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Remix Studies Conversations Part 4: Media Art & Design

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The focus of the discussion is on the role of remix in creative practices in art and design. Remix can offer a critical methodology artists and designers use to create juxtapositions that ponder the state of human existence in relation to cultural production. Works by these artists and arts educators are defined by principles of modularity, consisting of nonlinear means to create new content, and new conversations, with digital technology. Invited panelists produce work and do research that relates to the current moment remix is moving through. Presentations followed by a discussion with moderators, and a public Q&A.

Public Zoom Event: ADRI, College of Arts and Architecture, Penn State
Moderated by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough

Speakers

Joycelyn Wilson is an educational anthropologist, essayist, and assistant professor of hip hop studies and digital media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is the principal investigator of the HipHop2020 Innovation Archive, an Ed-tech startup inspired by hip hop music and culture, and creator of the OUTKAST Imagination, a critical design hermeneutic applied throughout her humanities and computational media-making courses. Dr. Wilson also coordinated the development of LMC’s recently established minor in Black Media Studies.

Her current research leverages the connections between hip hop’s techno-pedagogical affordances and relationships to design thinking in computational and creative media-making. This work is highlighted in Amazon Future Engineer’s “Your Voice Is Power” (YVIP), a coding competition that uses hip hop as a design remix to explore how computer science, music, and entrepreneurship can help students learn to code and advance racial equity. The project is a collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), EarSketch, and Pharrell Williams’s educational equity non-profit YELLOW.

Dr. Wilson has published in these areas across academic, popular, and documentary platforms including Teachers College Press, UGA Press, International Journal of Africana Studies, Routledge, and Proceedings of Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT). Her essays have been published by InStyle, Billboard, The Root, and Google Arts & Culture. She is a co-producer of the Emmy-nominated docufilm “Walking With Guns,” produced in collaboration with UN Ambassador and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. She has contributed expert commentary to MSBNC, Netflix’s Hip Hop Evolution, VH1’s ATL Rise, and TV-One’s UnSung.

Dr. Wilson can discuss the cultural histories of civil rights and social justice in the South, Black maker culture, and topics related to curriculum design, digital archiving and preservation, VR, interactive narrative, and experimental digital art.

Victoria Bradbury is an artist and researcher working with virtual reality, code and physical computing. She is a featured artist on the Radiance VR Blog. Her work has been shown at IEEE-GEM (curated by Nicholas O’Brien), xCoAx, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center Re-Happening, Harvestworks, Revolve Gallery, Albright Knox and The New Britain Museum of American Art. She is co-editor of “Art Hack Practice: Critical Intersections of Art, Innovation and the Maker Movement” (Routledge, 2019) and co-taught “The Glass Electric: Glassblowing, Electroforming, Interactive Electronics” at Pilchuck Glass School, 2019. Victoria holds a PhD with CRUMB at the University of Sunderland, UK and an MFA from Alfred University. She has been a member of the New Media Caucus Board since 2012 and is Assistant Professor of New Media at UNC Asheville. www.victoriabradbury.com

Andrew Demirjian builds linguistic, sonic and visual environments that disrupt habituated ways of reading, hearing and seeing. His interdisciplinary artistic practice examines structures that shape consciousness and perception, questioning frameworks that support the status quo and limit thought. The works are often presented in non-traditional spaces and take the form of multi-channel audiovisual installations, generative artworks, video poems, augmented reality apps and live performances. Andrew’s work has been exhibited at The Museum of the Moving Image, The New Museum – First Look: New Art Online, Fridman Gallery, Transformer Gallery, Eyebeam, Rush Arts, the White Box gallery, the Center for Book Arts, The Newark Museum and many other galleries, festivals and museums. The MacDowell Colony, Nokia Bell Labs, Puffin Foundation, Artslink, Harvestworks, Rhizozme, Bemis Center, LMCC, the MIT Open Documentary Lab and the NJSCA on the Arts are among some of the organizations that have supported his work. Andrew teaches theory and production courses in emerging media in the Film and Media Department and the IMA MFA program at Hunter College.

“Remix Studies Conversations Part 4: Media Art & Design” was a public event organized to highlight interdisciplinary research on remix as a form of creative production and communication across disciplines. The event featured distinguished scholars and artists: Joycelyn Wilson, Victoria Bradbury, and Andrew Demirjian, who were brought together to continue our ongoing discussions on remix as a creative variable at play across culture. Our invitees are contributors to The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities (2021), a special issue for Media-N: The Journal of the New Media Caucus: Forking Paths in New Media Art Practices: Investigating Remix, Keywords in Remix Studies (2018), and The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies (2015), edited by Eduardo Navas, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough.

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Remix Studies Conversations – Part 3 – 28th October 2021

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Remix Studies Conversations – Part 3 will be happening this Thursday 28th October at 9.30am EDT (1.30pm GMT). Hope to see you there! #remix #remixstudies #criticalremix #remixculture with Eduardo Navas, Xtine Burrough, Ethan Plaut, Christine Boone, Steve Anderson, and Eran Hadas. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/remix-conversations-3

 

Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow – A must-read for anyone interested in Remix

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Just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s ‘Pirate Cinema‘ – highly recommended – please download and share this with as many people as possible and support Cory’s future work by buying a copy for yourself or someone you know (or your local library).

DOWNLOAD PIRATE CINEMA (PDF)

http://craphound.com/pc/download/

(As with his previous books, Cory has generously made ‘Pirate Cinema’ available to share under a Creative Commons licence.)

Pirate Cinema Cover by Cory Doctorow

Pirate Cinema Cover

Synopsis:

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access to the internet is cut off for a year, with no appeal.

Trent’s too clever for that too happen. Except it does, and it nearly destroys his family. Shamed and shattered, Trent runs away to London, where he slowly learns the ways of staying alive on the streets. This brings him in touch with a demimonde of artists and activists who are trying to fight a new bill that will criminalize even more harmless internet creativity, making felons of millions of British citizens at a stroke.

Things look bad. Parliament is in power of a few wealthy media conglomerates. But the powers-that-be haven’t entirely reckoned with the power of a gripping movie to change people’s minds….

Everything is a Remix – Part 4

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Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fail.

Identity

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How does identity correlate with critical remix? You have the identity of the producer of the work, the identity of the viewer, the identity of the source samples used and the identity of the remix itself. What do we mean by identity in this context? Identity may be described as the sense of self from the subjective perspective. However, we all have a sense of identity of the people we know in our lives, so that may be described as our perception of their sense of self. Who they are. But it is only a sense. There may not be a true version of oneself, a universal, absolute “me”. Rather there are multiple selves that may be portrayed and perceived in different ways depending on the situation and people involved. In a person’s personality, there may be particular recurring traits that we come to expect – certain behavioural patterns we come to know and recognize in that person and become familiar to us. But these are not fixed by any means. All modular aspects of our ‘selves’ are subject to change over time. We can effect such changes in ourselves or be changed through experience. And so the once familiar becomes alien, uncanny, like a person you’ve known all your life who undergoes a mental breakdown or a stroke and becomes a different, almost unrecognizable person as a result. In remix, the ‘identity’ of the source material becomes alien, unfamiliar, through the process of recontextualisation. There is at once a sense of familiarity, recognition of the source material, but also a sense of unease, wonder, surprise, even amazement at seeing the material you recognize changed so drastically in the remix.

Archetypes

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Carl Jung theorized archetypes in mythical narratives as being somehow universal across all human cultures. Perhaps it is something inherent in our physiological make-up as human beings or perhaps something more spiritual – a shared common understanding of a higher form. Whatever it is, the evidence shows that in myths from very diverse cultures from around the world, the characters of such legends and stories tend to have great similarities and narratives. Heroes, villains, father figures, lost sons, rivalrous brothers, messiahs, resurrection etc. Is it possible that these stories were invented long ago in human history and passed down through generation after generation, spreading around the globe, much as the human species itself did, all of our shared ancestors allegedly being traceable to the African continent? Is it more likely to be a part of the human brain that causes us all to think in similar ways and come up with similar archetypes, as suggested in ‘The God Part of the Brain?’ Or is it the case that archetypes are actually universal to all human cultures and how could that be so?

Truth & Ideology

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Ideology is an overarching belief system, a framework that influences individual behavior. It is a reference point that may be called upon when considering any decision. It is a way to live. Religions are ideologies and so too is capitalism, Marxism – various ways of seeing the world. Why choose one ideology over another? Perhaps you were born into a particular ideology or set of ideologies. For example, as an Irish boy born at the beginning of the 1980s, I was brought up within a Catholic Christian ideological framework in my family and in my schools. In wider society, Capitalism was and remains the overarching ideology from an economic perspective. Politically, radical neo-liberal policies were adopted in the Western world from the mid to late 80s onwards, following the Reagan-Thatcher administrations of the USA and UK, respectively, which filtered through to the rest of the western countries.
So, we may say that at any one time, we as individuals are being influenced by a range of ideologies, sometimes conflicting with one another, across a wide spectrum of categories, representing the various fields of human endeavor. As mentioned, there can be spiritual ideologies, economic and political ideologies. There can also be social and legal ideologies, social being related to how people behave towards one another – certainly related to spiritual and political ideologies – treat others as you would have them treat you. A code of conduct. Legal ideology – again – how should people be punished if they break the rules? At the moment, there are too many laws and too much restriction on personal freedoms. What other kind of ideologies could ther be? Work ethic, attitude towards art and music, culture. Certainly there are cultural ideologies – what is the best way to create art and how should it be perceived? Positive and negative ideologies conflict. Hitler had a political / social ideology in Nazism that involved the creation of a ‘pure’ race of people. This ideology was very negative if you happened to be a jew at the time. Fundamentalist Islam has an ideology that seeks to remove all other religions. This is negative for anyone that is not Muslim. Ideologies are highly relative. What is good for one person or social group, may be inherently bad for another. Can all these ideologies be allowed to remain in existence – causing conflict, war and harm to humanity? Should different ideologies be mixed together to create one universal ideology? But they are constantly changing as well. Or should a modular approach be taken, which allows all current ideologies to exist but requires them to evolve and develop integrating features that will allow them to peacefully integrate with other ideologies to create a co-existing network of ideologies. This would mean changing certain aspects of ideologies to make them compatible with the others. Any glaring oppositions would need to be written out or compromised/adjusted. In pursuit of harmony. Currently, dissonance exists on a global scale.

Cultural Appropriation

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The Pearl Monument was visually striking. It is reminiscent of the world cup in some ways. It consists of 6 white curved pillars emanating from the ground and reaching towards the sky. The 6 pillars represent the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Atop these pillars rests a giant, white spherical pearl. Bahrain is famous for its pearly industry historically and so the overall monument was originally a symbol of cooperation towards a common goal between the GCC countries. How ironic. On Feb 14,2011, protestors seeking political reform congregated at the Pearl Roundabout with the monument at the centre of their protest camp. They were subsequently removed from the roundabout by GCC forces, an army made up of Saudi, UAE and other GCC soldiers. “Cooperation towards a common goal.” The protestors tried to come back and were shot down with some casualties. Following international pressure, the protestors were allowed to return to the Pearl Roundabout. Weeks later, protestors disrupted traffic by blocking roads and highways and a brutal military crackdown was imposed. The protestors camp was burned out, protestors removed and then in a final act of defiance, the Pearl Monument was brutally demolished – a symbol of resistance was torn down to represent a victory over the protestors. In the following weeks, miniature pearl monuments began to spring up around the villages of the island. Makeshift ¼ size replicas with curved white pillars and inflatable white balls on top. The reaction of the police and military was swift. They came in and demolished those too. After the original monument came down, what had become known as ‘Pearl Square’ in international media (really a roundabout, traffic circle or rotary) was landscaped and actually physically transformed from a roundabout into a traffic crossroads, a square with traffic lights. Difficult to believe. So, the monument was appropriated by the protestors and began to appear on posters, banners, t-shirts, flags, etc and became a symbol of the fight for freedom and democracy. Then it was reclaimed by the authorities and destroyed. A powerful symbol – too powerful to be allowed to remain.

Middle East Media

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Taking some inspiration from Philip Seib’s the Al Jazeera Effect, the proposal is to examine the media in the Middle East through the lens of the Bahrain protests of February / March 2011. Within Bahrain, the local national media presented a biased one-sided version of events, portraying the protestors as terrorists and the royal family as the saviours. Pure propaganda spin. The neighbouring Qatar based Al Jazeera however presented a much more objective perspective of the forceful excessive crackdown on peaceful protestors by an oppressive regime, that is until their own government sent in military forces to assist in the crackdown. Then everything went very quiet in relation to Bahrain on AL Jazeera. Old vs new approaches to journalism. Then you have social media. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as personal blogs were largely used as tools in the organization of the initial protests. Then you have the fascinating angle of other outside interests in Bahrain, namely Iran and Saudi Arabia, both of which reported or failed to report on the events as they unfolded, with particular biases. Saudi don’t want protests of their own, so they suppressed the news. Iran however seek to claim Bahrain or align themselves with the protestors. Then you have an even more interesting spin through the American and British media who also have high stakes in the country through the U.S. Fifth Fleet based there and the fact that Bahrain was under British rule until as late as the 1970s. Other counties around the world also reported in different ways the events occurring here. Freedom of speech / expression is being trampled on here.

Semiotics

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Semiotics – a semiotic approach to decoding artworks. 20th/21st century Found Footage Filmmaking from America? Global. Soviet re-editors earliest example. Include vidding. Emotion in found footage? A man writing about vidding…Kristina Busse. TransformativeWorks.org.