Explore the Module
With a brief history of modern art complete, we’ll turn our attention to focus of this course: digital and electronic media. In this module, we’ll look at digital media through the lens of spreadable media and ‘remix culture’; cornerstones of today’s internet. Specifically, we’ll look at:
Before the internet, mass media like television and radio was centralized. It was produced by a few for the masses to consume. The internet disrupted this. Through it it the ‘prosumer’ (the producer-consumer) can now actively participate in media culture.
Remixes, mashups and memes are familiar internet forms. But they’re connected to many of the ideas from art in the 20th century. Methods like ‘appropriation’ inform copyleft and creative commons. The continual challenges to the definition of art in the 20th century also paved the way for artists to engage the internet.
New media artists have flocked to the internet. They don’t just share their work online. Instead many leverage the materials, practices and features of the internet, like spreadability and remixability, in their artmaking as creative catalysts for both production, criticality and provocation.
We have a few objectives. Namely, you’ll start to
Familiarity: become familiar with new media art on the internet, popular forms for net-art and influential artists;
Connections: draw out the links between internet art and 20th century (traditional) art; we’ll also examine the the links between mass media and internet culture as well as their effects.
Techniques: understand the features of spread and remix that inform media composition for the internet as well as techiques and methods for internet media production; and
Application: prepare media compositions based on these ideas;
To learn about spreadability and remix culture, we’re first going to plum the depths of the internet. Each of you will uncover and present an interesting ‘thing’ that’s been widely shared on the internet and an artist who’s work intersects with the internet. We’ll use these to learn from each other and it will give us a catalog that we can all draw from (familiarity, techniques.) Using your discoveries, you’ll get hands-on with remixing memes by reworking each others compositions as part of the warm up exercise (application).
The remix will be our primary method in this module. It’s the “the activity of taking samples from pre-existing materials to combine them into new forms according to personal taste 1“. Our guest lecture will explore the remix in electronic media and net art. Our screening will examine how remix culture responds to and resists mass media production and copyrighted content through ongoing creative acts and expressions (familiarity, connections, techniques). McLuhan’s ‘The Medium is the Massage’ will continue this discussion (familiarity) while Cloninger’s ‘Commodify Your Consumption’ will provide tactical surfing as a toolkit for critical production for internet media (familiarity, techniques). Finally, you’ll grapple with spread and virality in your end of module project (application).
The phrase ‘spreadable media’ describes content that becomes ‘viral’. With today’s technology, content can become popular from bottom-up participation, meaning that it is created and shared by consumers before being picked up by media outlets, rather than the other way around (top-down). Media can be shared through various social media sites such as vine, facebook, twitter, tumblr etc. It covers media content circulation rather than distribution, with the audience having more power over how the content spreads and how many people are going to see it. Spreadable media is shared similarly to gossip, in that people find the content interesting and then want to pass it on to people they know, which makes the process active as people are making a conscious decision to share it.
There are many factors that can make content highly spreadable; humour, active participation, themes of community or empowerment, and posing questions that encourage further looking into. Spreadability can reduce cost of promoting content, as it is now so easy for it to gain views on social media – so even if viewers aren’t seeing your content directly from you, it is gaining views, likes and popularity, causing people to talk about it.
Memes are a form of spreadable media – they are made to be humorous and easily shared. They are also easily replicated, making them even more spreadable. Memes can be created by anyone relating to a wide range of internet cultures/sub cultures, meaning that they can be relevant to anyone and everyone. There are even sites that can be used to create memes, using famous (from the concept of spreadable media) pictures with your own text.
From https://grapevinemediablog.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/spreadable-media/
| Date | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday, Sept 20 | Intro | Introduction to module (10-15 mins) |
| Thursday, Sept 22 | Cases | Experiencing art and practicing critical reflection |
| Tuesday, Sept 27 | Guest | Guest lecture |
| Thursday, Sept 29 | Screening | TBC |
| Tuesday, Oct 4 | Discussion | Remix Culture: Mass Media, Sharing, and Spread |
| Thursday, Oct 6 | Desk Crits | Review and feedback for creative project development |
| Tuesday, Oct 11 | Critique | Critical review of creative project outcomes |
| Due Date | Deliverable | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, Sept 22, 9am | Looking out | Share your research/review of spreadable media and present in class. |
| Monday, Sept 26, 9pm | Warm up | Document your outcome for Meme Tennis and post to the Gallery |
| Tuesday, Sept 27, 9pm | Digital Crit | Give feedback to 2 projects online by Tuesday night |
| Thursday, Sept 29, 9am | Proposal | Create a proposal for your creative project (200 words + illustrations) and share on the Gallery |
| Thursday, Sept 29, 9pm | Digital Crit | Give feedback to 2 proposals online by Thursday night |
| Tuesday, Oct 4, 9am | Readings | Complete your reading reflections to prepare for in-class discussion |
| Thursday, Oct 6, 9am | Project | Develop a first cut implementation to discuss during desk crits |
| Monday, Oct 10, 9pm | Documentation | Deliver documentation of your creative project |
| Tuesday, Oct 11, 9am | Digital Crit | Give feedback to 2 projects online before class; vote on projects to review in class. |
Paolo Pedercini, School of Art, CMU
Paolo teaches foundational media production courses and an experimental game design class. His artistic practice deals with the relationship between electronic entertainment and ideology. He often works under the project name “molleindustria” producing video games addressing various social issues such as environmentalism, food politics, labor and gender.
His work is enjoyed by millions of non-art oriented people over the net and has been exhibited in proper art contexts from over seventeen countries around the world. He lectured in several universities in Europe and the USA in venues ranging from the oldest squat in Italy to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Paolo’s work has been received wide international coverage by major media including The Guardian, El Pais, BBC, Liberation, Der Standard, New York Times, Washington Post, Business Week, Playboy Brazil, ARTE’ TV, The Times among the others.
Spreadability: a): Find, trace and research on one piece of spreadable media that has gone viral. b): Uncover an example of electronic arts that uses the internet and spreadable media in an interesting way. Read the full description.
Meme Tennis: Rebound, remix and rework a meme as part of a team. Take turns to iterate and augment a piece of spreadable media in teams of three. Each person will have 30 minutes to edit the meme and pass to the next person in line. Independently reflect on the outcome. Read the full description.
Go Viral: Appropriate existing online content to create a sound or video piece you think could go viral. Read the full description.
Required
1) McLuhan, M. & Fiore, Q. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. Bantam. New York. 1967.
Framing Questions
- How does McLuhan’s text draw together many of the important ideas relating to media and society? What new perspective does it offer on media, communication, technology and it’s relationship to society and culture?
- McLuhan states “All Media work us over completely.” Why does he believe this to be the case and do you agree? Is this always the case? Why?
- The text end by looking at the effect of mass media (film and tv) of the time, how do these ideas extend or break down when we move them into modern mass media (the computer, the digital, the internet)?
- “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” In the context of this class (working with digital tools to make media), how do you respond to this statement?
2) Curt Cloninger. 2009. Commodify Your Consumption: Tactical Surfing / Wakes of Resistance‘
Framing Questions
- What is the production/consumption continuum proposed by Cloninger? Why is the web’s hobbyist user a problematic entity in production/consumption relationship? Reflect on where you are in this spectrum.
- How would you describe ‘resistance’ and how does it relate to critical/tactical media and art making on the web?
- In what ways is tactical surfing and remix art like conceptual art? What other parallels/connections could you draw?
- Describe the practice of artistic surfing. What are the strategies you could adopt in your media making?
- How does this text and the ideas around production/consumption and remix culture relate to those of McLuhan?
Also Great:
Introduction: Why Media Spreads from Jenkins, H., Ford, S., and Green, J. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. NYU Press, 2013
Lev Manovich. 2007. Understanding Hybrid Media
Curt Cloninger. 2011 “Remix As If.” Remix The Book / The Blog (August 2011). Edited by Mark Amerika.
Susan Elizabeth Ryan. 2005. What’s So New About New Media Art? Intelligent Agent Vol. 5 No. 2. Retrieved from http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol5_No2_new%20media_ryan.htm
Futher Reading
Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970) Constituents of a Theory of the Media, New Left Review, no. 64, 1970, pp. 13-36. Read Excerpted version
What is new media? in Lev Manovich. 2002. The Language of New Media, MIT Press.
Lev Manovich. 2007. What comes after remix?
Lawrence Lessig. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin Press
Henry Jenkins, “Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars?: Digital Cinema, Media Convergence, and Participatory Culture.” In David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins (eds.), Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003. © 2003
Curt Cloninger. 2014 One Per Year. Brescia, Italy: Link Editions, 2014.
RIP : A Remix Manifesto (2008) Website · IMDB
Synposis:
Join filmmaker Brett Gaylor and mashup artist Girl Talk as they explore copyright and content creation in the digital age. In the process they dissect the media landscape of the 21st century and shatter the wall between users and producers. Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil’s Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow also come along for the ride.
This documentary is available under Creative Commons Attribution — Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license.
You can earn an extra 2.5% credit as part of this module by engaging in and documenting an art experience. To earn this credit:
Visit Ryoji Ikeda’s DATA.MATRIX installation at the Wood Street Galleries before Sunday October 2nd.
Document your experience as a short 200 word write up. Include some ‘evidence’ you attended - a selfie in the gallery, a photo of your ticket, etc.
Submit your experience report on Slack as a post as a DM (direct message) to the course instructors and TAs.
Note: The Wood Street Galleries are free and open to the public i.e there’s no cost to entry.
Below is a list of additional online material that relates to the module and provides a starting point for your explorations. This is by no means exhaustive i.e. you should read/research beyond it.
Everything is a Remix Remastered
More examples at Kottke.org
There is a tonne of creative commons content on Flickr and Vimeo - there’s literally millions of videos! There’s also a huge list on creative commons content and audio too. Don’t forget: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Films
Wikipedia has for a list of public domain (no rights issues) movies.. See also: http://www.openflix.com ; http://www.infodigi.com/Public_Domain/films.html and https://archive.org/details/movies
For audio check out: https://www.freesound.org and http://ccmixter.org. LibreVox.org has public domain audio books. There’s also a lot of speaches and talks in the public domain . Many talks from conferences are also creative commons or public domain.
For images, check out Flickr and apply the creative commons filter when you search.