Everything is a Remix

From hip-hop to Hitler in the bunker, or why skilllessness is no obstacle to creativity.

We’re big believers in the importance of remix culture as a petri dish for creativity. You may recall the excellent Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy panel with Shepard Fairey and Lawrence Lessig we covered last year, some striking proof that originality is not all it’s cracked up to be, the fantastic Walking On Eggshells documentary about intellectual property in the age of remix, as well as RIP: A Remix Manifesto — the ambitious feature-length documentary about copyright and remix culture. And evidence for it is everywhere — most recently, in yesterday’s rather amusing tornado autotune remix.

This week, we bring you Everything is a Remix — a compelling four-part video series by filmmaker Kirby Ferguson about the evolution of remixing and collaborative creation, from folk art to today’s most cutting-edge tech-assisted multimedia creations.

[Today] anybody can remix anything. Music, video, photos, whatever, and distribute it globally pretty much instantly. You don’t need expensive tools, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills. Remixing is a folk art — anybody can do it. Yet these techniques, collect the material, combining it and transforming it, are the same ones you use at any level of creation. You could even say that everything is a remix.”

The first part of the series was released this month, with the remaining ones coming by the end of the year. [UPDATE: Per Kirby’s comment, only part 2 will be out this year, the remaining four will be released within the first half of 2011.] To support the project — an important voice in the dialogue about creativity and intellectual property — consider making a donation. (And, while you’re at it, we aren’t turning those away either — Brain Pickings is funded almost entirely by reader donations.)

UPDATE: Part 2 is now available and, unsurprisingly, it’s excellent.

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OpenIDEO: Collaborative Design for Social Good

A global drawing board, or what your DQ has to do with making the world a better place.

We’re big fans of design thinking pioneer IDEO here at Brain Pickings. We’re also fans of cross-disciplinary collaboration, so we’re thrilled to see IDEO’s latest venture, OpenIDEO — a highly collaborative, visually-driven open online tool for building an actionable creative process aimed at design for social good.

OpenIDEO is a global community that will draw on your optimism, inspiration, ideas and opinions to solve problems together for the collective social good.

OpenIDEO invites people to tackle big issues by sharing expertise and insight — be that in the form of creative sketches, business acumen, inspirational photos and images, or snippets of code — essentially building a patchwork of collective intelligence about the pressing problem being addressed. The community provides feedback every step of the way, and IDEO offers guidance by framing the challenge, prototyping and kindling the conversation.

One particularly interesting concept is the introduction of a metric for creative contribution. Dubbed your ‘Design Quotient,’ or DQ, it reflects your participation in the three development phases of problem-solving — inspiration, conception and evaluation — as well as the common thread of collaboration that binds all three, helping you you better understand where your unique strengths lie across these different domains.

Barely a week old, OpenIDEO is already working with TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver, harnessing the problem-solving power of the community to help him ignite the Food Revolution he envisioned. Another challenge is sponsored by Enterprising Schools, aiming to increase the access to low-cost learning tools for affordable private schools in India and, eventually, around the world. Upcoming challenges will feature projects backed by Sony and WWF.

While a number of idea-generation crowdsourcing platforms have emerged over the past couple of years, what makes OpenIDEO intriguing is that it adds an element of expert guidance, essentially combining two of the most powerful forces of creativity — collective intelligence and curatorial vision. We can’t wait to see what it blossoms into.

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7 Must-Read Books by TED Global Speakers

Design imperialism, what gender equality has to do with military spending, and where 185 pig parts go.

Last week, reported from this year’s TEDGlobal — four grueling days of cerebral stimulation and idea orgy spectatorship. Today, we spotlight 7 must-read books by some of this year’s speakers, litmus-tested for brilliance in the world’s most reliable quality-control lab: the TED stage.

PIG O5049

Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma set out to explore the increasing difficulty with which we can trace the origin of the products we consume in this age of globalization, labor specialization and outsourcing.

In PIG O5049, she hunts down the astounding number of different products — 185, to be exact — made from parts of a specific pig, owned by a farmer friend and tagged with the identification number 05049.

The book is a photographic anthology of these items — ranging from — complete with infographic charts and diagrams outlining the production destiny of the various pig parts.

Beautifully bound and visually stunning, the book takes an unusual, non-preachy approach to an issue of ever-growing importance, leaving you the reader to draw your own conclusions — a task more challenging than it sounds in an age of information overload and prescriptive ideology.

WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM

We’ve had a longtime brain crush on cultural theorist and author Steven Johnson, one of the sharpest thinkers and most compelling writers in the broader world of creative culture and intellectual property. His latest book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, explores exactly what the title promises — and, based on his instant-hit TED talk, it does so in a brilliant way that treks across anthropology, sociology, philosophy, behavioral psychology, cognitive science and copyright law, breezing through the cross-pollination of these diverse disciplines with an ease and humor that promise a read not fit for putting down.

The book comes out in October and is now available for pre-order.

THE VISUAL MISCELLANEUM

The Visual Miscellaneum, which we reviewed in full last October, is one of our all-time favorite books, so we were delighted to see its author, David McCandless take the TED stage. (And even more delighted to chat with him about infoviz and Britishness over wine.)

If you haven’t already, do yourself a favor and grab a copy of this visualization gem, a brilliantly curated anthology of infographic whimsy on anything from military spending to the most pleasurable guilty pleasures.

THE ACORN HOUSE COOKBOOK

Chef and entrepreneur Arthur Potts Dawson has set out to revolutionize the restaurant industry, the world’s most wasteful, second only to war. His Waterhouse restaurant, for instance, is the world’s first fully non-carbon eatery, running entirely on hydroelectricity from kitchen to table — a true walk-the-walk manifestation of his principles.

In The Acorn House Cookbook: Good Food from Field to Fork, with a foreword by TEDPrize winner and food activism celebrity Jamie Oliver, Dawson intersects great food with environmental sensibility in a recipe arsenal that makes for the most refined kind of moral and gustatory palate.

HALF THE SKY

At TED, women’s rights crusader Sheryl WuDunn made a convincing case for the idea that gender inequality is the greatest moral challenge of the 21st century.

Her bestselling book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, is as much a necessary course in cultural anthropology and gender politics as it is a manifesto for intercepting a vicious cycle of raging abuse and quiet oppression. She points to local women as the most powerful change agents without which it is impossible for a country to raise itself from poverty.

THE FORTY RULES OF LOVE

In The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi, Turkish novelist Elif Shafak weaves a fascinating story-within-a-story involving a Bostonian suburban housewife, literary infatuation, and 13th-century mysticism.

The novel exudes Shafak’s characteristic East-West narrative, a cross-cultural bridge of eloquence and captivating storytelling, and links nicely to her excellent TED talk about how fiction can overcome identity politics.

Stories help us get a glimpse of each other and, sometimes, maybe even like what we see.”

DESIGN REVOLUTION

Last year, we reviewed Emily Pilloton‘s fantastic humanitarian design anthology, Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. Since then, Pilloton and her partner have moved the Project H Design headquarters to Bernie County, North Carolina — one of rural America’s poorest areas, where 13% of children live below the poverty line. There, Pilloton has set out to revolutionize a broken education system from the ground up, founding the country’s first high school design/building program. She lives and breathes the Project H Design manifesto: There is no design without action; design WITH, not FOR; document, share and measure; start locally and scale globally; design systems, not stuff.

Design Revolution remains a powerful reminder of why humanitarian design matters — not to egos but to communities, not to award committees but to human ecosystems. It’s a particularly interesting read in the context of the recent epic kerfuffle in the design community, initiated by Bruce Nussbaum as he called designers the new imperialists, unleashing a deluge of responses by some of today’s most arduous in-the-field humanitarian designers, including Architecture for Humanity’s Cameron Sinclair, FrogDesign’s Robert Fabricant, and Pilloton herself.

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Office Supply Art: Magical Mosaics Made of Unusual Objects

What Leonardo da Vinci has to do with film noir and the Guinness Book of Records.

We’ve already seen artists do incredible things with ordinary materials — paper, cardboard, currency, even toilet paper rolls. Today, we turn to the wonderful world of office supplies and look at five artists who work their magic on Dilbert’s scene.

MARK KHAISMAN

Mixed media artist Mark Khaisman creates stunning collages by layer translucent packaging tape over Plexiglas panels to intersect a remarkably innovative technique with a hauntingly classic film noir aesthetic.

I started it like a traditional stained glass artist, but with tape I found I could continue my conversation with light, but in a more expedient manner.” ~ Mark Khaisman

ERIC DHAIG

Artist Eric Dhaig is a master of analog pixelation. His pushpin portraits are made of about 11,000 pushpins each, achieving remarkable photorealism while only using the basic colors commercially availble — red, yellow, blue, green, white and black. Dhaig refers to his portraits as “pictorial DNA” — seemingly simple sequences that, strung together, capture a complex person.

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BAPTISTE DEBOMBOURG

Staples may be among the obsolescence victims of the digital revolution, but to French artist Baptiste Debombourg they are much more than an utilitarian office staple. His incredible Renaissance-inspired staple murals take your breath away, each the soft, etheral sum of its 35,000 hard, jagged metal parts.

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SAIMIR STRATI

Saimir Strati‘s incredible nail mosaic of Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait isn’t just a phenomenal work of art, it’s a Guinness Book record holder for the world’s largest nail mosaic, weighing in at 400 kilograms — that’s 880 pounds — and measuring at 2×4 meters.

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PETER ROOT

Aritst Peter Root’s Ephemicropolis made the rounds a few months ago, but it’s such an impressive feat it warrants a second look. Technically elaborate yet aesthetically minimalist, the project took 100,000 staples and 40 continuous hours to complete, creating a hauntinly futuristic micro-cityscape.

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