Where is Our Orchestra? What Journalism Can Learn From the Mind-Blowing Remixes of Kutiman

There are two ways to watch the works of Kutiman: in revelation or in revulsion. To the former, he's carving out a new form of expression, building majestic orchestras from modest parts. To the latter, he's a crook, misappropriating the works of others for his own gain. It's best, before moving forward, for you to make up your own mind:

If you're among those that thinks he's a crook (or a crock), I can't offer you anything. There's nothing to see here, move along.

For those that watch and feel giddy, let's dig deeper. It's mind-blowing: Kutiman, an Israeli musician, cuts his songs together using snippets of performances on hundreds of YouTube videos. This isn't Jay-Z mashed up with the Beatles (the infamous "Gray Album" of 2004), but something decidedly new: using amateur performances as the raw material to create works that are entirely different. Works that stand up as new songs and new entities, but which couldn't exist without the building blocks of other people's material.

It goes against most everything that people know about Intellectual Property, but, as Merlin Mann writes in the essay that introduced me to Kutiman, "If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who 'did this' with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page."

You can't argue the work of Kutiman along legal lines -- he treads over them so completely as to render them obsolete. Instead, you can only argue it along artistic lines. And in those lines, it's a win. A win for culture, a win for creation, a win for anyone who's thought about just what it is we can do exactly with this explosion of self-expression the internet has engendered.

What can we do with it? Kutiman gives a simple, elegant answer: anything. It's a river, just reach in.

Journalists need to not simply reach in, but dive in headfirst. We need to build our own orchestras out of the information being created all around us. Be like Kutiman: use the millions of blog entries, photos, tweets, and videos that find themselves on the web every day to build something new.

Right now, some journalists look at the wealth of material on the web as a threat -- they see all these amateur voices and worry that they will overpower their own (hence the many, many, many stories about how "bloggers can't replace reporters"). Others look at it and see what journalists always see: story ideas. Hence all the stories you've had to slog through about Twitter this last month. Both are wrong.

Journalists need to look at this stuff not as competition or story fodder, but instead see it through the eyes of Kutiman: it is an endless supply of raw goods, ready to be remixed, rebuilt, and recreated in ways that are wholly new and wholly unexpected. At the end of the day, that's what journalism has always been best at: taking the world around us and giving it back to us in new ways. Well, that world has suddenly become much easier to access -- it's telling us about itself all the time. But that doesn't mean that the stories it tells are enough (pick any random Twitter stream and follow it for a while to prove that theory true). In the same way that the original videos Kutiman used had varying levels of artistic merit (I'm probably being overly diplomatic there -- many of them sucked) but are transformed into something beautiful irregardless, so to can a journalist take this never-ending stream of information and transform it into something revelatory. And, when they do, it will start a domino chain that will lead to somewhere entirely new.

Comments

[NickJones]

I liked the first 4:30.

[yesman]

This stuff is fine, but what's the big deal? When this is done with audio clips, it's called "sampling.­" You can hear remixes of various songs in any DJ mix. Kutiman is just doing it with video music rather than audio-only sources. Fine. It's interesting enough, but hardly earth-shaking. Take away the video aspect and just listen to the song, and it's not that different from what a zillion electronic music artists have done for years.

[metropixie]

Thanks to "journalism" for bringing this to my attention. I'm now going to look where I can download this. Fantastic idea. Great music, and a fun way to bring exposure to otherwise obscure artists. As for the cut and paste technique, we've had Holger Czukay, Brian Eno/Robert Fripp, Daedelus, and a slew of artists before Kutiman so revolutionary it is not. He's merely doing it with a different medium. And doing it well enough for me to like it.

[breakingpoint]

we copy everything from birth, nothing is original or hasn't been influenced by someone or something else

copyright laws stifle and kills creativity for monetary gain only

Kutiman is expressing a very real human experience.

[tompoe]

Our precious public domain is truly marvelous. Now, if we can just convince those corporate thugs to appreciate the benefits that come from social entrepreneurship, our world will be a better place.

[Yaniv Eidelstein]

"Irregardless"?? Oh no you didn't!

[listeningpost]

Daniel, you have make some distinctions here. Kutiman is building an orchestra only in a virtual sense-he is using recordings. Recordings are artifacts of performance, this is not a trivial distinction with regard to your thesis. We already have "news orchestras", they are called news bureaus, nothing new there.
Secondly, Kutiman is making art. Artists have different intentions and goals than journalists. Their relationship to reality is different and the criteria for critique is different. Primary sources have a different significance in art than they do in journalism.
You may have a good point here but I don't think you've made it successfully. Journalists don't review the news or comment on it unless those are their specific tasks, tasks which make up a small part of journalism.
I'd like to see you explore this and give some examples. It seems to me that the domino chain you point to here does lead to somewhere that's not entirely new, fiction.
In a way what Kutiman has done is create a new form of fiction. Or at least a new application of technologies. Many times artists lead the way for other disciplines. Exactly how do see this applied to Journalism?

[BLBass]

You're quite right, as far as you go. However, I think there's another layer to this. Press bureaus are one source of information, and "remixing" them would indeed be pointless, however you feel about the intellectual property rights. There would be some value to having professionals able to point out connections between minor factual stories, perhaps. But there is another source that I don't think is fully tapped yet: public opinion and reaction to facts.

Blogs are nice; I don't have (or make) the time for my own, and so my responses are currently limited to my own reflection and in-person social interactions. That's not even a bad thing. But the "orchestral" effect of Kutiman's video mixes, and why I think it goes beyond sampling, comes from the amateur nature of the source material. To use Mr. Sinker's analogy, the journalistic YouTube could be a clearinghouse where a single account (not registering to comment on several blogs, not putting in the effort to start your own blog, etc) enables wide use and reuse of opinions and the aggregate public response to any event. And while journalism is not art, the exploratory aspect of Kutiman's art is exactly what I think the world would gain from when used in a journalistic setting. It might even remove from journalism the emphasis on access to important public figures. A virtuoso could make far more from such snippets than from polls or interviews!

[listeningpost]

Good points. I've often found the comments here on HP to be more valuable than the original blogs. It would be good if there was some mechanism where these dialogues could continue. It's more about being able to access a knowledge base. We are an almost infinite number of monkeys occasionally hammering out a sonnet or two...