WEEK ONE: The Gleaners and I (2000)

"I'm not poor, I have enough to eat," says the filmmaker Agnes Varda, "but there is another kind of gleaning, which is artistic gleaning. You pick ideas, you pick images, you pick emotions from other people, and then you make it into a film."

HERE are ten things gleaned from The Gleaners and I, posted by a reviewer on the independent film streaming site FANDOR

and here are our very first readings :

WALTER BENJAMIN'S THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION (1936)

JONATHAN LETHEM'S THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE : a plagiarism (2007)

We will be discussing the classic Benjamin text as a class, but please post your comments on the Lethem article (and anything else you'd liket o bring up) below!!

FALL 2013  University of Colorado Boulder Film STudies:

 The fresh new RECYCLED IMAGES blog!!!!

ASTROLAND, Boulder CO May 2010

getting excited about our FILM SHOW next Wednesday at AstroLand!!!!!!

Curious about ASTROLAND? They might be Boulder's last hope, and by 'they' I mean YOU.

Our poster is coming soooon! Here is the talented Ryan working very hard on it in the projection room attended by his muses Anna and Tara. We are collaborating with C.Battle's Focus on the Frame class for this show, plus local punx Thee Gootchi Boiz --you know that golden haired drummer, right?

Editing in the basement, or, we heart MACKY!

URLS for in-class web day:

Marshall McLuhan
Lawrence Lessig
Creative Commons
CCMixter
Prelinger Internet Archive
Illegal Art (film and video)
Lost in Light project
Crash Course in Copyright

artists projects:
Olia Lialina
Bobby Abate
Young Hae Chang Industries
Cory Arcangel:
super mario
born to run
Ray Harmon
eTeam-SL dumpster

The Ecstasy of Influence

image by Owen O'Toole from back in the day

OK so now READ THIS article by Jonathan Lethem called The Ecstasy of Influence: a plagiarism, originally published in Harpers Magazine in early 2007, essential reading for all of us recyclers/appropriationists/samplers/remixers/fair users/ supercutters/and masher-uppers out here. Author Lethem even has his own project called Promiscuous Materials that is very similar to Jay-Z's 2005 online Construction Set , where the tracks to his Black Album were made downloadable specifically for musical remix use. WE listened to a little bit of DangerMouse's The Grey Album (2004) that was a direct result of that project, which certainly shook the copyright laws up--check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation's reportage on the federal copyright exception called 'fair use' specifically surrounding Feb 24, 2004, the day of coordinated internet civil disobedience known as Grey Tuesday. George Harrison was probably rolling in his grave, after everything he went through with the My Sweet Lord/He's So Fine trial in 1976.