As I may have mentioned once or twice before, I believe that culture is inherently recombinant.
We make stuff out of other things - poems out of words, paintings out of colors, metaphors out of disparate ideas, complex ideas out of simple ones, music out of sounds and so on.
So why is it that remix culture is so much more relevant obvious discussed now?
It's because media has become much easier to reproduce thanks to the radical decentralisation of the economics of cultural production [which is the phrase I'm backing as a substitute to social media - I'm not very hopeful it will catch on.]
So the very building blocks we can use to create have become themselves more complex - just as we moved from using words to long form allusion - and these complex building blocks have the added cultural weight of being part of pre-existing artifacts, which means you can, if you choose, use the web of associations that were built into the original artifact as foundations for your own.
If you want.
The album [for want of a better word] Thru You you see above is entirely generated from 'samples' from youtube [all credited] - each piece of it was made by someone else but the recombinance creates something new from the bits.
[Thanks Conner / Zefrank]
This soundboard that Marissa sent me has kept me entertained [and annoyed the other people in the departure lounge] by letting me create beats and pieces on the fly.
Because the pre-existing artifacts had little obvious cultural resonance, they are relatively neutral instruments.
The soundboard was entirely so - the youtube video less so [each piece has little resonance but the overall effect has some].
But this remixer of Obama from Eclectic Method, because it uses Obama, isn't neutral because of the intense and obvious cultural weight of samples.
When you sample Obama saying hope - it doesn't mean exactly the same thing as just using the word hope.
Which is kind of the point.