Remix Practices

La presente tesis busca analizar el uso de la edición como técnica de reciclaje de material audiovisual, entendiendo la edición como el proceso donde se sintetizan todos los elementos que conforman el producto final. El proceso de investigación se divide en tres capítulos: La edición y el reciclaje de material audiovisual, el potencial de la reedición en la creación audiovisual y por último  análisis de casos pertinentes al tema. El propósito de este estudio es aplicar el conocimiento adquirido en la realización de un largometraje a partir de material preexistente de la serie televisiva Everything Sucks! (Ben York Jones, Michael Mohan, 2018).

Critical evaluations of audio mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever recombinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. This essay does not side with either position but identifies and critiques the common understanding and fundamental assumptions that make these two, opposed positions possible in the first place. The investigation of this matter is divided into two main parts. The first considers the traditional understanding of technologically enabled reproduction and the often unquestioned value it invests in the concept of originality. It does so by beginning with a somewhat unlikely source, Plato's Phaedrus—a dialogue that, it is argued, originally articulates the original concept of originality that both determines and is reproduced in the theories and practices of sound recording. The second part of the essay demonstrates how the audio mash-up deliberately intervenes in this tradition, advancing a fundamental challenge to the original understanding and privilege of originality. In making this argument, however, the essay does not endeavor to position the mash-up as anything unique or innovative. Instead, it demonstrates how mash-ups, true to their thoroughly derivative nature, plunder, reuse, and remix anomalies that are already available in and constitutive of
recorded music.

Remix games are like remix videos, remix music, or remix images in that they are primarily comprised of sampled content. As a working definition, for the purposes of this chapter, remix games may be understood as games that are composed of previously published media elements, which have been appropriated, repurposed, and reconfigured in the creation of a new work that communicates different messages and meanings than the source material. This chapter has shown, the adoption of games as tools in digital humanities scholarship has been gradually increasing over the past decade, to the point where games have almost become an accepted form of academic publication in their own right. Finally, through a sample of global examples, this chapter highlights how remix games can be used to support existing practices within digital humanities scholarship, such as visualization, digital archiving, innovative pedagogy, and virtual simulation, while potentially enabling a range of new ones.

La musica, in quanto forma testuale, non è sfuggita ai processi d’ibridazione permessi dalla tecnologia digitale, anzi l’estrema facilità di appropriazione, manipolazione, rielaborazione e mescolanza è forse l’aspetto che più di altri contraddistingue il testo musicale digitale.

What roles do media technologies, artifacts, and users play in cultural change? This dissertation focuses on the shift from analog to digital media and concentrates on the role played by copies and replication in both systems of representation to identify and analyze material practices and rhetorical claims about their cultural influence. Specifically, it identifies and critiques the influence of recording formats qua copies in the history of three forms of composition in popular-music culture—remixes, disco edits, and MP3 blogs—to ask how something that is just the same can bring something new into being. I show that a focus on an artifact’s status as a copy—an object that can be said to be the same as other things—can illuminate our understanding of the cultural changes associated with digital and network technologies. By simultaneously identifying new cultural practices that are dependent on pure copying and resurrecting histories of media use, I critique the rhetoric of remix and participation as common tropes in digital discourse. This thesis examines the ways in which digital technologies were shaped by analog ones, as well as how and why analog formats persist in an era of digital networks. This exploration highlights the materiality of all media formats and shows how everyday users have played with and exploited material affordances over the past half-century. It also ponders the persistence of romantic ideals about authorship and expression within modes of expression and discourse that seem to challenge such constructions. What do these continuities and contradictions suggest about the networked experience and the social and cultural pleasures we derive from it? By teasing out unspoken assumptions about media and culture, this thesis offers fresh perspectives on the cultural poetics of networks and artifacts and poses questions about the promises and challenges of network visibility.

Critical Remix Video (CRV) has become a potentially powerful and persuasive alternative to mainstream commercial advertising. Many producers of such work seek to convince audiences that dominant media messages communicate inherently false ideological meanings by exposing contradictions and hypocrisies in these messages. However, CRVs themselves communicate equally contradictory ideological meanings in employing techniques of media manipulation, deception and censorship in their design. This study interrogates and deconstructs the visual signs in CRVs and explores the role and influence of ideology in the construction of meanings communicated to online audiences by such work. The findings of this inquiry should increase our understanding of how CRVs are constructed and why they are produced and enable future producers to improve the efficacy of subsequent iterations by revealing the inherent weaknesses in the current state of the art. A visual semiotic analysis of a representative sample of CRVs was carried out which found that in the process of unmasking the ideology in the subject of its critique, each CRV formulated a counter-ideology and made truth-claims that are equally susceptible to subsequent critique. Inadvertently, CRVs enable us to see more clearly that claims to truth, whether received through mainstream or alternative channels, cannot be accepted at face value and must be critically evaluated and considered in relation to the relative positions of the senders and receivers of the messages. Despite such dilemmas, CRVs represent an authentic opportunity for grassroots activist filmmakers to have their voices heard on a global stage, utilizing the full potential of digital networking and mobile technologies as well as spreadable media content and online distribution platforms.

Remix is now considered by many to be a form of derivative work, but such generalizations have resulted in numerous non-commercial remixes being wrongfully accused of copyright infringement. Gallagher argues that remix is a fundamentally transformative practice. The assumption that cultural works should be considered a form of private property is called into question in the digital age; thus, he proposes an alternative system to balance the economic interests of cultural producers with the ability of the public to engage with a growing intellectual commons of cultural works. Multimodal analyses of both remixed and non-remixed intertextual work, with a particular focus on examples of critical remix video, fuel the discussion, synthesizing a number of investigative methods including semiotic, rhetorical and ideological analysis. Author: Owen Gallagher (Routledge, 2017)

https://www.routledge.com/Reclaiming-Critical-Remix-Video-The-Role-of-Sampling-in-Transformative/Gallagher/p/book/9781138285262

Yoko Ono is unusual in that she is a site of considerable activity in three distinct spaces where the term “remix” is in common use. This paper reviews her activity in these distinct remix spaces and examines the spaces for identifiable variations in the term’s resonances and meaning. First, the “here” of academia reflects academic conversations about remix and remix cultures that can be traced back to the mid 1990s. The second site is the site in which the general public first encountered the term “remix”— the “there” of music and music production. Within this space we pursue the shift from remix as a purely technical term occurring within the recording process to remix as an aesthetic term reflecting expanding and shifting aspirations for the composer of a remix. Finally, this paper will consider the “everywhere” of an Internet-based popular culture grounded in current social media.

In social media, individuals are accustomed to hypertextual dynamics of a participative culture, established by languages that replicate behavioural patterns and potentialize their ideas. The resources in these platforms enable dialogues progressively more interactive, with a dissemination potency that can be one of the keys to think the intense flow of collaborative production that comes from the users in the web nowadays. In this context, after the social network website Facebook release a new function that enables the publication of images in the comments of its posts, it began an immense profusion of inside jokes and virals proliferated by memetic image sharing, basing itself in the irony and nonsense humor, characteristic of the entertainment in the so-called “digital trash culture”.

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Nas redes sociais, os indivíduos estão acostumados às dinâmicas hipertextuais de uma cultura participativa, estabelecida através de linguagens que replicam padrões de comportamentos e potencializam suas ideias. Os recursos nessas plataformas possibilitam diálogos cada vez mais interativos, cuja potência de disseminação pode ser uma das chaves para se pensar o intenso fluxo de produção colaborativa que parte dos usuários na rede atualmente. Nesse contexto, após a rede social Facebook liberar uma nova funcionalidade que permite a publicação de imagens nos comentários de suas postagens, deu-se início a uma imensa profusão de piadas internas e virais proliferados por meio do compartilhamento de imagens meméticas, pautando-se na ironia e humor nonsense, característicos do entretenimento na chamada "cultura digital trash".

The remix demonstrates that creativity is alive and well, but also under attack by corporate copyright holders trying to shut down media sharing and remixed media. Artistry now lies in how pre-existing materials are remixed and rendered new; it is through acts of transformation of the original that the remix's value is found. Artists reuse other works to reveal or transmit political messages, and not simply to re-create them. The remix is not killing narrative but instead is fostering a transformation and renaissance of creative practice, outside of the legal boundaries of copyright. The criminalization of new kinds of creative practice is a growing barrier to the remix's creative renaissance. Remix reimagines pre-existing texts, plots and genres as a way of interrogating the future of culture, via digital collaborative authorship and a distinct remix aesthetic of interruption, disturbance, and capture/leakage.

Le remix démontre que la créativité est bel et bien vivante; mais qu'elle est aussi en butte à des attaques par les détenteurs de droits d'auteur des entreprises, qui tentent d'arrêter le partage de médias et des médias remixés. La pratique de l'art se trouve maintenant dans la façon dont les matériaux préexistants sont remixés et rendus neufs. C'est l'acte de transformer le matériel original qui contribue à la valeur du remixage. Les artistes réutilisent d'autres textes pour révéler et pour transmettre des messages politiques, et non pas tout simplement pour les recréer. Le remix ne tue pas la forme narrative; au contraire il favorise une transformation et une renaissance de la pratique créative, à l'extérieur des limites juridiques du droit d'auteur. La criminalisation des nouveaux types de cette pratique créative est un obstacle croissant à la renaissance créative du remix. Le remix réinvente les textes préexistants, aussi bien que les intrigues et les genres comme un moyen d'interroger l'avenir de la culture, et cela, par le biais de la paternité des travaux numériques réalisés en collaboration, et par une forme esthétique distincte du remix qui est basée sur l'interruption, les perturbations, la capture et les fuites.

Capítulo do livro "Escrita não criativa e autoria", organizado por Luciene Azevedo e Tatiana da Silva Capaverde. Cada vez tem se tornado mais comum autores contemporâneos referirem-se a suas próprias obras como um trabalho de curadoria. Mas como pensar o autor como curador? Como pensar essa imbricação entre o curador e o artista e mais especificamente investir na possibilidade de aproximar a condição do autor contemporâneo a de um curador de sua própria imagem e de sua obra?  Os artigos reunidos neste livro tematizam questões que discutem a condição da autoria no presente considerando os procedimentos da escrita não-criativa e a possibilidade de pensar o autor como um curador. O ponto de partida de muitos ensaios são as premissas defendidas por Kenneth Goldsmith, professor da universidade da Pensilvânia, que ministrou durante alguns semestres um curso que ele mesmo chamou de “Escrita não-criativa” e que consistia em estimular seus alunos a investigarem técnicas de apropriação de obras alheias, defendendo a ideia de que os “escritores estão se tornando curadores da linguagem e fazendo um movimento similar à emergência do curador como artista nas artes virtuais”. Ao lado dele, Marjorie Perloff (2013) relaciona iniciativas como as de Goldsmith à não-originalidade, às práticas da citação, da cópia, da reprodução, da colagem e identifica, aí, a possibilidade de um novo paradigma para a criação literária. Nossos autores tomam essas provocações como ponto de partida para a reflexão e oferecem ao leitor um bom panorama sobre essas discussões.

Hablamos con John Postill, profesor titular de Comunicación en
RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), sobre temas presentes en su nuevo
libro: “The Rise of Nerd Politics” (El surgimiento de la Política Nerd).
Postill nos explica qué es la política nerd, cómo las prácticas creativas de la cultura de la remezcla y la cultura libre surgen y se expanden en movimientos sociales a través de los imaginarios populares. La entrevista finaliza con un tema muy actual que en inglés se llama “data storytelling”, los relatos que están detrás de los datos masivos y que al convertirse en historias llevan cuestiones técnicas a otros públicos, a persona comunes.

The paper investigates sign-making through selection and recontextualization of (snippets of) previous texts, i.e., copy-and-paste; it discusses the underlying semiotic mechanism and the resulting practices, namely forwarding and remix. It further considers the rhetorical effects of these forms of text production and their impact on old and new genres and generic conventions. When representation is produced through selection, (assemblage) and recontextualization, cohesion is no longer a necessary device for coherence, while texts are characterized by fragmentation and modular combination of topics, voices, modes and genres, together with increased intertextuality, implicitness and multi-layered meanings. This holds not only for the single texts we produce, but also for the semiotic environments we interpret and the interactions we participate in. In turn, long, linear and cohesive, mono-thematic, mono-voice, mono-modal and mono-generic texts seem essentially confined to a few formal, educational and academic genres which rely mainly on writing – and even these, although linear and cohesive in their final form, are frequently produced modularly, and are also increasingly read this way. All this opens new challenges for educational contexts. Consequently, the conclusions offer insights on the implications for the learning and teaching of (written) genres.

In its hybridized, intertextual and multifaced core, internet memes carry hereditary characteristics of cultural repertoires, such as day-to-day matters, media content and socio-political discourses. They are part of a vast digital culture DNA that resonates in the groups of communities of social networks websites, giving a new meaning to the interactional practices of collective curatorship of the social actors in the networks and its relationship to the consumption of the entertainment industry products that are linked to affections of the day-to-day life. Created from deviations, clippings, appropriation and free creations of texts and audiovisual works, this digital culture artifacts reveal themselves as well as a library of innumerable cultural repertoires and behavioral traces in the fertile ground of various groups and communities in the social networks websites. Memes can, in this sense, provide clues about how daily themes and political debates can intercross with entertainment and mobilize millions of people, working as collaborative micronarratives marked by innovation in its format, articulation of the signs, with high synthesis power (dense in content and simple in its format) and for the exercise of humor’s transposition. Is undeniable that in the last decade the digital environments in its several formats and genres have been a rich tool for the empirical studies of cyberculture. From 2013, especially, it is possible to observe a higher popularity of memes and its comprehension as relevant phenomena, fertile and still lacking study.

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Em seu cerne hibridizado, intertextual e multifacetado, os memes de internet carregam traços hereditários de repertórios culturais, tais como assuntos cotidianos, conteúdos midiáticos e discursos sociopolíticos. São parte do vasto DNA da cultura digital que pulsa nos grupos e comunidades de sites de redes sociais, ressignificando as práticas interacionais e de curadoria coletiva dos atores nas redes e sua relação com o consumo de produtos da indústria do entretenimento vinculada a afetos e afetações do cotidiano. Criados a partir de desvios, recortes, releituras, apropriações e criações livres de textos e obras audiovisuais, estes artefatos da cultura digital se revelam também como repositório de inúmeros repertórios culturais e traços comportamentais no fecundo terreno de variados grupos e comunidades dos sites de redes sociais. Os memes podem, assim, fornecer indícios acerca de como temas cotidianos e debates públicos podem se entrelaçar com produtos do entretenimento e mobilizar milhões de pessoas, funcionando como micronarrativas colaborativas marcadas pela inovação no formato, pela articulação dos signos, com alto poder de síntese (densos no conteúdo e simples no formato) e pelo exercício da transposição da comicidade. É inegável que na última década os ambientes digitais em seus mais variados formatos e gêneros têm sido uma rica ferramenta para os estudos empíricos da cibercultura. A partir de 2013, especificamente, é possível observar uma maior popularidade dos memes e sua compreensão enquanto fenômeno relevante, fértil e ainda carente de estudos.

In this article I analyze the cover version as a specific form of copying
in music recording and performance, and then evaluate it as a cultural variable that is part of the creative process in remix practice. This analysis demonstrates that cover versions, versioning, editing, sampling, and remixing are dependent on copying and, for this reason, my eventual focus is on the relation of copies to originals and copies to copies. Another important element examined throughout the essay is the role of selectivity in the creative process as a foundational principle of communication and how it shapes varying popular and individualized assumptions about definitions of originals and copies.

This article describes an arts-based writing project, the Cultural Selfie, used in a pre-service teacher education classroom to explore the concept of funds of knowledge and to develop intercultural awareness. The Cultural Selfie as a visual interpretation provided a space for pre-service teachers to reflect critically on their everyday cultural and literacy practices and their teacher Self. In doing so, they used literacy as a form of meaning-making to examine concepts such as privilege, cultural bias, and discomfort, as well as strength and weakness in relating to different cultures.

Fan edits are essentially unauthorized alternative versions of films made by fans. Unlike traditional film editing, which is characterized by a new assemblage of original film or video content, fan editing is a form of recombinant filmmaking that reactivates existing arrangements of audiovisual material. Fan edits are noncommercial transformative works that illustrate the mutability of digital cinema as well as the potential for new media artists, experimental filmmakers, and diverse critical voices to emerge from a networked public.

The Phantom Edit (2000) is a seminal fan edit based on Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) that established a model of production and distribution for fan edits. As a central research problem, this study recognizes that the failure of previous scholarship to account accurately for the history of The Phantom Edit, as well as an evident lack of close engagement with contemporary fan edits, have hindered the ability of scholars to grapple with significant developments in fan edit culture. In general, film and media studies have failed to account for both The Phantom Edit and nearly two decades of progressive work.

This study builds upon the limits of previous scholarship in order to illustrate a historical trajectory of fan editing from The Phantom Edit to its more diverse present state, which is exemplified by Raising Cain: Re-cut (2012), a fan edit based on Raising Cain (1992) that was eventually endorsed by Brian De Palma and sold as the official director’s cut. Furthermore, this study examines practical trends of fan edits and effective means of classification. Combining archival research, interviews, practical fan editing experience, and textual analysis of fan edits collected over several years of participation in the fan editing community, this study offers a foundation of knowledge about the technology, legal contexts, and cultural practice of fan edits.

PDF full text available: https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/26032

This research paper examines 21st century Internet and media cultures, with specific focus on remix video, participatory culture, and media literacy.

This paper received First Class Honors at Trinity College, Dublin.
Vanessa graduated with Distinction in B.A. English Literature and Media Studies.

This PDF doesn't include the integral video material embedded in the article for which you will need to visit: http://www.thecine-files.com/turning-up-the-volume/

“What do I see of what I hear? What do I hear of what I see?” (Michel Chion, 2004)

Michel Chion’s key questions (set out in his groundbreaking study Audio-Vision) succinctly draw attention to the sensuous and semantic interactions of sound and image in audiovisual media. This compelling interrogative approach helps the French theorist to issue a clarion call for the combined study of these elements, which will also involve separating them out, in the research process, to better see, or hear, the effect of one on the other. Chion doesn’t especially advocate anything other than writing as the means of expression of scholarly insights thus derived. Yet what better medium in which to take up his call for much more rounded and complex approaches to film studies than the audiovisual essay form, currently flourishing as part of an emergent online videographic film and moving image studies culture? It may take a while for this call to be properly answered, however. While there appears to be no shortage of “image-centric” audiovisual essaying in this new field, studies that foreground—or listen more closely to—film, video and televisual sound are distinctly in the minority. This won’t surprise anyone working in “sound studies,” of course, since this unfortunate under-representation simply mirrors the long-standing ocular-centricity of existing, written film and moving image studies.

But truly interesting, and increasingly generative, audiovisual sonic explorations have been appearing online. As someone who has written quite often on film sound, especially on music, I have been on the lookout (and listen-out) for them, as well as experimenting with creating them myself in my own videographic practice. In the below curated collection of such works (and of excerpted reflections upon them by makers, publishers, and critics), my focus has primarily been on what the internet currently has to offer this area of scholarship and creative critical practice, that is to say, web-native videos and scholarly, audiovisual works drawing on, or inspired by, those vernacular digital forms, including mash-ups, super-cuts (concise and impactful video remixes and assemblages made with sharing—even virality—in mind), engaging synchronous multiple screen comparisons, striking comparative sequential montages, and even long-form, deconstructive approaches to “masked listening” (as Chion might understand them), ones inspired by and sometimes connected to contemporary digital art forms.

A fan edit can generally be defined as an alternative version of a film or television text created by a fan. It offers a different viewing experience, much as a song remix offers a different listening experience. The contemporary wave of fan edits has emerged during the remix zeitgeist of digital media and at a time when digital video editing technology has become more affordable and popular. The increasing number of alternative versions of films and the works of revisionist Hollywood filmmakers such as George Lucas have contributed to a greater public understanding of cinema as a fluid medium instead of one that exists in a fixed form. The Phantom Edit (2000), a seminal fan edit based on Lucas's Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), inspired new ranks of fan editors. However, critics have misunderstood fan edits as merely the work of disgruntled fans. In order to provide a critical and historical basis for studies in fan editing as a creative practice, I examine previous interpretations of fan edits in the context of relevant contemporary works, and I use an annotated chronology of The Phantom Edit to trace its influence on subsequent fan editing communities and uncover their relationship with intellectual property disputes.

Full text available: https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/575

Notes and addenda: https://wille.tv/2014/09/22/fan-edits-and-the-legacy-of-the-phantom-edit/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f_C2ofoVbk

A video review of This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music by Margie Borschke

Reviewed by Owen Gallagher

Book publisher’s website: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/this-is-not-a-remix-9781501318948/

Equal parts science fiction, visual essay and academic paper. An arts-based reflection on the Art Museum of Ciudad Juárez that reinterprets its history through 25 panoramic collages, which were generated by remixing it's archive. A case is made to consider the museum an alien spaceship that landed in the middle of the desert with the specific mission to refine the locals.

In this paper we will deal with music related co-creation practices from the perspective of transmedia literacies. We will take as a case example " Evolution of Get Lucky " , a collective experiment by musician PV Nova, that consisted in taking one of the most popular pop songs of 2013, Daft Punk's Get Lucky, re-interpreting it through the conventions of different musical decades and inviting users to playfully build the pieces of a participatory music video. " Evolution of Get Lucky " is a perfect opportunity to reflect on transmedia literacies, as well as on appropriations of popular culture, the social shaping of music memory and the notion of nostalgia. Our approach to the case study will be informed by our previous work on participatory culture and co-creation practices.

"James Brown’s ‘‘I’m Real’ (1988) contains numerous lyrics regaled from James Brown’s earlier hits (including ‘Make it Funky’ (1971)) and also James Brown vocal samples from ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ (1970) and ‘Get on the Good Foot’ (1972). But why sample James Brown’s voice when the man himself was in the studio recording a vocal? What purpose could it serve, especially when he was already replicating moments from previous hits? This article investigates that chronologic duality. The central questions I pose here focus on what the choice to sample himself reveals about Brown’s status as a Soul legend, and whether the contemporaneous James could sincerely live up to the mythic status he establishes lyrically. Via a detailed investigation of the song ‘I’m Real’, I will probe Brown’s playful employment of his own past. His gambit, I will argue, may be read simultaneously as testament to his own glory, and as a signifier that the excesses of egotistic auto-projection were always more distant than they first appeared to be.

The remix demonstrates that creativity is alive and well, but also under attack by corporate copyright holders trying to shut down media sharing and remixed media. Artistry now lies in how pre-existing materials are remixed and rendered new; it is through acts of transformation of the original that the remix's value is found. Artists reuse other works to reveal or transmit political messages, and not simply to re-create them. The remix is not killing narrative but instead is fostering a transformation and renaissance of creative practice, outside of the legal boundaries of copyright. The criminalization of new kinds of creative practice is a growing barrier to the remix's creative renaissance. Remix reimagines pre-existing texts, plots and genres as a way of interrogating the future of culture, via digital collaborative authorship and a distinct remix aesthetic of interruption, disturbance, and capture/leakage. Le remix demontre que la creativite est bel et bien vivante; mais qu'elle est aussi en butte a des attaques par les detenteurs de droits d'auteur des entreprises, qui tentent d'arreter le partage de medias et des medias remixes. La pratique de l'art se trouve maintenant dans la facon dont les materiaux preexistants sont remixes et rendus neufs. C'est l'acte de transformer le materiel original qui contribue a la valeur du remixage. Les artistes reutilisent d'autres textes pour reveler et pour transmettre des messages politiques, et non pas tout simplement pour les recreer. Le remix ne tue pas la forme narrative; au contraire il favorise une transformation et une renaissance de la pratique creative, a l'exterieur des limites juridiques du droit d'auteur. La criminalisation des nouveaux types de cette pratique creative est un obstacle croissant a la renaissance creative du remix. Le remix reinvente les textes preexistants, aussi bien que les intrigues et les genres comme un moyen d'interroger l'avenir de la culture, et cela, par le biais de la paternite des travaux numeriques realises en collaboration, et par une forme esthetique distincte du remix qui est basee sur l'interruption, les perturbations, la capture et les fuites.

Hablamos con John Postill, profesor titular de Comunicación en RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), sobre temas presentes en su nuevo libro: “The Rise of Nerd Politics” (El surgimiento de la Política Nerd). Postill nos explica qué es la política nerd, cómo las prácticas creativas de la cultura de la remezcla y la cultura libre surgen y se expanden en movimientos sociales a través de los imaginarios populares. La entrevista finaliza con un tema muy actual que en inglés se llama “data storytelling”, los relatos que están detrás de los datos masivos y que al convertirse en historias llevan cuestiones técnicas a otros públicos, a persona comunes.

As a form of Indo-Caribbean popular music produced primarily in Trinidad, chutney soca has been shaped by a variety of remembered and 're-membered' sonic and stylistic traditions. Among them have been Indian classical singing, performed mostly by men; Hindu songs of worship (bhajans); Bhojpuri folksongs, especially those performed by women in the private, Hindu matikoor (pre-nuptial) and maaro (marriage) spaces; Caribbean Carnival music; and the songs of twentieth-century Hindi cinema. In this paper, I explore the importance of the latter and consider its implications on (re)constructions and deconstructions of Indianness. By illustrating the ways in which Bollywood—as it is colloquially known—has persistently informed the audio-visual Indo-Caribbean imaginary and performance aesthetic over time, I contend that its endurance in the Caribbean can be attributed to purist anxieties over the threat of identity loss in an effort to protect Indianness from ethnocultural invisibility within the larger creole nationalist framework that has historically characterized postcolonial Caribbean societies. As such, this paper contributes to critical dialogues on the politics of hybrid identity and difference in Caribbean contexts, strengthening the limited body of scholarly research on Indo-Caribbean popular culture, that is part of my larger dissertation project which investigates the evolution of chutney soca music as a transgressive platform through which to examine the tensions and negotiations around identity formation in Trinidad.

Let’s Go Crazy is a remix project conducted as a video response sensation on YouTube. It engages Stephanie Lenz’s court case against Universal Music Group (UMG), which sent a take-down notice to Lenz on YouTube for a 29-second home video featuring her 2 year-old son, Holden, dancing to the Prince song, “Let’s Go Crazy,” which is barely audible as background music. In short, it is a court case that demonstrates the imbalance between the role corporations play in the power dynamics between individuals who develop user-generated content and the interfaces used to share “free” media.

This project was co-created with students at California State University, Fullerton from 2008-13 using the now defunct YouTube "Video Response" feature.

This paper presents our approach to the development of Food Monitor, an original software program that provides a database of grocery items that can be used to monitor stock levels, suggest recipes, and provide nutritional information to the user. The software is intended to provide a low-cost, flexible and useful tool for the everyday consumer to assist the universal management of grocery-related activities in a residential setting, with a focus on increasing awareness of nutritional information to encourage healthy-eating, reducing food waste, and offering interactive recipe choices. The software was developed in the Max MSP graphical programming environment, which despite primarily being a domain for computer musicians and visual artists nevertheless offered a flexible set of tools to achieve the aforementioned aims and intentions. To this end, here we reflect not only on the development of the Food Monitor project itself, but more-so on the opportunities facilitated by flexible programming environments such as Max MSP to non-expert programmers. Abstract Keywords Cooking up a Remix Making Futures Journal Vol 4

Many scholars of digital technologies and networks have called “remix” the defining characteristic of digital culture, using it as shorthand for all that is new, digital and participatory. This chapter offers a critique of such claims by comparing and contrasting the history of remix as an analog cultural practice and artifact with the discourse about remix in digital culture. It considers the use of “remix” in contemporary discourse as a rhetorical strategy and asks whether the assumptions and aspirations that underpin this rhetoric obscure the aesthetic priorities and the political implications of analog copying practices.