Friday the 20th November, we met for the last time to watch everybody’s videos. It was very interesting seeing the final result and how far everybody has come. I really liked all the videos and even though they all were more or less about Remix Culture they were all very different. Most using a lot of found-footage, some using voice-over, others using their own songs.

It was nice seeing everything kind of come together again, after everybody had been rather busy with writing the last couple of weeks. It felt as if we had not only researched about Remix Culture but also participated in it actively, which is nice.

I really liked the course and I will certainly miss having a look at what’s happening on YouTube and discussing it in class or talking about current issues, like the Kanye West or the Dan Bull incident.

I’m done! My research paper is ready. Shakespeare’s sources and Shakespearean teen film have been explored and written about… I’m glad that it’s over now and that I can now concentrate on other things again.

But it is also sad, that the course is over now, as it was very interesting and brought me in contact with many things, I haven’t been in contact with before… (blogging for example, was before that course something completely foreign for me.)

I’m looking forward to tomorrows screening of all the videos. That’ll be very interesting and funny.

This might be the last entry for a while, as I learnt to appreciate the academic blogging, but still don’t want to blog private. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll have a course in Germany, which is good for blogging. We’ll see.

I have just uploaded my final video!

Enjoy watching it.

It’s crunch time.

The paper and the video are due next Friday. After I presented my video in class last Thursday I got some very good and useful feedback, which I have already used to make my video better, so that this task is almost done now. I’ll wait a few days and then look at it again and see whether everything works the way I want it to work and if it does, I’ll leave it the way it is right now. Otherwise I’ll make a few changes here and there, but I don’t think I’ll need many more changes. My paper unfortunately is still a different story. Many things are lacking and I don’t get on as fast as I want to. But as it is weekend now, I’ve had more time to work on it, which is good.

Time’s been running. It’s weird that this semester is almost over already. Only one more official class on Tuesday…

Tomorrow in class I have to present a new trailer of my video. So what I’ve been doing today basically is: working on it, trying to make it look good and better than before. But as I have only bought sony vegas movie studio 9 (I worked with windows movie maker before and that sucks, so I decided to get the editing software we got recommended after all), a while ago, I still have to learn many things and have not been as fast as I wanted to. But the trailer is now ready to be presented in class. I’m excited to see what the others will think of it. Hopefully they have some good suggestions about how to improve it for the final version which is due together with my paper on the 20th of november.

feedback in class (12th nov.09):

still image, old greek picture, -> longer! zoom in! more explicitly, back up inspired by others… -> love triangle sketch! emphazise point of plot being the same…

Nine theses about Remix Culture by Felix Stalder

1. Thesis: saturation of culture with medial objects is the condition for remixing to be possible

Felix Stalder argues that Remixing can only take place when people have access to “medial objects” without difficulties. The “status of saturation”, as he calls it, can only be reached when three main things are guaranteed. 1. economical-organisatorical: they have to be cheap and widely spread. 2. cultural, meaning that everybody has to be able to use them (without getting into troubles). 3. material, meaning that it has to be possible to change the objects. Stalder says that the “status of saturation” was reached the first time in history with the spreading of the printing press. He continues to draw a historical abstract and mentions the development of the academical writing in which it was not only regarded positively that old and new material were interwoven very close, but even seen as essential part of academic research. He continues his historical abstract by advancing in the centuries, talking about for example: avantgarde, montage and Dadaismus (but I will not go deeper in here, as it is not relevant for my research topic).

2. Thesis: “Meta-Medium” of networking computers brings all media to the point of saturation

Felix Stalder starts his second thesis by pointing out that with the invention of computer and the constant improvement of the technology and on top of that the global networking via the internet the “status of saturation” has reached a new dimension. This change is not only one of quantity but also of quality. He writes that in the future almost every work will be available online. Most of the new work is already “born digitally” and there are many initiatives to digitize old work for example google books.

3. Thesis: every new creation contains elements from already existing creations. Remixing makes this process obvious.

Stalder argues in this thesis that in everything new, there is already something old in there. He talks about Peter Burkholder who analyzed music in terms of reoccurring in different pieces of music. As example Stalder uses Mozart, who clearly was a musical genius. But even in his pieces you can find references to others such as Haydn or Gluck or sometimes to his own pieces. The interesting thing about this is, that both Haydn and Gluck lived during the same time and it is likely that the audience from back then heard those references more clearly then we do today! He continues to argue that this can be applied to other artists as well (which is important for me, as it can be transferred to Shakespeare as well!). He doesn’t say it in such a radical way, but you could conclude that everything is a remix, as he says, that the idea of the solitary work is not only theoretically impossible, but – also considering superb work – empirically proved to be impossible. Our connected world makes an out-sight impossible, which also leads to the point that in everything new, there is something old in there. (he goes further into that, but it is not so easy to translate and summarize it, but I might go into more depth in my research paper there.)

4. Thesis: the productive Remix-Culture is cooperative / shared instead of individual / centralist

The classical picture of creativity is one of someone being inspired in his own self, receiving a vision from his inner self. Felix Stalder argues that this picture is not up to date anymore. And that especially in Remix creativity goes completely different ways. He says that in Remix not the individual is in the center of attention, but the tension between different positions which are being put into relationship with each other in a cooperative situation. He follows in his argumentation Peter Jaszi who differentiated between three types of cooperation/collaboration: 1. “synchronous collaboration” 2. “asynchronous collaboration” 3. “serial collaboration”. The first one occurs in “real time” when for example musicians improvise together. The second one occurs when B reworks something from A and A in turn will change that outcome again, as example he states the wikipedia. The third one, the “serial collaboration” is the most interesting one for me, as you could call She’s the man a “serial collaboration”. Stalder explains it by saying, that again B reworks something from A, but A doesn’t change it anymore. The only thing required of A is his work, which makes it possible to have a long time between the work from A and the remix from B (as is the case from Twelfth Night and She’s the man). This kind of cooperation is not meant to change the old work to the better, but to transform it in a way one wants for example modernizing the setting.

5. Thesis: the ontology of the Remix is flat

Everything can come in contact with anything, theoretically. This structural openness of the Remix results out of the fact that the new creation is not dependent on the summary of different old parts, but from their character and thus is unpredictable, argues Felix Stalder and to emphasize  his point goes into the theories of Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda, something I will leave out, as it doesn’t relate with my research topic.

6. Thesis: Remix reduces the barrier of production and enlarges the circle of producers

Earlier cultural production was something professionals did, as they had the means, knowledge and technology to do it. Everyday people were consumers only and asked to buy what was being produced by the professionals. With the invention of technology and the creation of pages like YouTube a change took place, so that now everybody can create art and share it in the world wide web (even though there are still specialists.) And thus the number of people creating something has increased steadily.

7. Thesis: the boundary between professional and amateur culture blurs

In the 7. thesis Felix Stalder goes deeper into the change from professional-only-culture to professional-and-amateur-culture. He argues that the communication practices blur the status between private and non-private.  He sees one of the reasons in the fact that personal communication is being mixed with mass media, which results – especially within Remix culture – in a difficulty to differentiate between professional and amateur culture. Cultural production is being “de-specialized”. He explains this change through some examples.

8. Thesis: the boundaries between production, distribution and consumption blur

In the traditional cultural industry production, distribution and consumption were clearly separated from each other. In Remix Culture this is no longer the case, they start “melting together”. The blurring of the boundaries between production and consumption can be observed in fan communities. A fan often is not only a consumer but also a distributor feeling part of the thing he/she likes and actively contributing for it. Stalder quotes Henry Jenkins about whom we talked ourselves, so that I won’t go into depth there.

9. Thesis: attribution, control and payment differentiate each other

In his last thesis Stalder talks about copyright law. He sketches how new models could work in the future to do justice to Remix culture. But I won’t go into depth here either as it is not exactly important for my research topic.

As I have translated those theses roughly from German into English they might sound a little weird at times. But I think that this paper is really interesting in terms of another definition of Remix and therefore important for my own paper as well.

The viral video award 2009 is located within the 25th International Short Film Festival Berlin. 24 viral videos from all over the world are presented and everyone can vote their favorite. The videos are very different to each other.

There is for example this video:

which clearly references guy catches glasses with face, a very popular video on YouTube and also guys backflip into jeans.

Then there are videos which function as advertisement for a company like this one:

And then there are videos with a political message. Some talking about the dangers of smoking, others about the dangers of gen-manipulated food and others again trying to make us aware of some political decision which has a huge impact on our daily lives. For example this one:

Internet as marketing platform has been long discovered. When we surf on the web ads are all around us, trying to get our attention from what we were actually doing to the product they praise. But it seems that marketing strategies now even go other ways to reach more people. They have become aware of platforms like YouTube and put their own videos online to attract an audience. In some cases those videos have been very successful, being viewed millions of times in a short period (an interesting question, at this point to ask, is, why do they go viral?).

For example this video, which seems “very innocent” until the very end, when it reveals who’s made it. Even though when more familiar with in this case VW’s usual marketing strategy you can find some similarities as for example the font being used in the video.

I think I will be now able to argue that “She’s the man” is indeed a Remix of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night or What you will”! That is actually a great comfort as our class has been talking about Remix all semester and it wouldn’t make much sense to write a paper about something that is not a Remix and can’t even be interpreted as one! So all I have to do now is get on with writing faster (at the moment my pace is far too slow, not getting much more than half a page together in a day). And as Jill said we are not allowed to think about our videos yet, not think about the video yet, even though I have to admit, that it’s getting harder not to think about that yet. But the paper is probably the most important. It is kind of funny writing in English. I sometimes find myself writing too much in a “German-researcher-style”, which is not so good… And I have realized through all our conversations about our paper that papers are written differently in Norway compared to Germany. But luckily I’m allowed to write more in the way I’m used to which makes the whole thing easier.