Saw this on the sidewalk in Brooklyn Heights this morning, on my daily walk to work (teaching a class on Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"): a complete and pristine set of the Encyclopedia Americana, tossed in the rubbish heap.
Score one more for Wikipedia.
George Lucas, the man who screamed like a wounded wookie when the Phantom Edit first introduced JarJar-free prequelosity to millions of online nerds, has come around, kind of.
Lucasfilm, which is in the middle of a hype cycle centered around the original film's thirtieth birthday extravaganza, has announced that this time around, fans are being invited to mash-up, remix, and even eff with the official storyline and timeline, using 250 officially sanctioned video clips from all six feature-length films. They're partnering with online video editing site Eyespot.com to do it, which should provide Web 2.0 legitimacy to the plan, plus a huge boost in subscriber numbers for the video site.
Of course, Lucas isn't exactly uploading the master keys to the Death Star; for one thing, Eyespot will use some kind of pattern recognition software to censor out any user-generated clips that contain "nudity, pornography, and the like" (seems like a pretty conveniently broad stricture). Also, remixers will have zero stake in their work; Eyespot and Lucasfilm will divvy up the proceeds from streaming advertisements served to viewers. And don't even think about the possibility of either the source materials or the products being released under a Creative Commons license...
...But all in all, we like this. We are happy. We might even make an all-Jar-Jar-all-the-time edit, if it's not deemed obscene.
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Annenberg Center for Communication, based on the research I've been doing into sample-based music for my doctoral dissertation. Musicologist, musician and all-around cool human Joanna Demers (author of Steal this Music) also spoke, about the aesthetics of electronic music.
There's a WMV video of the event here, and an MP3 here. Howard Rheingold also blogged it here.
Many thanks to the Annenberg Center for giving us the opportunity to present our research, and to all the people who came to hear us.
Incidentally, Marissa and I will be presenting related research, based on our recent consumer survey about configurable cultural practices (e.g. mash-ups, remixes, machinima, etc.) at MIT5 in Cambridge later this month, and at ICA in San Francisco next month.
There's an article in the NYT today about some typical election season wrangling: Kerry's under attack for ostensibly insulting the troops (even if he did, it's probably better than sending them off to kill and die for no good reason). But here's where it gets interesting: he lashed back at his critics, calling them “assorted right-wing nut jobs.”
Hmmm, why does that phrase sound so familiar?
[snaps fingers]
It's because that's what the cartoon John Kerry called the cartoon George Bush in the famous video by JibJab that made the rounds just prior to the 2004 presidential elections.
WHAAAATT!!!!????
The meatspace John Kerry is plagiarizing the virtual John Kerry. Something is either very, very wrong here, or very, very right.
UPDATE: Aaron Simpson, the VP of Interactive at JibJab, writes:
We’re as mystified here at JibJab as you are – those lyrics were penned by Gregg Spiridellis mocking the state of political discourse, and sure enough they’ve entered the lexicon out in Washington!
CBS just announced that its thirteenth season of Survivor, due to premiere next month, was shot on the atoll of Aitutaki, in the Cook Islands.
There's nothing particularly shocking about this locale (in fact, spoilers revealed it before CBS's official announcement). What is shocking is the way they're dividing the tribes this season -- not randomly, as in earlier seasons, or by gender, as they have more recently, but BY RACE!!!! There will be a Caucasian tribe, a Hispanic tribe, an African-American tribe, and an Asian-American tribe (I guess there's no room for Native Americans, let alone "multiracial" people like my son). Eventually, Survivor will integrate the tribes (as they always do), but who can doubt that the entire season -- down to the pitched battle between the "final four" -- will be inevitably viewed through the racial lens?
I don't even know how to respond to this. Is CBS revealing America's racial burlesque for what it is -- an arbitrary, temporary and ultimately meaningless categorization more valuable for dividing people than for uniting them -- or simply cashing in on the inevitable public outcry (read: free marketing) that always results from poking at the still-festering sore of our nation's racist history? Or is racism now just a quaint artifact of centuries gone by, and racial identity reduced to the kind of paper-thin group affiliations that usually characterize "reality" television? Given the egregious disproportion in access to healthcare, wealth, education, and so forth that still exist between so-called racial groups in America today, I simply can't accept the latter interpretation.
Anyway, from a pure business context, I wonder whether the boost this gives CBS's flagging franchise will be worth the fallout. We shall see...
P.S. I was just reading Henry Jenkins' new book Convergence Culture, which has an excellent chapter on the culture of Survivor spoilers.
P.P.S. If you have any question whether the racialized division of contestants on Survivor will actually provide fodder for stereotype, bias, and other assorted manifestations of American bigotry, look no further than Rush Limbaugh's predictions about how the various races will fare in the contest. Sneak peak: it's "not going to be fair if there's a lot of water events." Ugh.
The Summer of Remix continues. Now the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has gotten into the game. CBC Radio Two -– which primarily broadcasts opera, classical music and jazz –- is starting a series of contests called “Compose Yourself,” inviting listeners to submit their own music to be featured as on-air programming.
The first contest in this series, which is now open for submissions, is called “Remix the Ring.”:
You are invited to Remix The Ring! Well, actually just part of it-the famous Ride of the Valkyries. Download the file of Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and remix it in any way you see fit. Mash it, chop it, layer it, turn it upside down. Your remix can have a dance feel, or be completely avant-garde. Let your imagination be your guide.
Now, if only New Line would jump in and let people add some video footage from Lord of the Rings, we'd have the makings of something interesting...
I've been doing more work-avoidance Google Trend-ing, and stumbled across something interesting: searches for mashups (new songs made by "mashing" together elements of other songs) have gained in popularity over the last two years, at nearly the same rate that searches for "folk music" have dwindled.
*mashup *folk music
Maybe I'm going too far out on a limb here, but it seems to me that both mashups and folk music espouse a certain ethic of participatory culture -- music for the masses, by the masses -- that doesn't apply to more commercial music genres. Can it be that former folkies are defecting for mashups? Going directly from autoharps and mandolins to ACID (the software, not the substance), without passing ClearChannel or collecting $200?
Or can it simply be that, at any given point in time, there is a certain level of cultural interest in participatory musical forms, and that people newly hip to this ethos are getting turned on to mashups instead of folk music?
Or is it just one of those odd coincidences without any rhyme or reason?
