Just saw the film, Rip! A Remix Manifesto, last weekend. The movie explores new creative modes of music-making (and other art forms) enabled by present day technologies and cultural interests. It also uses this path into the creative world to cover most of the present day struggles with copyright and notions of ownership of “intellectual property.”
Although Rip addresses a wide-range of topics and ground, one of the points it drives home better than anything is the notion of remixing and mashups as art-form (or at least our modern conception of these methods). It’s important to understand this newish sort of muscial creativity is composition (though now it’s increasingly possible to perform this way as well).
UnKindness Of Ravens started this way. We labeled our method of composition, “exposition” because our goal was to find the right elements of sounds and then structure them in such a way that they’d expose the latent music ready to be heard. UKOR happens to also create of its sounds first, so we initiate our palette, but the compositional process differs little from people that operate on the remix/mashup principles the movie highlights so well with the music-making of Girl Talk. Groups or people creating music with the remix/mashup process simply start with a different palette–one composed of sound from other sources.
The movie presented the issues in a passionate way that will capture the imaginations of many people who otherwise wouldn’t care about the misguided laws of present day “intellectual property” and their destructive force on creativity.
RiP! A Remix Manifesto , Brett Gaylor, provided by the National Film Board of Canada
“RiP: A remix manifesto is an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.”
Filmmaker Brett Gaylor encourages remixes of the film too.