Connection: Kuhn’s Rhetoric of Remix

In “The rhetoric of remix,” Virginia Kuhn evaluates three examples of digital remix, defining remix as “a digital argument that works across the registers of sound, text, and image to make claims and provides evidence to support those claims.”

Describing the well-known fanvid “Closer,” which uses the Nine Inch Nails song of the same name as the soundtrack to spliced footage of Kirk and Spock from the original Star Trek series, Kuhn writes, “the song provides strong support to the claim made by the images.” Soundtrack is an essential part of the argument of this remix. The focus in “Closer” is on the lyrics of the song and their connection with the visual storytelling. Though Vines are only six seconds long, we can see the use of the same association of soundtrack with visuals when analyzing remixed audio on Vine.

The tag #TGambinoIF, started by Vine user Mike Gambino, is a great example of differing visuals with the same soundtrack.

Often, these Vines start with a static scene and end with a sudden, strange visual, but this is not always the case. Some vines in this tag tell a story, like the one below.

Finally, some users in this tag remix visuals from other sources in order to make a mashup of clips and music.

Though each of these examples uses the same six-second audio clip, their visuals combine with the audio in different ways, making a different type of remix with the same audio material.

In Kuhn’s second example, “Now!”, a 1965 film by Santiago Alvarez, visuals and soundtrack again intersect to make a new object. In “Now!” the purpose is explicitly political: Alvarez seeks to expose the hypocrisy of the Johnson administration in the face of civil rights struggles and human rights violations both in the U.S. and abroad. Though less Vines are explicitly political, there is certainly a trend of pairing certain soundtracks with politically charged footage. The difference is that on Vine, the product is usually comedic.

A common political Vine during this past election season would take something Republican candidate Donald Trump said and place it in a new context, often to show how ridiculous it sounded to the creator.

When Trump referenced law and order as concepts, Vine users mashed up his remarks with the visuals and audio of the TV show Law & Order. 

Another tactic involved placing a candidate’s words together in a different order to create a new message. In this case, the creator of the Vine used Trump’s own words to create a threatening message.

Though the politics of Vine deserve their own separate analysis, we can see through these examples the kind of political remixing that takes place on Vine. Therefore, Vine acts as a space for speech through audio and visual remix. These Vines exist not only for entertainment, but also for the sake of making a specific statement to a Vine creator’s audience.