2012 Slatin Prize

Will Burdette won the 2012 MEME prize for his Remixing workshop.

Burroughs and Mingus from Will Burdette on Vimeo.

In 2010, Will Burdette presented a Remixing Workshop for DWRL instructors at orientation. Also in 2010, Burdette presented the workshop to students in E314J Literature and Popular Music. In 2012, Burdette consulted with Emily Bloom to help her adapt the workshop into a classroom assignment for her E 314L Banned Books class. In that class she asked students to remix the poems “Howl” or “The Great Hunger” with three voices and one additional sound element. 

In the workshops Burdette led in 2010, participants produced remixed ringtones. Participants took one musical track and one spoken word (literary or rhetorical) track and mixed them together live in DJay. Then they recorded the mixes and opened them in editing software to cut them down to 5-6 seconds, and exported them as ringtones. The Remixing Workshops are designed to introduce instructors and students to software and web-based tools for remixing, editing, and distributing audio content. My assignment gets participants acquainted with two audio interfaces: DJay and GarageBand. This move makes clear the difference between synchronous mixing and asynchronous editing. It also provides an opportunity to discuss juxtaposition, affect, copyright/copyleft, fair use, irony, and selection. Theoretically, the Remixing Workshops introduce students to remixing as a cultural (as opposed to a strictly musical) concept that offers a post-critical approach to texts.