Where do we get ideas? Is imitation a part of the creative process? This week we’ll look at where ideas come from, and how they get re-used, recycled, copied and remixed.
There is some historical tension between creators of existing works and those creating new works. A band puts out a song on an album in the 60’s, which gets sampled and re-fashioned into a new song that becomes a hit for someone else in 2015. A movie is created based on someone else’s story. And so on.
Lawsuits often result, because we tend to think that everything must be owned by someone. But mixed into our world of copyright law are two other principles, fair use and public domain, which are equally important.
Copyright was designed to be a temporary exclusive right to the creator of a work, and when the copyright period ends, the work is transferred into the public domain. This is to give incentive, temporarily, to the originator of a work to create it. Once the period of time ends, that work is set free so that society as a whole can make use of it. innovate, and progress.
Copyright law is often abused, and the length of time allowed by copyright keeps getting extended due to the bottomless pit of corporate lawyers making sure that Mickey Mouse is never set free, despite Walt Disney being aware of his limited period of copyright control when he released films like Steamboat Willie.
But Mickey wasn’t really anything new. He was a remixed version of his former self – Oswald the Rabbit. Which was a copy of Krazy Kat.
Walt Disney copied others. There is nothing wrong with this, and that’s the point of this week’s exploration. He did it, and so should we.
Kirby Ferguson’s takes a look at the world of copying and remixing in his documentary Everything Is A Remix. This was originally a series of four short online films, but has been remixed into a single film, easy to watch, that makes the argument that all creative works, to some degree, are copies, improvements, remixes, and re-tellings of other works that came before.
It’s a good lesson that creative works don’t simply appear out of nowhere. They have roots, in other creative works.
Everything is a Remix Remastered (2015 HD) from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.
If you are following along with this series, we’re building up our creativity toolbox. Lynda Barry taught us to express ourselves. Dali suggested we be ourselves. And Kirby Ferguson suggests we look at what has come before us to create entirely new works.
This weekend, take a moment and copy something, and see how you transform it in the process.
