Remixing Culture And Why The Art Of The Mash-Up Matters
“He goes on to make the point that “Copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today. Hard drives aren’t going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. Networks won’t get slower or harder to access. If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re not really making art for the 21st century.”
The best examples of this kind of creative work are often marked by a reframing of the original narrative, and so produce a fresh perspective on both the source material and the context in which it first existed.
One could argue that remix culture has been around as long as the idea of “culture” itself.
The art form known colloquially as “vidding” for example – editing found footage from TV shows and movies to music – actually dates back some 40 years and has often celebrated, what the theorist Francesca Coppa describes as, “a distinctly female way of seeing.” That progression represents an important engagement with the gender politics of pop culture, specifically as a critique on the historical dominance of the male perspective in dramatic storytelling.
Whatever your feelings about the artistic merits of the mash-up as a form or the efficacy of modern copyright legislation, there’s a far higher set of principles at stake here…..
……A specific sub-genre of this, vidding itself is commonly thought to have emerged from Star Trek fandom, with Kandy Fong’s 1975 slide mixes. The best known of these is an alternative take on Spock’s character set to Leonard Nimoy’s rendition of the Joni Mitchell song Both Sides Now. It was a clear influence on a later piece by T. Jonesy and Killa, a racy and subversive take on Kirk and Spock’s relationship set to the Nine Inch Nails track Closer.
Vidding evolved with the technology, from slideshows (Fong actually used to live “mix” using two projectors) to video recorders to computers. Aided by the evolution of editing software, it has fed into the diverse and vibrant field of DIY media production that includes GMV, AMV, Machinima and Political Remix Videos.
The latter provide critical (and often humorous) perspectives on social issues, the media, economics, gender, culture and the environment and can be seen as perhaps the most recent incarnation of the long tradition of political satire. Again this form pre-dates the Internet by many decades, but has flourished in recent years…..”