ENGLISH ONE ELEVEN: Lessig, Owning Culture, and

Mashing stuff up

Today

1. Upload time 2. Remix, in my words

3. Let me tell you ‘bout Larry Lessig4. Let’s talk about the Grey Album5. Let’s do some homework

Memo time

Let’s take the next five minutes to type up your reflective memos for inquiry 3. When you finish the memo, upload it and your project via the Niihka drop box. Remember to name your two uploads lastnameMemo3 and lastname3. Also remember it needs to be a .doc, .rtf, or .txt file.

Remix is Like…

Remix is the act of taking one or more cultural artifacts-- visual, video, audio, and/or alphabetic texts- and deliberately mixing elements together to create something new that often specifically mimics one or more of the sources. Many remixes are meant to be satirical or overtly political, though satire is not essential.

They Put me in the Remix

One of the things I’d like us to consider is how we can remix/remediate classroom space. On April 9th, we will meet entirely online, in an ANGEL chat room. If you don’t own your own computer, please talk to me after class so we can find a good place for you to be during class.

A quick lead-in: Lessig on IP law

• Lessig declares that he has the following position:– He is anti-piracy– He is anti-war (meaning law vs. creators

here)– He is anti-lawyer and anti-lobbyist (he

includes himself here, so he’s anti-Lessig, too)

Lessig video here (if you’d like to watch later)

Lessig is like,

• “We need to hear less from lawyers and lobbyists and more from artists [about who owns culture].”

• " This is a relationship between technology and ownership, which is translated to digital technology and copyright.”

Pirate Technologies

player piano – “pirated” sheet music radio– “pirated” records cable TV– “pirated” network TV betamax– “pirated” TV and movies

But as these were regulated, the law always waited to see “the potential of the technology.”

We Didn’t Start the Fire…

• “...this is not the first time radical new technologies have appeared and changed the way that culture gets made and distributed. This is a constant theme...”

• But… The law favored the pirate in those old cases. It is now "fit the technology to the law" and not "fit the law to the technology."

"This architecture demands... the right to remix culture."

Enter DJ Danger Mouse. He felt that the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s black album went together.So he created “the Grey Album” which you can DL here: http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html but don’t, because it’s totally illegal. *wink*

Or is it? Or… should it be?

RemixRemix

Remix is the act of taking one or more cultural artifacts-- in this case visual, though video, audio, and alphabetic texts are regularly remixed-- and deliberately mixing elements together to create something new that often specifically mimics one or more of the sources. Many remixes are meant to be satirical or overtly political, though satire is not essential to the genre.

Remix is the act of taking one or more cultural artifacts-- visual, video, audio, and/or alphabetic texts- and deliberately mixing elements together to create something new that often specifically mimics one or more of the sources. Many remixes are meant to be satirical or overtly political, though satire is not essential.

Remix

+ =

Remix

+

=

If you’re offended by profanity, plug your ears right about now

Whose song is this? Whose song is this?

Another Example

• The New Yorker ran a piece on Danger Mouse and the idea of mash-ups. You might recognize it.

• “Mashups find new uses for current digital technology, a new iteration of the cause-and-effect relationship behind almost every change in pop-music aesthetics: the gear changes, and then the music does.”

• So… whose song is this?

A Stroke of Genius

“In October of 2001, a d.j. named Roy Kerr, calling himself the Freelance Hellraiser, sent Temple-Morris [a mash-up show duo] a mashup called “A Stroke of Genius,” laying Christina Aguilera’s vocal from “Genie in a Bottle,” a lubricious pop song, over the music from the Strokes’ “Hard to Explain,” a brittle, honking guitar song. “

A few more remixes

• Shine• Brokeback

back to the visual while still looking at music…

• Is it “okay” for Nas to do this? • Is it okay for FOX to depict Nas in the ways

that they have?

Homewerkz

Forum 11: Find a remix online– post it.Unlike usual, this is due before-next-class.

Read: This and skim Bolter and Grusin (excerpt– on Niihka)