We have been talking about Remixes and Mashups in our Coetails classes off and on for some time now.  It’s been great discussion for me because as an art teacher I can bring these concepts into almost any of my classes with very little effort. Two of my finals units  now have incorporated some sort of remix or mashup into the students final product.  I’ve found the students to be incredibly motivated and creative at the same time.  As I move forward to create an animation class next year I am positive that these themes will continue to creep into my curriculum.

What I love about the buzz around mashups and remixes in todays culture is that this is nothing new to the art world.  I can talk about these things with my students as a very easy segway into the history of appropriation in the arts. According to MoMA appropriation is the intentional borrowing, copying, and alteration of preexisting images and objects. It’s been a part of western art for centuries but its a style that has rapidly increased with the rise of consumerism. Jonathan Lethem’s article in Harper’s Magazine “The Ecstasy of Influence” nicely describes how appropriation has been a part of the arts for a long time in many different ways. If you think remixing is anything new then check this article out.  I personally find that using the word remix is just what helps me to relate to my students.  From there we are able to dig a little bit deeper.

Using the word Remix also brings me to the idea of having a good hook for your students. I was recently introduced to a concept referred to as Fan Art. Again, to me this is another form of appropriation or if I was trying to pull in my students I would say Fan Art is another form of remixing.  If you are unsure about what Fan Art is watch this OffBook short from PBS.

The thing I love about fan art is that so many people start out drawing fan art when they are little.  When kids or even adults don’t know what to draw they will draw a character that they know from some sort of work of fiction. If you want to get a little creative you could draw them doing something new or out of character. I would say that about 70% of the independent drawings that my students do in their sketchbooks are fan art from their favorite shows. Fan art is yet another genre that falls under appropriation that I can easily use to stir up some creativity with my students.  I’m not sure where all this is going just yet but I’ve got high hopes for all the places appropriation in it’s many forms will take my classes in the future.

This semester I’m teaching a design class and I’m finding myself in new territory.  I’m constantly focused on making our projects to be meaningful and relevant. One very relevant project we were recently working on in class was designing a new cover for next years school agendas.   In a way the class was hired to a job with very specific criteria and functionality. Knowing this we took our task very seriously. Students broke off into small groups to work on their ideas, periodically regrouping to discuss design elements until we came up with something that we all agreed was aesthetically pleasing as good design. I feel the project was a huge success, used a collaborative design process, and helped students to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign.

 

One little bug  popped up in the process that brought me back to our copyright discussions in CoeTail. We started out our design process with a set of images that we owned.  At one point students wanted to use other images and began grabbing things off the internet without thinking twice. I quickly realized that in a class where we are constantly on the computer and we are working with layout and design that copyright needs to be addressed. As a matter of fact I should probably be addressing it in all of my art classes to some degree since appropriation is a common artistic practice.  With this thought in mind I have decided that the introduction to our next design project, which is t-shirt design, will begin with concepts of appropriation, copyright and remix culture. We have just finished creating our own personalized logos and have published them to our blogs.  Ownership of their own work and fair use of others are things that each of my students should be considering at this point.

This unit will be introduced to my students by addressing the issue we ran into a few weeks ago when images were taken from the internet for our cover project. The class will be broken up into groups of two, with each group researching one of the following topics and reporting back to the class.

• Explain copyright and who it is meant to protect.
• What is appropriation? Give 3 examples of famous artists using appropriation in their work.
• Tell us about Andy Warhol and one of the copyright lawsuits he was involved in.
• What are considered the fair use and artistic standards for artists involving copyright?
• Give two possible scenarios where copyright would affect us in Design class.

Once we have all been informed of each others topics we will take a closer look at our schools RUP. This will give the students time to not only review the RUP but also discuss what points in the RUP relate closely to our work in Design.

It is at this final point in the discussion that I will introduce students to Creative Commons, it’s purpose and how we should be using it from here on out. Creative Commons has two wonderful videos that I plan to share with the students to not only explain what Creative Commons is but also how they have contributed to the remix culture of modern artistic appropriation. The following is the first of those two videos. With help from the Creative Commons search engine we will be finding images to turn into remixed graphics on Adobe illustrator. Our final graphics should also be changed according to artistic standards of copyright so that they could be legally printed onto a t-shirt or submitted to a design company such as threadless.com.

I’m excited for students to do their own research into this topic and see how copyright enters the visual art world. I’m also excited to hear the discussions that might follow. This unit will being within the next two weeks in my class, stay tuned for updates.