Sample & Remix: Contemporary Cultural Production Across Arts & Media

Description from DukeHub

Sampling & remixing of previous works is a major mode of contemporary cultural production cutting across media and cultural practices. This course analyzes its genealogy, technological underpinnings, legal presuppositions and aesthetic consequences. Tensions between copy and copyright, between claims to originality and mechanical reproduction characterize this contemporary regime, now deployed globally. Its cultural implications will be distinguished from related modes of making art and meaning (imitation, citation, collage, montage...) and tracked through various objects: popular and avant-garde cinema; videogames, ready-mades and Pop Art; Hip-Hop and Electro; literature and DJ culture.

Skills

No skill passed the confidence bar. Weak matches go to review instead of this page: an AI pass that has to quote the description, then a person.

AI-resilient: 1 of 5 1/5

• No: Physical, lab or field work
• No: Live work with people
• ✓Yes: Judgment someone is accountable for · "legal"
• No: A craft you practice with your hands or body
• No: Small, in-person format

The checks lean on Microsoft Research, Working with AI (2025), which found generative AI applies least to physical work and hands-on work with people. A signal, not a promise. How the score works

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