Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.

Info on the Digital Economy Bill

Search for www.culture.gov.uk/images/…/digitalbritain-finalreport-jun09.pdf to view the White Paper

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 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.

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 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.

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!’

Point of Departure 2006
This video installation consisted of 5 vertical screens and another projection on the floor. The film produced with actors working within two airports (in Turkey and UK) begins with an empty set, the panning shots of unmanned equipment, the departure lounge and security stations and the viewer watches as the airports become inhabited. The film follows a narrative – the journey of three characters whose paths cross but with a looseness which does not explain their story. It seems to have a more voyeuristic feel where the viewer can watch their expressions and imagine what is going through their minds. One screen constantly looks from a birds eye view, much in the way CCTV cameras watch over people in areas of high security. Another film is projected on to the floor which shows the luggage as it passes through the X-Ray machine, scrutinised by the security workers on the screen above. As with the airport itself, the bags begin empty and gradually fill as the film progresses. The construction of the space is of great importance, enclosing the viewer and enabling them to see the smaller details of the character’s experience, allowing the narrative of the story to be completed within the imagination.

Quintet Without Borders 2007
Cavusoglu explores the idea of migration and has a particular interest in the Romany people who carry their traditions from place to place. For the piece Quintet Without Borders, his original idea was to offer five musicians from a traditional Romany group a trip to anywhere in the world they would like to go. Due to the potentially huge cost, he decided to scale this down to a 300 mile radius. From each of the musicians locations he would film and record the sound of their part of a traditional folk song. Each musician would play their part from memory, without being able to hear the other band member’s instruments and the resulting videos played on 5 separate screens, arranged in the format of a band where the individual tracks would come together to complete the song. Apart from straying a little out of sync near the start, the timing of the musicians becomes a perfect, emotional rendition… visually stunning and musically inspiring. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects remains that every band member chose to return to his home, to somewhere of special significance to his memory – by the sea at the local jetty, in a room of his childhood house.