Saturday, November 16, 2013

WEEK TWELVE: REMIX MASHUP VIDDING SUPERCUT MEME



Group presentation week on all the above categories with amazing examples! We listened to a general explanation of REMIX culture stemming from musical forms from Beethoven to Lee Scratch Perry, though remix video is a highly popular way of taking on contemporary media these days--here's a whole site dedicated to the latest in political remix videos of all kinds.  MASHUP remixes made using two distinct sources like The Dark Side of the Rainbow (try this at home), VIDDING and the grandmother of fannish vids Both Sides Now (1975) by Kandy Fong,  SUPERCUTS, a term coined by blogger Andy Baio in 2008 to describe obsessive works as The Usual Suspects --  also check this supercut we didn't watch in class but is mentioned in Ed Halters article below : ARTIST LOOKING AT THE CAMERA (2006) by Guthrie Lonergan who raided the Getty Images Archive for his sources as we can tell by the watermarks he leaves intact. Lastly we investigated MEMES,  actually short for mimesis, and according to the dictionary literally means  "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture".   We learned about 4chan as ground zero for memes, and looked at examples that ran the gamut - lolcats to pop culture references to political current events --like "Casually Pepper Spray Everything Cop”, a photoshop meme based on a photograph of the police officer who offhandedly pepper sprayed a group of Occupy protesters at the University of California Davis in November 2011. 

We ended the session with Buffy vs. Edward by pop culture hacker Jonathan Mcintosh, a remix/mashup as a pro-feminist visual critique. He has extensive liner notes on youtube, like 




Many remix videos carry a CC license and use this warning on their material:

FAIR USE NOTICE:This critical and transformative remix video constitutes a fair use of any copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US copyright law.


Yes, you too can keep up with the exciting and rapidly changing world of internet phenomena at  Know Your Meme.


+++Read for next week: Ed Halter's RECYCLE IT! (2008) from The Museum of the Moving Image's website for a nice lively read of our beloved and rebellious subject +++


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