It would only be fair to start out this overview of the investigative journey to understanding the terms assemblage and remix by giving a baseline definition of what assemblage is. The tagline, "Everything We've Created and Will Ever Create," should already serve as a bit of a context clue to fill you in on it, though. Put simply, assemblage deals with the making of things out of things that were already made before that. Remix then takes those made-things and creates another version of it out of itself. But there's actually nothing simple about these concepts: while the terms assemblage and remix should be categorized as textual in nature, the scope of what is meant by "textual" is just about as broad as the definitions of the terms themselves. 

   While I knew I was interested in how my terms applied to music from the get-go, I still wanted to explore other aspects of assemblage and remix to ensure I wasn’t limiting myself to this one “tunnel-visioned” approach to such a broad and all-encompassing set of terminology. Early on in the invention process, I explored general areas of copyright, Disney’s impact on copyright laws, sampling laws surrounding non-musical media, scholarly sources on assemblage as a textual ideology, and of course, music. I even considered ways in which some of the textual terms my peers had chosen to work with crossed paths with my own.

   One term in particular that stuck out to me--and specifically how it combines with my own studies of assemblage and remix--was rhetorical trajectory. The rhetorical trajectory of the Obama “Hope” poster can serve as a perfect example of visual remix. Another example of the crossover between remix and rhetorical trajectory that my peers and I considered was how a blue stripe in the American flag for “Blue Lives Matter” has become a mockery-remix of the Black Lives Matter movement, and rather than showing support for the police force like wielders of this symbol claim, it actually serves as a dog whistle-esque antiblack sentiment instead.

   Using real-world examples like those--along with creating new examples of media composed through assemblage and remix--work to provide a tangible grasp on these conceptual terms that are, quite frankly, too comprehensive to understand through a simplified, written definition alone. While it may sound like I've got a down-packed grasp of what the terms are, I would actually be discrediting my own authority on the subject by pretending that I know (or could even understand) all there is to be known about assemblage and remix and the different ways they manifest across media.