Understanding appropriation as a creative practice
A person models their creative style, performance or songwriting style, etc on another person’s style. Members of one culture adopt or adapt the style of another culture. For example, Elvis and black rock and roll; Lady Gaga and Madonna.
In the classical period of Western music the only generally legitimate ways a composer would appropriate another composer’s music would be to “transcribe” it for different instrumentation, or to write variations on that composer’s theme. Sometimes variations would be called a “rhapsody on the theme” or a “fantasia on the theme,” etc. The use of Read More …
An audio mashup takes parts of two or more recorded songs by different artists – maybe people who would never willingly be part of one another’s music – and creates a new song based entirely on these source songs. Mashups were originally done mostly by amateurs using computer software to combine the elements of the Read More …
The strict sense of remix involves someone (usually legally) creating a new mix using the recorded elements of someone else’s song. Originally remixes were extended dance versions of song for clubs, and this is still probably the most common kind of remix. Remixes are usually authorized by the artist or copyright holder of the original, Read More …
Sampling is the use of part of somebody else’s recording as part of your own musical performance or recording (accompaniment, chorus, rhythm track, occasional hook, etc). The term is now sometimes used in an extended sense outside of music production, for instance one can speak of “sampling” part of a movie for a video mashup. Read More …
A culture jam uses the media of a dominant culture (corporate, entertainment, political) to criticize and subvert the ends of that culture. Culture jams may be audio, video, or still images, and could possibly exist in other modes as well. A culture jam is something more than a parody (of, say, an ad). Its intentions Read More …
The cut-up technique is a method of literary creation in which a text is cut up into into individual words or short phrases and these are randomly rearranged to create new patterns of language. The technique was used by the Dadaists, especially Tristan Tzara, who wrote a brief set of instructions called “To make a Read More …
The Readymade is a form of appropriation art invented and exclusively practised by Marcel Duchamp, who was connected with the Dadaists but generally distanced himself from any school of art. The first and most famous readymade was the urinal that Duchamp signed “R. Mutt” and submitted under the title Fountain for an open exhibition of Read More …
A form of creative work where paper and other generally flat objects are pasted to canvas, board, etc. Often the pasted material is combined with other media (painting, pen and ink, etc), but sometimes an entire work is composed of pasted paper together. Typically the paper materials are printed matter from mass media (newspapers, magazine Read More …