Everything is a Remix

Everything is a Remix by Kirby Ferguson

Part One - Music

• Remix - To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new
• People began remixing last century, sampling beats in different songs
• Anyone can remix anything, (music, video, photos) people can distribute it globally pretty instantly
• You don't need expensive equipment/ a distributor/ or many skills
• The basic elements of creativity - Copy, transform, combine
• Lots of contorverys around Led Zeppelin 
• Paris 1961 The term heavy metal is made up in a novel which was made up of cutting existing books together - the first known remix
• Led Zeppelin clearly stole part of Willie Dixon's 'Bring it on Home' for their song 'Bring it on Home'
• They also stole other lyrics and melodys from other artists from a range of genres
• E.g. 'Dazed and Confused' - Led Zeppelin is clearly a cover of 'Dazed and Confused' by Jake Holmes
• What differentiates Led Zeppelin from other artists who copy is that they never attributed the original artist, and they didn't modify they're version enough to believably make it original.They Copyed without making fundamental changes
• Zeppelin got copied alot as well so 
• Covers and knockoffs are copys that stay within legal boundaries. They are legal remixing. 

Part Two - Movies (and other fiction)

• Graphic novals, tv shows, books,  video games, and the like are rich sources of material
• Audiences prefer the familiar
• Most box office hits rely heavily on existing material 
• Out of last years top 100 films, 74 of them are sequels, remakes, or adaptations of other texts
• Transforming the old into the new is what Hollywood does
• E.g. Alice in Wonderland and James Bond
• Hollywood films that arnt remixes, are genre films that stick to standard templates and predictable codes and conventions
• Subgenres also have there own rules
• Film are built on other films/ actual events/ plays/ books/ tv shows/ adverts/ toys
• This is inclusive of genre product all the way to indie art film, including even blockbusters
• Pop culture
• Star Wars - 
• the mono myth = the call to adventure, supernatural aid, the belly of the beast, the road of trials, "meeting with the goddess", and other cliches
• It stole a bunch of shots, plot ideas, character types, shot transitions,  from different media inc Flash Gordan
• Also a bunch of inspiration for all different parts of the films came from western films
• George Lucas didn't copy materials, he transformed them
• Without the films that preceded Star Wars, there could be no Star Wars
• Creation requires influence
• George Lucas was the most movie saturated director of his era, now it is Quentin Tarantino
• 'Kill Bill' by Quentin Tarantino is a remix masterpiece
• He used shot styles and types, costume ideas, set design, plot divides from a wide range of many films

Part Three - Elements of Creativity

• Creativity isn't magic, it doesn't appear instantaneously 
• It is applying ordinary trails of thought to existing materials
• Copying is how we learn 
• We can't make anything new until we are fluent in the language in the language of our domain, which we do through emulation
• Nobody starts out original, we copy to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding
• Transforming is taking an idea and creating variations 
• Everything is a tipping point in a continuous line of invention
• By combining thing together creative leaps can be made
• The basic elements of creativity are copy, transform, and combine
• Xerox - invented the first personal computer in the early 70s - was inspiration for Apple's first Macintosh
• The Xerox used desktop metaphor icons for documents, folders, etc. It also had a pointer and pop up menus. The Mac copied all of these things.
• Apple was the first to make computers viable to the everyday person, in the home
• Apple needed Xerox and Xerox needed Apple
• The interdependence of our creativity has been skewed by powerful cultural ideas
• Is innovation inevitable?

Part Four - 'System Failure'

• LUCA - the Last Universal Common Ancestor 
• The copying of his cells, and sometimes mutations have evolved into every life force on earth today
• Evolution - Copies, transforms, combines
• Memes - Ideas, behaviours, skills
• Social Evolution - Copy, transform, combine
• New ideas evolve from old ones
• Society and law see ideas as individual things that are property of a person, but in reality they aren't so clear cut
• The growing dominance of the market economy, where the products of our intellectual labors are bought and sold, produced and unfortunate side effect
• Manufacturing costs + development costs + margin > manufacturing costs + margin = copies cost less than new things = copies sell more
• Original creations cant compete with the price of copies
• Hense the creation of Copyright and patent acts
• Intellectual property came about due to 'Loss Aversion' (we hate losing what we've got)
• This applys to Disney, Shepard Fary, and Apple
• New different laws. legislation, and agreements are being made all the time about this
• 62% of patent lawsuits are over software
• Opportunistic litigation - suing to make money

everythingisaremix.info

This reminds me of another video I have seen with the same principles as everything is a remix, but explained in a way of addressing a creative, instead of a general audience.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." - Pablo Picasso