The above video was created by the Israeli musician and producer named Kutiman.  He revealed in a recent NPR interview that it took him 2 months of hard work to put together.  The final result was a result of hours upon hours spent searching YouTube to find a series of music videos that he eventually “mashed” together into the final video.  There are a number of reasons that the video is compelling for viewers, but a perhaps more interesting fact emerged, in the course of the interview, about why the process was compelling for Kutiman.

Due to the fact that he is a musician and producer himself, i assumed (as did Melissa Block, the interviewer) that the process must have become tedious for him.  In the interview (around min. 4:40), she asks “..it didn’t get boring at some point to be just working with other people’s at times pretty lousy recordings of themselves making music?”

His response was surprising to me, even though i could have guessed it was coming:

“Actually, the other way around,” Kutiman says. “After I finished this project, I found it really boring to play something myself — to compose a song or play guitar or play bass, it really looked boring to me. It has no video in it, it has no person in it, and it has no other life in it. It was fascinating to work on it. It was the most incredible project I’ve worked on.”

If you are not yet familiar with the new rise of what Larry Lessig would call “the Remix Culture,” in which people use what Lev Manovich might call “The Logic of Selection” as a new way of producing value in  “Mosaics” (Marshall McLuhan), “Mashups” or “Bricolage” like this, you might want to become a little more familiar.  Oh, and enjoy the products while you’re at it!