McLuhan Remix is three-part video essay with supporting web site created by Jamie O’Neil aka Kurt Weibers, a video/performance artist and assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo. Below I include the McLuhan Remix: Prologue and first paragraph of the web site intro.

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The Medium is the Mix
Remixing is the most important aesthetic and epistemological outcome of the technologies of digital media and the Internet. This video-essay is intended for today’s students (digital natives) who are studying McLuhan’s words on paper. McLuhan knew how to mix concepts to create a powerful reaction. He utilized electronic communication channels (audio and video) in his time, and he spoke through them with incredible fluency. Today, YouTube mash-ups are an emerging form of literacy, rarely used for scholarly purposes. This is because the digital era of “cut&paste” has mostly been problematical for traditional academics (it is unacceptable to remix a term paper). But networked, digital authoring also greatly expands the range of expressivity… How then would McLuhan expect an essay to be composed today, nearly a half-century after his time?  [Read more.]

Since I keep introducing The Medium is the Massage to students as an exemplar of electronic composition in the print medium as well as a theoretical text, it’s been my intent to rework the FYC Annotating McLuhan project into a video project remixing the book (both the print and audio versions), research, and video and audio recordings of McLuhan. For the time being, I’m going to use the video essay as a supplementary text in the current FYC course and plan on using it as a theoretical text and exemplar in next fall’s Advanced Composition: Image, Sound, Text course.

Via Lance Strate.