I've had to visit the notion of "remixes" in many classes in the EWM major. I've looked into musical remixes, text remixes, photoshop, video, etc. For a previous class I read excerpts from Jenkins Convergence Culture, which centered heavily on merging media. When I personally hear the word "remix" I immediately think of visual art. I work heavily as a visual artist using performance and installation art as my mediums. I made a show recently where the walls of the room where covered in Publix ads and magazine pictures. I use music in my shows, sometimes just the looped chorus's of recent pop songs. I also collage a lot in my spare. I made a zeen over Christmas break that was sold a book fair. It was complied of all of my own photograph along with text that I wrote, my friends wrote, other artists had said or written, and some words and images from magazines.
I clearly often utilize the idea of "remix" in my art and daily life. This has always worried me greatly. I don't know a lot of the rules, I don't know what I have to look out for or be careful about. I don't know when or if I'm ever breaking a law.
At the beginning of the movie Greg asks why people would bother a guy who is just trying to make music. I've seen people address this question in blog posts below. It's something I think about a lot too. Why bother people who are just trying to make art? Sure, yeah. Money is the answer. Ensuring yourself, getting what you deserve, etc. However, what does this mean for creators? He goes on to talk about how we're bombarded with media and it's forcing us to use it as an art form. (2.26) This reminds me of a question we were addressing in class earlier this semester. It was something along the lines of - is there any original writing, or is everything just being pulled from something else? In my mind when this question was posed I thought well everything is just building on something else in some way, we're all plagiarizing each other everyday. So much so that we're creating new works. So how does it work if someone just want's to mix two previous pieces of art together? They'd still be creating an entirely new work. And those original works were in some way pulling from other works, but it's never that simple. It seems to me that it becomes an issue when it's clear where the original text or art or song is coming from. Every pop song has the same structure, uses the same chords, forms the same beat. I choreographed a dance for a show to the chorus of a One Direction song and I laugh all the time because it works perfectly with the chorus of almost every pop song you hear on the radio. This isn't a copyright problem though. Why? It's weird.
At 22 minutes into the video a lyric video of George Bush is played and a comment is made that everyone with a 1500 dollar computer has the ability to do what film studios are doing. To make art that comments on the political and cultural aspects of our society. This is an amazing thing because we all have the ability to be heard, but then it puts into question how you are actually heard, what you're heard for and if people are listening correctly. People are making texts that can turn on them, or promote things that they didn't mean to promote, or cause controversy in a way they didn't expect. Rhetorical texts are now coming from all different avenues and can be understood in a million different ways.
Right after this an author speaks about his views on copyright and says that he knows that students will take his books and do all sorts of things with them and the copyright laws are in place to protect him financially but he wants his work to be used and reused by people in other ways. This is such an amazing idea and approach to the creativity / copyright situation. When this idea is incorporated into other art forms we'll start to see an expansion in what's been created. You can pull from someone, and maybe that leads an artist to a new place, to a new thing, to a new realization. Every single time I walk into a rehearsal I steal something from someone. As a director I ask my performs to make a piece using only images or ideas they saw in a piece I show them on youtube. Maybe that means they use the same words, or pictures or colors and maybe that leads us to a new place. Or maybe in our final product we're still using others words and images. Either way, it's helped us get to a new product. Currently I'm working on a piece that's a staged response to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg. I'm stealing from him left and right, but I'm not competing with him or discrediting him.
I clearly have a strong opinion on the notion reuse and recycle. The documentary was fascinating to me and covered a lot of the monetary aspects I was less familiar with, however, it left me feeling even more certain that laws need to be changed to support the new technology that's entering into the news ways of creating.
ReplyDeleteHi Jiana,
I just want to start off by saying that what you do sounds really cool and inspired! I could never be creative in that way, and I really respect that kind of art.
In terms of the copyright climate of the music industry explored in "Good Copy, Bad Copy," genre is an important factor to consider. For example, at 7:38, an attorney who was interviewed in the documentary says in regards to sampling and licensing: "But this is the way hip hop and rap music works. So many people have said this is the death-knell for hip hop." This brings into question one of Miller's ideals of the hybrid in "Genre as Social Action"- "a transient combination of forms based in a nonrecurrent (or not yet recurrent) situation- is itself not a genre but the adaptation of a genre to the idiosyncratic needs of a particular situation, institution, and rhetor." (Miller, 164) There's no denying that rap and hip hop are genres- however, is the sampling simply a part of that genre, as put forth in the documentary, or is it rather a hybrid? And how does the definition of this technique fit in with the established hierarchy involved with genre and copyright laws? These are questions that are faced by artists and those involved in these kinds of court cases because of this dilemma.
Honestly, I agree with you that copyright laws should probably change based on our technological advances. As English majors, I think we're kind of exposed to this kind of debate pretty early on, and we develop a certain appreciation for how others can build on a work, particularly because countless amounts of literature has worked with this ideal unabashedly. As is popularly said, most of classic American literature is either based on or at least alludes to the Christian Bible or to Shakespeare. And both of these texts are relatively fragile in terms of authorship! In the world of literature, authors regularly recognize that they pull from their everyday lives and any works they previously read in order to publish the book that put their name in the market. The romantic "genius" Author hasn't been around since the strong emphasis of the sublime existed in our culture. Although Longinus points to the "emotional and sublime features seem closer to the mind's eye, both because of their brilliance," (358) he also argues that the sublime can be taught. Imitation is necessary and based in memory of the particular artist- the sublime is a cultural phenomena we observe when we read other texts, ultimately reminding us of the presence of noumena- meaning that isn't even an entirely conscious process that we undergo. We are simply affected by other things that we find beautiful in others' writing, and subconsciously reflect what we admire so much.