Becoming familiar with current remixes is a way to help students understand the the legitimacy of appropriation. Encourage your students to bring in remixes, mashups, collages, and recuts that interest them. Share these links to provide a history of each music video remix genre and offer sample remixes to review. As you review examples with your students, relate the original source to the remixed version.

Here are some remix communities to help you:

• Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) supports all fan works and provides a history of vidding as well as many projects that document this culture.
  
• Machinimists are artists who use three-dimensional graphic engines from video games. To learn about fan machinima and see examples, check out Machinima.com
• Political Remix Videos (PRVs) use video clips from popular media such as new clips, speeches, TV shows, and movies to convey alternative messages not just on political structures but on social issues as well. To learn about PRVs, check out their site.
  
• Anime Music Videos is a community that shares and edits animated Japanese cartoons that add to a song or tell a story.
  

Activity: Reading a Remix

Using the following template, have students identify the original source and, in reviewing the remix, share the media influences and the media that was sampled from the original to create the remix.


Then, use these questions as a framework to discuss the remixes.

1. What constitutes the primary source material?
2. What is the media form of the remix?
3. What is the context of the remix?
4. What elements of the primary source material are being remixed?
5. Are the works of the same genre or different ones? How do you know?
6. What techniques are used in reworking the original material?
7. What is the intended purpose of the remix?
8. How does the remix build on, add to, or alter the cultural meaning of the original work?
9. Would you consider the remix an ethical appropriation of the primary source material? Why or why not?
10. Would you consider the remix a legal appropriation of the primary source material? Why or why not?

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