Privet Drive. The ominous fog makes the nighttime even more hoary and mysterious than usual here in suburban Britannia. Out from the shadows of God knows what dimension steps the oldest wizard in the books, the near-dead Dumbledore. He is clearly a powerful beast and walks with dignity despite his age and attire.

This from Brad Neely’s Wizard People, Dear Reader, which has been around for a long time, but I think deserves mention.  You can watch it in chunks on YouTube, but I think the version of the audio at illegal-art.org is superior in every way.  It’s almost trivial to Handbrake the first Harry Potter DVD (or grab the torrent) and replace the audio.  In my view, Brad Neely is a genius, a gifted writer, a visionary.  I won’t go deeply into why WPDR is a work of art, but will point you to a blog post that beautifully summarizes the phenomenon.  I’ll also point you to George Washington (NSFW, in case you were wondering), which holds up to repeated viewings, as does WPDR (if you’re a Harry Potter fan).

How does this relate to ds106?  Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about assignments in the remix/mashup domain, especially as the audio/video portions of the course approach.  There are lots of examples to be found of creative re-contextualizing of old material:  literal videos (e.g., Safety Dance), phonetic subtitles (e.g., Marmor Stein und Eisen by Drafi Deutcher…. Buffalaxed!), death metal animals (e.g., Death Metal Rooster, Death Metal Parrot), YTMND (e.g., Forrest Gump Meets Smokey the Bear or Obi Man Gione), etc.  I’m eager to continue to witness the ongoing creative power of the ds106 juggernaut. Given this thick soup of raw material, I also like the minimal aesthetic of what @scottlo does with just his voice…