Image source: still of Dave Chapelle impersonating Rick James from “Mashup Video with Jackson, Britney & Rick”

The following is a set of links I prepared for one of my classes on film and video language. I repost them here for later use, and to share with the online community. The list is not by any means exhaustive, and is not linear in any way. The top links are mashups and the bottom links are early hip hop and rock videos. They were chosen in part because of the different approaches to video making, this was necessary for the class, because the students need to understand how music video language evolved throughout the eighties and nineties on to today.

Some of the videos also show early traces of sampling, for example, Trans Europe Express was sampled by Afrika Bambaataa for Planet Rock. Also, the remix of Tour de France juxtaposed with the early version shows how electronic music has evolved while acknowledging the important paradigms set by early electrofunk compositions. The now well known mashups of Christina Aguilera and the Strokes, Madonna and the Sex Pistols, as well as Michael Jackson, Britney Spears the White Stripes and Rick James are some of the most successful remixes in this genre. Part of me admittedly rejects them for their popularity, but the creativity that has gone into the audio remix as well as the video editing have to be noted, because they have at this point set a standard in Remix Culture.

Christina Aguilera and the Strokes, Mashup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl85yq_k0V0

Madonna/Sex Pistols Mashup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucLIYZ-tyiQ
Madonna Eurithmics Mashup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK-
ppQnAl8A&feature=related
Madonna/Depeche Mode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW2
YUyeK5FI&feature=related

Michael Jackson/ Britney Spears and Rick James”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6
A8uivUNX0&feature=related

Oasis, “Wonderwall”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAPtTS0TYtU

Greenday, “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bxfpMGLMZ7Y

Early Version:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akGR
WdkAxhI&feature=related
Greenday/Oasis with Travis Mashup with Eminem:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=0DzDcAW6GmQ
Yet another twist on the mashup:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vNLop_nuCzo

Talking Head’s “Burning Down the House”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=st1lH8zcIuQ
&feature=related
Talking Head’s “Wild Wild Life”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4NXkM8PsPXs

The Cars, “Magic”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6bEu9wLDjKY
The Cars, “Shake it Up”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=foj81S44_
bE&feature=related

Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8z2M_hpoPwk

Ramones, “Rock and Roll High School”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hLahs7yCprQ

Malcom Mc Claren, “Buffalo Gals”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=7b1zKyVeKgk

Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=diiL9bq
valo&feature=related
In Scrubs:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=
CtAlZB2iqCU&feature=related

Soul Sonic Force’s “Planet Rock”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9h6pcqC6wrI
Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=k3kRuJhIVIo

Kraftwerk, “Tour De France” Original Version:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VPowpIR
VOuY&feature=related
Kraftwerk, “Tour De France,” 2003
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sQz-C
ZvkY8k&feature=related
Kraftwerk, “The Robots”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ
Kraftwerk, “Trans Europe Express”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=LWlgbAc3bbM

Image and text source: NYTimes

Published: February 10, 2008

REDMOND, Wash. — TUCKED away in a building on this forested corporate campus, John Montgomery and his team of 17 programmers might be more at home in Silicon Valley than at Microsoft.

Compared with its tenacious Internet competitors like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is generally still viewed as being more of the shrink-wrapped software generation than the Web 2.0 world.

In Silicon Valley today, software is increasingly delivered as a Web service, it is often put together by teams of programmers who might be scattered on three continents, it’s often free to users, and Web surfers usually do the testing soon after the first prototype is complete.

By contrast, Microsoft has long been a software engineering culture in which huge projects like Windows Vista are developed and tested by teams of hundreds, and whose completion time is measured in a large fraction of decades.

Although it is not yet widely visible to the outside world, some people inside Microsoft are beginning to break that mold.

Mr. Montgomery, a veteran product manager who has also worked as a computer industry writer and editor, is an example of how it just might be possible to teach dinosaurs to dance.

Read the entire article at NYTimes

Image source: Customer Evangelists

Text source: ZDnet

Original post: November 23, 2005

Two pieces of otherwise unrelated news flew past my eyes today while I was hydroplaning through my RSS Aggregator. The first was Amazon has apparently launched, or is just testing out, ProductWiki – a way for Amazon users to enter “customer editable product information” that will appear alongside “most, if not all, of the items the company sells”. I haven’t seen any confirmation of this in official Amazon sites or PR, so consider this an unconfirmed rumor at this point. But it’s certainly a fascinating concept, for anyone and everyone to be able to add information to Amazon product data. I assume that it would be additional data and wouldn’t replace the official manufacturer and retailer data (can you imagine the outcry otherwise).

In another more substantial piece of news, washingtonpost.com has released a “Post Remix site”, with the witty nickname mashingtonpost.com. They’re doing this “to foster innovation, and because we want to see your ideas about new ways of displaying news and information on the Web.” Some interesting mash-ups that people have done already: News Cloud (a tag cloud), Ripped from the Headlines! (a daily news quiz), world map interface, thumbnail quiz of Arts & Entertainment stories, and washingtonpost.com search results via RSS.

What do Amazon ProductWiki and mashingtonpost.com have in common? They both let users remix existing content and create new content. This is what Web 2.0 is all about, folks.

Image source: galibier design‘s quattro turntable

Text source: Serial Consign

Original post: September 24, 2007

One of my favourite blogs over the last year has been Remix Theory, a writing project quarterbacked by media theorist and artist Eduardo Navas. Eduardo is also the author of Remediative and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture, a fantastic essay that beat-juggles a variety of paradigms that range from remix history through to data mashups. Eduardo and I have been firing questions back and forth over email for a few weeks and he has provided a compelling window into his research.

How did you get started researching the remix as a critical paradigm?

It was more a matter of bringing together activities that I had been exploring throughout my life. At the age of 12, during the early eighties, I became a break-dancer and at the age of 18, or so, I bought my own turntables and sound system. Then I began to DJ in the Los Angeles area, something I would do until 2001 or so. During this time I also played percussion in a couple of Salsa cover bands. I was also very involved in the visual arts since I was a kid, and when I reached my mid-twenties I decided to focus in art as a profession and enrolled in art school in the mid-1990’s.

I eventually got a BFA from Otis College of Art, followed by a residency at Skowhegan School of Art, and then I received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. It was during my Graduate studies at Cal Arts when I became heavily invested in New Media. While at Cal Arts, I also played percussion with the Cal Arts Latin Jazz Band, and I also developed various music projects with another visual artist, Justin Peloian. Obviously, being part of a visual arts program meant that I would make “art” and so I was also heavily invested in studio based art. I was very influenced by Conceptualism. I simply loved (and still love) ideas, and I embraced my time at Cal Arts because the school has very good critical thinkers teaching.

(more…)

Image and text source: Wired

July 12, 2007

Paul D. Miller, also known as DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, has been producing beat-heavy electronic music for more than a decade. From his early solo trip-hop efforts to his more recent collaborations with jazz giants, Spooky has always approached music from multiple angles at once. He has the chops of a musician, the genre-blending ear of a disc jockey and the conceptual vision of a performance artist.

It was therefore no surprise when Trojan Records, a reggae label entering its 40th year, asked DJ Spooky to put together a mix showcasing tracks from its massive archives. When assembling >In Fine Style: DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records, one of several mixes commissioned to mark the Trojan birthday, Miller found countless parallels between the Jamaican reggae scene of the 1960s and ’70s and the digital mashup ecosystem of today. (See Upgrading Jamaica’s Cultural Shareware: Trojan Records at 40.)

Read the entire article at Wired

Image: Valéry Grancher: 24h00, 1999
interactive Web project sponsored by BAM

Image and text source: BAM/PFA

RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA celebrates the cultural and artistic practice of remix, inviting guest artists to “rip, mix, and burn” elements from two digital-media works in the museum’s collection—Ken Goldberg’s Ouija 2000 and Valéry Grancher’s 24h00 (both 1999)—resulting in new artistic creations. Drawing from the open-source software tradition, with the permission of artists Goldberg and Grancher, the remix artists may alter or revise original code or media files from the source works, or they may choose to take a more conceptual route, remixing some of the methods or behaviors of the originals into their own new works. Ouija 2000 and 24h00 will be exhibited along with new works by Michael Joaquin Grey, Alison Sant, Jonathon Keats, and Nathaniel Wojtalik and Iris Piers. On view in BAM’s Bancroft lobby and stairwell gallery, the artworks will also be available via the exhibition website at bampfa.berkeley.edu/ripmixburn for the public to download and remix.
(more…)

Image and text source: Rhizome.org

The brainchild of artist Gursoy Dogtas, Matt Magazine bills itself as “a synthesis between a fanzine and a current affairs magazine,” but while it comments on contemporary political and social issues with a zine-style combination of appropriated material and original content, it has a more restrained take on the cut-and-paste aesthetic than the average D.I.Y. publication. Crossing subjects and historical moments, each story combines a previously published text–typically classics on subjects ranging from philosophy to natural science–from a single source with images from another origin to create telling pairings. Every issue also has a similarly two-part theme: the first issue focused on ‘Freizeit und Konsum’ (leisure and consumption), and the second, which was released on October 10th with an opening and short-running exhibition at Les Complices in Zurich, tackles ‘Mobility and Surveillance’ with a series of five stories. The issue opens with Duncan Campbell’s investigation of a global surveillance system, ‘Inside Echelon,’ accompanied by photos from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert. Other pieces branch out to include ‘Attacks on Civil Aviation’ by Ariel Merari set against stills from a video work by Natalie Jeremijenko in which she attempts to board a plane wearing rollerskates, and Carl Schmitt on ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ matched to images of the Surveillance Camera Players. Dogtas’s own photography is offset by both selections from Carl von Clausewitz’s ‘On War’ and an essay by geographic theorist Tim Cresswell. Every piece in the issue sketches the sometimes enabling, sometimes conflicting relationship between two phenomena that increasingly frame modern life.

Image and text source: Wired

Originally published: March 26, 2006

A women named “Paiges” recalls hearing the band Portishead for the first time at a spot in New York’s Upper West Side, while she was meeting a man with whom she was having a torrid affair. “I was in NYC, your wife was out of town,” she writes. “We were in the bathroom and Portishead was playing. I remember being terrified that we would get caught.” She bought the album on her way home, and 12 years later still associates it with seeing her lover in that place.

That intimate memory isn’t locked in a diary or shared on a blog. It’s pinned to a spot near the intersection of West End Avenue and 104th Street on a new and growing community site called Platial that’s spreading a decidedly personal layer of geographic data atop the familiar terrain of online mapping.

Read the entire article at Wired

Photo credit: (cc) Beth Kanter

Image and text source: Robin Good

Originally published on October 17, 2006

Web 2.0 has unleashed an era of online participation, personalization and interoperability set to change the way we network, do business and interact with the media that engulf us.

One of the most exciting developments in recent times is that of the Mash Up. The term Mash-Up can seem initially confusing, especially as it has more than one meaning. As Wikipedia points out a Mash Up can refer to:

1. A Musical Mash Up that works on the basis of cutting often mismatched samples together to create new and interesting hybrids in dgital music. One of most famous musical Mash Ups of recent times is the now banned DJ Danger Mouse album ‘The Grey Album’ – created from the fusion of The Beatles White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album.
2. A Video Mash Up in which video and audio from different sources is cut together into a new Mashed Up union. One of the best video Mash Ups of recent times has to be the Bush/Blair Gay Bar video.
3. A Mash-Up “Web Application hybrid“, which seamlessly combines tools or data from one or more online sources into a new, integrated whole. Examples of this latter type of Mash Up, the focus of our Marshall Kirkpatrick interview, can be found in abundance at Programmable Web.

(more…)

Image and text source: O’Reilly Radar

Posted on September 11. 2007

I’ve been a fan of Ask’s Maps product, Ask City, since it launched (Radar post). Now Ask has made its web app viral by adding embeddable maps.

Much like Google’s embedded maps (Radar post), this only requires a simple cut-n-paste to utilize the feature. You can use all of Ask’s mapping tools, including drawing tools and movie searches on an embeddable map.

I am surprised that Ask is the first of the major mapping portals to add this feature after Google. I don’t see this as a copy or a me-too feature. I see embeddable maps as one of the fundamental features that a user is going to expect from their mapping portal — just like one does a video or photo sharing site.

More types of websites are going to become easily, anonymously embeddable in the future. When users put work into customizing or upoading content, they are going to want to be able to put it on their own sites. Google has been experimenting with embeddable Ajax search widgets, but those widgets still exist under the Google Code umbrella. I bet that many of these search pages (multimedia, web and local) will soon have their own embed links.