The domestication of digital technology has brought debate over sampling other people's music and copyright above ground, most notably in last year's furore over Danger Mouse's Grey Album, made by combining elements of the Beatles' White Album and Jay Z's Black Album.

Creating mash-ups of disparate music has become a popular past-time now consumers have the tools to remix songs on their home computers. Retooling existing work is a long-established tradition in art, and conceptual pioneer Marcel Duchamp is probably the most guilty for adding appropriation to the art curriculum.

His 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. extended his use of readymade objects to irreverently pencilling a moustache and goatee on to a Mona Lisa print, questioning the famous painting's sexuality.

American artist Jill Miller's I Am Making Art Too is the video equivalent of a mash-up, taking John Baldessari's 1971 performance video I Am Making Art, adding a Missy Elliot soundtrack and editing herself into the action.

Although Miller had no communication with Elliot, Baldessari gave his enthusiastic consent, even supplying the original footage for her to work with.

"I had many discussions with John about his work," Miller says. "He has so many great stories. He's in a position where he has nothing to lose by being generous to young artists. We talked about some of his older work and he mentioned being a bit embarrassed when watching some of it, particularly I am Making Art.

About a year after that, I said to John wouldn't it be funny if he gave me his master to digitise.

"I had no idea how lucky I was at that moment. It was all so casual. After he saw the final cut he laughed and said, 'Do the rest of them, will you?' "

In I Am Making Art, Baldessari makes slow-motion, Tai-Chi style gestures, announcing with each movement he is making art and parodying the earnestness of much performance art.

Although a respected giant of conceptual art, he was well aware of the potential for banality and, in another ironic work from 1971, students repeatedly wrote, "I will not make any more boring art".

Appropriation often works best when it is sympathetic to the original while intelligently giving it a new perspective and, without negating Baldessari's intentions, Miller has extended his parody, transforming the dry, black-and-white aesthetic of early video art into a booty-shaking, hip-hop video.

Miller's understanding of the era of early performance art is romanticised, tinted with nostalgia. "I was not alive in 1971 but when I look at video and performance art from that period, I conjure a time when there were more possibilities, when artists perceived the world as a wide-open place where almost anything could happen."

In the United States, the civil rights movement and burgeoning feminist movement clearly inspired these feelings. "Of course, my knowledge of this is shaped by other people's memories and photographs and stories."