September 25, 2014

Today:REMIX

Remix is Like…

Remix is the act of taking one or more cultural artifacts-- visual, video, audio, and/or alphabetic texts- and deliberately mixing elements together to create something new that often specifically mimics one or more of the sources. Many remixes are meant to be satirical or overtly political, though satire is not essential.

Different Similar Things

There’s often a mistaken conflation between the idea of remix and the idea of remediation. Arising from the work of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, remediation is transferring something from one media to another.

Selber & Johnson-Eilola

There’s also a third element in this discussion, explicated by Selber and Johnson-Eilola: the assemblage. An assemblage is a text made from original and pre-existing parts. So… almost everything is a type of assemblage.

“…the assemblages do not distinguish primarily between which parts are supposed to be original and which have been found and gathered somewhere else; assemblages are interested in what works, what has social effects. The distinction between original and existing fragments in a text is, if not meaningless, at least secondary.” p. 380

Examples of Remixes (and hence assemblages)

"This architecture demands... the right to remix culture."

Enter DJ Danger Mouse. He felt that the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album went together.So he created “the Grey Album”

To YouTube!

Remix: from The Daily Show

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Remix: from Marvel Comics

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Remix: from random net site

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Another ExampleThe New Yorker ran a piece on Danger Mouse and the idea of mash-ups. This gives us yet another term for “remix”“Mashups find new uses for current digital technology, a new iteration of the cause-and-effect relationship behind almost every change in pop-music aesthetics: the gear changes, and then the music does.”

A Stroke of Genius

“In October of 2001, a d.j. named Roy Kerr, calling himself the Freelance Hellraiser, sent Temple-Morris [a mash-up show duo] a mashup called “A Stroke of Genius,” laying Christina Aguilera’s vocal from “Genie in a Bottle,” a lubricious pop song, over the music from the Strokes’ “Hard to Explain,” a brittle, honking guitar song. “

A few more remixes• Shining• Brokeback

Time permitting: remix a Pony

For Tuesday:read: WIRED piece on Kim Dotcom

Watch: LessigWe talk IP Law