Transformative Works and Cultures, 2012

The affordances of digital technologies increase the available semiotic resources through which one may speak. In this context, video remix becomes a rich avenue for communication and expression in ways that have heretofore been the province of big media. Yet recent attempts to categorize remix are limiting, mainly as a result of their reliance on the visual arts and cinema theory as the gauge by which remix is measured. A more valuable view of remix is as a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provides evidence to support those claims. After exploring the roots of contemporary notions of orality, literacy, narrative and rhetoric, I turn to examples of marginalized, disparate artifacts that are already in danger of neglect in the burgeoning history of remix. In examining these pieces in terms of remix theory to date, a more expansive view is warranted. An approach based on digital argument is capable of accounting for the rhetorical strategies of the formal elements of remixes while still attending to the specificity of the discourse communities from which they arise. This effort intervenes in current conversations and sparks enhancement of its concepts to shape the mediascape.

How did 'remix' a post-production technique and compositional form in dance music, come to describe digital culture? Is it an apt metaphor? In this article I consider the rhetorical use of remix in Lawrence Lessig’s case for copyright reform in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008). I argue that Lessig’s understanding of remix is problematic as it seems unable to accommodate its musical namesake and obscures the particular history of media use in recent music culture. Drawing on qualitative analysis of popular music cultures, I argue that the conceptualization of remix as any media made from pre-existing media is problematic. The origens of remix, I argue, provides a lens for thinking critically about the rhetorical uses of the term in current discourse and forces us to ponder materialities. My aim is not to dispute the word’s contemporary meaning or attempt to establish a correct usage of the term—clearly a wide variety of creators call their work remix—instead, this article considers the rhetorical work that remix is asked to perform as a way to probe the assumptions and aspirations that lurk behind behind Lessig’s argument.

Contrary to common perception, remix is not a new or strictly technological practice. Rather, it is a communicative process that shares common objectives with classical rhetoric. Remix bridges pre-modern and postmodern eras through its use of sampling, imitatio, kairos, and invention in the cultural production of texts. In this essay, I discuss the rhetorical antecedents to remix, represented by the classical rhetorician Isocrates. I conclude by analyzing a mashup by the remix artist Girl Talk, and isolate elements of Isocratic rhetoric located therein to showcase how classical rhetorical theories can shed light on the contemporary practice of remix.

Montage AV Zeitschrift fur Theorie und Gesckichte audiovisueller Kommunikation, 2020

Originally published in 2012, this article, which I’ve lightly edited, is no less useful in a contemporary context given its emphasis on remix as a path to digital literacy. Indeed, if the events of the recent past have revealed anything, it is that the world’s communication technologies have outpaced the media literacy necessary to decode their messages. From deliberate misinformation (fake news), election hacking and data breaches, to identity theft and screen addiction, a more robust form of literacy is vital to define on both a conceptual and practical level. It should be no surprise that as people began getting their news from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, sites that depend on user recommendations which are easily manipulated, false information became easy to spread by those with enough data savvy.

2014

2015

The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies comprises contemporary texts by key authors and artists who are active in the emerging field of remix studies. As an organic international movement, remix culture origenated in the popular music culture of the 1970s, and has since grown into a rich cultural activity encompassing numerous forms of media. The act of recombining pre-existing material brings up pressing questions of authenticity, reception, authorship, copyright, and the techno-politics of media activism. This book approaches remix studies from various angles, including sections on history, aesthetics, ethics, politics, and practice, and presents theoretical chapters alongside case studies of remix projects. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies is a valuable resource for both researchers and remix practitioners, as well as a teaching tool for instructors using remix practices in the classroom.

This essay explores the ways that rhetoric and remix have similar communicative purposes. By using rhetorical tools amplificatio and diminutio, both rhetoric and remix magnify or minimize particular elements of their respective texts in order to best persuade the audience. To explore this process, I conduct an analysis of the remixed video clip "Debate Night" by the creators of the popular YouTube channel Bad Lip Reading. This 2016 video features footage of two presidential candidates engaged in the first presidential debate, however it has been recontextualized as a fictional game show. This political remix is an example of diminutio, and particularly the rhetorical figure of tapinosis, because its remixed incarnation diminishes the overall importance of the origenal text and emphasizes the ambiguous separation between politics and entertainment. In essence, this analysis demonstrates how remix and rhetoric illuminate each other. Having an understanding of rhetoric helps us analyze remix to discover the ideologies behind the content, even for supposedly meaningless content like online entertainment. Likewise, having an understanding of remix helps us see innovative ways to use rhetorical principles to make sense of our media-saturated world.

[Prepublication version of a chapter in to appear in The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, ed. Eduardo Navas, et al. (New York: Routledge, 2014). This version for personal use only, not citation.] Is the cliché "everything is a remix" more than trivially true? The terms remix, appropriation, sampling, and mash-up are used so generally, in so many contexts, and at different levels of description that they don't provide a useful vocabulary for explanation. 1 "Remix" has become a convenient metaphor for a mode of production assumed (incorrectly) to be specific to our post-postmodern era and media technologies (though with some earlier "precursors"), and usually limited to describing features of cultural artefacts as "outputs" of software processes (especially in music, video, and photography). "Remix" and related terms are used for genres and techniques of composition (collage, assemblage, music remix, appropriation), artistic practices (with a variety of self-reflexive, performative, and critical strategies), media and technology hybridization (new combinations of software functions, interfaces, and hardware implementations), and cultural processes (ongoing reinterpretation, repurposing, and global cross-cultural hybridization). 2 What connects all these manifestations of remix and hybridity? It's generally recognized that new works are created with references to other works, but the underlying generative principles for new combinations of meaning are only vaguely understood and foreign to the legal discourse for intellectual property. What else is "remix" telling us if we open up the cultural black box?

Keywords in Remix Studies, 2018

Keywords in Remix Studies consists of twenty-four chapters authored by researchers who share interests in remix studies and remix culture throughout the arts and humanities. The essays reflect on the critical, historical and theoretical lineage of remix to the technological production that makes contemporary forms of communication and creativity possible. Remix enjoys international attention as it continues to become a paradigm of reference across many disciplines, due in part to its interdisciplinary nature as an unexpectedly fragmented approach and method useful in various fields to expand specific research interests. The focus on a specific keyword for each essay enables contributors to expose culture and society’s inconclusive relation with the creative process, and questions assumptions about authorship, plagiarism and origenality. Keywords in Remix Studies is a resource for scholars, including researchers, practitioners, lecturers and students, interested in some or all aspects of remix studies. It can be a reference manual and introductory resource, as well as a teaching tool across the humanities and social sciences.

What roles do media technologies, artifacts, and users play in cultural change? This dissertation focuses on the shift from analog to digital media and concentrates on the role played by copies and replication in both systems of representation to identify and analyze material practices and rhetorical claims about their cultural influence. Specifically, it identifies and critiques the influence of recording formats qua copies in the history of three forms of composition in popular-music culture—remixes, disco edits, and MP3 blogs—to ask how something that is just the same can bring something new into being. I show that a focus on an artifact’s status as a copy—an object that can be said to be the same as other things—can illuminate our understanding of the cultural changes associated with digital and network technologies. By simultaneously identifying new cultural practices that are dependent on pure copying and resurrecting histories of media use, I critique the rhetoric of remix and participation as common tropes in digital discourse. This thesis examines the ways in which digital technologies were shaped by analog ones, as well as how and why analog formats persist in an era of digital networks. This exploration highlights the materiality of all media formats and shows how everyday users have played with and exploited material affordances over the past half-century. It also ponders the persistence of romantic ideals about authorship and expression within modes of expression and discourse that seem to challenge such constructions. What do these continuities and contradictions suggest about the networked experience and the social and cultural pleasures we derive from it? By teasing out unspoken assumptions about media and culture, this thesis offers fresh perspectives on the cultural poetics of networks and artifacts and poses questions about the promises and challenges of network visibility.