matt:littlemore

For the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the market, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences).
Avante garde artists’ experimentations with both form and content function as a direct challenge to the ideological and political power of mainstream commercial cinema …no solutions or programmatic statements, but a series of intricate challenges, hints and coded messages, subverting both form and content… it is by definition an aesthetic and political movement… film is sacked, atomised, caressed and possessed in a frenzy of passionate love.
Amos Vogel (From Film As A Subversive Art 1974)

Vogel’s view of the future of mainstream cinema seems to ring true today in relation to the remix culture of social networking sites such as YouTube. Perhaps not entirely subversive in intent, millions of Vidders and remixers are deconstructing and envisioning their own personal takes on film, TV and other media forms in popular culture. Usually as homage to their favourite movies, bands or even TV commercials (caressed and possessed in a frenzy of love) or in other cases a parody or political message (subverting form and content) usually delivered tongue in cheek The ‘Born Digital’ generation are making their own TV from slices of other people’s work, remixing peer’s as well as commercially owned work. Are they Vogel’s (unknowing?) iconoclasts transgressing narrative modes, structures and visual convention? For this is the art of the common people, this is modern entertainment, an ever-changing production and consumption cycle where new styles are immediately critiqued by peers, imitated and devalued. This is art separated from the art world, often illegal in media usage and so widespread almost impossible to police.

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!’

TV didn’t kill newspapers, video didn’t kill cinema and the ipod didn’t kill radio. What happens with the arrival of a new technology is that cultural significance and usage of the old medium shift, often embracing and enhancing rather than instigating it’s demise.
According to The IPA Study – ‘Marketing in the Era of Accountability’
TV is getting more effective over time; it has increased its lead over all other media channels in each of the last three decades. In fact, the report concludes “don’t neglect TV. Far from being dead, TV advertising remains one of the most effective and efficient media. New technology and increased competition for viewers may actually be making TV more efficient, not less”
It showed that campaigns focusing on fame and emotion were far more effective in driving the bottom line (sales, market share, profit and loyalty) than more rational campaigns based on information and persuasion – and that TV is the most effective medium at delivering these.
Thinkbox TV Marketing tell us ‘TV hardwires brand memories… TV is typically processed at a low involvement level, which means the content is less critically analysed but this makes it well suited to thematic or brand messages that need to be remembered for the long-term. Information which enters the memory through low involvement processing gets stored directly via the emotional centres of the brain straight to the long-term, implicit memory without any conscious filtering. TV is an incredibly effective way of increasing a set of associations around a brand. It literally hardwires brands into the brain.
fMRI scans demonstrate that the two parts of the brain most stimulated when watching audio-visual material (like TV and cinema) are the amygdalla (emotion) and the hippocampus (long term memory encoding). Emotions and long term memory = where brands live. Neuroscience studies from a variety of media companies (Viacom, GMTV and PHD) have confirmed this finding.’
They also tell us ‘We’re watching an hour more commercial TV a week than 10 years ago’. It would be interesting to see how much of this extra time spent is taken up watching extending advert breaks!
TV is still the dominant Youth Medium. TV is the medium that young people spend nearly half (47%) of their media time with. MTV and Microsoft research, along with Thinkbox’s own has shown how TV is young people’s favourite activity (along with listening to music) and the IPA’s Touchpoints 2 showed that young adults spend nearly twice as much time watching television as they spend online.