As
the recent copyright woes of Obama poster artist Shepard Fairey show, there's a war raging over what some now are calling a new art form in the emerging
Web 2.0 culture—
remix.
Broadly defined, remix is collage, a recombination of existing,
reference images or music and video clips from popular digital culture,
elements of which are
mashed up
into something new. As thousands of people share and produce their own
mashups and remixes online, an urgent question is emerging across
today's cultural landscape:
Should
remix be outlawed as a violation of an artist's or photographer's
copyright or—as long as the remix is significantly altered from the
original—should remix be permitted by law to be shared freely, via social media, across the Web and in popular culture at large?
At a recent panel talk at the
New York Public Library, remixer/street artist
Fairey, copyright scholar
Larry Lessig, and author
Steven Johnson all
argued for free expression, saying remix is a form of self-expression
and free speech that should be allowed to flow mostly unrestricted
across today's burgeoning digital world. "Remix
is literacy in the 21st century," Lessig said. The chief of Stanford University's
Center for Internet and Society , Lessig is the author of
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.
He said that failing to legally protect remixes as original forms of
art and expression "will make pirates of our children...We cannot kill
this form of expression; we can only criminalize it, drive it
underground. We can't make [remixers] passive, we can only make them
pirates."
For his part, Johnson, author of
The Invention of Air,
a new book about the history of information flows in American and
British society, said remix has "deep roots in the Age of Enlightenment
and among America's Founding Fathers." He said that Thomas Jefferson,
no less, remixed the Bible to produce his own underground version of
it; Johnson refers to that effort as
"the original American remix."
Said Johnson: "Where do we think innovation and creativity come
from—protecting ideas or setting them free, allowing them to circulate
freely?"
Fairey rounded out the talk, citing remix as one of the
early 21st century's most popular forms of free political expression.
Fairey said his most "potent" remix is not his iconic, 2008
Obama Hope poster [over which he is being sued by the Associated Press
and is countersuing for the right to have made it]—but his 2005 remix,
Greetings from Iraq,
a reference to a 1930s-era, WPA-produced Yellowstone Park tourism
poster. "This referenced something that advertised a geyser to go see;
I've made that geyser into an explosion, figuring it as something to go
run from," Fairey said. "...Remix is all about making references;
references are how you establish a point of view in popular culture,
and they are crucial to my work as an artist."
What do you think? [Fairey's 2005 remix, left; the original Yellowstone poster, right]
Here are some of Lessig's examples of popular remix, which he included as part of his talk:
* Johan Soderberg's
Read My Lips remix,
a 2006 mashup of George Bush and Tony Blair news clips on YouTube,
created to make a statement about their mutual support for the Iraq War;
*
Will.i.am's February 2008 Yes We Can video, a remix of an Obama speech set to music, was widely distributed on YouTube prior to the presidential election last November.
* Beyonce's
October 2008 performance video of Single Ladies got 1.7 million views on YouTube in original form, but a
Saturday Night Live parody-remix produced a month later [see it
here] got even more attention, Lessig said—some 3.2 million views. And those remixes led to dozens of others, including
this one.
*
The Grey Album, a mashup album by
Danger Mouse, released in 2004, that uses an
a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's
The Black Album and couples it with instrumentals created from a multitude of unauthorized samples from The Beatles'
The White Album. [The Grey Album made headlines after record producer EMI attempted to halt its distribution.]
*
Anime music video remixes, which began as a trend around 2007
by remixing images from Japanese cartoons with a music track from a movie trailer. See this March 2007 example,
Disney in D Minor. Each AMV, Lessig says, can take between 50 and 400 hours to create.
* Social commentary remixes, including this March 2008 remix by experimental filmmaker Andrew Filippone,
Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett. It shows
Rose
engaging in an interview with himself about the future of the Web. ["It
took about eight hours of editing to produce," Filippone said. Added
Lessig: "What is striking to me about remix is how hard it is to do
well."]
