History

This is part one of Remixing Culture, a short documentary exploring the relationship between digital technology and remix music. In this episode, we will meet the faces of remix and mash-up culture, and the pioneers who created this genre. Remix is a popular genre of music that is created by amalgamating different samples from different songs to make a new song. By listening to remixed music, a listener can experience the familiarity of an older tune but in a novel way, through different drums, varying tempos and synthesizers to complement the original track. The controversy that lies in this art form is that this kind of interpretation is simply the cutting and pasting of the work of another artist, and thus is not considered “original” in the sense of traditionally writing music from scratch. However, and as this episode outlines, remixing and reinterpreting art is the fundamental cornerstone of collective human creativity, because culture necessarily builds on the past.

Featuring: Grahm Zilla, Joe Kraft, Lawrence Lessig, John Oswald.