Did you know every face we see in our dreams is one we’ve seen before? Our brains are incapable of creating a new face while were dreaming so it uses the faces of our friends, people we’ve seen on tv, people we’ve seen on the street.

I guess its true, there is no such thing as an original idea.

This weeks lectorial focussed on the idea of remixes, primarily in the music industry but also featured some examples of recontextualised art, such as the famous camels soup cans pop art.

The struggle between legal copyrights and creativity is not one I’ve considered before this course began but it is becoming clear to me that it is one of the major factors that will be present throughout my media career. It began when we learned about the copyrights placed on music and videos so that they cannot be incorporated into my projects, and now we have learnt that there is a continuous struggle between remix artists and copyright laws.

I like remixes. I have a problem when it comes to music in that I fall completely in love with a song, play it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and… you get the drift. By that point I’m sick of it and need a cool down period of at least a couple of months before i can listen to the song again, which is a shame because i do love the song. Remixes are slightly different enough so that I can listen to and enjoy the song without hating it.

My brother listens to a lot of club remixes, which I am then forced to listen to since he drives me around. There’s a few I’ve heard that take old songs from when I was growing up and put them to a club beat, which lets people dance to them. For people of my generation this is a way of bringing their youth into their present.

The focus of our lecture was the way remixes can change the meaning of things. Its similar to the theory presented in a previous lecture that putting the same mans face next to different shots of food, a woman or a coffin can change the audiences perception of his emotions. Remixes can work in the same way. An example springs to mind of the soundtrack for ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’, which included a remixed version of ‘The Hanging Tree’, a poignant and moving song which represented the rebellion and anger of the citizens of the film as they took action against their oppressive government. And the producers re-released it as a peppy dance hit. Many comments were made about how thats exactly what the Capitol would have done since it takes away from the emotional message of the song. Not to say that dance songs with strong beats can’t in their own way have a strong message.

I’ll end this with a nifty website I found which I was reminded of during this weeks lecture. Infinite Jukebox identifies similar beats in your favourite songs and jumps between them, letting you loop a song forever without awkward pauses. Enjoy!