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.
Examples of Literary Mashup
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:
Shaking Up Shakespeare Literary Mashup
A new Australian website, "ReMix My Lit" is devoted entirely to the practice of remixing literature, as explained in this blurb from their homepage:
"Remix is all about taking existing material and making something new out of it.
It's a familiar concept in music but extends to all creative content so why isn't
the literati getting amongst it? There's no reason why writers can't mix, match, push and pull content to create remixed works. And that's why remix my lit exists."
-from homepage of remixmylit.com
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This article shows the sometime humorous results you can get from blending the texts of different authors:
When Shakespeare met Seuss: mashing up literature
Featured Book Review: Mashed-up fiction makes it to the New York Times Best Seller list:
In PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES, postmodern author Seth Grahame-Smith reconfigures the classic Jane Austen romance novel to include brain-eating zombies. Is this a mere ploy to attract today's generation of video game addicted youth to great literature? Or does the original work benefit from being remixed thusly? Enquiring minds want to know eat brains.
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Recommended Viewing:
rip! A Remix Manifesto:
This documentary by filmmaker Brett Gaylor digs deeps into the legal difficulties and artistic benefits of using the mashup (remix) process in music and multimendia. Using the framework of a "Remix Manifesto", the film relates the story of an ongoing cultural battle between mighty corporate copyright owners and a new breed of artists who "take the world's culture and transform it into something different". Read more: "...comsumers have become creators, making the folk art of the future..."
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Recommended Reading:
Makers by Cory Doctorow
Remix goes beyond the arts and into the realms of engineering and software development: Cory Doctorow tells the story of two "makers" (engineers, coders, artists all rolled into one) who possess an Open Source vision of breaking down corporate and copyright barriors through the ubiquitous free sharing of information and resources to magnify human potential and build a new post-scarcity Utopian society. A hopeful story of mashup engineering.
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Other interesting Mashup resources:
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Automatic Text Mashups
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:
Text Mashups With Cut'n'Mix
Mac Version of Cut'n'Mix
 Download
(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.)
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