In today’s creative community, original ideas are often seen as ideal while “derivative” is a nasty word. But writer, director and filmmaker Kirby Ferguson stands by innovative ideas that may have come from somewhere else – one bassline sampled dozens of times through song, for instance, doesn’t make all of the subsequent songs bad, they’re just using ideas already in the ether.

Ferguson spoke yesterday at PromaxBDA: The Conference 2013 in a session called “Everything Is a Remix: The Challenge of Originality,” where he stood by creative ideas, no matter where they come from.

To build upon that creativity, according to Ferguson, once simply has to copy, transform and combine, even though “the idea runs counter to our culture’s idea of individual and original creativity.”

“Most creative works are sprawling, messy affairs,” said Ferguson. They take from previous works, intentionally or not, and whether they are derivative or original, that work can still stand on its own. Danger Mouse created the “Grey Album” from The Beatles and Jay-Z. Led Zeppelin merged other bands’ work into their hit songs, and their bassline beats were borrowed from artist like Beastie Boys and Dr. Dre.

Ferguson’s point was that, even though ideas or origins of ideas can be traced back to a point on the spectrum, that doesn’t take away from their value as good ideas. People, and audiences, like things that are familiar to them, according to Ferguson. “Hollywood is full of sequels, remakes and adaptations,” he said. “‘Transformers’ is based off of a TV show that is based on a series of toys.”

These formulaic and unoriginal ideas are prevalent: “Its in good work, bad work, revolutionary work,” Ferguson said. And with this remix system in creativity, “we get plenty of repetition and redundancy.”

This often results in the idea of multiple discovery. Sometimes ideas just pop up in public consciousness at the same time, without being stolen or ripped off of previous inventions, and end up in inevitable duplicates. It’s why three Coco Chanel movies premiered within three months of one another, and why right around the same time Ferguson presented his idea and video series focused on the remix concept, Malcolm Gladwell published an article focusing on the same idea and titled it the “Creation Myth.” It’s also why there are constantly any number of Sherlock Holmes pilots in the mix.

And so, Ferguson said, the creative community needs to accept that we “often draw from our culture in a way that we don’t always acknowledge,” and start using the tools to copy, transform and combine in order to make new ideas from the old.

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