Remix Culture Spotlight: Walking on Eggshells

What legal anachronism has to do with Bob Dylan, Picasso and Family Guy.

We’re big proponents of remix culture here because at the core of our mission lies the idea that creativity is merely the ability to combine all the existing pieces in our head — knowledge, memory, inspiration — into incredible new things. Last year, we featured a brilliant panel with Shepard Fairey and CreativeCommons founder Lawrence Lessig titled Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, followed closely by the excellent documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Today, we bring you Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age — a new documentary from Yale Law & Technology, offering 24 densely compelling minutes of insight into various facets of intellectual property in the age of remix. From appropriation to sampling to creative influence to reuse, the film is an anthology of conversations with some of today’s most notable remix artists and media theorists, exposing the central paradox of contemporary copyright law: How can something originally intended to incentivize people to create serve to hinder new forms of creativity?

You’re not gonna tell me ‘oh, that’s not creative because you’re using someone’s sampled piano note’ There’s no question that at some point using other people’s recordings is 100% your creativity, and at some points it’s 0% your creativity. Then it’s even trickier because sometimes it’s just this recognition — you recognize that this fits, and isn’t that recognition something amazing that maybe no one else recognized?” ~ DJ Earworm

Let’s just take Bob Dylan or somebody like that, whom we take for granted. Does he have a grocery list, an inventory of all of his influences, all the people he has plagiarized and taken from and sampled? These are things that are part of creativity. They are previous things, previous artworks, previous entities. They already exist. Nothing comes out of your ear, out of thin air.” ~ Joy Garnett

For those of us living on the remix side of things, the film’s thesis is hardly groundbreaking. But what makes it important is that it adds another voice to one of the most necessary and urgent creative conversations of our time, building on a narrative that will continue to bend an antiquated law until it breaks and makes room for a more inclusive, era-appropriate conception of creativity.

via GOOD

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Popular Science, Digitized

137 years of human curiosity, or what lawnmowers have to do with nuclear detectives in China.

Thousands of magazines have stuffed our mailboxes and collected dust on our coffee tables over the years, but very few have captivated the attention of geeks and dreamers as long as Popular Science.

A hundred and thirty-seven years ago, Edward L. Youmans founded the publication to help bring scientific knowledge to the educated layman. Topics ranged the scientific gamut from the birth of electricity to the mystery of the brain. In addition to staff writers, our modern world of science has been covered by the likes of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, T.H. Huxley, and Louis Pasteur.

Luckily for historians and the ever-curious, Popular Science has teamed up with Google to archive all 137 years of the magazine. (You may remember Google’s groundbreaking similar partnership with LIFE Magazine in late 2008.) Not only is this spectacular treasure of information free, but it’s available in original format — which means that besides enjoying antique articles about human-powered flying machines, you can also enjoy the advertisements of eras past. (Cigarettes, whiskey and riding lawnmowers seem to populate the 60’s.)

The archives aren’t indexed by volume. Instead, a fairly accurate search function brings up all the relevant articles from the past century for you to wade through. This time machine of science is beautiful to navigate, and even looks fantastic on the iPhone.

For those of you who are new to the archives, we’ve taken the liberty of finding a few nuggets of nostalgia to get you started:

The Moon — So Far (May, 1958): “Look hard, next full moon (April 3, May 3). Our oldest-established permanent satellite looms over the trees, familiar and close, yet mysterious and distant…We are ready to stretch across 240,000 miles to touch it…”

A nuclear detective looks at China’s atom bomb (Feb, 1965): “To an atomic scientist, what are the implications of China’s atomic bomb? We asked Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist who participated in the World War II Manhattan Project…”

Traveling telephones — new technology expands mobile service (Feb, 1978): “There’s a button labeled SND on Motorola’s futuristic –looking Pulsar II radiotelephone. I pushed it, and a number stored in its microcomputer memory began stepping, digit by digit, across the red LED handset display.

Go ahead, dive in.

Len Kendall is the cofounder of the3six5 project. (Featured on Brain Pickings here.) He enjoys being clever, quippy, and constructively grumpy.

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Gift Guide Part 3: Free

DIY goodness, intellectual enrichment, and how to go cheap without being cheap.

This is the final installment in the curated 3-part Brain Pickings holiday gift guide. Today, we’re saluting thrift and last-minuteness with five priceless yet free gifts that show off your creative connoisseurship without making a dent in your wallet.

INTELLECTUAL MIXTAPE

Everyone loves a good mixtape. But, let’s face it, it isn’t the most original — or, for that matter, the most intellectually enriching — of gifts. So why not put a personal growth spin on the cultural classic? iTunes is actually a fantastic resource for free podcasts and lectures from the world’s best universities, across a multitude of disciplines. Show off your eclectic yet refined taste by burning your giftee a mix of selected episodes from a few smart podcasts — think part sampler, part mixtape, part gift certificate to self-improvement.

Here are a few of our favorites to get you started:

• NPR Fresh Air — conversations with today’s biggest cultural luminaries about the issues that shape our era
• The Stuff of Genius from HowStuffWorks.com, spotlighting the stories behind some of modern civilization’s greatest inventions, from the electric guitar to Standard Time to earmuffs
• Free: The Future of a Radical Price — if Chris Anderson hadn’t offered his latest book as a free download, it would’ve been a tragicomic bit of irony. Thankfully, he did.
• Coverville, one of the best music podcasts out there, uncovering the world’s cover gems. A few of our favorite episodes: The Coldplay Cover Story, For the Kids, and the Kids at Heart, Too, The Bob Marley Cover Story, The Johnny Mercer Cover Story
• TEDTalks — unless you’ve been living under the proverbial Brain Pickings rock, you know we’re huge TED fans around here. For a few of our favorite talks in iTunes HD, look for Philippe Starck, Elizabeth Gilbert, Hans Rosling and Sir Ken Robinson.
• Stuff from the B-Side — another HowStuffWorks.com gem, exploring the more obscure corners of music culture, from the presidential record collection to the future of digital music
• KCRW DnA: Design & Architecture — explores the fascinating and multiplicitous ways in which design and architecture touch our daily lives, from the iPod to the Walt Disney Concert Hall

Perfect for: Lifelong learners, personal growth fiends, the eclectically curious

NOTHING

We sung the praises of nothing a while ago, and it’s still one of the best gifts out there. It’s cheap, but you aren’t — it’s a clever and tongue-in-cheek choice that serves as a powerful antidote to our culture of excess. Your socially-conscious friends will appreciate it, and they won’t have to regift it along with that bizarre snow globe from grandma.

Perfect for: The environmentally concerned, those with a good conscience and good sense of humor

PHOTO COASTER

Here’s a wonderful DIY gift that’s both super cool and doable even with the craft skill level of a six-year-old — cork photo coasters.

All you need: Some photos, a pen, an X-acto knife, a few very, very basic art supplies and sheets of cork. Depending on your choice of photos, you can make the coasters artsy or personal, but either way, they’re bound to delight — not to mention save a coffeetable or two from those dreaded mug circles.

Perfect for: Everyone

ORIGAMI FORTUNETELLER

Ah, the paper fortuneteller — what a fond childhood memory. But, if you’re like us, your adult self couldn’t make one to save your life. Thankfully, the good folks at eHow have put together a simple how-to video that revives this nostalgic gem.

Ramp up the cool factor by getting creative with the paper itself and/or slipping in a few clever, inside-jokey fortunes.

Perfect for: Retrostalgics, the kid at heart, those who value personal, non-generic gifts

BRAIN PICKINGS

Yes, we’re being shamelessly self-promotional — but that’s only because we fervently believe in our mission, and there’s no shame in that.

Brain Pickings aims to enrich people’s creative and intellectual scope by taking them on a curated journey into the great creative unknown — because we believe indiscriminate curiosity and exposure to cross-disciplinary interestingness fuels our inner capacity for creativity. So tickle a friend’s brain by introducing them to Brain Pickings — you can sign them up for our newsletter for a sampler, or just send them a simple note/email with our URL.

Inspired information is, after all, the greatest gift of all. So who cares if it doesn’t come in giftwrap and a red ribbon?

Perfect for: Everyone — especially the chronically curious, those immersed in creative culture

Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

SnagFilms: Democratizing Documentaries

What the Arctic Circle has to do with the Bush administration and the lifecycle of rock ‘n’ roll.

In an ideal world, we’d all be able to tour the world’s independent film festival circuit, pursuing our complete cultural enlightenment in documentaries on anything from the secret life of John Lennon to the history of horse racing. The world, of course, is far from ideal and most of us are geographically, financially, and otherwise strapped. Enter SnagFilms — an ambitious repository of full-length, high-quality documentaries that you can watch however, wherever you like, for free.

By making the films streamable on-demand, 24/7, anywhere in the world, the project rallies for — and, we dare say, greatly succeeds in — expanding the audience for documentary film. A Snag feature lets you take the films with you across your web presence — blogs, Facebook, or any other online dwelling where you can practically open your very own virtual theater.

With a rapidly growing library of 925 films, SnagFilms covers an incredibly wide range of subjects, styles and genres from filmmakers big and small.

Art from the Arctic trails the journey of British artist and filmmaker David Buckland, who organizes three sailing expeditions to the High Arctic as part of a series of collaborations between artists, educators and scientists, designed to create public awareness of global climate change.

Dig! is a raw, unfiltered journey into the underbelly of rock ‘n’ roll, illuminating the little-understood truth of its success and eventual self-destruction. The story is told through 7 years of production and 2000 hours of footage, trailing the conflicted friendship-rivalry relationship between 60’s revivalists Anton A. Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor of The Dandy Warhols, all the while offering a profound, subtle commentary on the balance between art and commerce.

In The End of America, the controversial and brilliant Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, reveals chilling evidence that the Bush years may have put American democracy under serious threat. Aided by citizen journalism from the web, home videos and blogs, she unearths a number of deeply unsettling similarities between American policies and dictator-driven regimes, from secret prisons to paramilitary groups to the calculated loopholes of law.

The Photographers, originally released in 1995, goes behind the camera with veteran National Geographic photographers as they go on assignments ranging from armed conflicts to deep-sea dives. The film probes into the quintessential question of what it entails to make a memorable photograph, to brilliantly capture a moment, to create monumental meaning in a single image.

Explore SnagFilms for yourself. And be sure to try the MovieMatcher tool — a glorified smart tag-cloud, really — which makes movie suggestions based on your mood and topics of interest.

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