Arola's Awesome Assemblages

In Arola and Arola’s article, they describe a concept known as bare repetition. After reading the article and discussing in class with my peers, this term, to my understanding, means that something is repeated over and over again, but throughout that repetition and time, remains the same. Some well-known examples are the Batman and Superman movies. While they’ve been remade over and over again, sometimes even into television shows, they always stay the same. There’s always the superhero in their suit, with their iconic vehicle, and their complicated love interest. While minor details may change the important things don’t and make the movies easily recognizable. Now a days, there are a lot of TV shows doing similar things, such as, Arrow, Riverdale, Gotham, and The Flash. All of these shows share their storyline from a comic of some kind and thus are using bare repetition.

Here’s a trailer for the show Riverdale, which is based off of the Archie comics:

Another type of assemblage explained in Arola and Arola’s article is ethical assemblage. This occurs when someone adds a new component to something original. Probably my favorite example of this is song remixes. So many artists do this, and not just EDM DJs as most people think, many musicians will remix their own songs just because they can. Lorde, for example recently remixed the song Homemade Dynamite off of her sophomore album Melodrama, adding more of a beat to it and allowing three other artists to feature on the remixed track. Check it out here. Another really cool example of this ethical assemblage is created by a DJ known as Pop Danthology. At the end of each year he creates a mash up of every song that topped the charts throughout that year and uploads it to YouTube.

Here is his mash up from 2012, which is the year I discovered him, and one of my favorite remixes that he has created in the nearly five years since then: