Nothing is Original, Everything is a Remix. BUT Does it Really Matter?
“Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made; we are dependent on one another. Admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness.”
Remix: To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new. Creating a remix is a great way for both an artist and remixer to generate or expand their fan base and further establish themselves as musicians. Often a track remixed by a credible producer can shine a light on an emerging artist, and vice versa. In this article, we will discuss how Kirby explores the basic elements of creativity: copy, transform and combine. Let’s start.
HERE ARE SOME OF THE MOST INTERESTING POINTS OF THIS BLOG
· Everything we make is a remix of existing creations.
· Creation requires influence.
· The most dramatic results happen when different ideas are combined.
· We all are building with the same materials.
· The new ideas evolve from the old ones. There are no original ideas. There are tipping points in a continuous line of innovation by many different people.
How inspiration of previous creations has been the foundations of music and films?
IN MUSIC
There’s no question that all artists (and certainly all individuals who are creative for a living) are influenced by everything around them. In fact, it’s often other works that inspire us to create in the first place. The concept of Remix often referenced in popular culture derives from the model of music remixes which were produced around the late 1960s and early 1970s in New York City, an activity with roots in Jamaica’s music.
By the mid-1970s Led Zeppelin are the biggest touring rock band in America, yet many critics and peers label them as… rip-offs. Zeppelin clearly copied a lot of amount of other people’s material, but that alone, isn’t unusual.
Firstly, when Zeppelin used someone else’s material, they didn’t attribute song writing to the original artist. Secondly, Led Zeppelin didn’t modify their versions enough to claim they were original. Ultimately, in the wake of their enormous success, Led Zeppelin went from the copier to the copied.
IN FILMS
“Finding inspiration can be tough. But when people do find it, they go on to do great films. And sometimes, those great things are either great and pretty crap.”
Films are built on other films, as well as on books, TV shows, actual events, plays, whatever. This applies to everything from the average films, right on up to revered indie art fares. And it even applies to massively influential blockbusters, the kinds of films that reshape pop culture.
INNOVATION AND CREATION
“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. But creativity isn’t magic: it happens by applying ordinary tools of thought to existing materials.”
Nobody starts out the 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. For example,
· 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.
· 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.
We can call it multiple discoveries — the same innovation emerging from different places. These are all major advances, but they’re not original ideas so much as tipping points in a continuous line of inventions by many different people. But the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined.
SOCIAL EVOLUTION
“Copy, transform and combine. It’s who we are, it’s how we live, and of course, it’s how we create.”
The genes in our bodies can be traced back over three-and-a-half billion years to a single organism, Luca, the Last Universal Common Ancestor. As Luca reproduced, its genes copied and transformed. And our culture evolves in a similar way, but the elements aren’t genes, they’re memes — ideas, behaviors, and skills.
For almost our entire history ideas were free. But the growing dominance of the market economy produced an unfortunate side-effect. For example,
If a guy invents a better light bulb, his price needs to cover not just the manufacturing cost, but also the cost of inventing the thing in the first place. Now if a competitor starts manufacturing a copy of the invention, the competitor doesn’t need to cover those development costs so his version can be cheaper.
The bottom line: original creations can’t compete with the price of copies.
In the United States, the introduction of copyrights and patents was intended to address this imbalance. The copyright act of 1790 was titled an act for the encouragement of learning and the patent act of 1790 was titled an act to promote the progress of useful arts. The intent was to better the lives of everyone by incentivizing creativity and creating a rich public domain, a shared pool of knowledge open to all. But over time, the power of the market transformed this principle beyond recognition. Influential thinkers proposed that ideas are a form of property, and this conviction would eventually yield a new term… intellectual property.
So to summarize, the full picture looks like this.
We believe that ideas are property and we’re excessively territorial when we feel that property belongs to us. Our laws then indulge this bias with ever-broadening protections and massive rewards. So, what now?
We live in an age with daunting problems. We need the best ideas possible, and we need them to spread fast. That’s social evolution and it’s not up to governments or corporations or lawyers… it’s up to us.
Check out the full video here