Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Remix

DJ's like Fatboy Slim have pioneered the music remix and Girl Talk has built a successful career on it. It's a huge part of video culture too because remixing is an entertaining way to make anything just a bit more ridiculous. It's also a forum for creativity because remixers pair audio samples with all sorts of visuals. Faris recently hired Eclectic Method for the NYC Twestival. They are the fore-fathers of mash-up have been affecting the way we experience media since back in the day. The most recent example of this phenomenon is a meltdown Christian Bale had on-set. It didn't take long for the Bale remixes to pour in.

It's interesting because we love to tell stories, extrapolate and exaggerate; and remixing is great for just that. But it's bigger than an entertaining video. This story is about driving creativity. I'm a proponent of the philosophy that good ideas come from good ideas. Well I guess I picked that up from Lawarance Lessig. He is well know for fighting for remix culture because new ideas come from remixing old ones. His book f
rames the problem as "a war between an old read-only culture, in which media megaliths sell copyrighted music and movies to passive consumers, and a dawning digital read-write culture, in which audiovisual products are freely downloaded and manipulated in an explosion of democratized creativity." So I guess the question is how do we promote an environment that encourages the rapid progression of ideas instead of stymiing it?

Lessig remixed on Colbert



Lessig @ TED



Christian Bale Melt-down Remixed

No comments: