Over the past few weeks you’ve been creating work often built on others’ work. Is that ok? Taking digital pieces of copyrighted work and remixing to make something of your own? Or how about recording a commentary over movie scenes as you did in a your video essay about a film? A number of videos created for the video essay assignment were taken down automatically by YouTube. Why does that happen for some videos and not others that have copyrighted material?
For the next week we are going to be thinking about these issues and others as we look at remix as a cultural phenomena and as an artistic practice. Kirby Ferguson is a filmmaker that produced a four part video essay series, titled, “Everything is a Remix.” Through examples and narrative Ferguson talks about the origins of creativity and the controls that copyright have placed over our ability to be ‘creative.’ I suggest you watch Jim Groom’s discussion with the UMW class about the Ferguson videos as well (he’s gets apocalyptic!).
Remix Reflection Post: Watch the four part series, and create a blog post reflection. In that post I want you to find and embed two piece of media and juxtapose them one which is the newer ‘remix’ and the other which was ‘sampled.’ What if any relationship exists between the two creators? How do you know that one is inspired by the other? What did you find out? How does it fit in with what you discovered in Ferguson’s video essays? Tag this post, ‘everythingisaremix’ (no quotes.) And if you’re really interested in the legal politics around remix and hip-hop, I suggest watching Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod’s Copyright Criminals which takes you through the origins of sample culture and how courts courts put constraints on musician’s creative impulses.
Remix Ten Stars Assignments: For the second half of this week’s assignment, you are going to use the remix generator created by Alan Levine for this week’s ten stars worth of work. The premise for the generator is to take a ds106 assignment and apply a ‘remix card‘ to it. Each remix card will offer a new method to interpret an existing assignment. For example, the Informercialize It card asks that you:
Redo an assignment to be like a bad infomercial. YOU SHOULD SHOUT OUT HOW WONDERFUL IT IS! You should be calling 1-800-BUY-JUNK to order it! But wait, you get more…
This student remixed the movie fortune (cookies) assignment to create, this set of Infomercial Fortunes. In this case the assignment was worth two stars and the remix card was also two stars making the remixed assignment now four stars.
You want to rework a particular student’s completed assignment with the new remix card applied. Be sure you link back to the original student’s post so they’ll receive a pingback which will let them know you’ve remixed their work. It’s typically flattering to have your work remixed, so hopefully the student will comment. If you use the remix generator be sure to use all tags that are generated in the new remix assignment. But if you wish to make your own combination of remix card to a particular assignment, please use the original assignment tags, plus ‘RemixAssignments’ (no quotes.)
And please be sure to describe why you chose the particular student’s work to remix and how you think its meaning was changed by your interpretation.