The first Remix? The Musical Dice Game in 18th Century Western Europe
Remixing involves disassembling a pre-existing work to isolate fragments that can later be used to construct a version of the disassembled work. This method of sampling was later applied to creating novel works that are not variants of the earlier work from which the fragments were sourced but instead constitute independent compositions. I refer to this practice as Remix (as contrasted to 'remix' being a variant of an earlier work).
Remix is only possible at a stage of advanced technological development where media-processing equipment exists that can disassemble available recordings – of sound, film, or even photography (photographs are recordings of the real world). At the very least, the source material must exist that is to be sampled. William Burroughs popularised in the late 1950s a literary technique that had been invented by the Dadaists in the 1920s who would cut up written text and rearrange it to create new texts.
Read more: The first Remix? The Musical Dice Game in 18th Century Western Europe
Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing Works
An essay I wrote back in 2014, as I learned that remixes and interpolations would now be allowed to compete in all categories in the Grammy Awards. Six years later, I reworked it almost completely to become an academic paper, also adding new examples and new developments.
Remix to Recycle: An “Environmentalist” Approach to Reusing Works is included in Issue No. 3 (2020, published on 17 January 2021) of Global Conversations: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture.
Remix at Work
The No Fire Today Remix is most apposite an example of how remix works as a creative strategy of reusing found material.
No Fire Today Remix demonstrates the creative possibilities that accessible and user-friendly digital sampling and mixing tools afford to people who would otherwise be excluded from active participation in culture.
Intertextuality vs. Remix
To show the difference between intertextuality and remix, let us consider the following example.
The image shows Obama conversing with Putin over the phone, Obama asking what Putin will have for Thanksgiving dinner, the response being "Turkey".
One will fail to understand the pun/joke unless already acquainted with the context. And that is the recent (25 November 2015) downing of a Russian bomber by Turkish figure jets. Reports say that the Turkish shot the Russian airplane for allegedly entering Turkish airspace for as short as 10 seconds, which angered Russian President Putin who threatened a swift and harsh response.
Page 1 of 3


