Knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded. Sharing is the nature of creation. It matters because we live in media. Like fishes live in water. They iron all subjects flat than then proceed, in groups, at a forced march across the flattened plain. Involvements with the material is not encouraged nor taken into consideration, but their dutifulness of response is carefully monitored. We are saying no. We are saying we want to actually create with it respond to it cut it up design the molecules of our new water.

I wanted to start off with the guest artists we had come in since it was really cool to see and hear about the work they are doing.  David Fodel’s work was very broad in terms of the kind of art he produces and the technology involved.  I liked the stripped down had animation of this song cutting off heads because of the childish voice and animations that dealt with a serious issue.  Some of his other works were very technological such as the wind harp using satellite data and the broadcasting performance using various electronic instruments spanning several decades.  I felt like overall Davids work lacked a more focused direction which can be hard to really understand his work but at the same time allows for freedom and experimentation.  Phil Solomon’s video machinima was particularity interesting.  I have seen several machinimas before and tired to do my own at one point.  Most of the films have voice and character interaction to tell a story.  Phil’s work lacked these elements which was great because he used his theory and knowledge of film to create works that had much deeper meaning and used very specific effects from the game to create his works.  I really was impressed how he used the fire as a way to light up his sets and the cheat codes to create a dream like effect with the car driving through the air like a plane.  After hearing about his friends death and then seeing the second video it was incredibly impactful for me as a tribute to his friend and a morning of the loss but also as a journey through time and space trying to find your way.  To control a character or vehicle like Phil did in this film without having things pop up or the camera get stuck is pretty amazing.  The hardest thing in making a machinima is controlling the characters to do what you want them to do with the limited abilities in the game. Phil did a great job of this.  Learning VDMX was a really great demo and a program that I have heard about for several years but never had a chance to try it out.  I really like the possibilities with the program and especially the way you can set midi devices and the wii mote controller.  I plan to experiment with this program and learn more and more.  In reading the VJ theory and other pieces I found a few things interesting that have come up several times in all of the content we have gone over.  Disc Jockey or DJ is a term I have heard for many years most notably withe the rise of hip hop culture and the work of Grand Master Flash.  A new term for me is VJ and more specifically Video Jammer instead of Jockey.  It makes sense especially after using VDMX where your channel faders and other setups and effects can be used in a way that you literally jam up the video display with all of this content.  In VJ Theory they talked about DJ and VJ and the history with MTV and the birth of the VJ with the music videos.  Rewind to early film and they talk about silent films where the film was spread out over several reals that had to be changed.  the accidental changing of the these reels and showing them in the incorrect order was esentially the birth of remixing film.  Another interesting thing was the western story telling and how this part of the USA at the time used spoken word to tell a story and when they saw film the order of the story did not make sense to these people and so if the order of the film got mixed up it was not seen as a mistake but just as the flow of the story.  Video is a very interesting part of the remix culture ever expanding with todays technology although the basic ideas and and experimentation have been around since the beginning of film technology.  I hope to play with this  side of digital art more and see what happens.

“-they’ve been there before — but they aren’t going to stop creating.”

-Henery Jenkins

“Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it.”

-Henry Jenkins

Convergence culture has no better friend than George Lucas.  Think the relationship of convergence media was good only for pop culture.  Fair use and collaborators are continuing to sell the Lucas trademark Star Wars films in ways that Lucas nor his high paid Hollywood allies ever dreamed.  In return, the fans have gained a generation worth of myths and tales (Jenkins, 2006).  This is a culture where everyone wins.  New and emerging artist take their stab at telling their own tales using the Lucas fantasy.  These new editors and filmmakers, armed with tools like Youtube and today’s wide range of cameras and editing software, now participate with an audience, engaged and interactive.  These are today’s storytellers communicating in creative voice to spread previous fantasies and myths of heroes and villains.  These new films push the original ideas into a new realm of interaction and engagement.  Communities of filmmakers learn from watching each other and furthering their own skills.

DJ’s have understood this since the 70’s when they started sampling beats, scratching records, and using vocals tracks to create what is hip-hop.  The original mash up culture may in fact be hip-hop.  The very nature of the DJ, MC, Break Dancers and graffiti artwork all feed off each other in a participatory fashion.  These elements started in the underground and drove quickly to the top.  Bringing with it, hip-hop inspired millions world wide, gave a voice to people of all types, and made billions of dollars in music sales, concerts, fashion, and film.   Even though people thought hip-hop would be a quick fad, it is here to stay 30 years later.  Suppose we criminalize hip-hop.   Would it go quietly back underground?

If societies are to progress, freedom has to be guarded.  The mind develops a memory of the tales of our time.  Once the tales begin to guide us, they cannot leave the psyche.  In the same way, though copyright exists to protect investment and self-preservation, it should not exist to limit the tales we tell or the way in which we tell them.  Nor will it ever be able to stop the new media entrepreneurs from building on solid foundations.  Collaborators will not be prohibited.   Literacy is advancing.  The forms in which our stories exist are being reinvented everyday.  There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them.  The people are speaking and speaking to audiences like never before.  The evolution of democracy is happening.  Billy Joel put it best, “We didn’t start the fire, it was always burning, since the world’s been turning.”

Reference:

Jenkins, Henry.  2006.  Convergence Culture.  New York.  New York University Press.

DJ Spooky Rhythm Science is a deep and thought provoking exercise in the remix and science of audio experiments.  Throughout the experience a flow of ideas and information emerges but the principle question the remains is what is the remix?  With the collective audience of people across the world and sheer amount of content developed by humans has created a library of endless ideas.  What happens when an idea has been done or copied?  Do we keep doing the same thing or do we try to make something new from that existing idea?  The same track? the same beat? Day after day night after night…it would be like some kind of living death if that happened to dj culture.  Remixing and recreating is human nature and inevitable.  Rhythm science has a history to go along with its future.  As technology has evolved so have the visionary people who use it.  Perhaps the terminology has changed or the process in which we create a remix but the fundamentals and initial intentions are the same.  In a remix single notes are assigned not to playing cards but rather the digitized roto reliefs on-line representations of the engraved cards that Duchamp made throughout his career and gave away randomly to people.  This simple idea of taking the pieces of a complete set and doing away with the instructions to do what you please is exactly the process Duchamp is talking about the basis for the remix.  Repetition will only be tolerated for so long.  People become tired and board of this.  You can never play a record the same way for the same crowd.  That’s why remixes happen.  Sampling plays with different perceptions of time.  Sampling allows people to replay their own memories of the sounds and situations of their lives.  Life experiences influence ideas and actions on a conscious and subconscious level.  Todays notion of creativity and originality are configured by velocity:  it’s a blur a constellation of styles, a knowledge and pleasure in the play of surfaces, a rejection of history as objective force in favor of subjective.  Rhythm science models itself on open source Linux coded operating systems, becomes a mode of psycholgeographic shareware for the open market in a world where identity is for sale to the highest bidder.  The community based content generation provides some of the greatest ideas and resources for rethinking and remixing ideas.  This is evident in the opposite way with a model like the Microsoft software which is closed community protecting their work.  Because of this development is hampered and much more susceptible to problems and lack of creativity.

Opposites extract. Perhaps some of the most successful and interesting ideas come out of this concept.  Conflict creates a much more interesting story then peace.  For a remix to be successful it must be as or more interesting then the original work.  I look around at the airports hustle and bustle and its list of times dates and names all synchronized with the different departures and arrivals.  Nothing is out of the ordinary.  Nothing.  Many times I have found myself in an airport passing the time and there is no greater place to witness the hub of ideas people and media converging in a single environment.  The airport atmosphere is a constant remix perpetuating.  Sampling is like sending a fax to your self from the sonic debris of the possible future.  Things will be made and grabbing that piece of the future is as easy as sorting through the data and plucking a few interesting bits to create a work.  So as we flow across the page in the here and now, and as you process the words as you read them, remember this:  They process you as well.  The creative process goes both ways and experiencing the remix will intern impact actions and produce a new remix.  Is it live? Or is it a sample?  After almost three decades of rhythm science the question remains just as powerful as ever.  Remix is creative nature and we are continuously trying to understand it.

With the base on the well-known ‘Keyboard cat’ (a cat that can play the piano wearing a fashion T-shirt and doing funny faces at the same time), we are going to analyze the main characteristics that make a video of a cat turning into a famous video: easy to spread on the Internet and easy to find everywhere. For this, we are going to use the characteristics of a meme described by Richard Dawkins (I spoke about this a few days before in another post): longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity.

This video starts on December 2007 but is in a few months ago, June 2009, when explodes with 3,141,919 views. Then, it generates a lot of different activities related on it: twitter with 6.000 followers,  on another web page you can buy T-shirts and cups with the Keybord cat on it, papercraft activities with the drawing of the same cat and a lot of media reports about it.

Of course, copies are important in this point. There are a lot of copies about this video, but not based on real fidelity. The people copy it changing the meaning of the first video. They create remix videos about fear, nostalgia, videos that express any awkward or painful situation and even video games! Easy copies, but with not exactly the same meaning. This is a really good example on  The Daily Show of Jon Stewart.

Finally, why ‘Keyboard cat’ has achieved this fame?

On Time Magazine, we found an article written written on June 2009 that said that “These days, people only use the Internet to search for pictures of adorable animals. Unfortunately, most of them are cats.” This means that the only reason is because it is a cute cat. A cute and funny cat. And the people love it. At the end, on Internet you can find a lot of videos related with animals that have many viewers. In my opinion animals doing human activities like playing the piano, eat with a fork, dancing, etc. are easy to spread on Internet because people think they are cute because they have human behaviour.

Without forget Jenkins characteristics or qualities typical to succesful spreadable media, is important not lose the idea of humour. I think is another characteristic that make famous a video.

Internet could be a very potent weapon of communication. A weapon to change the perception of things. Internet gives us  the possibility to know all the planet earth with only a button switch on. However, many people enjoy watching Internet videos of cute cats. At the end it does not matter, because this point shows us that Internet is now a really free media in which you can find videos of cute cats, falls, babies, etc. All mixed with political criticism, independent analysis of history, digital media,…

But if you want a more deep analisis about ‘Keyboard cat’ don’t lose this good and funny video about it. It is really interesting and you can find other analisis with spreading ideas(memes) based on Youtube videos:

Blood and Guts in High School was a very interesting book and at times a tough read.  From the first pages my only though was what the hell is the book and what is the point.  After completing the book my thoughts did not change all that much.  Although I am not a big reader and generally find reading more of a chore than enjoyment I can appreciate books that god beyond the traditional structure and provide a more interesting and interactive experience.  Acker’s book goes beyond the typical read using pictures text and unconventional writing to create a ver expressive and unconventional read.  Throughout the entire book the main theme is sex and self hatred which never escaped my mind although Im not sure it was suppose to.  I can only think what a messed up person this is who wrote the book.  Only someone who had a deeply troubled childhood could grow up to write these kinds of things.  Perhaps the most difficult part of the book was the middle when Acker begins to go on and on about slavery and Janeys being tied up and abused.  Several times the poems are simply a collection of words that have no flow or connection to create a logical thought.  At this point I began to seriously lose interest in the book because I was no longer following her thoughts and the repetition of cock , fuck , sex was becoming unbearable.  Perhaps the only thing that saved me from not putting th book down besides the fact we had to read it for class was the complete change in the last pages when simple pictures with text titles began to tell the story of the golden black box and the family dying in the river.  Although the theme was an unhappy one several times I actually laughed at the simple drawings accompanied by text such as” dead babies” and “and then I died”.  Although Acker’s book was in interesting read I feel that in terms of literary creativity books such as Infinate Jest” and more importantly “House of Leaves” where the book  not only has interesting text configurations on some pages but uses color for specific words and most important has footnotes that lead readers on a journey through the book in a non linear fashion and sometimes with no specific point but to stray from the story.

DJ Spookys Rhythm Science was a very deep and complicated book.  This is the second time I have read the book and it was still very though provoking.  My first thought was that DJ Spooky is no kid off the streets that made it big making music and spinning records in the club.  On the contrary he is a very educated and well versed intellectual.  After reading Acker’s book and then DJ Spooky my impression is that Acker must be some kind of street rat with no education and in contrast DJ Spooky comes off as being finely aged scholar.

In todays world we are constantly being bombarded with information, media, advertising and virtually every aspect of life is thrown at us.  The evolution of technology has made all of these things more accessable and more susceptible to being stolen, copied or remixed in some form or another.  Traditional forms of art in the past always had to be seen and experienced in person.  Wether it be a painting, sculpture, performance or music if you were not close enough to see feel hear or in some form experience that art then you never had any connection or idea about the piece.  As technology has become an increasing force in modern culture art has become more and more accessible in many ways. Not only are people able to experience and be impacted by art by way of technology bringing art to anyone is any variety of ways but technology has also given people the tools and  power to become artists themselves.  Things like photo editing programs music generators video all use technology to empower the artist.  Technology has also provided artistic power to those who are not necessarily skilled or trained to be artists the tool need to ones own artistic ability that in the past was simply not possible.   All art has suddenly become part of an international database of information that artists can now use as source material to create new and different art.  At this point in human artistic evolution its almost impossible to create something that has not been done before.  Sure it may seem like a new idea but chances are that even if you have created something unique that it has elements taken from previous art.  With that in mind it is very hard to put a foot down and try to enforce copyright issues especially in the creation of art because at some point if all art is protected from being copies or reused then its possible that there would simply not be any way to make new art without doing something that is protected because it has already been created.  Do I think that we should have completely free copy for all to enjoy?  No I think it would be a complete disaster.  I think that copyrights do have a lot of value in society and economically the protection is beneficial to artists and businesses.  Artists need to be protected to ensure that their work is not taken for granted.  In order to make a living as an artist you need to protect your interests or you will lose your identity and if you make our living as an artist your income.  businesses need the protection of copyright because not only do they create logos and images for their brand but the public then recognizes the images and the product.  This product brand recognition develops a sense of trust with the general public.  If logos wer not copyrighted then another company could make a product that could be inferior or even dangerous and use another companies logos. This could have disastrous effects on the consuer and their trust in a companies products.  I think in terms of art and copyright there are a lot of artists out there that do not rely on their art to support their lives and simply use in as expression or hobby.  This kind of art has a much greater possibility of being copied or remixed without reparations because the effects of using that art does not have a great impact on the artist’s life.

Although not necessarily art or even a remix of art the show South Park pulls a lot of its content from media and current situations. They impersonate celebrities, recreate tv shows and pull events and plot snippets from movies music politics and more.

My own personal use of art remix has been spurred by my accident and the x-rays of my leg before and after.  I made an image using my leg and taking a found object on the internet.  By editing the image I was able to create a fake x-ray containing both the actual image of my leg and the found object as if it was also in the x-ray.  I have an idea to do another project using the x-rays to somehow creat a bolt of lightning coming down and striking the ground but I have not started this project yet.  DJ Spookys work is interesting to me and whole idea of remixing music or even sounds like the webmix is quite appealing to me as a future project.

http://www.artnode.org/projects/vedclydbog/vedclydbog.mp3

Derfor elsker vi din computer

Vi elsker din computer skal manifestere, at netkunsten er en del af samtidskunsten, så længe nettet eksisterer.

As I wrote in the last post about my new media research on Twitter, this new social networking site offers a very specific new format for communication. It gives a constraint of 140 characters to write a status update. Although Twitter asks the user to write “what he is doing”, this space is used by different users in different ways. A very interesting research on Twitter population and the different uses of the technology is to find in the master thesis Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self, by Edward Mishaud (2007).

Like the now extremely popular sms technology, introduced on mobile phones and spread all over the world, Twitter introduces a new format in writing. While sms took the place of voice mail or phone calls, Twitter has appeared in a totally different communication context: that of on-line writing and social networking sites. When sms became popular, sms format begun to be introduced in writing novels and books, both by a single author and in collaborative projects. Sms technology changed the way we communicate with each other through a mobile phone on a very personal level, and constructed new narratives that were translated and reflected into story-writing techniques.

However, the way sms developed as a service within societies is not what this technology was intended for. Sms was originally integrated in mobile phones as an emergency tool that would warn the phone owner in case it would be needed. The present role and functions of sms have been literally shaped by society. This is an excellent example of the “Social Shaping of Technology” (SST) theory by MacKenzie & Wajcman (1999).

So is Twitter, in a way. By creating new constraints in communication, Twitter also stimulates new forms of expression. The tool is used in different ways, such as for news report, debates, personal communication, marketing, political purposes, groups coordination, etc.  Poetic expression can be seen as one of the possibilities. It is very unlikely that all these new ways Twitter is used by different groups have been foreseen by the developers of the service from the very beginning.

On Twitter there is a special channel dedicated to poetry (probably more than one, but this is just an example). Not poetry in general, but Twitter poetry. This channel called @twihaiku refers explicitly to Haiku poetry, a Japanese form of poetry that has a very strict structure, limiting the length of the poem to 3 verses, and therefore could have certain affinities with Twitter. Also, Haiku are very often associated with images from every-day life, which play a very big role on Twitter. The short format of both Haikus and tweets forces the writer to be very concise. Written text resembles very much an image, a photograph. @twihaiku publishes a selection of submitted Twitter Haikus. Another Twitter channel that publishes collected Twitter poetry is @twittems. Twittems is a project started by a group of anonymous writers. They also collect tweets that they think express something interesting, as they write on the website.

Besides these channels that collect Twitter poems, a number of remix of Twitter content exist, that can be seen as forms of poetry. One bigger project is  Twistori, also interesting for his appealing graphics. Tom Watson found his own way to transform the information flow on Twitter into poetry. In his blog he writes how this idea came to be and how he creates his own poetry using tweets by other users. I also found this girl, @iThomasina, who sees Twitter as the longest poem in the world, and remixes it in video:

These reinterpretations of tweets show an interest for what is expressed on Twitter by other users, and at the same time a need for reading and expressing our own emotions. This way of using user generated text to create a new text reminds me to Levy’s idea of the hypertext and text virtuality as expressed in his book Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (1998). According to him, digital text is not always virtual. Virtualization of text occurs only when a creative process takes place in the human interacting with the digital content. A virtual text is not predefined, but is “made” by the reader and acquires new different meanings according to how it’s read. According to Levy, virtual reading implies writing in a way.

“It is no longer the meaning of the text that concerns us, but the direction and elaboration of our thought, the accuracy of our image of the world, the fulfillment of our plans, the awakening of our pleasure, the thread of our dreams. This time the text is no longer crushed and crumpled into a ball, but cut up, pulverized, distributed, evaluated in terms of an autoparturient subjectivity.” Levy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age, 1998

Twitter can then be seen as a very big hypertext, that is constantly expanding. This big hypertext can become a pertinent text, a poem, a story. Something that makes sense for a very specific user. The content on Twitter can assume new meanings by being read and remixed by Twitter’s users.

A number of aspects of my story go beyond the Twitter phenomenon. Remix culture is very alive and does not only concerns Twitter and text, but also images, sound, video, etc. The tendency to reuse digital content to create new media products (and thus new meaning) has been described by Larry Lessing very extensively in his books and during several conferences and presentations. Obviously, Lessig is defending his ideas of a free culture and advocates for the extension of the public domain. Apart one’s personal opinion about Creative Commons and Lessig’s ideas, I find his presentation down here very illustrating for the point I want to make in this post:

It is to that other one, to Tietzel, that things happen. I pedal through Boulder and I stop, you might say effortlessly, to gaze at the Flatirons above Chataqua; of Tietzel I receive news by email and I see his name in a list of cyclist or some biographical documentary. I like sushi, winning, Italy, gardening, the taste of coffee ice cream and the prose of Louis Lamore; the other shares these passions, but in a vain kind of way that turns them into characteristics of a sports celebrity. It would be absurd to claim that our relationship is conflicted; I live, I let myself live so that Tietzel may pedal his bicycle, and this writing enslaves me. It poses no trouble for me to admit that he has put together some terrible sentences, yet these sentences cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is bad does not define anyone, not even to the other, but to language and expectation. In any case, I am destined to define all that I am, certainly, and only glancing moments of myself will be able to thrive on in the other. Stroke by stroke, I continue resisting to him everything, even though I am aware of his machine like willingness to push on and improve.

Armstrong understood that all things fight to justify being; the man strives to be eternally a man and the machine a machine. I will endure in Tietzel, not in myself (Am I another?), but I see myself less in his racing than in those of many others, or in the tranquility of a brush stroke. Years ago I tried to distance myself from him by moving on from the adolescence of the participation to competition with time and distance, but those games are now Tietzel and I will have to produce of other things. In this way, my life is a rolling away and I let go of everything and everything is turned over to oblivion, or to the other.

Which one of us is writing this piece?

This is my version of the Exercises in Style short story using slang terms from the fictional British gangster Ali G.

Here me now so Ize gettin on da bus. You know da one goes down to our turf. I see dis batty boy wif a massive neck and wearing trilby wif a stupid cord round it starts to natter this geezer about treading on his kicks whenever someone hops on or off the bus. Dis wanker then finds an open seat parks his posterior. Later on Ize down at da Westside near da boozer and Ize seen da same minger and his mate banging on about adding a button to his tommy hilfinger.

The links for my webmix can be found on the upper right hand tab labels Interweb auditory mix. This is my source content That I used to create a full live audio remix in class.

New postings on my blog will now be content from the Remix Culture class.

“When people take media into their own hands, the results can be wonderfully creative; they can also be bad news for all involved“

By: Henry Jenkins

A great idea to start with my project description.  Is great or not that people have the power on Internet?

Here is my new blog about digital culture. Only one point to research all the stuff that this topic generates. Blogs, social nets, independent media, free music,…at the end a new culture has born. I am attending a course at the University of Bergen which prepares me to understand all the changes inside that new culture. Now, Remix Culture dominates Internet, but what is Remix Culture?

“Remix culture is a term employed by Lawrence Lessig and other copyright activists to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process.”  (Wikipedia: also a creation by the digital culture)

It appears that the recession has not affected concert sales. Just look at the Pollstar 2009 mid year business analysis. People will always need the escape and the experience of live music, and tough economic times aren’t going to stop them apparently. Last year “the average box-office gross was up 18 percent and the average attendance up 6.3 percent, according to Billboard magazine” writes John Gerome of CBS News, who also notes that many musicians, promoters, and distributors are offering discounts and promotions of various kinds to help fans be able to afford their shows. Live Nation, for example, sometimes offers a four-pack deal (four tickets for the price of three) in essence rewarding you for bringing your friends.

Perhaps this trend is similar in a sense to alcohol sales. People certainly don’t stop drinking during tough economic times, but they might go out less and instead buy liquor at the store or choose cheaper drinks when they do go out. As far as concert tickets go, strapped fans will still go see their favorite bands. They’ll just buy crappier tickets.

Artists (well… some of them) are still making a ton of money from ticket sales. “Just ask Bruce Springsteen, Brit-pop singer Lily Allen, musical comedy duo the Flight of the Conchords, or indie-rock darling Neko Case, all of whom put on sold-out concerts in Boston in the last month,” says Sarah Rodman of the Boston Globe. In the era of steadily declining album sales, concerts are the life support that musicians continue to cling to.

MC Lars, who still makes royalties off of his older stuff on iTunes told us, “…for the newer stuff — the only way to get heard is to be out on the road as much as possible and playing clubs and all that because really with the recession and with kids knowing about bit torrent… the answer is to be on tour if you wanna make money as a musician – OR to write songs for commercials and not have any desire to be an independent musician!” He is a shining example of the DIY artist who is not afraid to try new things and get creative, especially when it comes to interacting with his fans.

This article in the Sydney Morning Herald presents some similar views from down under. “A lot of acts are putting out records to promote their tours,” says Michael Gudinski, the managing director of Frontier Touring Company. “In the old days you used to tour to promote your record.” Back then touring gave you the exposure needed to sell albums, which equaled revenue. Of course now the internet has forced the music industry onto its knees and slashed record sales. It has, however, graciously opened a new window of opportunity for the concert industry. “With the advent of the internet, which I regard as the radio of the 21st century, the potential concert-going audience in this country, in my opinion, has quadrupled,” says veteran concert promoter Michael Chugg.

As music 2.0 continues to evolve and present us with surprises, fans are increasingly becoming participants in the industry, rather than just passive observers and consumers. Take posse.com, for example, which “is turning fans into ticket agents. A music lover receives a commission each time someone clicks on a link or ad on their social networking page to buy a ticket to a show.” Pretty slick. Fans are becoming savvier, hungrier, and their expectations have changed.

One strategy being utilized by artists and promoters as a result is offering fans access to exclusive content, merch, and other VIP type goodies. Elliot Fox, the Director of Marketing & Promotions for JDub Records (a nonprofit record and event production company focused on new Jewish music, building community, and cross-cultural dialogue), explained that they are combating unfavorable conditions by developing new incentives and marketing strategies in order to reach their existing fan base while also building new ones. “The key to keeping fans loyal while also attracting new ones is being able to offer added value and additional content to users. For example, we can offer a free album download with purchase of a t-shirt or a free label sampler for fans who follow us on twitter. We are also in the process of launching a membership model where fans can pay a yearly subscription fee and will automatically receive our next 4 releases both physically and digitally. We feel that providing fans with a steady flow of new content allows them to feel connected to what the artists and label are trying to do.” Word.

The smart artists are figuring out ways to thrive in the current economic climate. Some attempt to make their live music experience accessible to a broader audience by offering tickets at a variety of price points. Others attempt to convert casual fans – who perhaps listen to, purchase, or illegally download their music but don’t go to concerts – into loyal fans. It’s the loyal fans who are most likely to go enjoy and support their favorite musicians even in tough times. It’s the loyal fans who might skip the family vacation to Hawaii this year but still splurge on a road trip to a music festival or decent seats at that U2 concert. Deep artist/fan connections are critical to success in music 2.0 and in most cases it’s what both the fans and the artists want – which is another reason why remix culture is still gaining momentum.

Another group diving headfirst into the artist/fan lovefest era is John Brown’s Body. Their manager, Seth Herman, pointed out numerous ways JBB is actively making themselves available to fans. “Basically we went right back to the grassroots level- replying to every email, sending everyone who buys merch at our online store a thank you, and giving away free tickets to a show if there is room on the guest list.” When touring they even take it a step further and reach out to local bands who are willing to pre-sell tickets and they’ll sometimes work with promoters to give the local band discounted tickets so they can bring out their friends. As we recently discussed, JBB is also working with The Hector Fund to pay for their international tour through “artistfunding.” The opportunities afforded fans through that particular collaboration are absurdly cool.

As we stumble blindly through the foggy terrain of this new musical frontier, trying bold new things and getting intimate with the music and its creators in totally new ways, at least we can count on one thing: Live music is here to stay.

Well, a fascinating Friday afternoon at the BBC Web at 20 documentary launch, surrounded by true web royalty, from Sir Tim Berners Lee down. Having been appropriately awed by said royalty, I decided that I am in fact a web urchin, and then sat down to enjoy the show.

There doesn’t seem to be too much point in rehashing the content – you can catch much of it here and here, and it’s been well commented on all over the place – so instead, I’m just going to make a note of a perception about formal and informal media that really leapt out at me as I sat there.

As the introductory video began, with Fatboy Slim pounding out as background music, it struck me that there’s a big difference between the kind of professionally produced content that fills the traditional mediasphere, and the more informal creative work that thrives online.

The Fatboy Slim track was a first cue to formality. If I wanted to use it in a short film, I wouldn’t be able to; I couldn’t afford the licensing costs (in fact, I ran into licensing issues at the Tate only last week). The BBC, of course, can – and so its presence here became for me a signifier of the BBC’s commercial and creative heft, its status as the kind of organisation that works with, and creates, formal, rather than informal, media.

Then, there was the editing of the video itself. It was wonderfully crafted, clearly the product of a highly skilled professional; but again, the  sheen that that professionalism gave it very firmly placed it in the formal media camp. It didn’t feel like the product of a personal obsession, of someone working out a tool as they went along in order to use it to say what they desperately needed to say.

That sense of formality was also present in the broader structure of the event. The main speakers – Sir Tim Berners Lee, Bill Thompson and Susan Greenfield, MC’d by event and programme host Aleks Krotoski – sat on a little podium, variously giving speeches, talking with each other, and responding to questions. The questioners sat on bar stools off to one side; Chris Anderson beamed down from a video screen. We – as audience – audienced before them.

It was a physical structure that mimicked the audience / content relationships of traditional media forms. Experts talked; other experts interacted with them; and everyone else observed. Chances to interrupt the smooth flow of expertise (although in the case of Susan Greenfield, I use that term in its loosest possible sense) were few and far between; chances for informal conversation, rather than formal Q&A, were non-existent.

This formality contrasted very strongly with the various Web inspired events that have been becoming more and more popular. Unconferences, Tuttle Crowd / Tribe / Team workshops, meet ups of one kind or another, and even more traditional conferences and exhibitions – all have made a virtue of open, conversational informality, and deliberately created spaces within which hierarchy is erased and content follows shared personal obsessions.

Of course, that happened at the Web At 20 event – but it happened afterwards, when everyone was chatting over drinks, and felt very separate from the main flow of things. I felt very distant from the main event itself; in fact, I felt like I was watching it on television, rather than actually present. I didn’t even manage to get an audience question in, which is very rare indeed!

And of course, that’s not to say that it wasn’t a very enjoyable event; who couldn’t enjoy really interesting people talking about really interesting things? But it was very formal indeed, and for me it highlighted a fascinating problem that the Web at Twenty production team are going to have to deal with over the next few months.

The BBC – by definition – demands formal content; but the web thrives on informality. Web at Twenty is a BBC production about the web, so it’s going to have to engage with both the crafted professionalism of its parent and the obsessive amateurism of the online world. How’s it going to mediate between the two?

Will interviews be shot by professional cameramen, or by Zi6 wielding researchers? Will the final edit of each show happen in a BBC edit suite, or on a laptop running iMovie or Windows Movie Maker? Will incidental music come from Fatboy Slim, or Golders Green’s finest bedroom kosmische guitarist?

Will all footage come from the production team, or will people pop up online with invaluable content they’ve shot themselves? Once it’s all coming together, will people be able to remix Web at 20 content any way they want to, or will it be licensed in such a way that that’s impossible? Assuming it happens, how’s all that remixed content going to interact with the broader BBC web presence?

The Web at 20 production team are a very creative, seriously sharp bunch, so I suspect that their answers to the above are going to be fascinating. And the launch event? In the end – and despite the above – I think it was a very positive achievement.

It didn’t fully embody the informality of the web, but it’s content did do a very good job of introducing the concept of it to the BBC. It planted an informal media seed, and from now on, that seed’s going to grow. Of course, we can all be a part of its growth, following it and engaging with it here. It should be very exciting watching it develop!

I have been browsing through my old bookmarks and data sources lately and found some interesting things I would like to draw your attention too. First thing is the video underneath on fair use of online video resources from the Center for Social Media at American University. Now what is fair use again? In the accompanying text it says:

 “Fair use is the part of copyright law that permits new makers, in some situations, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying the owners. The courts tell us that fair use should be “transformative”—adding value to what they take and using it for a purpose different from the original work. So when makers mash up several works—say, The Ten Commandment , Ben-Hur and 10 Things I Hate about You , making Ten Things I Hate about Commandments —they aren’t necessarily stealing. They are quoting in order to make a new commentary on popular culture, and creating a new piece of popular culture.”

Hmmm, although still vague, the video offers some true potential to online creativity, counter posing strict copyright rules with examples of what exactly is permitted under the nomen of fair use, balance, community codes and prevention of censorship. And it seems quite a lot actually. But how exactly do I know when it’s fair use? The video states ‘so long as you don’t use so much that your work becomes the substitute for the original.’ Or ‘don’t use more than you need to illustrate your point.’ These still seem unclear boundaries to me, but at least fair use rights do offer a lot of opportunities for remix and mashup artists to make an argument for their case. Still ‘this code of best practices does not tell you the limits of fair use rights’, it says on the website. It seems it has to be ‘reasonable’ use. Diving deeper into the explanations on the website.

 Remix Culture: Fair Use is your friend

“Fair use is flexible; it is not uncertain or unreliable. In fact, for any particular field of critical or creative activity, lawyers and judges consider expectations and practice in assessing what is “fair” within the field. In weighing the balance at the heart of fair use analysis, judges refer to four types of considerations mentioned in the law: the nature of the use, the nature of the work used, the extent of the use and its economic effect. This still leaves much room for interpretation, especially since the law is clear that these are not the only necessary considerations. In reviewing the history of fair use litigation, we find that judges return again and again to two key questions 

1) Did the unlicensed use “transform” the material taken from the copyrighted work by using it for a different purpose than that of the original, or did it just repeat the work for the same intent and value as the original?

2) Was the material taken appropriate in kind and amount, considering the nature of the copyrighted work and of the use?

Both questions touch on, among other things, the question of whether the use will cause excessive economic harm to the copyright owner.”

These guidelines actually give people quite some power to defend their use of copyrighted material, as long as it ‘adds’ something. A report which can also be found on the site ‘points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.’

Still, mashups stay contested as the video underneath shows. The discussion continues…

To show a beautiful example of the potential of a remix or collage (or assemblage) of a movie (made as long ago as the early 30’s) you can find underneath part 1 of the mesmerizing work Rose Hobart by Joseph Cornell (which I found through the equally astonishing article ‘Theatre of the spirit: Joseph Cornell and Silence’ by Catherine Corman, in Paul D. Miller’s Sound Unbound). The film is a collage of footage from the 1931 movie East of Borneo, from which the sound was stripped and during live performances accompanied by a record of Brazilian music. The movie is an ode of Cornell to actress Rose Hobart, focusing almost exclusively on the scenes she appears in. Corman quotes Cornell calling the film ‘a communication of her essence as a human being’. Thank god for fair use.

I’ve been chatting to David and Tom at ag8 about the project that would become Purefold (a further, excellent summary here) since last year, so it’s fantastic to see it finally hitting the public domain; and very exciting that it’s getting such a positive reaction.

However, I’m not how much what’s truly revolutionary about it has really been picked up. In fact, even though I’ve known about it for a while, I didn’t really understand just what is so disruptive about it until – oddly enough – I got sucked into ‘Toy Story’ the other day.

I did rather enjoy getting absorbed in it; it’s a very charming, beautifully put together film. But, as I watched it again for the first time in years, I was more and more surprised by the extent to which, beneath the charm, it dramatises a certain kind of fear of the remix culture that Purefold so strongly endorses.

What struck me first of all was my unexpected sympathy for Sid, the evil boy next door. He’s presented as an all round toy nemesis, a very clearly defined villain; but the more I watched him in action, the more I realised that his ostensibly destructive play is in fact highly creative – particularly when compared to that of Andy, the ‘good’ boy.

When Andy plays, he stays entirely within the pre-created narratives that come packaged with his toys. In fact, the film defines his relationship with his toys in such commercial terms that his shift of allegiance from Woody to Buzz is signalled by the appearance of Buzz Lightyear merchandise (a duvet, posters, and so on) all over his room. Andy hasn’t made a new friend; he’s brought, very uncritically, into a new franchise.

Sid, by contrast, is a natural hacker. He refuses to accept any sort of pre-defined narratives, instead fitting toys into his own, completely unrestrained imaginative world. For Sid, bolting a Pterodactyl’s head onto the body of a doll in order to heal it makes perfect imaginative sense; and in fact, as he does so, we see that his commitment to the craft of toy hacking is such that he has a full set of remodelling tools in his bedroom.

And the Pterodacdoll is only one example of Sid’s creativity. The creatures that live around his room (a robot spider supporting a shaven doll’s head, a pair of legs that animate a fishing rod, a walking car, and so on) are equally striking, equally surreal. Where Andy’s imaginative world is defined (and limited) by preset narrative franchises, Sid is a kind of pre-pubescent cross between Max Ernst and W. Heath Robinson.

But, without exception, his ferocious imaginative drive is presented as a destructive force. The toys are terrified of Sid; he’s constantly upsetting his sister; he’s a major threat to Woody and Buzz; and all of this builds to one of the film’s key climactic moments, which comes when the toys defeat him.

Woody’s speech to Sid at this moment is worth quoting in full. Coming to life in Sid’s hand, Woody says (unsurprisingly, in a very menacing way): ‘We don’t like being blown up, Sid, or smashed up, or ripped apart… Take good care of your toys – because, if you don’t, we’ll find out, Sid. We toys see everything. So PLAY NICE!’ (my punctuation).

In effect, what Sid is being told is ‘Don’t redefine your toys’ – don’t hack them, don’t remix them according to your own imaginative or creative needs. In this context, ‘PLAY NICE’ means ‘Play within the pre-determined parameters of your toys’ – or, more precisely, ‘never replace the story we sold you with the stories you can make for yourself’. And that’s the point at which the film’s fear of remix culture is most evident.

Of course, you might think I’m reading too much into the film; that I’m finding a conservative subtext where none exists, or that I’m overstating the extent to which rights holders seek to protect their properties by preventing them from being remixed. But in fact this kind of mashphobia is very real, and very pervasive.

Don’t believe me? Check out Lawrence Lessig’s opus ‘Free Culture’, or Cory Doctorow’s more recent book ‘Content’. Both are available for free download from these links, and both are very absorbing reads. Or, you can watch Lawrence talk here:

Or just take a wander round the internet; whether it’s Sony protecting AIBO code, publishers battling with Harry Potter fan-fic writers, Fox preventing The Simpsons from appearing for a couple of seconds in the background in a documentary about staging Wagner, or Warner Bros issuing cease and desist orders protesting fair use of its musical properties, fear of the remix is everywhere.

But Purefold content contains and endorses no such fear. All Purefold content is going to be issued under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license, in effect allowing anyone to do anything they want with it, as long as they properly attribute Purefold content and release their new creations under a similar virus.

That means that Purefold is encouraging us to all become Sids; to become people who take what’s out there, whether professionally created or otherwise, and then repurpose it according to our own creative needs and drives.

It’s the anti-Toy Story; and, in thus being, it shows that it understands the form and function of the new world of media that digital culture has enabled far more than the Pixars and the Foxes of this world, and is willing to engage with that world in a way that’s at once entirely disruptive, and entirely democratic.

This is a brief synopsis that details more of the process and software side of Read/Write/Remix:

With this piece my main focus was Remix Culture and the use of sampling in the art making process. It is my belief that innovation and creativity grow from connecting ideas rather than from protecting them. The lines between art, music, film, literature and technology have blurred – making everything fair game for communicating ideas. I wanted to explore the concept that Remix is an art in itself and has the potential to evolve and further expand into the mainstream of contemporary art.

I spent countless hours searching the World Wide Web for various audio and image based sources that I sampled for potential use in my own piece. This was followed by a selection process where I chose the audio and video files I felt were best suited to the piece. Finally they were edited to meet my specifications. I also created base audio and video tracks that would loop while the NanoPads were not being interacted with.

I used two Korg NanoPad MIDI controllers, one to control audio clips and the other to control video, as the interactive components in the piece. Using black acrylic and various tools, I fabricated two custom housings for the NanoPads, allowing only a select portion of the controller to be used by the audience.

Using Max/MSP/Jitter I built a patch that allowed certain video loops to be launched when they were triggered by the video dedicated MIDI controller. It also allowed audio coming in from Ableton Live, triggered by the audio dedicated MIDI controller, to have a direct effect on the color space. This patch was essentially the framework for the whole visual aspect of the piece, as well as some parts of the audio component.

Some images of the work in the gallery

Look for some video updates to follow once editing is finished