RT @ Persepolis

    Hi all. Judy is still away on vacation, so I’m still filling in as a guest-blogger here at Transforming Power. Judy will be back towards the end of the month, as energizied and invigorated as ever! In the meantime, here’s my latest post. Enjoy.
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    We’ve all heard about the music remix (perhaps better known by its more recent moniker, “the mash-up”) and there’s even been several examples of remixing movies (from Star Wars and Superman to the recent Canadian documentary RIP: A Remix Manifesto) however I had yet to encounter the comic book remix, that is until I came across Persepolis 2.0.

    Persepolis was the graphic novel that inspired the 2008 Oscar nominated animated film by the same title. The book and the film were written by Marjane Satrapi based on her experiences of growing up in the late 1970s/early 1980s during the Iranian Revolution. If you haven’t read the book or seen the film I can’t recommend both of them highly enough (read the book first, then see the film of course).

    The creators of Persepolis 2.0, who go by the names “Payman and Sina” have taken Satrapi’s beautiful images and “updated” them to reflect the recent political turmoil in Iran. Although Satrapi was not directly involved in the recreation, Persepolis 2.0 stays remarkably close to the feel of the original. So close in fact that the remix might even fool those who have never read the original into thinking that it is itself an original work.

    The larger issues at hand with Persepolis 2.0 and all “Art 2.0” in general are of course the moral, ethical and even legal issues of using someone else’s art to create your own. Certainly this type of artistic sharing is not going away anytime soon, as the ability to remix anything is becoming easier by the day. Remix’s run the gamut from weird and pointless to plan old bad. However this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t accept and even respect remixed art. Every so often an intelligent and relevant remix appears, such as Persepolis 2.0, and we can see exactly why it is worthwhile and even necessary to share culture.

    Culture is ever changing, sometimes by the hour, as was seen by the post-election events in Iran. Reflecting this was Twitter, which became so critical in spreading news throughout the nation because of its speed and reach. By re-interpreting Persepolis 2.0, the creators were using images that were familiar to many and would likely spread faster than new images by unknown creators. Let’s just think of Persepolis 2.0 as an artistic retweet.