Before you get started trying to male your own remixes and mashups, explore the concepts and see if you can try and sort out the differences. As part of your understanding, you should reviewi at least two of the references on the concepts listed below and at least three of the examples listed further below.

Instead of writing up an explanation of what you learned, try to formulate your own understanding about remix and mashup, and record a video or audio of you explaining it to someone who is not familiar with the concept; this could be a family member, friend, neighbor, random stranger. Can you explain it in a way that makes sense to them?

Write up a blog post that includes this recording and anything else you want to share to show your understanding of remix, and explaining how the examples you watched demonstrated the form. Put some thought on whether this is a creative act and as well explore what it means for the entities that retain copyright over the media forms that are remixed. Include links and/or embeds of all media you reference.

RiP: A Remix Manifesto a documentary by Brett Gaylor on remix culture featuring the work of Girl Talk. The video is 90 minutes long, watch at least half of it! Note, you can watch the video directly on vimeo https://vimeo.com/8040182

http://vimeo.com/14912890

Everything is a Remix is a four part series by Kirby Ferguson; most important are Part 1 and Part 3. This is maybe the most valuable resource for understanding remix.

https://vimeo.com/62839607

The New Prohibition by Andy Baio is a must view insight into copyright, fair use (“fair use is not a law”), and remix culture.

For some interesting perspective on art and remix, see Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist a book based on a compelling blog post– review the Steal Like An Artist Book Trailer.

Let Us Never Speak Of This Thing Again resources and audio from a ds106 session in 2011 from Brian Lamb,

This is itself a remix of Disney clips to explain copyright (which if you know anything about the history of copyright and Disney, carries a decent amount of irony).

Author Terry Teachout describes how many of Duke Ellington’s pop hits were written from pieces lifted directly from his band members, often without them getting the credit. Read more on Compiling as a Creative Act: What Duke Ellington’s Remixing Reveals about Plagiarism and Innovation (Brain Pickings)

Below is an assortment of remix/mashup examples or resources. Review at least 3 of them or feel free to use your own examples, just be sure to justify how they are remixes. And let us know in the comments below of ones we should add to this list

• Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed – two different sources re-edited to be a coherent story
• Two Gentlemen of Lebowski mashing up Shakespeare and the Big Lebowski
• Star Wars Call Me Maybe a remix/recut mashup of Star Wars dialogue to tell a new tale
• Don’t Tase Me Bro/MC Hammer – news event mashed up with music
• Youtube duet: Miles Davis improvising on LCD Soundsystem
• Scary Mary (recut movie trailer – family movie reversed to Horror)

• The Shining Recut used above as this unit’s inspiration (recut movie trailer – horror movie reversed to be love story– see more from Know Your Meme)
• Star Trek Meets Monty Python – redubbing
• Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny a clever retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in a modern form
• Kel McKeown: Instructional Video – creating new sounds from recut instructional videos
• Hitler Downfall DMCA Takedown – retelling via captioning
• Literal Video Versions – music videos form literal interpretation of lyrics
• Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen (suggested by ds106 student Amber R)
• Odd Kid – lip sync and remix
• Sweded Films – low/no budget remakes of hollywood films
• Weird Al Yankovic Bob parody plus a twist, lyrics are palindromes
• Comic Strips Mashups
• Fabulous Secret Powers (suggested by ds106 student Nathan W)
• The Magic School Bus (Fan Made Movie Trailer) (suggested by ds106 students Haley C)
• Datamasher create interesting combos of data, rendered as visuals
• Overlooked ReMIX remixing video game music
• Make your own Obamaicon and read more about the issue of copyright claims on this well known design
• 30 Classic Music Albums Recreated With Lego

If it has not happened to you while working on your earlier projects, it will likely in this section. A stern email notice from YouTube about your copyright violation. They use a powerful technology known as ContentID that automatically is able to determine if a user’s upload includes video or audio that matches copyrighted content. Sometimes you just get a warning, sometimes it prevents you from embedding media, and in some cases your video might be removed outright.

The first time it happens, you will be shocked. “I’m not trying to make money!” “It’s for education!”

You have a few options if this happen; see the ds106 handbook for suggestions.

Yes, at first it interferes with your work on assignments. But give it more thought in your unit reflection, and try to weigh the balances of being able to “take” video clips and make them into something new (including looking at your own creations and asking how it might change if it is your creativity being used by others).

Photographer Jonathan Worth is bringing ds106 in on what will be a huge project that tries to look at the evolving difference between analog and digital media. Jonathan shared his collection of high quality original portrait photos he did of author Cory Doctorow. These have been made available for you to remix, regenerate, and to make new art, especially in light of the themes and topics of Doctorow’s books. Your assignment will be to make something new of one of these photos, or better yet, remix of someone else’s remix.

We named this project after one of Cory Doctorow’s books, calling this For The Remix! Learn more from Jonathan about the idea behind this project:

https://vimeo.com/64019665

This is a new experiment in public art, and a new way of thinking about digital media. Who could be a better figure than an author who releases all of his published works under creative commons license with an open invitation to remix? We want you to really think wildly in what way you might re-interpret the author’s image in a way that lends itself to being a real artifact, more than an image.

If you need some examples to jump off from, see the gallery of remixes done — it is more than ok (we encourage it) for you to remix someone else’s remix (just give them credit!)

Jonathan was a guest on the the April 16, 2013 ds106 show and shared more about this project.

Your ds106 assignment is to use one or more of the original photos and remix it in a novel, interesting way and perhaps reflecting the themes of Doctorow’s books.

The way you remix is up to you. It could be an alternate form of the image, using the images in an animation, poster, video, a drawing/painting based on it, something 3d made… Note that the original photos are at medium to high resolution (i.e big file size). If you create a digital image, you ought to work at high resolution, but when you save a copy for your web page, you will want to use a tool like GIMP or Photoshop that allows you to change the resolution settings to be 72 dpi and maybe a pixel dimension of 1000px. Do not upload a multi MB image to flickr or your web site!

What you should do then is write this up as a blog post using the tags for the ds106 assignment For The Remix (MashupAssignments, MashupAssignments1020). In addition, leave your link and any other info about your remix as a comment at http://fortheremix.wordpress.com/how.

For this unit, we are going to mess with your brain a little bit by asking you yo remix an existing ds106 assignment.  

Here is how it works… go to the ds106 remixer site at http://remix.ds106.us/ and follow the link for the Remix Generator. When it loads, it will randomly choose one of the hundreds of ds106 assignments; as well it will serve up one of what we call “Remix Cards” which is a certain twist or variation to apply to the assignment.

Your task is to then interpret this as a new assignment — and complete it. Not only that, we want you to look at the examples that were done for the original assignment, and use media from one of these as your starting point.

For example, one combination is combining the Wiggle Spectroscopy (visual assignment) with the Go Emo remix card – so the challenge there would be to create a wiggle visual that features an emo type character. To do this I might download the GIF created at http://floriyann.com/?p=53 and try to edit it to change one of the soccer players into say a more emo type player.

It’s tricky! (And some combinations may not even be possible!) We are not as interested in what fabulous creations you can make, but how you can write up your process and justify your interpretation of the remix assignment. If the remix generator gives you something that does not make sense, just reload it and try another combination. Note that the remixed assignment is not created until you click the big Remix It button. Be sure to save the URL for your remixed assignment.

For this week, write up one Remix Assignment using the Remixer. If there are examples for the original assignment, then aim to use media created from one of those examples (do not forget to link to it in your writeup). Be sure to include all of the tags provided by the Remix generator.

Complete at least 6 stars of assignments from the Mashup Category of the assignment bank. Most of these require video editing and are not trivial to complete.

If you don’t see an assignment you like, and you have an idea for one, submit it. Or remix something else you find among ds106, an assignment, a Daily Create, someone else’s work.

• Link to your “what is remix” blog post, in which you investigate the remix resources and examples provided above, and embed a video or audio recording of you explaining remix to someone else.
• Link to and discussion of your Remix the Vacation with Popcorn assignment (and yes you can say how much you hated Popcorn).
• Link to and reflection on the Remixing a “Post-Photographic Portrait” challenge. We will have a site ready later this week where you can submit your work to be considered to be part of the final art project.
• Link to your blog post for the assignment you did with the ds106 Remix Generator
• Link to and discussion of your 6 stars worth of remix assignments.
• Summary of your work and final reflections on remix/mashup. Note that in your reflection we are looking to see some thought given to what you have learned about Remix/Mashup and where it may apply to other work or acts of creativity you may do or see. Would you classify the examples you looked and/or ones you made as creative? Or write about where their place is in the realm of culture and media. Or speculate on the implication for copyright.