09102013

Remix culture is a society that combines and edits existing materials to produce a new product. These works are all allowed and encouraged. This culture is for users to improve, change, edited, and otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Remixing is a global activity celebrated by millions, consisting of an exchange of creative and effective information made possible by the world of technology and copy+paste.

Where is it that we've come across this word so often? You got it, music.

Hip hop music is one of the first genres to include remixes into it's culture. It takes iconic sounds from other tracks and remixes it into something completely different. They include different vocals, beats and break downs in between to refresh the user's interpretation of the song.

RiP!: A REMIX MANIFESTO

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto is a documentary film made in 2008 that is open source. It is directed by Brett Gaylor and is about "the changing concept of copyright."

This film is the brain child of hundreds of people in the span of six years. The project title was "Basement Tapes" at first, but was then later released as RiP!: A Remix Manifesto later on. Brett Gaylor encouraged users and audiences alike to take this movie and remix them into their own projects, incorporating media from the Open Source Cinema website, as well as from Youtube, Flickr or Myspace.

Upon watching the film in class, we all come to a realization of the importance of our roles as designers to uphold the remix culture and to provide new and open source materials for the designers in the generations to come. We had to familiarize and acquaint ourselves with copyrights and the remix culture from a historical stand point and find a way to get past the copyright laws that have been set upon creative works.

Girl Talk, or known more commonly to fellow friends and family as Gregg Michael Gillis is an American musician who's music consists of mashups and remixes, as well as digital sampling, which often use a dozen or more unauthorized samples from different songs to create an entirely new track. Girl Talk was featured heavily in the RiP!: A Remix Manifesto film, with a call to overhaul copyright laws. His parents, in one scene, complain to him about his frequent stripping during his performances. He also discusses his medical career and how laws affect his research.

Lawrence Lessig was also featured in the film. He is an American academic and political activist, and a professor of law at Harvard Law School. He is also the founder of the Center for Internet and Society.

He is best known as a spokesperson for reduced legal restrictions on copyright and trademark, particularly in technology applications.

Amongst other people who were in the video included Jammie Thomas, the single mom successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) at the Capitol v. Thomas case for Thomas' illegal downloading. This single mother only makes USD36,000 a year was ordered to pay up USD222,220 for making 24 songs available to download on a file sharing network called Kazaa.

There were even second and third trials that had asked for more than a million US dollars but the judges went back to the initial amount of USD200k. These songs included artists like Linkin Park, Sarah McLaughlan, Journey and Janet Jackson.

This little snippet of a clip shows Girl Talk bringing us on a trip to remind us that Culture Always Builds on the Past.

He shows us the traditional Folk song recorded first by Staple Singers in 1959. The track was reinvented in The Rolling Stones song "The last time" in 1965, and it goes on and on until we reach the last scene where it's him on the laptop and turn tables in a club, and everyone is still enjoying that same some from the 1950s without even realizing the amount of remixes it has gone through to get there today.

As part of my research, I made a playlist for my boyfriend. I decided to apply the remix design to my own personal style. I listed the songs that I wanted to have for my playlist, and then downloaded a template for the CD case.

I really liked how Girl Talk stressed that "culture always builds on the past." I used textures piled on top of each other to create each face, starting off with a vintage print, and a desert multiplied over like crumbling paper, followed by masking tape multiplied on the outside.

I like the mixture of materials used, between wallpaper to masking tape textures, as well as the broad range of time zones that they come from. I plan to put together more things like this in the future!