Eduardo Navas

I tore through this theory-heavy collection instrumentally, as I’m furiously working on our DMCA exemption. This is a collection of theorists and practitioners talking about remix, a lot in very general terms and some in very specific terms. Kembrew McLeod’s oral history of sampling has a lot of great quotes from people in the music business, including an RIAA lawyer who says that sampling isn’t necessary unless you pay as against a bunch of people who talk about chilled creativity and how it’s financially impossible to use multiple samples in a song now. Navas has a nice piece about how modern capitalism wants us to participate, just in controlled ways, so it can monetize us—it doesn’t want us to shut up because it learns more when we talk. I also liked Lev Manovich’s point about modularity in culture: just as remix makes specific units of shows and music modular and configurable, modularity is also showing up when Facebook lets you select an area of a picture and annotate it, or when Medium allows you to comment on a particular paragraph. Katarina Freund’s article on boundary policing in vidding is interesting and probably controversial among vidders I know. Video remix is the default meaning of remix in most of the articles, with some on music and a few on text.… (meer)