Everything is a Remix

Posted February 20, 2012

Kirby Ferguson - Creator of "Everything is a remix"

‘Everything is a remix‘ an independent film in four parts (fourth part just released a few days ago) by Kirby Ferguson.

The film explores about how everything we do in art, inventions, innovations and technology is essentially a remix. The first part, which I found most interesting deals with remixing in music. Ferguson treats influences and remakes in music as remixing. I guess for the ease of discussion it’s probably a good idea, as it simplifies matters. He shows examples of how Led Zeppelin basically “remixed” or bluntly stole songs from other artists and made them their own without giving any credit to the original creators.Zeppelin themselves were then massively sampled and remixed and examples of that also appear in the film.
Here is the first part:

PART 1 – The song remains the same

The main point of the first part is that this thing called remixing is an essential part of society’s evolution. Nothing is created in a blank space. Everything influences everything. That’s how we advance as a culture, and it’s totally OK. What’s twisted about it is the fact that corporations and lawyers make a business out of copyright laws and intellectual property. Treating ideas as property is the problem in my view. You learn from everything around you and you create your own art, inventions, techniques, based on what you’ve learned. It’s such a basic concept. I mean to put it simply, we learn language by copying what we hear. Would we ever consider language to be an intellectual property that must be protected by law?

The films are of a high quality and I found them fascinating. I salute K Ferguson for making them and hope he makes more films in the future. Here are the other three sections of the film.

PART 2 – Remix Inc.