Remix Culture

We live in an ever increasingly digital world where we are constantly bombarded with media. There is a seemingly infinite amount of media and source material right at our fingertips just waiting to be sampled, edited, altered, chopped, reinterpreted. Access to tools of creation, manipulation, production, and distribution grow more and more easily accessible. This is a time when millions of bits of information can be disseminated around the globe in mere seconds with the click of a mouse. The lines between art, music, film, literature and technology have blurred – making everything fair game for communicating ideas. This is remix culture.

With this piece my goal is to create an entirely sample based audio/visual (re)mix that will examine the use of sampling and remixing in various art-forms through history up to the current state of the remix culture. I will attempt to show how sampling/remixing is an art in itself and has the potential to evolve and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.
Other topics that arise within this theme are issues of fair use-sampling/remixing someone else’s work for the purpose of comment and criticism (“If they want to critique me, they’ve got to be able to quote me”) as well as copyright law and piracy.

~ by notorious c.h.g. on November 10, 2008.