Noriginality

The topic of remix has come up here on occasion, and it's one I cover in my Introduction to New Media class at Fordham University.  So it seems only right that I include this Ted Talk video that recently came to my attention, entitled Kirby Ferguson: Embracing the Remix. Here's what the blurb over on YouTube says:

Nothing is original, says Kirby Ferguson, creator of Everything is a Remix. From Bob Dylan to Steve Jobs, he says our most celebrated creators both borrow, steal and transform.

And of course, I hasten to add that there is nothing original about the idea that there is nothing original.  As Walter Ong explains in Orality and Literacy, this realization is relatively recent in literary circles, where it is associated with the concept of intertextuality, that no text is a closed system, but that all texts draw on previous writings through quotation, allusion, or simple influence. 

Moreover, what is generally unacknowledged is the fact that the language itself is borrowed, not the invention of the author.  In this sense, all writing is remix.  And all speech as well.

Through most of the modern era, originality was idealized to the point of worship. And as general semantics scholar Wendell Johnson notes, idealization is the first step of the IFD Disease, a result of treating high level abstractions as if they were concrete phenomena, and failing to adequately define our terms, establish procedures, and set measurable goals.  As the IFD disease progresses, idealization leads to frustration, and ends with demoralization. And in some instances, the elusiveness of originality was seen as reason enough for suicide, at least among poetic types in the Romantic era.

And let's not forget the first lines of the Book of Ecclesiastes (the original Hebrew name of the scroll being Kohelet, which means preacher), attributed to King Solomon.  Here's the poetic rendering from the good old King James Version:

1	The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
2	Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
3	What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
4	One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
5	The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
6	The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
7	All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
8	All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
9	The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
10	Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
11	There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

So life is a remix, whether you believe in the Bible, or in those twisty strands of DNA.  Well, anyway, where was I. Oh yes, the video, right, here it is (and special thanks to Maria Popova and Brain Pickings for bringing this to my attention):

As you might have guessed from the fact that I am including the video here, I am generally sympathetic to Kirby's view.  Of course, there was the case of George Harrison being found guilty of plagiarism, however unintended it may have been.  Here's a YouTube video that does a great job of demonstrating how Harrison's 1970 hit song "My Sweet Lord" really did plagiarize "He's So Fine," a song written by Ronald Mack and recorded by The Chiffons in 1962:

And that's the problem, after all. We don't want to do away with intellectual property rights altogether, or at least I don't think we do.  In fact, as a product of the typographic media environment, they are very much undermined by the electronic media, and especially by the fact that digital copying can be done so easily, and without loss of quality. While the extension of copyright to protect corporate interests is absolutely unwarranted, those interests, and those of all intellectual property holders, individual and conglomerate, are threatened as never before by the new technologies, and there is no easy solution. 

I am far from alone in saying that for many years Lawrence Lessig has been a voice of reason in all this, and his fabulous Ted Talk is included in my previous post, Say Amen to Digital Sampling, along with a very interesting YouTube video that relates to it.  And for something a bit more offbeat, another post from a while back on the topic is McLuhan Redux/Remix.

And yeah, I know, this post wasn't very original at all, was it?  Maybe we need a new word, like maybe...

 Noriginality?

Say Amen to Digital Sampling

This is a video that was first brought to my attention by one of my interactive media students a few years ago, one that I just shared with the Introduction to New Media class that I'm teaching this summer at Fordham University.  We had just been talking about the differences between the concepts of digital and analog, and gotten into the practices of remix and sampling, and this was a perfect illustration.  And while the video was posted on a class blog back in 2008, I realize that I never added it here to Blog Time Passing, so it's well passed the time that I remedy that oversight.

Here's the write-up from the YouTube page where the video is entitled Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop:

This fascinating, brilliant 20-minute video narrates the history of the "Amen Break," a six-second drum sample from the b-side of a chart-topping single from 1969. This sample was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music -- a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures. Nate Harrison's 2004 video is a meditation on the ownership of culture, the nature of art and creativity, and the history of a remarkable music clip.

And here's the video itself:





The video mentions Larry Lessig, and now I realize that I never added Lessig's TED Talk, which I have used many times in my new media classes, to this blog (and here I thought for sure I had!).  It's called Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity, and the summary reads

Larry Lessig, the Net’s most celebrated lawyer, cites John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the "ASCAP cartel" in his argument for reviving our creative culture.

 And Lessig's short bio reads

Harvard professor Larry Lessig is one of our foremost authorities on copyright issues, with a vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.

There's a link over to his Profile Page where the longer bio reads

No expert has brought as much fresh thinking to the field of contemporary copyright law as has Lawrence Lessig. A Harvard professor and founder of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, this fiery believer foresaw the response a threatened content industry would have to digital technology -- and he came to the aid of the citizenry.

As corporate interests have sought to rein in the forces of Napster and YouTube, Lessig has fought back with argument -- take his recent appearance before the U.S. Supreme Court, fighting the extension of copyright protection from 50 to 70 years -- and with solutions: He chairs Creative Commons, a nuanced, free licensing scheme for individual creators.

Lessig possesses a rare combination of lawerly exactitude and impassioned love of the creative impulse. Applying both with equal dedication, he has become a true hero to artists, authors, scientists, coders and opiners everywhere.

And here now, is his outstanding TED Talk video:



And of course including all this here on my blog is fair use, right?  Right? Right...?

Tatooin' Indiana

With triple digit temperatures in the New York City Metropolitan Area, brains are frying in the pan just like eggs on the sidewalk, so all I can muster up is a little bit of an amusement.  We all know that George Lucas and Steve Spielberg are collaborators and otherwise sympatico filmmakers, so this mash up of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark seems altogether appropriate, not to mention well-executed:

It is, of course, quite gratifying to know that Jawas are no friends of the Nazis, and in fact are quite willing to take them on.  As a nomadic people native to the desert planet of Tatooine, they clearly have more in common with the ancient Israelites of the Middle East than they do with the coldhearted denizens of Germania.  I also recall how these creatures were also the roadies for Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps tour (really, I'm not kidding).  They sure do get around, and they sure do have a jones for killing the bad guys!  And these days, it sure does feel like we're out in the desert sun, maybe for a little bit too long...

Causation or Coincidence?

First, thanks to those of you who left comments or sent private messages after my last post, A Minor Medical Mystery.  I really appreciate it,   And I want to quickly acknowledge that this is far from the worst that could happen.  As I understand it, kidney stones are generally not that serious of an illness, the pain is about as painful as pain can get, but that's about it.  And on that score, things have improved, as I haven't experienced the worst of the pain in the last couple of days.

On Thursday morning, I was checked by an urologist, the stone should pass at some point, and I have to drink lots of fluids, and take Tamsulsin, which increases the flow.  With all that, well, you might say a river runs through me!  Oh, and I have painkillers to take, as needed.

But, here's the interesting part, or at least mildly interesting.  In my previous post, I mentioned how the emergency room doctor characterized getting this kidney stone after a colonoscopy as a "bizarre coincidence" and how my family physician was of the same opinion.  But in a comment Michael left on A Minor Medical Mystery, he said, "The stuff that you take to clean out your system can have an impact on the kidneys," and he is quite right, indeed.

Specifically, my urologist said that the preparation for a colonoscopy involves draining the water out of your digestive track, along with washing everything else out), and that dehydration leads to kidney stones.  In fact, he said that this is the kidney stone season (did you know kidney stones have a season?  I didn't), as it's been quite hot in the area lately, up into the 90s, and that results in people getting dehydrated as well.  I haven't been out that much, though, so it's really about the dehydration from the colonoscopy preparation, which no doubt pushed whatever was already forming in my kidney past the tipping point.

Of course, this is not to say that there's any proof that the dehydration from cleaning out my digestive system caused the kidney stone problem I encountered a few hours after my colonoscopy, just that it's a possible explanation for this not so bizarre coincidence, and a reasonable explanation for it.

Part of the problem in pinpointing the connection is that, rather than simple cause and effect, we have cause and side effect, where the side effect occurs in a system other than the one being acted upon.  We also have cause and indirect effect, where there is one or more intermediary effects, in this instance colonoscopy causing preparation (which came before the colonoscopy itself, but was required for the procedure, so a case where the cause precedes the effect), preparation causing dehydration, dehydration causing stone.  The problem of dealing with side effects and indirect effects comes up quite frequently in media ecology, as we try to understand how changes affects systems (e.g., technological innovations affect social systems).

When folks work from a non-scientific approach, they sometimes dismiss the possibility that anything can be a mere coincidence.  In one sense, this fits in with an ecological approach, all things are interconnected.  But in terms of linear cause and effect, that's not the case, which is why post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy.  For those unfamiliar with this, the Latin phrase basically means after this therefore because of this, in other words, because one event came after another, the earlier event must have caused the later one.  Certainly, we expect the cause to precede the event, so temporal sequence is part of the story, but it's not the whole story when it comes to causation, as there must be a direct link between cause and effect (or a series of direct links in a chain of causes and effects).  Assuming that there is a direct link when there isn't is, in general semantics terms, assuming that it's a statement of fact when it's only an inference.

Put another way, researchers will caution that correlation is not causation.  By the way, when there's correlation without any necessary temporal sequence, say when two events happen simultaneously, that sort of thing is associated with another logical fallacy, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, with this therefore because of this.  Again, the fallacy is believing that there is causation involved, or even some direct interrelationship, rather than simply coincidence, that is, simply a temporal relationship of co-incidence.  Or synchronicity.

For example, I said above that "you might say that a river runs through me," and that was meant as a humorous allusion to the book and film title, A River Runs Through It.  I made that little joke before checking to see what new films have been added to the Starz On Demand cable television service for this week, and when I went to check, I kid you not, the 1992 Robert Redford film A River Runs Through It had been added to the line-up!  Did I somehow cause it to happen?  Did some kind of supernatural force line the two events up in time?  Or is it mere coincidence?

Another, different kind of example.  Today, my mother called me up.  She was upset, because she was watching TV, and a commercial came on for one of those law firms saying to come and see them for getting compensated for various medical conditions.  I've seen them before, no doubt you have too.  Well, she saw one that I had never seen or heard of before, one where they included on their list of possible causes for legal action, if your kidneys have been damaged by a colonscopy!  There is at least some element of coincidence in her seeing this commercial at this time (and I reassured her that what I have is a stone, not kidney damage (as least I hope not)).  But apparently there is enough of a causal relationship to merit malpractice suits, and advertising time!  And quite a few hits on a Google search as well!

Proving causal relationships is always problematic, which is why the cigarette companies were able to get away with denying that tobacco causes lung disease for so long.  It finally took a collective cry of BULLSHIT! and some legal and legislative action to get them to own up to it.  On the other hand, there's a psychological syndrome that's not all that uncommon where people genuinely believe themselves responsible for something they couldn't possibly have caused, say someone is looking at a stranger on a city street, and that person gets hit by a car, and the onlooker thinks that he somehow caused that to happen.

Or, on the lighter side, one of the silly amusements we engaged in, as I recall from my misspent youth, was to put on an album that we liked, turn on the television with the sound off, and enjoy the random connections that could be made between the music and the moving images.  I vaguely recall watching figure skating with some rock album on, and the synchronicities had me and my friends in stitches.

One thing such practice that diffused through the social networks a bit after my time was that you could watch the classic film, The Wizard of Oz, with Pink Floyd's trippy album, Dark Side of the Moon playing, and you'd see remarkable coincidences.  My guess is that this didn't really come up until after the movie came out on video, which would have been around 1981 or so.  It probably also followed the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1983, as vinyl would require flipping the album over, whereas the practice is to set the CD on repeat (it plays three times through to the end of the movie).  I think we can consider it an early form of the mash up or remix.

For a rundown on all of the synchronicities that come up, check out The Darkside of Oz - www.angelfire.com.   For a more balanced account, take a look at the Wikipedia entry on The Dark Side of the Rainbow.  And to see for yourself, at least through the first third of the film, take a look below, courtesy of the good people at Google:

My thanks to Chad Calease, who brought this video to my attention via Twitter.  Chad's website, thinfilms, and his thinfilms blog, are worth checking out.

So, what do you think?  For my part, I can see being in college and checking this out with a group of friends, everyone inebriated and finding it absolutely amazing, and hilarious.  Context is everything! But now, watching it on my own, sober and older, it's just, meh.  Cute, but the coincidences seem few and far between, and not all that much.  What really amazes me is that some people actually believe that Pink Floyd deliberately recorded The Dark Side of the Moon, which came out in 1973, long before CDs and home video, to sync up with The Wizard of Oz in this way.  Causation?  Or the Pink Floyd ergo Oz hoc fallacy?

But it's no coincidence that someone came up with the idea of commercializing what can arguably be termed a "folk" practice, that is, a practice that originated from people, as a form of play and creative expression.  And so, we have http://www.syncmovies.com for your convenience!  And not only do they sell a DVD of The Dark Side of Oz sync, but twenty other syncs as well!  All for $189.99!  The perfect gift for any occasion (check it out by clicking here)!  They also have a groovy page of Sync Links you might want to check out, if you're into conducting further research on the subject.

As for me, I'm stuck with the dark side of the kidney stone, drinking lots of liquids, which means that I'm constantly running off to see the wizard, if you know what I mean...

Yesterday's Day After Tomorrow, Doris

I have fond childhood memories of Doris Day singing Que Sera Sera, this mainly from The Doris Day Show which ran on television from 1968-1973.  Although it fell on the wrong side of the generation gap for baby boomers like myself, the song captured a child's point of view and a sense of "go with the flow" that was not entirely at odds with the youth culture of that time.

Actually, the song itself goes back to 1956, having been written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, and originally appearing in Alfred Hitchcock's classic film The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which Doris Day starred opposite James Stewart.  Here are the lyrics:

When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what will I be
Will I be pretty, will I be rich
Here's what she said to me.


Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.


When I was young, I fell in love
I asked my sweetheart what lies ahead
Will we have rainbows, day after day
Here's what my sweetheart said.


Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.


Now I have children of my own
They ask their mother, what will I be
Will I be handsome, will I be rich
I tell them tenderly.


Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

Admittedly, a bit corny, yes, but very sweet nonetheless.  But that's besides the point.  The point being that there's nothing corny or sweet about this mash-up that samples Doris Day's signature song, and is itself entitled Que Sera.  The artist is listed as Wax Tailor, which good old Wikipedia identifies as the alias of "French trip hop/hip hop producer, Jean-Christophe Le Saoût."

The music is okay if you like that sort of thing, certainly interesting and skillful, but what really caught my eye, when one of my MySpace friends shared this video with me, is it's use of edited footage from the restored version of the great silent science fiction film, Metropolis.  I think the production values here are excellent, and well worth a view:

What is truly magnificent about this video is the irony it achieves by juxtaposing Fritz Lang's visions of futures passed, a vision of the future that says more about 1927 Germany that it does about any future period that was or yet may be, with the lines from the song that say, whatever will be will be, and especially, the future's not ours to see. 

The history of the future is not about the future, it is about the present day that was imagining a future to come, and that imagination tells us about what people at that time were hoping for, and what they feared might come to pass, what they valued and what they despised.  Images of the future are not prophecies, they are distorted reflections of the present, that is, of the time in which they originated.

Man, all this time talk gets me all tensed up and out of sync!  So, anyway, it's a cool video, don't you think?  And as an added bonus, here's a little source material for you:

Que sera, sera, the most important thing to know about the future is that we cannot know it, that it is unpredictable and uncontrollable, and it's hubris to think otherwise.  As corny as that song may be, it taught me an important lesson about what it means to be a human being, fallible and limited.  And that is what I call a Day's work!

Television in Time

Here are a couple of videos that friends from the virtual world have brought to my attention.  First is a YouTube remix/mashup video entitled The Golden Age of Video - By Ricardo Autobahn, which is an amazing bit of editing work.  Here it is:



The lyrics are listed on the YouTube page, so here they are:

1,2,1,2,3,4
We accept her, one of us, we accept her, one of us!
Gooble gobble gooble gobble!
We accept her, we accept her!
We accept her, one of us, we accept her, one of us!
Gooble gobble gooble gobble!
We accept her, we accept her!

(We-we) we came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
I was testing you - and you passed,
Dental plan! Lisa needs braces,
Be required to fart on a regular basis,
I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse,
Channel 13 - Eyewitness news!
Robocop, who is he?
Dead or alive you're coming with me.

In a hurry to be fed, beady eyes and big blue head.

I'm telling the truth Doc, you gotta believe me,
Why does everything I whip leave me?
My beautiful chocolate! Candy is dandy,
Fava beans and a nice Chianti,
You can count on Slippery Pete,
Suicide will be nice and neat!
I didn't build the Panama canal,
Open the pod bay doors please, HAL,

These aren't the droids you're looking for,
These aren't the droids we're looking for,
I am not a number I am a free man!
Rosebud.
To The Idiotmobile!
Right away Michael,
I-I-I-I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.

We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
You don't understand I coulda had class,
Round and tasty on a bun,
Ooh Zippy look what you've done!
Finally! Cast off those lines!
No, I've been nervous lots of times,
Red Rum! What's the matter honey?
Just robbed Boss Hogg all of his money!

We came, saw, we kicked it's ass,
Writing checks your body can't cash,
I was elected to lead, not read,
I feel the need - the need for speed,
Watch out for snakes, a good man's loafer,
HQ - my hat looks like a muffin - over,
My god it's full of stars,
There was no driver in the car..

In the car (repeat)

Well you see I'm in hot pursuit!

There are only two things I love in this world - everybody and television!
#The Simpsons
#Run With Us!
Ugh - you must be shrooming,
Wait for me Moomin!
Cross live to meet the host of that show, Meat Boy,
I want to go to there.

We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
An oil tycoon - like a.. moustache,
Nice beaver! I just had it stuffed,
I don't give a shit, close enough,
Where's me washboard? I'll get me coat,
Y-y-y-you're gonna need a bigger boat,
What'd she say? I think she bought it,
Suck it monkeys! I'm goin' corporate!
C'mon let's take a drive! A drive?
Number 5 is alive!
It's only a laugh, no harm done,
Pickles, french fries, yum yum yum,
Bueller, Bueller, Bueller,
It's 2 degrees cooler,
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long,
Six words in the whole song.

We-we-we accept her, one of us, we accept her, one of us!
Gooble gobble gooble gobble!
We accept her, we accept her!
You are number 6 5 4 3 2
I am not a number, I am a free man

We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
Give me my 20,000 in cash,
We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
I think you woke up the dead with that blast
We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
I think fast, I talk fast,
We came, we saw, we kicked it's ass,
Lois, this is not my Batman glass,

And now this:  an episode from the TV series, The Flash,  http://www.dailymotion.com about the silver age superhero of the same name (secret identity is Barry Allen, but don't tell anyone).   This comes to us from DailyMotion.com, the title is The Flash: Ghost In The Machine (Ep. 108), and the write-up is as follows:

A demented electronics genius, who once tried to blackmail the city, reappears after 35 years only to face the masked crime fighter who defeated him in 1955 and a new crime fighter -- the Flash (JOHN WESLEY SHIPP) .

Note that this is the full episode, which is about fifty minutes long, which may be more time than you're wiling to spend, but at least check out the cool retro beginning, before the bad guy travels to the future, the program's present, our past (1990 that is) via suspended animation.

The Flash: Ghost In The Machine (Ep. 108)
Uploaded by The_WB. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

Television is a fascinating medium, it really is a means to become unstuck in time, as Vonnegut described it in Slaughterhouse-5.   It's a time machine, but one that's discontinuous and nonlinear.  And so it goes...

McLuhan Redux/Remix

So, I recently heard from Jamie O'Neil, an assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. Canisius is a Jesuit school, like my own Fordham University--in traditional parlance, we are sister schools. And Jamie is a media ecologist who was prompted to contact me by my friend, sister media ecologist, and fellow Media Ecology Association board member Ellen Rose from the University of New Brunswick. That's in Canada, you know...

So, Jamie is also a performance artist, and he has an alias, Kurt Weibers, or I guess you could call it a stage name, pseudonym, or what have you. Here's the deal, in his own words:

Jamie O'Neil is a video/performance artist, writer and teacher. In 2002, he created the virtual identity of Kurt Weibers for usage online, in videos and live performance seminars. Kurt Weibers is the spokesman for Global Point Strategies, which developed Navel Software for organizational change, as well as numerous motivational presentations on topics ranging from creativity, listening, time management and synchronicity, to quantitative research methods for understanding culture. Kurt Weibers works as a reporter, business consultant in Norway and a DJ / VJ (on the side) the latter role being the reason for his involvement in the McLuhan Remix project.

This write-up is taken from his McLuhan Remix website, which is worth a look. It includes some explanation of the remix or mash-up phenomenon, and its relationship to Marshall McLuhan, as well as a short video essay entitled, naturally enough, McLuhan Remix, which is made up of three YouTube videos. You can play them continuously on his McLuhan Remix page, but I will also embed them here for your convenience, dear reader:

McLuhan Remix: Prologue 1/3

McLuhan Remix: The Medium is the Mix 2/3

McLuhan Remix: Epilogue 3/3

There's other interesting material on kurtweibers's Channel on YouTube, which you can explore if you care to.

The bottom line, for me, is not so much that McLuhan was prescient, but simply that he was identifying the characteristics of electricity, electrical technology, and the electronic media environment, much as Lewis Mumford had done before him. Most of what is being hailed as new and unprecedented about contemporary digital technology is, in fact, characteristic of electric technology in general, and was recognized by media ecologists like Mumford and McLuhan over the course of the 20th century. That is why McLuhan is more relevant than ever today, as we continue to electrify just about everything we can. You might say that what we are doing is in one sense expanding the electronic media environment, but in another filling it in or filling it out, or to put it another way, coloring in between the power lines. Remixed drinks, anyone?