Nina Paley: All Creative Work Is Derivative

I’m a big believer in creativity as a combinatorial force — a great big puzzle you construct from existing pieces in your mental pool of resources. Which is why I strive to continuously highlight tidbits of interestingness and inspiration, in the hope that each of them lies dormant in your mind until, one day, it sparks some incredible new creation. So the concept of remix culture is both a frequent topic and a point of passion around here. Now, from filmmaker Nina Paley of Sita Sings The Blues fame comes a simple yet brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed case for the combinatorial nature of creativity.

Paley photographed archaeological artifacts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and animated them to illustrate her point: All creativity builds upon something that existed before and every work of art is essentially a derivative work.

If you’re intrigued by this concept, I highly recommend checking out the roundup of similarly minded projects here and taking a peek at Steven Johnson’s insight on where good ideas come from, most notably his absolutely fantastic new book on the subject.

A free hi-res download of Paley’s animation is available at the Internet Archive.

via Open Culture

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PICKED: Miracles – 20 Years of Pop in One Mashup

We’re lovers of art of remix as a creative medium, so we’re all over the latest gem by mashup master Peter Bull, better known as Norwegian Recycling.

Miracles draws on 16 iconic songs spanning nearly 20 years of pop music history, from Jacko to Gaga, blending them seamlessly into one catchy, head-bobbingly addictive track.

Here’s a list of the samples used:

1. Bruno Mars – Just The Way You Are
2. B.O.B. feat. Bruno Mars – Nothing On You
3. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
4. Britney Spears – Hit Me, Baby, One More Time
5. Jason Derulo – In My Head
6. Justin Timberlake – My Love
7. Lady Gaga – Just Dance
8. Leona Lewis – Bleeding Love
9. Ne-Yo – So Sick
10. Michael Jackson – Black Or White
11. Snoop Dogg – Sexual Eruption
12. Survivor – Eye Of The Tiger
13. Taylor Swift – Fifteen
14. Taylor Swift – Fearless
15. Savage Garden – The Animal Song
16. Snoop Dogg feat. Justin Timberlake – Signs

To support Bull’s work — all of which he makes available for free — consider making a donation — we can only imagine the epic time investment involved in his mashups. (Ahem, we aren’t turning those away either — though no epic feat of pop music, Brain Pickings is also a free labor of love and takes a good 400 hours a month across the site, newsletter and Twitter feed.)

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Global Collaborative Film: life.turns.

What 1205 strangers have to do with Gmail, virtual zoetropes and the anatomy of walking.

Collaborative cinema has been a pipe dream for the creative community for quite some time. We’ve previously looked at examples ranging from a fanmade Lord of the Rings prequel to the excellent PSST! project to ambitious collaborative 3D animation. Now, life.turns. approaches collaborative cinema from a photography angle with an ongoing global collaborative film project composed of 1205 photographs taken in 21 countries over 40 days.

Created as part of the 2010 Edinburgh Arts Festival, the project invites contributors to upload photos of themselves in one or more of eight figures of basic human walking. The images are then assembled and arranged in a sequence reflecting a natural gait, stitched together into a virtual motion collage.

You can also create your own zoetrope by remixing different images within the sequence.

The film is currently 3 minutes and 21 seconds long, and they’re running low on poses of Figure 3 above, so chip in by joining Blipfoto and uploading an image of yourself in that (or another) pose.

Though certainly not an original idea (remember that Gmail envelope video from 2007?), life.turns. offers an utterly delightful example of simple collaborative storytelling harnessing the power of global interconnectedness.

Bonus points for using Turn by Travis, with the artist’s permission, as the score.)

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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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