7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College


Write an essay on the role of remake and appropriation in art, focusing on Sherrie Levine’s work After Walker Evans, which was composed of Levine’s photographs of Walker Evans’ photographs (the collection was swiftly confiscated by the Evans estate).

Identify all of the samples in the 1985 hip hop track “Lesson One: The Payoff Mix” by Double Dee & Steinski, and write an essay explaining the textual interplay created by the juxtapositions.



Remix Culture

Why take this course?
Modern artists don’t start with a blank page or empty canvas. They start with preexisting works.

What you’ll learn:
How to analyze—and create—artworks made out of other artworks.


ere are some defining artists of the post-postmodern age: Spike Jonze, whose video for Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” wove the band into an episode of Happy Days; Girl Talk, who turned 322 snippets of recordings into an original album; and Garfield Minus Garfield, a website that erases the eponymous cat from his own comic strip. The creative act is no longer about building something out of nothing but rather building something new out of cultural products that already exist.

In this class, we’ll examine the philosophical roots of remix culture and study seminal works like Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram and Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. And we’ll examine modern-day exemplars from DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing to Auto-Tune the News.

Next, we’ll take a look at three sets of technological tools that helped democratize art creation.

This course is a prerequisite for US Intellectual History 1990-Present

Writing tools: From the Gutenberg printing press to Microsoft Word, publishing technology has made it easier to reproduce, copy, and manipulate words.

Aural tools: Grandmaster Flash’s turntables and crossfader turned records into instruments. Samplers like the E-Mu SP-1200 and the Akai S950 made prerecorded music a manipulatable musical ingredient. Pro Tools and other software programs made professional-quality sound deconstruction available to the average consumer.

Video tools: From reel-to-reel film editing suites to Avid to iMovie, the process of video editing has grown cheaper and easier, as well.

Finally, students will be asked to create their own manipulations of preexisting works.

Do not write in this area

By Jason Tanz


Do not write in this area
Create a unique work using only clips from the 60,000-plus educational, industrial, and amateur films in the Prelinger Archives (archive.org/details/prelinger). If you complete the extra credit assignment, please submit a link to wireduniversity@wired.com.

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