netpoetic.com

Remixworx is a collaborative blog for creative digital media remixing, started by Randy Adams (aka runran) in November 2006.

To date there are 429 posts – i.e. remixes of audio, Flash animations, digital images, visual poetry, texts… but there are many more remixes scattered throughout the comments areas. We’ve lost count, but there must be well over 500 (perhaps more than 600?) remixes within the whole blog.

Last May I took a few trails from remixworx to E-Poetry ’09 in Barcelona:

Beyond the high quality of the works presented, the collaborative axis of remixworx is more than respectable, and the sheer variety of types of works (stylistically/aesthetically)—kinetic visual poems often combining text/animation/sound—appearing on the site is marvelous.

Chris Funkhouser, Encapsulating E-Poetry 2009

One year on and I’ve been thinking about remixworx again… But first, here’s how I viewed things two years ago, also in the merry month of May:

so what’s it like to participate as a remixer? one player’s perspective…

It’s exhilarating, stimulating, fun, liberating… There’s room for each artist/writer to stamp their mark on R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX, but R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX is just as likely to stamp its mark on each of us too. Unpacking someone else’s creative work, remixing it and adding something original of your own is a transformative process that works both ways. Often it’s a multi-authored piece so you can trace its generative history, see how it’s mutated. Coded works, such as Flash pieces, you have to literally get inside to deconstruct, to decode them, which is almost like getting inside someone else’s head. It’s an oddly distant but intimate form of co-creation.The process opens you up to new ways of working, new ideas, new creative challenges, new techniques, new ways of looking at the world, both online and off.

All of which is still true for me, but in contrast to two years ago the rate of remixing has slowed down considerably, which perhaps accounts for the elegiac tone of some of the more recent remixes – e.g. bookish and bookish stones – but it’s not over yet. These days it’s a languidly unfolding remixworx, very different from the heady days of rapid turnover and the almost frantic pace of remixing in our first year or two. Of course, in the early months there were more of us doing it, but mainly the project has been sustained by the core remixers: Randy Adams (runran), Chris Joseph (babel) and me (crissxross). The three of us still feed the blog but we’ve all become so busy with other projects/jobs/lifestyle changes… you could say that remixworx is on a frugal diet these days.

To give you a taste, here are a few from the feasting time:

i have been eating vispoetry

breakfast vispo

vispo soup

bread and circus

bread circus

Tags: collaboration | e-poetry | remixing

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