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Today’s Remix Culture class is about fan writing, collective writing/creation and vernacular creativity. Students have read these articles:

• Burgess, Jean. 2006. Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies, Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling Continuum, 20(2), pages 201-214. (particularly p 201-207)
• Jenkins, Henry . 2006. “Why Heather Can Write: Media Literacy and the Harry Potter Wars” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006: page 169-205
• Lüders, Marika. 2008. Conceptualizing Personal Media. New Media and Society 10(5).
• Rettberg, Scott. 2005.“All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation.” Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture, Copenhagen.

We’ll talk a bit about key concepts in these articles (cultural studies: audience as co-creators of meaning, vs today where they’re more literal creators; amateur, prosumer; , and then move on to explore a case study, which admittedly only minimally involves remixing. It heavily involves responding to mass media/celebrities though, so I’m using it anyway. We’ll look at Dan Bull’s “Love Letter” to Lily Allen and the media fuss it’s gained. Groups of students will be given different tasks and then we’ll all come together to discuss the case and in particular, ideas about democratisation of the media (or not) and the power relationships between celebrities and “ordinary people” and the media.

Here are the tasks groups will work on and present to the class:

• Who is Lily Allen? What did she recently say about copyright and piracy of music? Can you summarise a few media/popular responses to this?
• Who is Dan Bull? Was he well known before this video? What other things has he done/made? Were they popular? Is his Twitter account popular? What kind of things does he write there?
• How popular is Dan Bull’s video? It was featured in the free London newspaper Metro - how important was this mainstream media attention in making the video popular? Was it featured in other mainstream media? Has it spread in other online/social media? Summarise the video’s rise to fame.

Once we have the “facts” of the case on the table I want to discuss the way Dan Bull used a celebrity to pull himself (or perhaps better, his message?) into public view (see also his Twitter feed where he comments Yoko Ono, for instance), and the relationship between mass media and this kind of viral media. Is Dan Bull simply playing us - is this a carefully planned market strategy to get famous? Or is he just as dependent on mass media as the rest of us? What’s Lily Allen’s position in all this?

Just as we would not traditionally assume that someone is literate if they can read but not write, we should not assume that someone possesses media literacy if they can consume but not express themselves.

– Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p 170.

This spring, I recorded a short video lecture on how to use blogs in teaching for the Virtual Book online course on E-Pedagogy for Teachers in Higher Education, which is produced by Høgskolen in Bergen and planned and edited by Anne Karin Larsen and Grete Oline Hole. My short talk summarises the main advantages of blogging as a learner (or researcher!) and gives concrete suggestions on how to help support students as they move from writing for just themselves and their teacher towards writing in a network of other learners, using blogs.

There are some other interesting-looking video lectures on e-learning in the same course, along with a suggested curriculum and list of assignments, so that teachers wishing to use the same material can do so. It’s not specified on the website yet, but the editors are planning to submit the material to the Medea Awards, which will involve licencing it all as Creative Commons, non-commercial. But I don’t think that’s happened quite yet.

At the Digital Culture program, we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Nordic Digital Culture Network, a Nordplus Higher Education network which we have been working to develop for the past year. Linking together digital culture programs from the Nordic and Baltic region, the Digital Culture Network facilitates curriculum development, student and faculty exchanges, and innovative teaching ideas and best practices. Students studying in the programs in the network will benefit from increased student and teacher mobility and enhanced opportunities for study. All the programs in the network — the University of Bergen in Norway, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland — are leaders in the field of digital culture in their respective countries. Network participants will facilitate student and faculty exchange ranging from express visits to semester or yearlong exchanges, joint programs and master’s degrees. We are launching network activities this activities this fall and spring with faculty exchanges between the institutions, and will add programs, such as student exchanges and a summer school for digital culture, in coming years. I also encourage students from other countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere to explore the exchange and M.A. program opportunities detailed on the site. For instance, both Bergen and Jyväskylä welcome applications to our M.A. programs in digital culture from well qualified international students. While international students are responsible for their own living expenses, they are not required to pay tuition.

I’m enjoying this Flickr set by Mike Licht of old portraits and posters that have been updated so the people in them are blogging. This is “Young Woman Blogging, after Marie-Denise Villers”. They’re all CC licenced, though who knows whether the original art work was used legally, strictly speaking.

The Child, by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet raises all sorts of interesting questions about representation, narration and the relationship between words and images - every image in the piece actually consists of letters or words.

You could definitely call The Child electronic literature, and it certainly has literary aspects. It’s a narrative, but the narrative is very simplistic and that’s really not where the interest lies - it’s the fascination of the word-images and the visual kinetics and the music that are satisfying in this video. Interestingly it was made “for the french dj Alex Gopher”, and yes, it does evoke that trance-like feeling of being in an emotion or inside of music.

Have you seen Eric Faden’s A Fair(y) Use Tale? It uses clips from a couple of dozen Disney movies to explain copyright and fair use:

I found the video in a very useful teaching resource for discussing copyright in relation to remixes at TeachingCopyright.org. One of their suggested lesson plans for high school students is specifically about remixes and when a remix can be said to be covered by fair use. Students learn a bit about fair use, view two-three videos (A Fair(y) Use Tale is one of them) and then use a Trial Guide to research and finally run a mock trial where Disney sues Faden for breach of copyright. In total it would take two 60 minute classes to do this, with students preparing the trial at home between classes. Here’s the lesson plan, there are also educator’s notes and resources to go with it. Thank you Electronic Frontier Foundation!

Unfortunately, Norway and most of Europe don’t have Fair Use, so totally cribbing this lesson plan probably won’t do for Thursday’s class, although the topic is copyright and remix culture. In fact, I’m pretty sure that while A Fair(y) Use Tale would be legal in the US (at least, it should be), it would be clearly illegal in Norway. In Norway we don’t have fair use, but we do have “sitatrett” or “the right to cite”, which allows quotation of other sources without permission, but expressly forbids twisting the meaning of whatever is quoted. The quotation has to be “loyal” to the source. You can criticise the source, but not by taking the quote out of context unfairly. (Gisle Hannemyrs Lommejuss for digitale medier provides a good overview in the section on “avgrensninger i opphavsretten”. See also the section on “appropriasjonskunst”.) Fair use, on the other hand, expressly permits parody and says that “transformative use” of material is one of the proofs that the use is actually “fair use”. I’m not a lawyer, btw, and to be honest, the details of all this are extremely confusing. And in a class like ours, the international aspects are crazy. We have exchange students from Germany, Spain, Italy, Hong Kong, France, Slovenia and more, mostly just here for a semester. What if one of these makes a remix while in Norway, but uses US material and publishes it on a US server, and then goes back to their home country which may have different laws again? To complicate things further: what if an exchange student makes their remix in their own language, while in Norway, using content from the US, Norway and China or Italy or whatever, and publishes it on a US server? I asked a lawyer friend about this and she just laughed and said oh no, don’t even go there. So frankly, I have no idea.

So today’s class is about copyright, anyway. We’ve read the first 100 pages of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive
in the Hybrid Economy, and I’ve also recommended that students watch one of Lessig’s talks, such as his TED talk on Laws that choke creativity, as well as one of the several good documentaries on the effects of copyright laws and remix culture - Johnsen, Andreas, Ralf Christensen and Henrik Moltke’s Good Copy Bad Copy (2007) or Brett Gaylor’s RIP: A Remix Manifesto (2009)

We also need to discuss some of the entirely practical issues we have to deal with: how do we deal with copyright in the videos we’re making ourselves?

We’ll definitely discuss Creative Commons licensing, and the public domain, of course. And we’ll look at sources for Creative Commons licenced images (you can search for CC licenced photos at Flickr or Google images - and a lot of old images in “The Commons” at Flickr have no copyright restrictions (check each photo though), videos (blip.tv) and music (find and sample music at ccMixster, or at Jamendo, create your own at jamstudio.com) - or check out one of the lists of sources for CC licenced material.

For works in the public domain (“i det fri) see for instance this list of a few resources from TeachingCopyright.org.

Then there’s also the simple method of asking the person who created the image, video or text for permission. Since YouTube still doesn’t have a simple way of licencing videos, this is what you have to do to use most YouTube videos. Mostly, people will be happy to say yes.

Neva’s post about Foucault’s “What is an Author” raises an interesting question. She notes that Foucault writes that “an anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer - but not an author”. How does that fit with remix and collaborative art, Neva asks. Most artists in projects she has explored so far use nicknames or are completely anonymous. Neva asks: “Does that mean we should be sceptical about anonymous pieces of art? Can we trust their ‘makers’? And, can we even call this ‘art’?”

This will be our main topic today. We’ll discuss Barthes’ declaration that the author is dead, look at Chatman’s communication model and think about whether this divorces the author from the text/work or not, and use Foucault to think about possible alternatives to the author function - ways that a work/the text/fiction/remixes can be “limited”.

[there’ll be an image of Chatman’s communication model here later; for now I’ll use the one in my PhD thesis]

I also want to talk a little about hoaxes/fictions online - when a pseudonymous video, blog or similar gets really popular, people always figure out who’s really behind it - i.e. who is the author. Some examples: Karen26, lonelygirl15 (see also my post on why this upset people so much), the Vote Different ad by ParkRidge47.

Can we identify author functions in remix works?

We’ll split up in groups to discuss this:

Choose one of the works you’ve looked at this semester – a remix video or website or image.

• Can you identify an “author”?
• Who is speaking? (in Barthes’ sense…)
• Are there other functions that “limit meaning” or that let us understand this in one clear way, apart from an author function?

(more…)

Today’s Remix Culture class is about the Gutenberg Parenthesis:

a cultural realm where it is felt that cultural products (including stage plays and student essays) should be original, independent, autonomous compositions — the individual achievement and the individual property of those who create them.

I first encountered the concept at Tom Pettitt’s plenary keynote at Media in Transition 5 conference in 2005. Here’s a PDF of his talk, or you can watch a video of his actual presentation. Pettitt starts speaking at 36:50 minutes into the video, and his talk lasts for about ten minutes. Here’s his diagram of characteristics of art and culture before, during and after the parenthesis:

And for a little more, you could see my presentation discussing the concept with librarians, which emphasises the meaning of silent reading and such - and the post includes some interesting objections from the librarians.

Having just read Mark Sample’s useful post about teaching electronic literature to students who experience it as a totally foreign culture, I’m thinking that his idea that we need to help guide students through the different stages from denial to integration might apply just as well to the Gutenberg Parenthesis. If there is a vast cultural difference between someone entrenched in the parenthesis and someone who has not yet entered it or has moved beyond it - well, perhaps we really need to think about how to communicate between these very different mindsets.

Mark Sample explains the stages thus:

In the early ethnocentric stages of Bennett’s model, individuals begin by first denying that cultural difference exists in the first place, either because of their own isolation or because of willful ignorance. Greater exposure to cultural difference next prompts a defensive posture, an us-versus-them mentality in which existing cognitive categories are reinforced and any comment directed toward one’s own culture is perceived as an attack. The last ethnocentric stage is characterized by a minimization of difference. Individuals tell themselves that “people are the same everywhere,” a superficially benign attitude that in fact masks uniqueness and still evaluates other cultures from a reference point within one’s own culture. The final three stages are marked by an understanding that behaviors, norms, beliefs and so on are all relative. The first ethnorelative stage is acceptance, genuinely acknowledging cultural difference and seeing that difference within its own cultural context. Next comes adaptation, when individuals change their own attitudes, behaviors, and even language to match their surroundings in an attempt to communicate and empathize. Finally, integration occurs when individuals move freely between cultures, practicing what Bennett calls “constructive marginality,” that is, seeing identity construction as an ongoing process that is always marginal to any specific social group.

Mark Sample goes on to argue that we need to construct assignments that help students move from denial to integration, or from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism, for instance having students argue against the value of electronic literature and then for its value.

I wonder if this way of thinking could help us understand why issues of copyright, for instance, or filesharing or plagiarism, are so complicated and why people have such different ideas about them?

(Links for teaching:

• facsimile of early edition of Romeo and Juliet without author’s name but reference to the play having been plaid publiquely and with great applause - plays were slow to enter the parenthesis
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets, published with his name - poetry entered the parenthesis early. These facsimile’s may not be the exact ones that Pettitt cites but close enough for illustrative purposes (probably not for text scholars though!)
• Freestyle rap / the Dozens is an example of never-entered-the-parenthesis - this is an awful example since it’s Eminem but in a few minutes it’s the best I could do, sorry.
• Commedia dell’arte is an example of pre-parenthetical art (wikipedia)

Reading Reflections:

• Sissel on Textual Poachers
• Michela on Benjamin
• Elisabeth on Jenkins and Benjamin

Remix Culture students are finishing up their 250 word project descriptions and their video previews, so today’s class is mostly going to be a workshop were we can all get on with it and raise any issues that have come up.

I do want to show everyone the Kuleshov effect, which I think is particularly relevant to the people working on the manipulation of reality and on remixes of videos. Lev Kuleshov was an early Soviet filmmaker who set up a simple experiment: he showed an audience a film that showed the same footage of a man’s face three times - but each time followed by a different image: a bowl of soup, a dead body and a half-naked woman.

Each time, the audience interpreted the man’s expression differently, showing that the meaning of an image or sequence of images is as much in the images it is surrounded by as in the image itself.

You can read about the Kuleshov effect in pretty much any book called something like An Introduction to Film Studies, and if you’re writing about remix video in any sense you should definitely read a little more about this and other theories of video montage.

(I wonder whether we should all study cinema montage theory a bit more? After all, film editing is always a form of remixing, I suppose?)

Here’s a brief video of Hitchcock explaining (and demonstrating) the Kuleshov effect, without mentioning Kuleshov.

Montage was a major part of 1920s and 1930s Soviet film theory. The Odessa Stairs scene in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, where images “collide” and create new meanings is probably the most famous example:

If there’s interest, we can talk more about film montage in the upcoming weeks.

Here’s the plan for today’s Remix Culture class:

• Look at our overall research project outline. Does this make sense? Are there important things we’re missing? Edit.
• Talk a bit about how to get from idea to research proposal
• Discuss our annotated bibliography. Edit spreadsheet, adding tags. What are the gaps?
• Find more articles, work on project descriptions - write in blog.

That should be plenty :)

Students in our Remix Culture class are currently honing their research questions - next week they’ll have 250 word project descriptions and a video trailer posted to their blogs. Almost all the students are well on their way, but it’s not always easy finding the way from that first intuitive fascination with a topic or an artefact to defining a research question and planning a course of action. This part of the process can be hard work - often it’s far easier to think of six other possible topics than to commit to one!

So let’s look at one way in which that initial fascination might be focused. To our group’s great amusement, last week Kurdin showed us the fake trailer for the second Titantic movie - the one where they find out that Jack is still alive and fish him up from the depths of the ocean, frozen into a block of ice but still alive. But how on earth will he adapt to the 21st century - and the realisation that Rose is dead?

OK, so you have the fascination with this artefact - where could you go from here?

First, find some context. When you google the title of the video you’ll see that the fourth or fifth hit is to the blog The Trailer Mash: Movie Trailers, Recut. Titanic Two the Surface is clearly not an isolated phenomenon. OK, so a research project could examine the whole genre, which the blog tells us is called trailer mashups - what characterises trailer mashups? Do they tend to be critical of the movie, to parody the movie or pure appreciations of the movie? What’s the history of this genre? Did it exist before internet sharing and video editing became easy?

Next step: what’s been done on this topic academically? Google Scholar is a very easy place to start hunting. Try searching for “trailer remix” or “trailer mashup” or if the results aren’t great, add movie to the search terms. Perhaps try searching for the title of Titanic Two the Surface, just in case someone actually wrote about it. You’ll see that there is some mention of this genre in scholarly articles, but not a lot - which actually means it’s a promising field to explore.

What might adjacent scholarly fields be? Well, we talked about fan fiction in an earlier class - and this could certainly be seen in the light of fan fiction. So search for scholarly articles and books about fan fiction, maybe adding in the search term “movie”. Henry Jenkins’ book Textual Poachers is a classic in this field - unfortunately it’s currently on loan from the University of Bergen library, but you could reserve it if you’re quick. Another field that would be interesting is movie mashups in general. You could simply start with the Wikipedia article (though for a research article you need to go further than Wikipedia! Encyclopedias are starting points for research, and not OK as sole references.) and follow references and ideas from there. Googling “movie mashup” you’ll see one of the first hits is a Wired article on how Hollywood is actually starting to commission mashups - which might lead you to thinking about the relationship between the movie industry and fans.

I still haven’t suggested a specific research question - that would be up to you, if this were your topic. But hopefully you’ll see ways in which you can flesh out a fairly vague idea and figure out which direction you would like to explore further. You’ll need to read more (and look at more trailer mashups) to finalise your research question, but just from this much, you might have an idea already of which aspects would interest you most.