Kirby Ferguson's inbox is about to go crazy – again.
He enraged Led Zeppelin fans and many more with his 2010 documentary hit Everything Is A Remix. It shows how stars from Woody Guthrie and Led Zeppelin to Jay Z and especially Steve Jobs have taken from the work of earlier artists to "create" their own success. It has had 4 million views and counting.
Ferguson's point is that copyright laws deny a creative reality. Everyone builds on what has gone before to come up with something "new". Admitting this liberates us from pressure to be "original" and lets us "simply begin", he says.
Cue flak. As if the flaming feedback from his last effort wasn't enough, the New York-based, Canadian film maker has taken on conspiracy theorists with his next work. This Is Not A Conspiracy Theory unpicks the psychology behind their beliefs.
Conspiracy theories are a "dramatic expression of a uniquely modern anxiety: the sensation that you are trapped within the invisible design of a greater power", says Ferguson, in Sydney for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Opera House this weekend. He is agnostic about whether the tales he looks at are true. The first episode, out this month, of what will be an 80-minute documentary, doesn't set out to disprove there are aliens in storage at Area 51 in Nevada or that it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald who shot JFK.
The notion that omnipotent people pull levers behind the scenes is a way of making sense of the complex interaction of the rules, systems and designs we have created, Ferguson says. We humanise to explain what we don't understand, falling back on characters and stories.
Cue more flak, this time from outraged theorists unshakeable in their beliefs. "I am very concerned about getting a lot of emails that I don't want to get," he said.
The former graphic designer has given up his day job to make crowd-sourced documentary episodes, raising money through Kickstarter. His latest work will be available on subscription. He hopes subscribers will feed in ideas he can incorporate into future instalments. (See? Everything is a remix).
His crusade is to come up with "pulpy, poppy, fun ways" to tell important stories that might otherwise be eye-glazing to the YouTube generation. Can he make a living out of it? He's about to find out, he says.