In this course, we'll explore the world of remix theory and culture, with a focus on video remix. We'll look at interconnections between video remix and other forms of remix (music remix, art remix, montage as remix, social media as remix). We'll look at video remixes that have been "canonized" and then we may challenge those canons with our own investigations of the world of video remix.
Remix is a key element in our contemporary digital culture. We may not even realize how often we use digital tools to remix and thus transform culture, be it simply by using social media or by actually editing video, music, and images. Media editing platforms help us to contribute to or intervene in popular culture by bringing elements together in unexpected ways. Remix offers us a way to speak with the language of popular culture, and what we say through remix could be poetry, political speech, or both at once. This is part of what Eruthros is getting at in her video “Weapon,” which remixes visuals from musical artist Janelle Monae’s music videos to the Bastille song of the same name. (Please take a moment to watch this video; we'll talk about it in class).
Back in 2004’ Lawrence Lessig calls this participatory popular culture “read/write” culture. Rather than explain this idea for him, I’d love you to get it from the source—take a watch this TED talk by Lessig on the read-write internet and free culture. (Some of the examples are a bit painfully outdated but his argument about (re)creativity still holds relevance for us today) as does the creative commons structure he created as a result of this argument.
https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_laws_that_choke_creativity?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare
Read-write culture is predicated on the always-present possibility of transformation. Lessig defines read/write as our ability to intervene in and change media, rather than only to passively consume it. This doesn’t mean we’re always writing/remixing; certainly we often put ourselves in “read only” mode, so to speak, say when we’re scrolling through social media or watching Netflix. But even then, we know that others are creating, intervening, and transforming, be it commenting on reddit, posting on TikTok, or remixing in a YouTube video.
We engage with the media culture that permeates our lives in part by breaking it down into smaller pieces, into modular elements–what we could understand as cultural building blocks. We then move those blocks around, recombining them to create new structures, and in so doing, transform their meanings. Broadly speaking, this is remix.
When we remix cultural building blocks, we’re asserting the multimedia reality of our everyday engagement in culture. We don’t “consume” a singular media text in a vacuum, but in a multitextual, multiplatform flow that accompanies us throughout our day. We engage with multiple media texts throughout our day, on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Netflix, Snapchat. Wonder Woman can coexist in our personal and popular imagination with Princess Leia, Katara, Blackpink, and Beyonce (and many others) as you can see in these different videos set to Beyonce’s “Run the World.”
Wonder Woman [AMV] Run The World
Women of Star Wars: "Run the World (Girls)"
WHO RUN THE WORLD? [BLACKPINK FMV]
Run The World (Girls) / / Avatar & Legend of Korra Edit
The Untamed: Girls run the world (FMV)
(And this is just the tip of a mountain of Run The World remix videos.)
Actors and fictional characters, real world spaces and fictional places populate the landscapes of our imagination. When we remix different sources together we’re making external this internal experience of media culture. And to take this one step further, we collectively remix via our Twitter and Facebook feeds, Pinterest and Tumblr, TikTok and Snapchat, as we (and the site algorithms) juxtapose various gifs, photos, quizzes, performances, and personal moments. On top of that, when we add tags to posts or photos, we are remixing by creating new combinations of image and word. When we click on one of those tags, a new, ephemeral remixed flow is created, authored by a shifting collective that includes ourselves, others, and the algorithms of the interfaces we are using. “My Dash Did a Thing” posts on Tumblr beautifully evoke this dynamic flow; the Tumblr user’s dashboard seems to bring in direct conversation diverse cultural referents in compelling (and sometimes bizarre!) ways.