Just saw the film, Rip, 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 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.

This was published here on Tuesday, 17 March 2009 at 21:23 and is filed under News. You may leave a response, or trackback from your own site.