We live in a Remix culture. -Today, many cultural and lifestyle arenas - music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food - are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, and mash-ups.
The Web in particular has become a breeding ground for variety of new remix practices. -A website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.
Another type of remix technology popular today is RSS. - Using RSS reader, an individual can subsribe to such feeds - create her custom mix selected from many millions of feeds available.
Remix practices extend beyond particular technologies and areas of culture. -Wired magazine devoted its July 2005 issue to the theme Remix Planet. The introduction boldly stated: “From Kill Bill to Gorillaz, from custom Nikes to Pimp My Ride, this is the age of the remix.”
-“Remixing” originally had a precise and a narrow meaning limited to music. -Today it refers to any reworking of already existing cultural work.
-Remixing is accepted in the music industry, while in other cultural areas (film, visual art, photography, design, etc.), it's seen as violating a copyright or stealing.
-One term that is sometimes used to talk about these practices in non-music areas is “Appropriation.” -"Appropriation" - often refers to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of new work. -According to Manovich, “remixing” is a better term because it suggests a systematic re-working of a source, the meaning which “appropriation” does not have.
-The other older term commonly used across media is “Quoting.” -If remixing implies systematically rearranging the whole text, quoting refers to inserting some fragments from old text(s) into the new one. -We shouldn't see quoting as a historical precedent for remixing. Rather, we can think of it as a precedent for another new practice of authorship practice that, like remixing, was made possible by electronic and digital technology – sampling.
-SAMPLING -Music critic Andrew Goodwin defined sampling as “the uninhibited use of digital sound recording as a central element of composition. Sampling thus becomes an aesthetic programme.” -It is tempting to say that the arrival of sampling technologies has industrialized the practices of montage and collage that were always central to twentieth century culture.Yet we should be careful in applying the old terms to new technologically driven cultural practices. While it is comforting to see the historical continuities, it is also too easy to miss new distinctive features of the present. The use of terms “montage” and “collage” in relation to the sampling and remixing practices is a case in point. -rather than sampling from mass media to create a unique and final artistic work (as in modernism), contemporary musicians use their own works and works by other artists in further remixes.
EXAMPLES
Gap Mangione - "Diana In The Autumn Wind"
(J.Dilla Production) Slum Village - "Fall In Love"
Miguel Atwood Ferguson & Carlos Niño - "Fall In Love"
During 2000s remix gradually moved from being one of the options to being treated as practically a new cultural default. -In this model, a much large number of producers publish content into “a global media cloud”; the users create personalized mixes by choosing from this cloud. -Furthermore, a user can also select when and where to view her news – a phenomenon that has come to be known as “timeshifting” and “place shifting.
The arrival of a new paradigm has been reflected in and supported by a set of new terms. -The new terms are more discriminating than the old ones as they now name many specific operations involved in communication. -Most of the new terms describe new types of users’ activities which were either not possible with the old media or were strictly marginal, if old terms such as “read,” “view” and “listen” were media-specific, the new ones are not.
Among these new terms,“remix” and “mashup” started to be used in contexts where previously the term “editing” had been standard -For instance, when referring to a user editing a video. When in the spring of 2007 Adobe released video editing software for users of the popular media sharing web site Photobucket, it named the software Remix.
The “web” has changed do with the changes in the patterns of information flow between the original Web and so-called Web 2.0. -In the original web model, information was published in the form of web pages collected into web sites. To receive information, a user had to visit each site individually. You could create a set of bookmarks for the sites you wanted to come back to, or a separate page containing the links to these sites. -With RSS and other web feed technologies, any periodically changing or frequently updated content can be syndicated (i.e., turned into a feed, or a channel), and any user can subscribe to it.
The software technologies used to send information into the cloud are complemented by software that allows people to curate (or “mix”) the information sources they are interested in. -Software in this category is referred to as newsreaders, feed readers, or aggregators. Examples include separate web-based feed readers such as Bloglines and Google Reader; all popular web browsers that also provide functions to read feeds; desktop-based feed-readers such as NetNewsWire; and personalized home pages such as live.com, iGoogle, my Yahoo!
The practically unlimited number of these sources now available in the “cloud” means that manual ways of selecting among these sources become limited in value. -We take it for granted that Google and other search engines automatically process tremendous amounts of data to deliver search results. -We also take it for granted that Google’s algorithms automatically insert ads in web pages by analyzing pages’ content.
