Dr Stephen Harrington'Remix Culture'

Polylogical communication: Some trends...

• Changing emphasis of creativity.

• Vernacular/‘Folk’/amateur/everyday creative culture.

• Unsteady definitions of authorship.

• Strengthened networks, weaker heirarchies

Polylogical communication: Some trends...

• Changing emphasis of creativity.

• Vernacular/‘Folk’/amateur/everyday creative culture.

• Unsteady definitions of authorship.

• Strengthened networks, weaker heirarchies

Changing emphasis of creativity:• Less about making original texts, than doing creative

things with texts that already exist.

• See intertextuality (week 4)

• Remixing creative materials/ideas/things (e.g. Rap)

• Creative use technology (e.g. turntable, Roland TR-909)

• Redaction (Hartley, 2000)

“Repurposing, subverting and improving what is already there” (Rennie, 2005: 42)

• Mother of all funk chords

• Gotye's Somebodies

• Talking cats & the translation

• Hitler Downfall Meme (Shifman, 2011)

Changing emphasis of creativity:

• Downfall (‘Der Untergang’)

• Re-Subtitled parodies on YouTube, to make comment on the world around us.

• Constantin films requests removal of parodies in April 2010 on copyright infringement grounds. YouTube agrees.

– Hitler’s response

– LEX

Changing emphasis of creativity:

• Does ‘mashing’ two works require originality or creativity?

• If so, should that opportunity for creative expression be denied?

• Should we be forcing artists to re-use very old works rather than the culture around them?

Remix Culture:

• Men at Work’s Land Down Under.

• 25 years after it was released, ‘Larrikin music’ wins federal court case, based on flute riff.– Similar to Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum

Tree.

• May receive 40-60% of royalties ever collected for the song.

Copyright: too far?

“…all works are connected, to varying degrees, or build upon, in various ways, other works and various ideas and notions from the past. Artists, writers, film-makers, musicians – they are all influenced in different ways by previous works by artists, writers, film-makers, and musicians. And they were influenced by those who preceded them. This notion that texts are related to one another is called intertextuality.” (Berger, 255: 76)

Copyright:

• Shows how audiovisual material receives apparently ‘special’ protection from copyright.–See Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films

• Even though academics and authors do it all the time without consequence.

• Could we see more insidious trickle-down effects here? (Lessig, 2007)

Copyright: