Machinic enculturation, copyright bots, and the aesthetics of composing mashups for machines

ABSTRACT Sample-based media producers compose their art for machines. They implement aural effects and editing techniques to their source media, which very directly affect the sound of their music, but the aesthetics of which are not aimed at human ears; they are aimed at convincing copyright bots their media is not worth “flagging.” We offer machinic enculturation as a term descriptive of the phenomenon of adapting one’s media practices to machinic audiences. Then, using the basic operations of rhetoric (addition, omission, transposition, and transmutation) and a stylistic framework (antithesis, apostrophe, and reasoning by question and answer), we demonstrate a born-digital aesthetic, moored in the rhetorical prowess of some producers as they compose their music for copyright bots.