Remix, Media Production, and Translocal Practices in Youth Culture

• In Event: Play, Drama, and Media Making as Cultural Flows: Research Innovation in Children and Youth’s Literacies

Abstract

Many youth draw on cultural and material remix by combining spoken word poetry and media production. In this paper, the author discusses remix in relation to the translocal practices of youth artists whose purposeful collaboration suggests cultural flows as dynamic across settings and important to 21st century education. Remix is defined here as a means to appropriate, borrow, and blend cultural texts to create new (or newer) texts. Remix also means taking something old and making it relevant again (Lessig (2008). At the heart of remix is the use of one or more modalities (oral or written language, images, symbols, sounds, gestures, artifacts, etc.) in specific semiotic domains that communicate distinctive types of meaning. Remix, then, is not simply about a change in content (a derivative) but also a change in context (a different meaning). In her study of literacy and media in children’s lives, Dyson (2003) suggests that children draw on their knowledge of popular cultural texts to make meaning of other texts through processes of recontextualization—that is, “differentiation, appropriation, translation, and the reframing of cultural material across symbolic forms and social practices.” The reframing, which in itself is a remix, produces a different meaning.
To gain some perspective on literary and media arts, I utilized an ethnographic approach that built on existing networks from an earlier study on youth poetry. I attended and observed various community media arts events and accessed media texts online or through copies provided by the artists themselves. I was also active in Web sphere search, an approach to studying Web objects and mediated patterns (Schneider & Foot, 2005), to follow the dissemination of local youth-made films regionally and nationally. Considering my level of access to media texts and interaction with artists, I focused on video poem projects, one of which is “Barely Audible” (the focus of this paper), to understand how youths themselves shaped and were being shaped by remix culture. Data sources include semi-structured interviews with poets, artists, and producers; field notes from participant observations; collection of media or related products such as written poems (in draft or published form), audio and video recorded spoken-word performances, DVD copies of completed videos; and producer-director commentary.
Content and visual analysis of suggests the idiosyncratic uptakes by youth artists, particularly how the social worlds detailed by an African-American writer-poet in a poem transcend one location and are recontextualized in another by other multiracial artists. Filmmakers of “Barely Audible” in New York City, for example, used visual/filmic modes to augment meanings embedded in the poem out of Oakland, California. This is important because it demonstrates a process of meaning making—a kind of remix across artistic genres, practices, and locales—that helped to shape the creation of another text and forge strong ties between artists as partners in education. Translocal practices in youth culture can offer a place from where to draw a range of ideas relevant to literacy, teaching, and connected learning.

Author

• Korina Jocson, University of Massachusetts - Amherst