“All ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources. We are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own.”- Mark Twain“I remixed a remix; it was back to normal.”- Mitch Hedberg
Kirby Ferguson’s video on “remixing” presents an
easily-understandable visual representation of Bolter & Grusin’s idea of “remediation”
on contemporary culture. His documentary series includes videos on musical
remixes as well as copywrite and legal issues, but I found this particular
video to be most telling of contemporary culture and mass media. Like Ferguson says, “transforming the old into the new is Hollywood’s greatest talent.”
Furthermore, while Ferguson
makes a quick mention and visual comparison of the “remixed master thesis” of
all remediations – Tarantino’s Kill Bill – there is another video online that
does the same thing, a video I first saw about a year ago. However, in a
perhaps predictable outcome, “Everything is a Remix: Kill Bill” is NOT made by Ferguson
(like I originally presumed given the similarities between the videos, but
rather by a Rob G. Wilson who is merely associated with Ferguson’s documentary.
It’s sort of weird in itself, the idea that Wilson’s
video is a sort of remediation (or remix) of Ferguson’s piece about remediation
(remixing). It makes me think of a mobius strip, in which remediations of
remediations follow along the twists and turns of our cultural pathway.
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Note: I have posted here the YouTube uploads of the Kirby
and Wilson videos for accessibility, but used Vimeo for research.
Ferguson,
Kirby. “Everything is a Remix Part 2. Vimeo.
Viemo.com, 2011. Web. 23 September 2012. <http://vimeo.com/19447662>
Wilson, Rob G. “Everything is a Remix: Kill Bill.” Vimeo. Viemo.com, 2011. Web. 23
September 2012. <http://vimeo.com/19469447>
Zucker-Scharff. "Remixed: the derivative nature of
creativity and our failure to recognize it." Hacktext.com. 8 March 2012.
Web. 20 September 2012.
<http://hacktext.com/2012/03/remixed-the-derivative-nature-of-creativity-and-our-failure-to-recognize-it-1747/>
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