What is Mashup? | |||||||||
"Mashup" is recombinant art, derived art. Some may call it type of plagiarism resulting from the impulse to create paired with a lack of imagination. Others will contend that this process of remixing source materials, whether they be "found sounds", literature or pop music has great artistic merit. This site focusses on the use of mashup in the print medium: fiction and other types of creative writing. Although mashup can take many forms and is known by many names, the process remains the same: elements of different source materials are mixed together (or "juxtaposed") to create a new composition. In literature studies and writer's workshops, mashup is beginning to grow in popularity as technique to unleash creativity by recontextualizing source materials. One educational project aims to create a new version of Shakespeare's King Lear by combining student reformulations of the original text into modern-day English: A new Australian website, "ReMix My Lit" is devoted entirely to the practice of remixing literature, as explained in this blurb from their homepage:
This article shows the sometime humorous results you can get from blending the texts of different authors:
Other interesting Mashup resources:
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There are plenty of audio processing applications which allow the user to blend different music together to create homemade mashup music. Cut'n'Mix is a word processor which does the same thing, only with texts instead of sound. Here is a short tutorial demonstrating how you can automatically create literary mashups with the Cut'n'Mix Word Machine:
Download Cut'n'Mix
(6.1 MB, Windows XP or Vista required. This installer contains a fully-functional 7-day trial. For continued use beyond the trial period, a license key can be purchased for $14.99. Purchase instructions are contained in the application.)