewise, operating and existing in a space such as Facebook only serves the ends which prevent the democratization of cyberspace(s), especially when we, for example, pay Facebook to boost our posts, which is increasingly the only reliable way to have your content seen. As such, we aim to limit our dependence on Facebook with respect to the dissemination of this interactive experiment. Of course, once the project is copied and pasted into the ether, this limited interaction with Facebook is out of our hands. Although flooding Facebook  with even more content is hardly a means to the end of its democratization, we will nevertheless attempt this reclamation of certain media to serve the greater end of democratization of the cyberspace(s) where they reside. At the least, we can symbolically subvert those infrastructures by encouraging engagement through them rather than simple consumption. It would be well to remember that companies like Facebook do not always have our best interests at heart, so we encourage you to experience our work outside of those realms and to use it as a way to question the power structures which reign over the social media, data commodification, and copyright landscapes. These predominant systems of power are not some boon of the 21st century, rather they are extensions of systems of exclusion and exploitation that existed before the advent of current technologies and media. Of course, we would be remiss to overlook the importance of services such as bandcamp. With its unique “Fair Trade Music Policy” unheard of in the commercial realms of music, bandcamp leads the pack in music publishing.


So how does transparent sampling work to dismantle and/or subvert these systems? Let’s turn back to Astra Taylor: “A more democratic culture means supporting creative work not because it is viral but because it is important, focusing on serving needs as well as desires, and making sure marginalized people are given not just a chance to speak but to be heard. A more democratic culture is one where previously excluded populations are given the material means to fully engage. To create a culture that is more diverse and inclusive, we have to pioneer ways of addressing discrimination and bias head-on, despite the difficulties of applying traditional methods of mitigating prejudice to digital networks. We have to shape our tools of discovery, the recommendation engines and personalization filters, so they do more than reinforce our prior choices and private bubbles. Finally, if we want a culture that is more resistant to the short-term expectations of corporate shareholders and the whims of marketers, we have to invest in noncommercial enterprises.” (ibid, p. 231, emphases ours) If we embrace noncommercial open source ideology in all spheres of our lives, we put ourselves in a position to reclaim the mechanisms of our day-to-day activities. As author and academic Gabriella Coleman concludes in her book, Coding Freedom (.pdf), the domain of free software “has without doubt shifted the axis of intellectual property law, providing a model that has inspired others to build similar endeavors in various fields stretching from journalism to science. Thus, one of the most profound political effects of free software has been to weaken the hegemonic status of intellectual property law; copyright and patents now have company.” (p. 64)


We intend to employ transparent sampling as a means of recycling, repurposing, and redeveloping already-existing material while also offering full attribution to the original author of the sampled material. Apart from applying these qualities of an open source project, it acts as a critique of sampling tropes in electronic music, where there exists a dearth of attribution and diversity. Why should it remain fashionable to sample other artists but conceal your sources? What end does that serve? Being two white cis male producers, it is our responsibility to ask these questions, as well as to acknowledge our use of the work of marginalized people and how they have shaped and allowed the production of our own work. Additionally, our self-removal from commercial spaces serves to democratize those spaces by decreasing the overwhelming representation of white males which those spaces are known for. Because this work is situated within a multitude of contexts, it is our responsibility to attempt to shift the disadvantageous axes that position it.


To reflect the uncontrollable nature of interaction with and consumption of our experiment, and to present the material means to fully engage, we are offering the full collection of project files for each song in order to facilitate whatever you may seek to do with them. Additionally, all of the source images behind the artwork, by Charlotte Forbes, will be completely available. Charlotte’s contribution to Sent from my iPad is comprised of eleven visual compositions, one corresponding to the whole, with the remaining ten corresponding to the constituent pieces, each composed from her own photographs. Let the access to all of our source material act as our attempt to encourage a deeper intimacy with the technologies that surround us, especially to the end of reclaiming them. As well, you will have access to our sample guide, what essentially amounts to an aural bibliography. Please do let us know if and how you engage with our work, as it is this engagement which best completes what we here present. Finally, any donations made via our bandcamp page will be forwarded to our label, Stack Your Roster, for further investment in noncommercial enterprises, and the development and promotion of our artists.


Update 1, April 22, 2016: added quote from Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom


Update 2, August 8, 2016: added “cis” to description of ourselves


Update 3, August 15, 2016: changed hyperlink of “open source” from a Google search of “what is open source?” to an article on the distinction between FLOSS (Free, Libre, and Open Source Software) and FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)


Update 4, September 16, 2016: added reference to bandcamp and its “Fair Trade Music Policy”