Miller plays a “remixed” State of the Union clip at his talk.

Image and text source: The Student Life and Life Style, Pomona College

March 24, 2006

Standing quietly behind his chrome-encased digital turn tables, Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, affably channels the virtues of communism into the auditory world of music creation. As do many in DJ culture, Miller composes by sampling and remixing previously existing songs and images into an audio-visual collage all his own—essentially a de-privatization of the sonic landscape. But rather than adding drum lines to borrowed melodies and claiming the product as his own (see Diddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You”), Miller completely reworks his source material into a creation entirely of his own making.

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(Source: Morning Edition)

November 7, 2006 ·

Time magazine has named the video-sharing Web site YouTube as its “Invention of the Year for 2006.” The magazine says YouTube’s scale and sudden popularity have changed how information is distributed.

(Source: Time.com)

November 22, 2006

Meet Peter. Peter is a 79-year-old English retiree. Back in WW II he served as a radar technician. He is now an international star.

One year ago, this would not have been possible, but the world has changed. In the past 12 months, cheap propecia thousands of ordinary people have become famous. Famous people have been embarrassed. Huge sums of money have changed hands. Lots and lots of Mentos have been dropped into Diet Coke. The rules are different now, and one website changed them: YouTube.

[…]

(Source: IDC List)

Thu Apr 13 19:13:28 EDT 2006

A Conversation between Manovich and Lichty
LM: We live in ‘remix’ culture. Are there limits to remixing? Can
anything be remixed with anything? Shall there be an ethics of remixing?

PL: Actually, I don’t think we live in a ‘remix’ culture, I liken it
more to pastiche or collage, or even object-oriented culture. To remix
is to take cultural elements and transform/repurpose them tot he point
where the source referent is obscured, idsappears, or its signifying
power is backgrounded to the point where the new ‘author’s intent
overrides. This is actually tightly linked to issues of intellectual
control/copyright…

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(Source: Wired)

Issue 13.07 – July 2005

When I was 13, in 1961, I surreptitiously purchased an anthology of Beat writing – sensing, correctly, that my mother wouldn’t approve. Immediately, and to my very great excitement, I discovered Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and one William S. Burroughs – author of something called Naked Lunch, excerpted there in all its coruscating brilliance.Burroughs was then as radical a literary man as the world had to offer, and in my opinion, he still holds the title. Nothing, in all my experience of literature since, has ever been quite as remarkable for me, and nothing has ever had as strong an effect on my sense of the sheer possibilities of writing.Later, attempting to understand this impact, I discovered that Burroughs had incorporated snippets of other writers’ texts into his work, an action I knew my teachers would have called plagiarism. Some of these borrowings had been lifted from American science fiction of the ’40s and ’50s, adding a secondary shock of recognition for me.

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(Source: The Social Customer Manifesto)

February 26, 2005

“Think back to a book I did in the late 80’s on UUCP – I did it originally as an 80-page pamphlet and I did 10 editions over the next five years, about every 6 months there was a new edition and they were almost entirely driven by user-submitted content. People would say ‘Oh you didn’t cover this-and-this device, and here’s how it works’ and they’d give me 3-4 paragraphs which I’d just drop right into the book. And I think we have a lot more of that ‘book as output of connected conversations’ now, where people are engaged in dialogue…” – Tim O’Reilly
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This is a Youtube video of man presenting a paper in a conference on Remix Culture.  Other videos on copyright are also found in this section of Youtube.

(Source: O’Reilly Policy Devcenter)

02/24/2005

What do you get when you mix P2P, inexpensive digital input devices, open source software, easy editing tools, and reasonably affordable bandwidth? Potentially, you get what Lawrence Lessig calls remix culture: a rich, diverse outpouring of creativity based on creativity. This is not a certain future, however. Peer-to-peer is on the verge of being effectively outlawed. Continuation of the current copyright regime would mean that vast quantities of creative content will be forever locked away from remix artists.

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