Remix

The recombination of existing media elements to create new works, highlighting issues of authorship, originality, and copyright in the digital age
Daniel Johannes Rosnes 2025-09-24

Explication

Remix is the creation of new works by repurposing existing material. The term remix exists in relation to many similar terms, such as mashup, bricolage, and sampling (Gunkel 2016, 3), but remix emerged as the de facto term that encompasses the spectrum of transformative and derivative works, a synecdoche for a better term that does not exist. Remix is a contested term with many different meanings; remix can be everything from the specific practice of creating art using existing material to the “dominant aesthetics of the era of globalization” (Manovich 2013, 267) and a cultural “binder” that infects every aspect of culture (Navas 2012, 4). Remix does have one boundary, which is that works of remix should be recognizable as reinterpretation of an original (Navas 2012, 65); without this identifiable link, they cease to be a remix.

Lawrence Lessig popularized the term in his eponymous book from 2008, arguing that creativity in the digital age had evolved more rapidly than copyright laws have been able to adapt. The 20^th century had seen the production of culture becoming increasingly professionalized, which limited the role of consumers. Analogue media could be remixed but has often required expensive tools and specialized knowledge, which set a steep barrier to entry. This has changed with the introduction and popularization of digital media that allows users to gather and repurpose material with ease. The use of digital media had thus been able to exceed the earlier analogue limitations and extend the expressive and performative range of literary artistry (Lessig 2008, 37).

Although remixes are tied to the digital, there are analogue antecedents. Remix has always existed in forms, such as oral storytelling or the production and reproduction of music, and the name remix is derived from the practice of remixing music. Music remixes can be traced back to Jamaican dub in the 1960s and later, when Jamaican immigrants created Hip-Hop in New York City in the 1970s (Navas 2012, 65). Dub and Hip-Hop transformed the production and post-production of music into a performance in and of itself, turning DJs and producers into artists in their own right, as exemplified by Lev Manovich, who describes DJs as the defining author of the digital culture (Manovich 2001, 129).

Remix is significant because it reframes originality. Gunkel argues that remix causes “short circuits in the material of Western thought” (2015, 171) by showing the creative potential of “derivative” works that appropriate, recombine, or resituate the work of others. Western culture favors the original over the derivative and places great emphasis on the auteurs who produce canonical works. Gunkel traces the privileged position of the original all the way back to Plato (2015, 35), who reproduced a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, arguing that a transcript of a speech is nothing more than a cheap imitation of the original performance, and the idea had been further expanded by Plato in later works such as with the Theory of Forms and the allegory of the cave (2015, 47). The power of remix inheres in showing that copies can be original in their own right, that they are not just doomed to be lesser. Originality in the digital age is not about producing something that has not been done before but finding new and creative uses for that which already exists.

Remix emerged in the late 1990s and defined the 2000s, and while remix was “ubiquitous” coming into the 2020s (Waysdorf 2021), its hegemony is now challenged. With the emergence of generative AI, remix is more relevant than ever while at the same time at risk of being left behind by a stronger cultural force. Just as remix once defined cultural production, generative AI can once again allow for faster and easier creation of content by remixing the existing material it was trained on—often mass harvested without permission and without any traceable references to the original.

See Also

• Appropriation - Use of pre-existing media or texts within a new work, often to critique, comment upon, or pay homage to the original source material
• Combinatorics - Combination and recombination of text, images, or other media to create varied storylines or poetic structures from a defined set of elements, enabling intricate patterns of interaction and interpretation
• Remediation - Representation or incorporation of a creative work into a newer medium

Works Cited

Gunkel, David J. Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics after Remix. MIT Press, 2016.

Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2008.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2001.

Manovich, Lev. Software Takes Command. Bloomsbury, 2013.

Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Springer, 2012.

Waysdorf, Abby S. “Remix in the Age of Ubiquitous Remix.” Convergence, vol. 27, no. 4, Aug. 2021, pp. 1129–44. SAGE Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856521994454.

Further Reading

Sinnreich, Aram. Mashed up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture. Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

Boone, Marcus. In Praise of Copying. Harvard University Press, 2013.

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