Back in January, he challenged the remix world to slice and dice his interview with Lawrence Lessig and set it to techno music.   Several great remixes showed up on YouTube and Colbert had a follow-up a couple weeks later…

But now the stakes are raised.  Colbert is officially inviting all editors and remixers to insert themselves into his show here. That’s right.  Hack your way onto national television by actually re-slicing a piece of recorded reality:  The Colbert Report show footage.  Add yourself in and, if they like your style, they’ll air your supposed Colbert Interview.

This is huge!

We talk a lot about how reality is a remix and you have the power to re-envision it as you go.  Here is a definitive example of that power in action.  You want to be on the show.  So you remix yourself into previous interview footage.  If it’s successful, you’re spell lands your face on the actual show!   Magic in action.
Techno Magic.

A techno remix.

This is the philosophy behind the electronic movement.  Everything we experience in day to day reality is mediated by some form of electronic signal.  It’s not something to rise up against necessarily.  Consider that everything we experience of regular waking life is itself mediated by language.  You see a car, the word car runs through your mind.  You process what car means, how it connec

ts (via words and concepts) to other associated things or ideas.   This internal monologue serves as a buffer between your mind and the reality that it’s processing around you.

This is the electronic paradigm.

Since we’re already used to experiencing the world thr

ough second-hand information, it isn’t a hard stretch to digitize that buffer zone.  To turn the medium via which we interact with and experience t

he world into digital beats or electronic sounds.  To images and video.  Texts and Tweets.  The world is

becoming a digital ocean of data, of information.  Ideas floating around in a crossover zone between material reality and cyber reality.

The great part about this?

We can remix the whole damn thing.

Remixing technological data (music, video, images, etc) is a means of remixing your perception and experience of the world.  Of Life.

Life is a remix.

Feel free to chop up ideas and re-imagine them.  Alter and change them.  Manipulate images and sounds.  That’s the freedom you have as a unique human being in the Digital Age.  Mix things up.

Mix up the world.

After all, the techno-world is a techno remix.

If you’re not doing the mixing… someone else is.