Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Everything is a Remix

Everything is a Remix from kirby1 on Vimeo.



"Remixing is a folk art but the techniques involved — collecting material, combining it, transforming it — are the same ones used at any level of creation. You could even say that everything is a remix.
everythingisaremix.info/​"

3 comments:

Synthcopation said...

Theologically speaking, only God creates "ex nihilo", we're always making our craft--whatever that may be--out of pre-existing material.

PT said...

Maybe I'm just old fashioned but using someone else's material and not giving them credit is just lame.
Other than that, sample away!

Synthcopation said...

One distinction I would make is that, yes, Led Zeppelin, et al, we're borrowing ideas from other musicians (chord progression and melodies and the like). But the fact remains that they were actually playing the music themselves and creating that sound themselves. That takes some skill and experimentation. Simply lifting an audio track and looping it does not have much artistic merit to it and I don't think I would compare it to what Led Zeppelin was doing. However, in defense of the remix artist, I would say there is merit when, like the collage artist, he or she takes what was previously recorded and comes up with something NEW that didn't exist in the original form. If done successfully, I think the finished work would be so different from the sources it was derived from that copyright would not even be an issue. But then would you call it a remix if you couldn't tell what it was a remix of?