Week 2 Story

In class this week we watched a short series called “Everything is a Remix” that essentially reminded us that “anybody can remix anything”. Remixing brings together the basic elements and steps of creativity – Copy, Transform and Combine. When I think of the word remix, I think of the way an original piece has been created into something completely different but using something that already exists as a starting point.

One of my favourite examples of a “remix” is series of songs that I have listened to since they were first released in 2008. Every year around New Years Eve, Youtube “DJ”, DJ Earworm releases a mashup/remix song of the top 25 songs of that year, using lyrics and beats of different songs and combining them into one.  Below is his most famous one, the 2009 “Blame it on the Pop”.

A question was posed to us this week – What is the point of coming up with new stories if everything has been done before? I think in relation to remixing, this question becomes almost rhetorical. There is no need to create new content when in fact we can work with content that already exists to create something new. Perhaps, “originality” is best expressed by working with something that already exists and making something different from it, rather than stretching to invent something totally new. Nowadays it could be fair to say that really nobody starts out with an “original” idea, we are all just making variations of something that already exists, whether we are aware of those things existing or not.