Produsage???

So is there anything wrong with taking someone else’s original creation and manipulating it to become your own piece of work? Is the piece of work you created as a result even a ‘new’ piece of work? The internet has many sites which allow users to display their manipulated works, providing them with an incentive to create such things. The act of recreating original work to give it a new meaning is known as ‘produsage’, a term coined by Dr Axel Bruns, an associate professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. It seems there would be a fine line between this and plagiarism, but I guess produsage is the legal recreation of someone else’s work. But this introduces that annoying question of whether produsage results in a ‘new’ piece of work or not? Think about Andy Warhol’s famous colour-in ‘artwork’. Is this new art, taking a photograph and colouring it in?
Despite which side you take, there are positive aspects of produsage. When I think about the examples of produsage that I’ve seen (and enjoyed), they are typically clips of re-dubbed TV shows and movies, as well as covers of songs. in the instances of clips, I found I enjoyed the clip because I could relate to the original aspect of the video, and also because I knew a lot of people who also enjoyed each clip. In fact, I am generally shown these humorous videos by others who’ve found them or been shown by someone else. This indicates two significant characteristics of prodused work which drive the concept’s success; relativity (it’s easy to relate to because you’ve seen part of it somewhere before) and popularity (it becomes very wide spread really quickly before it uses work that is already popular). Both these characteristics substantially enhance the effectiveness of produsage, and have driven it to become incorporated within popular culture. Throughout various forms of social media, prodused work and clips have become extremely fashionable, and the more they are enjoyed, the more popular they get.

Here is one of my favourite prodused clips…



And here is one of my favourite song covers...



Personally, I do really enjoy many prodused works and I appreciate the creativity shown. However, I can definitely see how traditionalists would have a problem with it, and produsage does lack authenticity from this perspective. I don’t know if I’d ever really get into creating produsage myself, but I do know I’m going to keep enjoying it!