One of the things that make blogs particularly interesting are series. The “series” series recommends series at related blogs. This time I am introducing the online video series called “Everything is a Remix“, featured on a blog with the same name.
Technically, “Everything is a Remix” is not so much a series presented at blog but a blog devoted to a series of the same name. By now, New York-based filmmaker Kirby Ferguson has put together the first two of what in the end should be four parts of a video series to demonstrate the importance remixing had and still has for our culture. I find the two episodes so far more than stunning. While the first episode focuses remixing in the field of music, the second episode deals with movies. In addition to his impressive videos, Ferguson also meticulously lists his source material (e.g. list of songs used in Pt. I) and gives detailed transcripts of his videos (e.g. transcript of Pt. II).
Everything is a Remix, Pt. I:
Everything is a Remix, Pt. II:
When watching the videos in Europe, keep in mind that technically publishing those most creative works for free on his blog does not conform to European copyright law, which lacks a general fair use clause that allows such derivative work in the US.
(leonhard)
governancexborders.com 
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February 3, 2011 at 18:39
kritzikratzi
i quite agree on the the basic ideas in this video, that every work is just derivative of another, making terms like creator- and ownership even more fragile than they already are.
first of all i insanely love the irony that the author can talk about remixes for such a long time, failing to ever mention other people who talked about remixing or how his idea is just a remix of some elses ideas.
maybe that kind of #recursionfail just makes the mathematician inside of me giggle and no one else, idk…
also, if every idea is based on another idea – shouldn’t we be searching for the first idea ever? (the “mother-idea”, if you will). (*)
on to things more substantial …
there are various comparisons made between scenes/elements from different movies/songs and the only explanation that seems to come to mind is “gosh, this must be a remix”. but couldn’t it also be that sometimes equal ideas might have no direct connection?
this can be observered frequently in the field of the natural sciences, e.g. consider the invention of differential calculus by leibniz and newton: “The modern development of calculus is usually credited to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who provided independent and unified approaches to differentiation and derivatives.”
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_calculus#History_of_differentiation )
i.e. to claim if there are two scenes showing people firing a gun film from similar camera angles, then one must be a remix of the other, is just ridicolous. (the same goes for that very basic led-zeppelin drum-beat in the first episode)
still, you might say, he’s right in the sense that then those two independent ideas must have a common ancestor. i guess. such errors still bother me.
what also worried me is that there seems to be hardly any differentiation between degrees of remixing. it’s all just a remix. period.
maybe not talking about such factors simply means that this show is very didactic and doesn’t want to overwhelm it’s viewers in the first episodes.
i’ll have to wait and see to find out :)
(*) yes, this is a joke. _please_ don’t do it!
February 3, 2011 at 18:40
kritzikratzi
p.s. damn.. sorry for the lengthy post, i promise i only wanted to write “me likey” at first.
February 3, 2011 at 19:41
leonidobusch
first of all, thank you for sharing your thoughts – I really enjoyed reading them.
second, I am quite disappointed that you don’t want to help me in my search for the “mother-idea” ;-)
third, I do share your appreciation for the #recursionfail, so it is not only math-geeks but also organization studies nerds, which are used to thinking of and acknowledging recursions and respective fails..
fourth, I agree that maybe some of the parallels are just coincidences and not remixes. and there are definitely degrees of remixing, which could be differentiated.
but, fifth, especially in the realm of music, the current copyright legislation would not allow to simply “reuse” sequences of similar or identical parts without consent of the “original” author. and I think this is the main point one can derive from the videos, even if this may not be the original intention of the author: most works are either remixes of previous works or, if not, are dependent on the freedom to use/further develop similar or identical ideas. both forms of creativity are therefore hindered by too restrictive copyright laws…
February 3, 2011 at 21:04
kritzikratzi
“but, fifth, especially in the realm of music […]”
definitely agreed. it reminds of the beautiful work by (or in this context better: remixed by) johannes kreidler who composed 70 000 songs into a single one. if i remember correctly it was actually you who brought this piece to my attention :)
i’d like to add that even many forms of “modern” licensing (excluding my current favourite license, the wtfpl) don’t deal with those issues very well.
I could give examples from my day-to-day experience with coding, but the same problems arise with music. Once you build upon a work that built upon work that had a no-commercial clause in it you are simply out of luck if you can’t get hold of all the authors in the chain/tree (and those chains/trees could get very long once CC-NC-style licenses are more commonly used).
At least this is my understanding of the situation, please correct me if i’m wrong.
“second, I am quite disappointed that you don’t want to help me in my search for the “mother-idea” ;-)”
Allright then, let’s do this! i first naively thought that the oldest idea should be fire (~40 000 bc). But after some hard thinking i came to the conclusion the spear might be much older (turns out it’s ~400 000 years).
This however made me think that they must have used rocks long before that as tools (turns out true as well, dated at ~2mio years bc).
I’m certain sticks were considered handy even long before that — for poking (which we still enjoy) and other stuff — but it’s hard to dig up infos on that. I guess dating the invention of the stick as tool is still an active topic of research.
Hm…so for now we should settle with using rocks as tools as the first idea ever! It’s stunning, thinking that it has taken us 2 million years just to go from rock tools to the rockband tool (it makes us look stupid, doesn’t it?). So somehow those are interconnected. I can’t wait to start filling out the graph in between.