Remix Culture!

Hi Guys! It was great meeting everyone tonight! I love the Hiking / Land Art project you all dreamt up tonight -- so cool -- we've never done that before! Lets be sure to get you guys collaborating on a nice location that's not too strenuous so everyone can do it, and that has something interesting for us to interact / create with -- I'll try to show you some Earth & Land Art soon so you can start thinking about some interesting locations...

Anyway, as I mentioned, tonight was a "mini-lecture" on Remix Culture and other ideas. Here are those 3 videos I showed:

Above is the Grand Rapids Lip Dub. It's a crazy amazing piece featuring SO many people. Is it a "new" idea? Is it art breaking bounds and discovering new ideas? Maybe... Maybe not... but it is a celebration of culture... of a place and some of the people who make up that community.

Below is the video by Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute. In it he makes a case that our aggressive copyright policy, while "supporting" creativity by giving financial incentive to the creator, also denies the generative and collaborative nature of creativity by criminalizing the remix activities of many young people. The guy you see speaking near the beginning of Sanchez video is Lawrence Lessig of the Berkman Center. Lessig is a major thinker on shared culture and creativity in the 21st century.

Sanchez talks about the Brooklyn and San Francisco Brat Pack / Lisztomania videos, and in class I mentioned that dozens of cities have now used this "cultural template" or "meme" to create their own version of this music video. The last video I showed was the Taipei version:

So that's a little about tonight's ideas. As I type this I see the bright orange PUBLISH POST button just underneath, and if you recall I also talked about how that button doesn't only mean "Turn in my Homework" but it is also the dream of so many people in America and across the globe yearning to build a deeper, more inclusive culture. You might think about that when you hit that button, and you might like to say a bit about it in your blog post for this week.

If you have any questions, just ask them in a "Comment" to this blog post.

And when you create your blog, give me the link to it in a comment to this post.

Have a great week... LMK if you need anything... and I'll see you next Tuesday!