ReReRe:CCCC-ing, part 1 (Rip: A Remix Manifesto)

The call for proposals for the 2010 CCCCs in Louisville is titled “The Remix: Revisit, Rethink, Revise, Renew.” First off, proposal readers better get ready for a whole bunch of “Re:”s which is likely to be included in just about every single proposal. I didn’t look too closely at the CCCCs program for San Francisco, but I will bet you there were enough waves to make a reader seasick.

Second, I suspect the CCCCs ought to be careful what it asks for. Is this an organization that is really ready to rethink, revise, and renew? I dunno.

Third– and maybe this is just me– but that “The” bothers me, as in “The Remix,” which suggests singularity which obviously not only doesn’t exist but which is defied by remixing in the first place. Plus every time I read the phrase “The Remix,” I misread and/or hear “The Reflex” by Duran Duran.

I’ve got a couple of vague ideas for proposals, but one thing I’m kind of thinking about is something along the lines of Rip: A Remix Manifesto, only in the form of an essay/word-driven project. Here’s a preview:

The Ann Arbor film festival is going to screen this on Saturday night, but not until 9 pm. And given that I am a flying solo this weekend while Annette is off at a conference, I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it or not. But the point of the movie, as I understand it, is it is the first “open source” documentary, where the filmmaker invited folks to remix/mashup the video. So the two things I wonder about:

Could this work in a “conventional” first year writing project, where one of the research writing “essay” projects was replaced with a “mashup” essay?

And is the CCCCs and/or comp/rhet world actually ready for something like that?

3 Replies to “ReReRe:CCCC-ing, part 1 (Rip: A Remix Manifesto)”

  1. Here’s what scares me about this whole remix business: Being that CCCC ain’t the most hip crowd, I’m afraid that there will be all these missappropriations/misunderstandings about the hip hop concept of the remix and what a remix does. Further, this misappropriation will get played out in all kinds of problematic contexts where rhet/comp people try to be cool, but really do some racially problematic and insensitive things (like at the 2008 convention when they paraded the Scholars for the Dream recipients in a procession around the hotel to the music of New Orleans Jazz–not a good idea to put colored folk on display to a tradition meant for funeral ceremonies). If I go to CCCC next year, I’m afraid I’ll be pissed the whole time I’m there.

  2. I see your point, but I do think that remixing/ripping/mashups/etc. goes beyond hip hop– that is, hip hop is often (but not always) one example of this larger movement, if that makes sense. I mean, Lessig, Doctorow, the folks behind RiP, etc., are not riffing on hip hop, IMO.

    That NOLA “parade” does sound kinda wrong though.

  3. Steve, I agree the theme has some problems. For one, a lot of the Cs crowd isn’t ready to remix, as I said in my presentation. And I hear Stacy’s point about conflation (mis-synedochalizing?) of remixing and hiphop. Regardless, I’m glad to see a theme with actual content, as opposed to vague metaphors about streets, waves, and the like.

Leave a Reply to Staci Perryman-Clark Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
https://stevendkrause.com/2009/03/27/rererecccc-ing-part-1-rip-a-remix-manifesto/?replytocom=4571
stevendkrause.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-30
99107
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:FEK2222HOSMVBBNSVGIK4SCX7QGPL4PQ
<urn:uuid:443a5ae5-d472-4703-8223-03d188f0d098>
2018-07-16T16:31:31Z
192.252.144.19
text/html
sha1:G2ZD2TASD7QWVWC6OTX4M5PIAOH5XGII
<urn:uuid:783b8645-6322-445b-a5c2-b97fc648306e>
https://stevendkrause.com/2009/03/27/rererecccc-ing-part-1-rip-a-remix-manifesto/?replytocom=4571
response
<urn:uuid:92c5b87e-4e7e-43ae-9d7c-ac02f1be21ec>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-61-216-17.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-30
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf