Certainly not… but Logorama – an excellent short film directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain. Presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009, it opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.
Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.
‘If, as expected, the volume of digital content will increase 10x to 100x over the next 3 to 5 years then we are on the verge of a “big bang” in the communications industry that will provide the UK with enormous economic and industrial opportunities.’
The ‘Digital Britain’ white paper will among other things give Ofcom more responsibility to detect copyright infringement in the digital age. Perhaps about time some new rules are made, still a delicate balance between the protection of intellectual property and space allowed for individuals to express and grow creatively needs to be struck.
Chapters 4 (Creative Industries in the Digital World) 6 (Research, Education and Skills) and 7 (Digital Security and Safety) will be particularly interesting, but it is well worth checking out your rights and restrictions regarding the creation of any digital content.
Info on the Digital Economy Bill
Search for www.culture.gov.uk/images/…/digitalbritain-finalreport-jun09.pdf to view the White Paper
We made mix tapes, they remix music – We watched TV, they make TV
Lawrence Lessig is perhaps the most important voice for artists, authors and coders of the digital age who wish to remix existing media assets without fear of recrimination. He is a founding board member of Creative Commons and a strong supporter of legislation to free up the restrictions on copyright and trademark in the context of technology applications.
Most Vidders and Remixers, if considering copyrights at all, tend to see no problem with using ‘found’ media assets to reconstruct and ‘mash up’ and as their work is generally created for fun and not for profit, simply see their role as one of adding content (and value) to sites such as YouTube. The role of Youtube has become a kind of interactive public access TV – viewers watch, critique, imitate and parody at an incredible rate, media which can itself become (although somewhat short-lived) a popular cultural style in it’s own right.
Lessig says ‘We live in an age of prohibition, where in many areas of life ordinary people live against the law. The kids live life knowing they live it against the law – which is extremely corrosive and corrupting.’
Copyright law has a very unclear role in the digital age – every visual reference is itself a ‘copy’, where many of these copies are used to the benefit of the originator. Is it fair to allow copies which work for the good of the copyright holder and criminalise the copies which don’t? And is it possible that by creating a culture of illegal creativity in the world of new media this may have a detrimental effect on society as a whole?
Anybody involved or interested in Remix Culture should check out his speech on how the law is strangling creativity
The idea of interactive film narrative has been around a long time, yet has never really made it to popular culture in cinema or the small screen. Kinoautomat was the world’s first piece of interactive cinema – part film, part performance, which premiered in Montreal in 1967 – “One Man and His House’. Created by Dr. Raduz Cincera, the narrative was determined by a majority vote at crucial parts of the story where the normally passive cinema-goers would push a button to decide the outcome of a particular scene. The votes (red or green) would display around the border of the screen, and the projectionist would switch the lens between 2 synchronised films depending on the result. Politically inspired, Cincera who was a Czech during the Cold War, was making a commentary on the illusion of control of voting. Although no ‘new media’ technologies were used, Kinoautomat was the first instance of interactive media.
The idea of user defined narrative took me back to the days of Fighting Fantasy books, with which I whiled away many childhood hours. The work of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, such as ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’ (1982) and ‘The Forest of Doom’ (1983) allowed the reader, armed with a pencil and 2 dice, to decide his own fate as the narrative was traversed. The format allowed the books a much longer lifespan, having many different outcomes. The series became hugely successful, putting the reader in control of the fate of the character, the idea closely related to the boom of simlar role playing games in the computer games industry.
Another nostalgic favourite from the same era was the arcade game ‘Dragon’s Lair’ (1983). Created by Rick Dyer of Advanced Microcomputer Systems, it was the first of a number of Laser Disc games, which used real animation footage where the narrative was decided by the choice of the player at critical points. The story was delivered by jumping to the chosen scene on the disc. This was very much an example of interactive video – very different to the coded arcade games of the time and with a graphical detail which was to really stand out against the pixel video games surrounding. And so it should, 6 years in the making, costing Bluth (Don Bluth – The Secret of NIMH) Studios $1.3 million to produce the 22 minutes of animation, some individual seconds using 24 hand painted cels – much higher than the industry standard. However, the initial magic (and commercial income) was to be short lived with players becoming bored with the memorizable play and operators with the unreliability of the units. Despite the emergence of some other laser disc based games such as MACH III which used video footage with the game overlayed on top, the interactive laser disc technology was to disappear from the arcades in the early 90s.
Of course, media technologies continue to make ideas more accessible, cheaper to produce and more portable. You can now download Dragon’s Lair for your iPhone and play Fighting Fantasy on your DS.
Inspired by the Colour of Sound Weekend I dug out my old Casio PT-50 childhood keyboard with the idea of bringing my toy of the 80′s into the 10′s. I knew she would come in handy one day so was stored with my other nostalgic 80′s electronica. Despite a few dodgy slider contacts no doubt clogged from 3 decades of forgotten toy cupboard dust, with a new set of batteries and a good shake the PT-50 was ready to be wacked into the mac to see how she fared in a new digital age. And I must say, even just using Garageband for a bit of extra echo, reverb and fuzzbox it actually sounds half decent! And so, research pointed me to the idea of Circuit Bending where I found an example of that very keyboard…
Reed Ghazala – self styled multi media artist, hailed as the Father of Circuit-Bending, pioneered the transformation of the existing circuitry of basically any sound making toy or device. His other-worldly creations, controlled by transplanted switches, movement and sound itself saw a new kind of instrument genre. Musical artists such as Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, Faust & Towa Tei wishing to push musical boundaries were quick to commission instruments for themselves.
The legacy continues… poor teletubby
The era of the digital native has brought about the rise of a new generation of digital media producers who are often free from the constraints of artistic convention and legal consideration. The new guerrilla media revival utilizing experimental media as resistance, parody and subversion is alive and thriving in the digital world. The result is some daring creative experimentation with narrative and form, fresh artistic visions largely unaware of but rooted in the avant-garde tradition. In his book exploring the social and cultural contexts of subversive cinema ‘Film as a Subversive Art’ (1974) Amos Vogel says:
The avant-garde offers no solutions or programmatic statements, but a series of intricate challenges, hints and coded messages, subverting both form and content. in this fundamental sense, it is by definition an aesthetic and a political movement… In its works, film is sacked, atomized, caressed and possessed in a frenzy of passionate love.
The description lends itself comfortably to the ideals of the YouTube ‘Vidders’ and remixers. A large proportion of YouTube content is made of ‘fanvids’ which although have a flagrant disregard for intellectual property and copyright law are generally a celebration of pop culture which are intended as a display of appreciation for a particular band, artist or celebrity to share with other fans. Rather than subversion they see their work as adding value to the site, acknowledging credit to the creators of video and music and as there is no profit to be made consider the results free advertising for their favorite artists. Some artists react positively to the exposure, realising the videos may actually create more sales. As the players in the remix culture use ‘found’ materials (sharing a lineage to Marcel Duchamp and the surrealists who used and repurposed found objects) they often skirt copyright laws, the interference from the corporations who own the material only serving to make them more savvy to use clever workarounds to confuse the censors and bots which detect infringements.
The use of social networking and new forms of digital communication has allowed people to become participants in an organic production and consumption cycle, using the relatively anonymous platform for creative expression and resistance – the success or failure of their work to be judged by their peers. With the availability of easily obtained music and video archives, remix aesthetics, blogs and web 2.0 new styles and formulas are quickly played out, imitated and subsequently devalued and replaced more quickly than ever before. In this way, the unnamed guerrilla artist is reshaping the very visual culture of new digital media and directly challenges the ideological and political power of mainstream media. In the 1971 book ‘Guerrilla television’ Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Media Collective say
Community video will be subversive to any group, bureaucracy or individual which feels threatened by a coalescing of grassroots consciousness… it puts people in touch with one another about common grievances.
James Vicary was a market researcher, best known for popularizing the notion of subliminal advertising in 1957. He used a movie theatre in Fort Lee, New Jersey he tested subliminal messaging on over 45,000 movie goers over a 6 week period. While the patrons watched a movie (called Picnic) Vicary displayed 2 subliminal messages – ‘Eat Popcorn’ and ‘Drink Coca-Cola’. The messages were text based subliminal messages and were displayed much faster than the human eye can see – they flashed on the screen for 3/1000s of 1 second – and they were displayed once every 5 seconds. Results were taken by comparing the current 6 weeks sales of Coca Cola and popcorn to sales figures from the previous 6 weeks. The difference was phenomenal:
Popcorn sales had risen by 57%
Coca Cola sales rose by 18.1%
These figures suprised even Vicary himself. At the time the findings caused somewhat of a hysteria, further research started to be done into the influence of subliminal messages, and they were soon banned from being used within advertisements. However no detailed study of his findings was released and no independent evidence turned up to support his claim. Eventually, in 1962, Vicary admitted that the original study was fabricated.
Khaled Sanadzadeh recalls an interesting story of unnoticed musical subversion in the 1980s – ‘The strange case of Western electronica and psychadelia being beamed out into every home across Iran at it’s most anti-western extreme’. It was the 1980s. Iran was at war with Iraq. Officials were encouraging youths to go to the front defending their country. Residents of Iran dealt with planes that were dropping bombs on them. These bombs were made in the USA and the chemical ones were from West Germany. Iranians had strong revolutionary feelings. They had denied westernization just few years before that. In such a situation, to endorse the West and its culture was an unforgivable sin. However, somewhere at the heart of the anti-West propaganda machine, Iranian TV and radio, weird happenings were taking place.’
‘For a long time, no singer appeared on Iranian TV or sang on the radio. They always used instrumental music in between or at the beginning of their programmes. In the mornings, there were educational programmes about physics, chemistry and biology. The afternoon was the time of war-propaganda and soldiers’ happy faces going to fight with an evil creature called Saddam Hussein were shown. At night, it was the news and stories of successes of Iranian army. Since Mozart and Beethoven’s pieces did not fit these subjects, and people were fed up with Iranian traditional music, they opted to utilize other things; electronic and ambient tunes… There was a programme called ‘The Analysis of the Week’s Politics’ on Iranian TV and they occasionally talked about Germany and France helping Iraq in the war. The sound themes were works of Klaus Shulze and Jean Michel Jarre!’
Revive is based on ‘Dynamic Intersection’, which provides very fast moving objects. The source includes some more scenes. This physics engine works with penetration detection of any object. If a penetration (intersection) is detected the simulation will run backwards and forwards in frame-time, untill a accurate collision time is found. After that, the last detected collision is resolved.
Check out this physics-led use of flash