10 (Post dated so it is in order)

Here is one of my favorite remixes - Toy Story Requiem

Audio from a Requiem for a Dream trailer, with video from Toy Story 2. Pretty freaking cool.

In Remix Lessig discusses remix as a modern form of collage. On page 70 the book explains that collage

"emerged with the invention of photography. Very shortly after it was invented.. you started seeing these sort of joking postcards that were photo composites. There would be a horse- drawn wagon with a cucumber in the back the size of a house. Things like that. Just little joking composite photograph things."

A digital remix is just the natural evolution of collage. Toy Story Requiem is one of these collages. Firstly, the video juxtaposes many different clips from Toy Story 2 together to create a cohesive narrative that fits the audio. They did a great job with this. The character's lips even match up with a lot of the dialogue. I would imagine that this took quite a bit of time to accomplish. It is also a collage in the sense that it takes the video from one film and posts it over the audio from another. It is like taking the Mona Lisa and pasting it into Nighthawks (that would be a sweet collage).

9

Lessig's main point is essentially that our current system of copyright law is absolutely absurd and outdated. The example he uses of Stephanie Lenz's story really gets my blood boiling. I just cannot begin to fathom how what she did is unacceptable. She filmed a video of her kid dancing to some music on TV, who cares? Who are the lawyers who pushed for this? How do this people sleep at night?

Read Only, or RO, culture is media created that we can't give back to. This is essentially all media created before the internet age; newspapers, books, records, CDs, movies, TV, etc. Read/Write, or RW, culture is culture in which the consumers are also the creators. In an RW culture we the consumers take the media that we consume, digest it, and re-create it. Essentially it is what students do on college campuses everyday, and what kids everywhere do on their computers all of the time.

Lessig uses Sousa because he and Lessig are kindred spirits of sorts. Though separated by many decades, both support read/write culture. Sousa was worried that the prominence of the phonograph, a read only technology, would eliminate what we now call read/write culture. Like Sousa, Lessig is a major supporter of RW culture.

Blog Seven

"Hip Hop Goes Transmedia: Seven Laws" by Marguerite de Bourgoing is primarily about how the new generation of hip hop is self made. The artists promote themselves by performing at open mics and clubs, and by having a strong online presence through blogs and twitter. It also talks about how hip-hop and fashion are so intertwined that a lot of these artists actually have their own clothing lines.

This article fits in with everything we have been talking about this semester. These hip-hop artists are essentially the embodiment of web 2.0. They are the users creating the content and distributing it without the meddling of the evil record industry. They are on myspace, facebook, twitter, blogger, tumblr, and flickr. They are participatory culture in every sense.

Miller's key argument is essentially that although in one sense nothing is original, in another sense everything is. He says that it is impossible to see anything outside of the context of what we have already learned. The way I see this is that we are all a product of humanities collective experience, and we can't learn or process anything outside of this context. I used the example of science in class. In a sense nothing in science is original, it is all a natural progression of what has come before it. Miller uses Edison as an example of this. Edison expanded on the ideas of others to create the phonograph, which is a new and unique invention. It was however only possible because of the work and knowledge that past scientists had helped to accumulate.

Miller's book is relevant to what we have learned in class so far in the sense that in our day and age we have access to more information than ever, and with everyone online contributing content it is extremely difficult to not include someone else's ideas or work into our own in some form. Though you may not be directly plagiarizing someone, no matter what you are incorporating someone else's ideas in your own.