What is Remixing?

• By Jenny Parker
• January 15, 2008

Visitor-participation can take many forms – one of our favorites here at Night Kitchen “the remix”: using technology to rearrange and recontexualize an exhibit in order to create their own original narrative. Night Kitchen’s Franklin Remixed project is an excellent example. Here, students used blogging, podcasting, and image sharing to remix exhibit components to create their own online exhibit.

Museum curators and educators understand this kind of knowledge construction as a major aspect of what we do professionally. The exhibit-remix project simply extends this task to museum visitors, allowing them to share in the same rich creative process museum professionals experience. The result is nothing short of the “democratization of creativity,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar in Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity:

"It’s about demolishing the myth that there has to be a special class of creators, and flattening out the creative curve so we can all contribute to our creative environment."

When you think about it, we already remix in everyday life: Surfing, blogging, tagging – these are all ways we organize and create meaning out of the onslaught of information in our daily lives. It is becoming the dominant means by which we consume media, learn, and communicate in an information-saturated age.  

Perhaps it only makes sense, then, to incorporate these methods of knowledge building into today’s museum experience?

Find out more in Night Kitchen Interactive’s 2007 paper, Remixing Exhibits.

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