R/W Culture, cont’d.

After reading Lessig and watching Rip!, I’m definitely thinking about some of my favorite examples of remix art in a different light.  These two are both examples that occurred to me in the past week…sort of old favorites that I’ve remembered and I think about in a new light now.

This first one is by an artist/YouTube user named “Kutiman”, who essentially makes mashups of musical YouTube videos that he’s found.  I think it’s interesting that his creativity exists entirely within the circle of YouTube — he finds videos people have uploaded to the site, mashes them up, and then posts them on his own YouTube account.  Plus, this song, called “I’m New” is just masterfully done; it’s a great song in itself, discounting the fact that it’s a mashup.  His songs don’t have that ‘aha!’ moment of musical recognition a la Girl Talk, because you’ve probably never watched any of the videos before, but you can still admire the craft of it.  Here’s the vid:

[youtube EsBfj6khrG4]

Also, HERE is his own weird site, which has all his songs listed in a playlist, plus a cool function where you can see the “credits” for his songs and link to all their original youtube videos.

This second example is very near and dear to my heart.  It’s called “in bflat” and it’s “a collaborative music/spoken word project”.  Here’s how the guy came up with the idea:

“I was making a site with embedded YouTube videos, when I realized that YouTube doesn’t stop the user from running more than one video at a time. I was curious to see if there was a musical way to explore that concept, so I recorded some instrumental videos and eventually came up with In Bb v1.”

Then, for version 2, he sent out some emails and posted an open call for submissions on the site, with a few instructions:

-“Sing or play an instrument, in Bb major. Simple, floating textures work best, with no tempo or groove. Leave lots of silence between phrases.  Total length should be between 1-2 minutes.”

He selected 20 of the best ones and compiled them into that page that I linked to above.  Basically, you can mix and match the videos, playing as many or as few at a time as you want, and because they are tempoless and in the same key, they all sound good together.  In fact, they sound downright magical together.  And that’s why I find this to be one of the more inspiring examples of collaborative internet creativity I’ve ever seen.  That something like this is possible never occurred to me, and it alerts me to the fact that there’s tons of undiscovered possibilities for stuff like this that the internet provides if people think about things a little differently.  It may take a little while to load, but I highly recommend checking in bflat out.

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