Everything is a Remix Part 4 update
Time for the classic good news-bad news combo. The good news is that Everything is a Remix Part 4 looks really good. In many ways, I think it's the best thing I've done. The bad news is – of course – that it's behind schedule, and honestly, I'm not even sure how far behind it is. My guess right now is that it will be out in mid-January. Visit here again for further updates or follow me on Twitter. Or best of all, sign-up for the mailing list and you'll be notified the moment the video drops.
Couple more items:
- I'm running a holiday special on Everything is a Remix merchandise: $5 off on t-shirts and posters. There are only 7 shirts and 13 posters remaining and once they're gone they're gone. Order now to make sure you get them for Christmas.
- I'll be at SXSW in March and in the UK for an extended stay in the summer.
- Everything is a Remix Part 4 will likely be premiered at a live event here in Brooklyn.
Giving away €5 (about 7 bucks) in Flattr credits
Update: This offer is now over.
The fine folks over at Flattr have offered me €5 (about 7 bucks) in Flattr credits to give to 100 people. (If you don't know what Flattr is, watch the short video above.) You have to be a new user to qualify.
To get your free credits, email me at kirby at everythingisaremix.info with the subject line, "Flattr". The first 100 respondents win. The guys at Flatter will then contact you with a promo code to use during your sign-up.
Once you've got some credits, here's some recommendations on folks to flattr:
Or you can flattr fellow Everything is a Remix fans like Mia, Julien, Douglas, Becka and Andrew.
And of course, you can always flattr Everything is a Remix.
If you enjoy Flattr, be sure to keep using it. It's a simple way to support online creators and I'd like to see it spread.
Even if you don't have any interest in Flattr, it's Pay a Blogger Day, so take a moment to donate any amount you can to someone whose work you find valuable.
Protect IP Act Breaks the Internet
When I found out Fight for the Future needed help with their campaign against a new bill called PROTECT-IP, I had to take a little time away from Everything is a Remix Part 4 and produce the video above. PROTECT-IP is the latest piece of legislation aiming to chip away at your online rights in the name of protecting the entertainment industry's business model. It's legislation that won't work, will give us yet more lawsuits, and will make the net worse.
Whether you lean right and hate business regulation, lean left and hate censorship, or lean neither way but hate useless legislation, PROTECT-IP is a bill everyone should oppose. I encourage you to head over to Fight For the Future and contact congress.
Everything is a Remix: The Matrix
A special treat to tide you over until Part 4 arrives (it's running late): Rob G. Wilson made this video examining the origins of The Matrix. It was written by Cynthia Closkey and most of the comparisons were crowdsourced by Everything is a Remix fans.
Films
0:27 - Fist of Legend (1994) 0:38 - Tai-Chi Master (Twin Dragons) (1993) 0:44 - Fist of Legend (1994) 0:48 - Tai-Chi Master (Twin Dragons) (1993) 0:53 - Drunken Master (1978) 1:02 - Fist of Legend (1994) 1:09 - The Killer (1989) 1:19 - Fist of Legend (1994) 1:21 - Iron Monkey (1993) 1:31 - Once Upon A Time In China (1991) 1:36 - Fist of Legend (1994) 1:41 - Tai-Chi Master (Twin Dragons) (1993) 1:45 - Philip K. Dick Speech (1977) 2:18 - Strange Days (1995) 2:24 - Akira (1988) 2:30 - Total Recall (1990) 3:24 - Alice In Wonderland (1951) 3:42 - The Killer (1989) 3:53 - A Better Tomorrow (1986) 4:05 - Ghost In The Shell (1995) 4:32 - Akira (1998) 4:39 - Koyannisqatsi (1982) 4:49 - Dr. Who: The Deadly Assassin (1976) 5:10 - Ghost In The Shell (1995)
Music
(All sourced from The Matrix Soundtrack) 0:20 - Rob Dougan - Clubbed To Death (Kurayamino Variation) 1:44 - Hive - Ultrasonic Sound 2:30 - Lunatic Calm - Leave You Far Behind (Lunatics Roller Coaster Mix) 3:38 - Propellerheads - Spybreak 4:39 - Rob Dougan - Clubbed To Death (Kurayamino Variation)
Shop now open!
Update 25-02-2012: Shop is sold out but I'll have new stuff in the next month or two!
The Everything is a Remix shop is now open for US customers. I'm offering $5 off on posters and t-shirts until October 15th. In exchange I'd appreciate your patience. I've never operated a shop before so there's bound to be a few snags here and there. If you experience any bugs with your order, just drop me a line at orders@everythingisaremix.info and I'll straighten it out.
August 2011 status update
Hi everybody. Research for Part 4 is now complete and I'm in a very busy writing phase. I hope to have a first draft in about a week. My tentative launch date for Part 4 is October 25th.
A few assorted bits of news...
If you'd like to see me and Austin Kleon at SXSW 2012, please take a moment to vote for our panel.
I'll be in Sweden at Media Evolution this week and at the Cusp Conference September 28th and 29th.
For those who emailed about partnerships and collaborations, I've been on the road for a while and haven't started to sort out responses. I'll get to those in September, but please note that I'll only be getting in touch with a select group. A lot of people have emailed, so that means most of you unfortunately won't hear back from me. I very much appreciate everyone's interest and I truly wish I could just use everyone.
See you in September, Kirby
New remix-ready versions, Part 3 subtitled
I've uploaded an MKV file of Part 3 with subtitles, as well as versions of all the videos without music and without voice-over. Right-click and choose "Save Link as..." to download to your computer. Everything is a Remix Part 1 MKV with Subtitles Everything is a Remix Part 1 (no music) Everything is a Remix Part 1 (no voice-over)
Everything is a Remix Part 2 MKV with Subtitles Everything is a Remix Part 2 (no music) Everything is a Remix Part 2 (no voice-over)
Everything is a Remix Part 3 MKV with Subtitles Everything is a Remix Part 3 (no music) Everything is a Remix Part 3 (no voice-over)
Tell me about the best remixes
What are the best remixes of the past few years? They can be music, video, text, commercial, noncommercial, whatever. Please comment below. Thanks!
Everything is a Remix Part 3
If you enjoy this video and would like to support the series, please take a moment to donate.
Music Used in This Episode, Transcript, References, Subtitles and Samples You can also view this video on YouTube
If you notice any errors in this video, I would appreciate if you could leave a comment below.
Nelson and Valdez of Wreck and Salvage each produced videos inspired by Part 3. Check 'em out: Nelson, Valdez
Everything is a Remix Part 3 Transcript
Click here to watch Everything is a Remix Part 3. The act of creation is surrounded by a fog of myths. Myths that creativity comes via inspiration. That original creations break the mold, that they’re the products of geniuses, and appear as quickly as electricity can heat a filament. But creativity isn’t magic: it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.
And the soil from which we grow our creations is something we scorn and misunderstand, even though it gives us so much… and that's copying. Put simply, copying is how we learn. We can’t introduce anything new until we’re fluent in the language of our domain, and we do that through emulation.
For instance, all artists spend their formative years producing derivative work.
Bob Dylan’s first album contained eleven cover songs.
Richard Pryor began his stand-up career doing a not-very-good imitation of Bill Cosby.
And Hunter S. Thompson re-typed The Great Gatsby just to get the feel of writing a great novel.
Nobody starts out original. We need copying to build a foundation of knowledge and understanding. And after that... things can get interesting.
After we’ve grounded ourselves in the fundamentals through copying, it’s then possible to create something new through transformation. Taking an idea and creating variations. This is time-consuming tinkering but it can eventually produce a breakthrough.
James Watt created a major improvement to the steam engine because he was assigned to repair a Thomas Newcomen steam engine. He then spent twelve years developing his version.
Christopher Latham Sholes’ modeled his typewriter keyboard on a piano. This design slowly evolved over five years into the QWERTY layout we still use today.
And Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — his first patent was “Improvement in Electric Lamps“ — but he did produce the first commercially viable bulb... after trying 6,000 different materials for the filament.
These are all major advances, but they’re not original ideas so much as tipping points in a continuous line of invention by many different people.
But the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined. By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of history's biggest breakthroughs.
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press was invented around 1440, but almost all its components had been around for centuries.
Henry Ford and The Ford Motor Company didn’t invent the assembly line, interchangeable parts or even the automobile itself. But they combined all these elements in 1908 to produce the the first mass market car, the Model T.
And the Internet slowly grew over several decades as networks and protocols merged. It finally hit critical mass in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee added the World Wide Web.
These are the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform, and combine. And the perfect illustration of all these at work is the story of the devices we’re using right now. So let’s travel back to the dawn of the personal computer revolution and look at the company that started it all… Xerox.
Xerox invented the modern personal computer in the early seventies. The Alto was a mouse-driven system with a graphical user interface. Bear in mind that a popular personal computer of this era was operated with switches, and if you flipped them in the right order, you got to see blinking lights. The Alto was way ahead of its time. Eventually Apple got a load of the Alto, and later released not one but two computers with graphical interfaces, the Lisa and its more successful follow-up, The Macintosh.
The Alto was never a commercial product, but Xerox did release a system based on it in 1981, the Star 8010, two years before The Lisa, three years before the Mac. It was the Star and the Alto that served as the foundation for the Macintosh.
The Xerox Star used a desktop metaphor with icons for documents and folders. It had a pointer, scroll bars, and pop-up menus. These were huge innovations and the Mac copied every one of them. But it was the first combination it incorporated that set the Mac on a path towards long-term success.
Apple aimed to merge the computer with the household appliance. The Mac was to be a simple device like a TV or a stereo. This was unlike the Star, which was intended for professional use, and vastly different from the cumbersome command-based systems that dominated the era. The Mac was for the home and this produced a cascade of transformations.
Firstly, Apple removed one of the buttons on the mouse to make its novel pointing device less confusing. Then they added the double-click for opening files. The Star used a separate key to open files. The Mac also let you drag icons around and move and resize windows. The Star didn’t have drag-and-drop — you moved and copied files by selecting an icon, pressing a key, then clicking a location. And you resized windows with a menu. The Star and the Alto both featured pop-up menus, but because the location of these would move around the screen, the user had to continually re-orient. The Mac introduced the menu bar, which stayed in the same place no matter what you were doing. And the Mac added the trash can to make deleting files more intuitive and less nerve-wracking.
And lastly, through compromise and clever engineering Apple managed to pare down the Mac’s price to $2,500. Still pretty expensive but much cheaper than the $10,000 Lisa or the $17,000 Star.
But what started it all was the graphical interface merged with the idea of the computer as household appliance. The Mac is a demonstration of the explosive potential of combinations. The Star and the Alto, on the other hand, are the products of years of elite research and development. They’re a testament to the slow power of transformation. But of course they too contain the work of others. The Alto and the Star are evolutionary branches that lead back to the NLS System, which introduced windows and the mouse, to Sketchpad, the first interactive drawing application, and even back to the Memex, a concept resembling the modern PC decades before it was possible.
The interdependence of our creativity has been obscured by powerful cultural ideas, but technology is now exposing this connectedness. We’re struggling legally, ethically and artistically to deal with these implications — and that’s our final episode, Part 4.
What if Xerox never decided to pursue the graphical interface? Or Thomas Edison found a different trade? What if Tim Berners-Lee never got the funding to develop the World Wide Web? Would our world be different? Would we be further behind?
History seems to tell us things wouldn’t be so different. Whenever there’s a major breakthrough, there’s usually others on the same path. Maybe a bit behind, maybe not behind at all.
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both invented calculus around 1684.
The theory of evolution was proposed by Darwin, of course, but Alfred Russel Wallace had pretty much the same idea at pretty much the same time. And Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed patents for the telephone on the same day.
We call this multiple discovery — the same innovation emerging from different places. Science and invention is riddled with it, but it can also happen in the arts.
In film, for instance, we had three Coco Chanel movies released within nine months of each other.
Around 1999 we had a quartet of sci-fi movies about artificial reality.
Even Charlie Kaufman’s unusually original, Synecdoche, New York, bears an uncanny resemblance to Tom McCarthy’s novel, Remainder. They’re both the stories of men who suddenly become wealthy and start recreating moments of their lives, even going so far as to recreate the recreations.
And actually, this — the video you’re watching — was written just before the New Yorker published a Malcolm Gladwell story about Apple, Xerox and the nature of innovation.
We’re all building with the same materials. And sometimes by coincidence we get similar results, but sometimes innovations just seem inevitable.
Part 3 Soundtrack
Vorspiel, Wiener Philharmoniker From the album Wagner: Das Rheingold
Finger Bib, Alarm Will Sound From the album Acoustica
Pocket Calculator, Kraftwerk From the album Computer World
Some Kind of Nature, Gorillaz From the album Plastic Beach
E-Musik, Neu! From the album Neu! 75
Highschool Lover, Air From the album Virgin Suicides
Knife, Grizzly Bear From the album Yellow House
Finger Bib (Original Version), Aphex Twin From the album Richard D. James Album
Le Rallye, Tindersticks From the album Claire Denis Film Scores 1996-2009