Remixing old texts, images, sounds and videos to create new works is how writers and communities develop shared values and achieve persuasive and creative effects. Remixing is a key contemporary composition practice. Sampling, or copying and pasting parts of existing works, is a form of remixing that is common in new media culture, where professionals and average users apply it across different software applications. Sampling allows for the development of mashups, where elements from different media are combined. When writing or composing new works, authors draw from their vast knowledge and experiences, similar to how DJs sample from existing songs to create new music. The internet represents a collective archive from which new creative works are derived.

1. by Lindsay Illich
Curry College
CEA 2012

2. Remixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and
video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual
writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve
persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is perhaps the premier
contemporary composing practice.
—DeVoss & Ridolfo

3. Sampling
Today, sampling is practiced in new media culture when
any software users including creative industry
professionals as well as average consumers apply cut/copy
& paste in diverse software applications; for professionals
this could mean 3-D modeling software like Maya (used to
develop animations in films like Spiderman or Lord of the
Rings );[1] and for average persons it could mean Microsoft
Word, often used to write texts like this one. Cut/copy &
paste is a vital new media feature in the development of
Remix. In Web 2.0 applications cut/copy & paste is a
necessary element to develop mashups; yet the cultural
model of mashups is not limited to software, but spans
across media.
Eduardo Navas
“Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture”

5. Sampling as a Metaphor for Thinking and Writing
In a DJ’s world, making a new song requires samples from other songs. To
sample from a song is to borrow a few bars of melody or a bass line.
You can see how this translates to composing: written texts are culled, shaped,
patterned on prior knowledge, which itself includes knowledge of genre,
quotes, ideas, what things you’ve heard. Essentially, a writer brings the vast
sum of memory, what DJ Spooky calls “a vast playhouse” and, later an “archive.”
On the meta-level, the world wide web represents a culture’s memory out of
which new artifacts are made.
Ultimately, says DJ Spooky, “as an artist you’re only as good as your archive.

6. Rhetorical velocity – Rhetorical velocity is, simply put, a strategic approach to
composing for rhetorical delivery. It is both a way of considering delivery as a
rhetorical mode, aligned with an understanding of how texts work as a component
of a strategy. In the inventive thinking of composing, rhetorical velocity is the
strategic theorizing for how a text might be recomposed (and why it might be
recomposed) by third parties, and how this recomposing may be useful or not to the
short- or long-term rhetorical objectives of the rhetorician. (Ridolfo and Voss)

7. What’s in your archive?

8. lindsay_illich@hotmail.com
lillich0511@curry.edu