Joshua Pablo Rosenstock is a multimedia artist, musician, and educator based in Boston. His work explores the process of remixing via the creation of new instruments, interactive interfaces, and multimedia installations. With the Berwick, Rosenstock will be working on ‘Shrine to the Funky Drummer’, a multimedia installation that will seek to portray a specific instance of media sampling as an archetypal cultural moment and a lens through which to examine a multifaceted story of creative appropriation.  The ‘Funky Drummer’ is a five-second excerpt from a James Brown song that has been used as the foundation of hundreds of other musical compositions and is one of popular music’s most famous samples.

During his project, he’ll be gathering, creating, and presenting artifacts and ‘holy relics’ that explore the early history of Hip Hop and the creative acts of sampling and remixing.  Rosenstock will be investigating debates about copyright and fair use in relation to Afro-Diasporic musical notions of ‘versioning,’ the fetishistic culture of record-digging, and postmodern theoretical questions about authorship in the age of digital (re)production.