Monthly Archives: December 2011

The State of the Nation Address 2011 – Enda Kenny Recut

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Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny reassures the nation in the run-up to Christmas by telling it like it is, in this critical remix video, which uses footage from the original RTE ‘State of the Nation Address’ broadcast from December 2011 recut and remixed with Vangelis’ Conquest of Paradise.

Fair Use Notice:
This remix is a satirical transformative work, which forms part of a doctoral research project and has been constructed for educational and research purposes, as well as critical commentary, therefore it represents a ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material, according to section 107 of U.S. copyright law.

Attributions
State of the Nation Address by Enda Kenny, RTE (2011)
Conquest of Paradise, Vangelis

Remixed in Dec.2011 by Owen Gallagher, PhD Researcher, NCAD, Dublin, Ireland
http://criticalremix.com | http://totalrecut.com | http://remixstudies.org

Do They Know It’s Christmas – Occupy / Band Aid Mashup 2011

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In this Critical Remix Video (CRV), the three ‘official’ versions of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ from 1984, 1989 and 2004 are mashed together with the most recent version, from the TV musical ‘Glee’ (2009). All four music videos are combined with footage from the Occupy Wall Street movement, contrasted against footage from the Arab Spring uprisings, in particular, those which took place in African countries in 2011.

Fair Use Notice:
This remix is a transformative work, which forms part of a doctoral research project and has been constructed for educational and research purposes, as well as critical commentary, therefore it represents a ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material, according to section 107 of U.S. copyright law.

Attributions
Do They Know It’s Christmas – Band Aid (1984)
Do They Know It’s Christmas – Band Aid II(1989)
Do They Know It’s Christmas – Band Aid 20 (2004)
Do They Know It’s Christmas – Glee (2009)
News Footage – AP, RT, CNN (2011)

Remixed in Dec.2011 by Owen Gallagher, PhD Researcher, NCAD, Dublin, Ireland
www.criticalremix.com | www.totalrecut.com | www.remixstudies.org

Man of the Year 2012: How Jon Stewart Became President

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YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOuu1b81ogU (15 minute original)
Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/33979645 (10 minute cut)

HTML5 Embed Code:

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What if Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Barack Obama ran head-to-head in the presidential election campaign in 2012? Who would win?

This is a Critical Remix Video (CRV) starring Stewart, Colbert and Obama from the Daily Show, the Colbert Report and the White House, respectively – also featuring cameos from Bill O’Reilly of the O’Reilly Factor and Christopher Walken from Robin William’s ‘Man of the Year’.

This remix is a transformative satirical work, which forms part of a doctoral research project and has been constructed for educational and research purposes, as well as critical commentary, therefore it represents a ‘fair use’ of copyrighted material according to section 107 of US copyright law. Please feel free to remix it.

Produced in December 2011 by Owen Gallagher, PhD Researcher, NCAD, Dublin, Ireland.

www.criticalremix.com | www.totalrecut.com | www.remixstudies.org

Attributions:
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Comedy Central
The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central
The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly, Fox News
Man of the Year starring Robin Williams, Universal Pictures
The U.S. Government Whitehouse Presidential Broadcasts, WH.gov
RT, CBS, MSNBC, ABC, CNN, AP, TBS, C-SPAN, Mitt Romney
Facebook, Terry Gross, The Adjustment Bureau Soundtrack

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.

Decoding the Remix

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Decoding the remix – layers of meaning and interpretation. Looking for specific undertones, e.g. evidence of class issues in found footage film-making or perhaps elitism? Looking for hidden meanings or altering meaning. The meaning of the original text is altered as a result of being recontextualised. Consumerism is our culture. More about the process of creating meaning – less about the work itself or the artist, more about the processes and practices of meanings and those who perceive it. Evidence of power struggles in found footage filmmaking. Turning the tables, tipping the scales – found footage filmmakers looked for the scraps of culture to make their work. Now commercial work looks for ideas in the scraps of found footage filmmakers! Benjamin, De Certeau, Debord, Baudrillard, Hall. War metaphoes in remix. Decoding remixes is one thing but many PRVs or Critical remix works are decoding mainstream media themselves. So it becomes quite meta – decoding something that is itself decoding something else. Manovich meta-medium. Surveying the origins of meda media in found footage filmmaking. Surveying is like mapping so to survey this field is to create a map of people, places, events, work and the systems in which they operate. Times, dates. It is certainly possible to create an interactive visualization of this. A survey of a field alone is not considered to be original research. A survey of what has been written about this in other academic publications, summarizing the content and context of each one. Marxism in found footage – class consciousness – Arnold Howser. The Social History of Art. The Social History of Found Footage Filmmaking and its Digital Evolution into Meta Media Production. The goal is to show how found footage filmmaking interacts with power structures in society. The critical approach that could be used is Marxism. Marxist visual culture attempts to show how art is tied to specific classes, contains information about the economy and how images reinforce the status quo (current ideology). Check Clement Greenberg. Art History entry. Evidence in current work of a change from capitalism to something new – looking at found footage filmmaking, we can see the rise of consumer society and postmodern thought reflected in its evolution and today we can see the emergence of a new economic system. T.J. Clark and Meye Schapir.