Everyone is a remix
This probably qualifies as old Internet now, but there was a video series 15 years ago on YouTube that I loved called “Everything is a remix”. From 2010 to 2012 author Kirby Fergusson dissected the seemingly simple premise that everything is a remix. With examples of the influences on some of the greatest songs and movies of all time, it has itself been remixed in 2023 and is well worth a watch.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and would consider myself a child of the remix era. From Fatboy Slim to The Beastie Boys, Daft Punk and the wonderful mix tapes of the 2000s from the likes of The Kleptones and Girl Talk, I love this concept and how it’s explored. Kirby says something in the 2023 version which stopped me in my tracks.
“When we create we are alone, yet, we are together”
Today is Father’s Day in the UK. My Dad died in 2010 at the age of 90 but I still think of him often and in addition to some of his many flaws, I have also inherited his love of photography and motorcycles.
Like him, I have been known to take a photo of the odd landscape and sheep, and like him, especially as I get older, I post pictures of flowers and the changing seasons to social media, documenting my life for friends as I bob along. Dad used to do his version of this in a pre-smartphone era. I remember the first time he called me very excited, I think it must have been in the mid-2000s. He’d been using a digital camera for some time, a Canon of some sort. He didn’t have a computer so had to take the memory cards to photo printing shops to have prints made. This wasn’t particularly expensive but he stumbled upon another way when trying to make a buck putting together images on postcards and selling them to pubs for pocket money. He would go in, offer to take pictures of the establishment and in turn design a postcard which could then be printed and sold for a reasonable fee to said establishment. With no graphic design skills of his own, he would engage the services of a local copy shop who could help him by doing some basic layout and producing the cards. During this process he discovered that they could also print any images using a colour laser printer for next to nothing per A4 sheet. Thus began a period in my life where I received mountains of terribly printed, slightly haphazardly cut, colour laser print images of The Lake District. It was Instagram or Flickr before both. Daffodils, fields of sheep, a pint, a bemused person in a pub I’ve never visited holding a pint, Sir Chris Bonnington, something funny he saw in a shop window. He’d snap it with his DSLR, go to the shop, bend the guy’s ear for a bit, leave with some prints and pop them in the post. The first time he did it, he called me to express his excitement at the incredible quality of the images that would soon be in my hands. Dear reader, they were fairly awful prints by any standard, but they made him happy and by extension, me. His love of cameras, photography and words are probably why I’m here today writing this for you to read. I’ve always been excited to put things on a page and show them to people, and he always wanted me to end up somewhere like the BBC where he was confident I’d make a nuisance of myself in some productive way.
I never made it to Auntie Beeb, but think he’d like the podcast. It combines people, pictures and story telling which I know meant a lot to him. I am a remix of elements of him and I hope that one day my sons look back on the remixed traits and interests I gave them.