Webspinabattle

There are some who argue that there is no such thing as originality, things exist because they are copies of something that preceded them and in some way that statement it’s true. When we talk about the good plagiarism we are not talking about how the author of fifty shades of grey started writing her novel as a fanfiction of twilight, although that is exactly what happened and even though her adaptation was somewhat infamous, it became a bestseller and even got the Hollywood treatment with a Razzie worthy film adaptation.

Making Jurassic World, Fast and Furious 10 or a non-Harry Potter (but same universe)movie, are an obvious attempt to enlarge an existing universe sometimes adding some more things to the already existing source material to create something, sometimes good sometimes just profitable. We, however, have a lot more examples of things that have clearly been influenced by something that already exists and created something that seems completely original.

The movie Interstellar(2014)  was clearly influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and still had a very different take on a similar topic. The Reading the Ecstasy of influence explains this relation between influence and plagiarism very well, by comparing some classics of literature like Nabokov’s Lolita and Heinz von Lichberg’s story of the same name and the list goes on but, how does this happen?

The webspinabattle exercise concept was a little bit nonsensical at first, probably because of mere ignorance, but after reading and analyzing what we were doing, I came to the conclusion that the battle was an extreme example of the process of creating something new out existing material. We are surrounded by ideas and when we create something we are influenced by what is happening in the world that surrounds us, today, for example, almost all comedy has something to do with politics (yeah, that blond candidate) and that is because that is what is current and the parodies are a mix of the political environment plus the popular music and trends.

When preparing for the battle we took audio from many sources, viral videos, clips, different styles of music, and by mixing all of them we created a combination that has never been used before, what we did was unique not only because of the material but because of the context and the ones performing.

My personal opinion is that there is nothing ‘new’ in the world and probably never was, even defining the word ‘new’ in this context can become very abstract and even confusing. For me, everything that has been created is thanks to something else, in the same way, a person is a combination of genes of mother and father, who are also a combination of their own parents. Creativity is  taking from everywhere and making a unique combination, just like a human being is unique.