Lev Manovich, “What comes after remix?”

In this article, Manovich draws a historical parallel between the remix culture and other ways of reusing works from other people. The title of the article is misleading and Manovich raises essential questions that he does not answer. Yet he discusses important issues about the meaning and history of remix culture.

Manovich differentiates sampling from remixing in the very beginning of his article. Sampling has occurred throughout the whole history of humankind and is often a component of remixing. The art of remix, on the other hand, does not restrict to the reutilization of materials. It changes the original work and it is ultimately a different, original piece. This broad understanding explains, for instance, why people started using the term “remix” in the turn of the 21st century for other types of art, besides sound/music.

It is curious, however, that copyright restrictions of a remix usually applied to these other works (literature, software, visual projects) do not apply to sonic works. “While in the realm of commercial music remixing is officially accepted, in other cultural areas it is seen as violating the copyright and therefore as stealing. So while filmmakers, visual artists, photographers, architects and Web designers routinely remix already existing works, this is not openly admitted, and no proper terms equivalent to remixing in music exist to describe these practices [Manovich].” Similarly to the author, I cannot think of much conclusive explanations for this phenomena, but I think it speaks to the fact that humans are predominantly visual beings. Our society is very imagery, so we tend to weigh more importance to the preservation of visual works. Thus, in the eyes of our society, remixing a painting has more serious implications than remixing a song.