Dr. Dean Taciuch
George Mason University

Spring 2008


 

Remix Project

Using existing work (Public Domain, Creative Commons, or your own), create a new work which reuses, remixes, or otherwise remakes the content. The finished work must transform the existing works in some way--via commentary, juxtaposition, manipulation, "quoting," sampling, etc.

As inspiration, consider the following passage from Lawrence Lessig:

One way I've begun to think about this is to question whether within our culture, writing is allowed. Now when you say the word writing, for those of us over the age of 15, our conception of writing is writing with text, and in fact our tradition protects the right to write with text and to draw upon other people's writings with text quite substantially. People can review my book and quote my words in reviewing my book, criticize me, do whatever they want, and that's protected by a tradition of fair use that has taken hundreds of years to develop but is now pretty strong.

But if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing--you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it's understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front. So the same act of creativity in some sense, you know, taking, creating, mixing out of what other people do, is legal in the text world and illegal in the digital media world. And the struggle is to get people to recognize that there's no good reason for the rules to be so radically different between the two contexts, and that we ought to be encouraging a wider range of creativity using digital media--both because there are many people who would be extraordinarily talented in exploiting those types of creativity, and also because it would really spur growth in collective literacy about how media itself functions and how it has its effect. (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/policy/2005/02/24/lessig.html)

You will also need to write a short (3-4 paragraph) explanation of your remix: sources, techniques, purpose.

The grade on this assignment will be based mainly on the presentation and organization of the material.

 

Resources

Internet Archive
Creative Commons

 

Examples:

Aaron Snitzer: Creative Commons Illuminated

John Cage/Rash Roland Kirk: Sound

William Burroughs/Brion Gysin: Cut-Ups essay and video

Tom Phillips: A Humument

Rob's Amazing Poem Generator

Other online Generators from languageisavirus.com


 

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