Frankenstein Monster is a Cut Up, Brundlefly is a Mashup

 

A few nights ago I presented Red Riding Hood Remix: Innovation Through Storytelling wherein I discussed creative methods for looking at things from different perspectives. One of those methods was the Cut Up. The Cut Up is very simple: take a few sheets of paper and “cut it up” in quarters or eighths. Then mix up the pieces and paste them together randomly. Rewrite the randomly placed words, filling in gaps and adjusting for disruptive grammar. Turn it into poetry.

 

This should not be confused with Mashups. A Mashup is very similar to a Cut Up, but it requires a different set of skills. A great Cut Up artist, like William S. Burroughs (author of The Naked Lunch), can turn random words into psychedelic prose through it’s jarring and disharmonious nature. A great Mashup artist, like DJ Earworm, must listen to different material and find synchronous (or similar) elements first and THEN make precision cuts (samples) to re-fit and overlap into one harmonious track. One is a tearing apart and reconstructing, the other is fusing together and blending.

 

It’s kind of like the Frankenstein Monster (cut up) versus Brundlefly (mashup). One is patched together from various body parts dug out of a graveyard by a humpbacked assistant (from Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein), and the other is genetically spliced together with the DNA of a common housefly during teleportation (from David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly). I realize that neither of these examples make Cut Ups or Mashup very visually appealing. But perhaps this will:

 

 

DJ Earworm mashed together the top songs of 2009. There is something uncanny about mashing 25 songs into a catchy four-and-a-quarter minute song, but he manages to squeeze in the entire Billboard Top 25, and make a decent video at the same time. And it doesn’t sound like a mess, it sounds like a legitimate chart-topper on it’s own (borrowed) merit. At present it has close to ten million views on YouTube. Who says you can’t splice and dice and make something beautiful? (I now have The United State of Pop 2009 mp3 on my iPhone)

 

I am going to add Splice and Dice as another Creative Method to use during ideation: harmoniously fuse elements of similar mediums together, and if they don’t quite fit, use a shoehorn (or pitch-shifter or teleporter).

Posted via email from Jason Theodor’s Creative Method and Systems Channel

 

This entry was written by jted, posted on January 31, 2010 at 12:25 am, filed under Creative Method and tagged Brundlefly, Creative Method, Cut Up, DJ Earworm, Frankenstein, mashup, Splice and Dice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.

The Creative Method and Systems Debut

Download a PDF of The Creative Method and Systems.

Sign up for the Creative Method and Systems workshop on May 9th in Toronto

After five years of promising myself I would write a book on creativity, I finally got most of my ideas together in one package. I presented this package on April 28th, 2009, at FITC Toronto (an eclectic innovation, design, and technology conference). Cramming half a decade of thinking into a one hour presentation is challenging, but the net result is this distillation of The Creative Method and Systems. It has garnered some attention on SlideShare.net, becoming the Top Presentation of the Day in less than 24 hours after posting. I know this was due, in part, by some wonderful Twitter followers who kept broadcasting and relinking to the slideshow. Thank you very much for the attention. This was also due to a timely interview in BlogTO about creativity at FITC by Corina. Thank you to her as well.

So what’s next? An audio addition to the SlideShare presentation is coming in the next few weeks. I’m also creating a Ning community to challenge, use, and discuss these ideas. If you are interested, you can sign up here. But please note that there is very limited space to start and that you may be placed on a waiting list.

There will be a lot more, as this is just the beginning of The Creative Method and Systems. It will continue to grow and evolve as I work toward improving the sections that need more attention, and reacting to comments and suggestions.

If you are interested in inviting me to speak at your school, institution, or agency, feel free to contact me at Jason.Theodor[at]gmail.com. Please put CREATIVE METHOD in the subject.

Thanks again to everyone who has downloaded, watched, favourited, re-tweeted, and linked to The Creative Method and Systems.

This entry was written by jted, posted on April 28, 2009 at 4:42 pm, filed under Creative Method, Featured and tagged BlogTO, brainstorming, Creative Method, creativity, ideation, Jason Theodor, JasonTheodor, jted, presentation, slideshare. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.