When the Sheen Is Off

As someone who has written about web generators and mash-ups, I have to say something about the latest series of Internet memes involving rehab-refusing actor Charlie Sheen and his wild statements in recent transgressive public appearances. In the mash-up category, we have Cats Quote Charlie Sheen and online quizzes about "Whose Line Is It Anyway: Gaddafi/Sheen," as well as a YouTube video in which Sheen serves as Gaddafi's translator.

The Charlie Sheen Random Quote Generator is also making the virtual rounds. You can even have a quote generating widget as a Wordpress plugin.

Troop Troupe

I've written a lot about the ways that common vernacular video practices have embarrassed the U.S. military. For example, when videos appear in which American soldiers seem to be taunting children, mocking the destruction of mosques, or killing puppies, not to speak of the Abu Ghraib footage, there are often obvious costs to public diplomacy efforts. Of course, defense department officials often express anxiety about how digital technologies and ubiquitous recording devices compromise national security rather than set back public relations or will emphasize sanctioned portals with approved content that gives a supposedly "truer" picture of the military.

In contrast, there are feel-good videos with soldiers hamming it up to popular songs, like this video of "Hey Ya." (See here, here, here, here, and here for more; these videos get a lot of views.) Music companies are also smart enough not to send take-down notices to those who post these expressions of remix culture. There are also examples like "This is Why I'm Hot (Deployed Edition)" that use new lyrics. There's a lot to draw attention to these videos: viewers want to express support for the troops by disseminating the links, people like displays of vernacular dancing, and its an ironic send-up of the military ideal of coordinated action.

That's why I find the latest military video getting a million plus views interesting. It's much campier than the other videos, with soldiers dancing to Lady Gaga's "Telephone" in homoerotic poses and transgender costumes. It seems to show a military more comfortable with its own potentially subversive digital video practices out in the field.



(Strangely, the official video original from Lady Gaga doesn't show the cellphone communication described in the lyrics; the choreographed action is largely set in a women's prison and a roadside diner for some reason, and little is depicted with the cellphone as the "electronic leash" that the song laments.)

Being and Time Code

As someone who took one of Derrida's seminars in which Sein und Zeit was assigned in graduate school, I probably found this cartoony machinima made with xtra normal funnier than a normal person. The site emphasizes how "if you can type, you can make a movie" and shows how interactivity with the keyboard replaces the old trope of the lens. (It also shows Friedrich Kittler to be right in dating new media to typing, also in this case Gramophone, Film, Typewriter are all one.)

Downfall's Downfall

Okay, I've written about the "Downfall meme" a lot on this blog. (Here is one example.) Now, apparently, YouTube takedowns by the owners of the intellectual property rights to this German film about the last days of Adolph Hitler are now on the verge of forbidding the hundreds of subtitled parodies on the web.

Check out Slate magazine's coverage of "YouTube vs. Der Führer: Why you shouldn't blame the video site for removing all of those Hitler videos" for more about the latest developments in attempts to police these remixes in the face of their even greater proliferation.

The Sixty Million Dollar Man

Virtualpolitik friend Kembrew McLeod recently wrote in the Atlantic about "How to Make a Documentary About Sampling--Legally."

While we raised the money to license about two-dozen songs and some footage, our film nevertheless contains over 400 brief-but-unlicensed uses of copyrighted material. When I can't sleep at night, I sometimes count how much we'd be liable for: up to $150,000 in statutory damages, per infringement. 400 x $150,000 = $60,000,000. Sixty. Million. Dollars.

Why did we use so many clips? Ben and I wanted the film's aesthetic to reflect its subject matter: collage, hip-hop sampling, and the rise of remix culture. Copyright Criminals documents how hip-hop producers have, since the genre's origins, cut and pasted portions of old records into their own music. For years, hip-hop stayed beneath the commercial radar, which gave producers a lot of creative freedom to make their art however they wished. The music that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s often featured densely layered musical collages that were groundbreaking.
. . .
Fun fact: If they sue us, the case would be called Bridgeport v. Copyright Criminals. Something is fundamentally wrong when a professor who studies copyright has problems making and distributing a documentary because the film's subject matter stands in the way. But after a lot of hard work, our film made it into the world.

So, how did we pull it off? Two words: fair use. This U.S. statute allows you to quote from copyrighted works without permission for the purposes of education, commentary, criticism, and other transformative uses. In 2005, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Social Media worked with documentarians to develop and publish an influential document that helped strengthen fair use. The Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use provides clear guidelines for quoting copyrighted content in ways that documentarians considered fair.

Given that courts pay attention to a particular community's standards when deciding copyright infringement cases, this was a key factor in successfully persuading broadcasters, DVD distribution companies, and insurers to relax their stringent rights clearance policies. This made it possible for Copyright Criminals to air on television. In fact, fair use might very well apply to the many examples of transformative sampling documented in Copyright Criminals; even music industry attorneys have privately admitted this to me. One major irony of our film is that if fair use had been more firmly established for sampling twenty years ago, things might have turned out very differently for Public Enemy and others.

It's a rhetorically interesting piece in which McLeod wants to distance himself from "the rant of a spoiled child" and uses the language of civics to make his point, as when he says that the public needs a "democratic system of checks and balances developed by real people."

Bin Laden Bin Busy

Facestore is encouraging more user-generated content on YouTube, where a number of remix artists are creating fake Osama Bin Laden videos. The 9-11 Al Qaeda mastermind sings "I Will Survive," orders Scottish food and drink, orders Scottish food and drink again, speaks Chinese, roots for the Rangers, imitates the character Timmy, and sells umbrellas.

Na Na Na Na Na

Although it has received hundreds of thousands of views and even a few mentions in the news media, I'd give low marks to this political remix of a political remix, which takes the will.i.am "Yes We Can" video and mashes it up with Congressman John Boehner's angry "Hell No You Can't." It gets repetitive quickly. The content on Boehner's own YouTube channel shows a little more remix artistry and includes the video below.

What Would Hitler Say?

Happy New Ear

I talked about the 2008 mash-up of Billboard's top 25 pop hits by DJ Earworm here, so I thought readers/viewers might enjoy the 2009 version now available on the web.

First Time Farce, Second Time Tragedy

My UC Irvine colleague Peter Krapp gave a talk today called "Of Games and Gestures: machinima and the suspensions of animation" in conjunction with the new lecture series at the Center for Computer Games and Virtual Worlds in which he argued that the "trained motion of players" and the "virtuoso ballet" that may build on "an archive of gaming performances" initially should not be "reduced to fan culture" not only because gaming is inscribed within certain historical conditions but also because such "gestures are neither necessary nor natural" as they express an "attitude or emotion" and also convey information about the "motion of the camera in game space." In thinking about machinima in the context of silent cinema, Krapp argued that the pantomimes of both art forms reflected a kind of melancholy about increasing technologization and the need to prove one's humanity. Unlike contemporary big budget films that can be summarized in their pitch lines or in their plot round-ups on IMDB, machinima can be difficult to summarize. By combining game demo, fan art, and media history, machinima represents much more than a mass-mediation of user generated content. He conceded that there was also "a ludic angle" to the record of performance, but that this record has a longer history that dates back to Muybridge. (I had seen Krapp earlier this year give an interesting talk that also referenced Muybridge about Taylorism and scientific management that offers a database of employee maneuvers.) Krapp asserted that a society that has lost its gestures is consequently obsessed with them as life becomes indecipherable and the subject must retreat to bourgeois concerns, interiority, and psychoanalysis.



Krapp showed a number of classic machinima favorites, which included I'm Still Seeing Breen (above) , along with Cantina Crawl X, the first episode of This Spartan Life, Warthog Jump (which inspired the Flash game Warthog Launch), and A Few Good G Men (below).



Yesterday, I saw Enda Walsh's play The Walworth Farce from Ireland's Druid Theater, a devastating play about a paranoid schizophrenic patriarch and his two terrorized sons who are forced to reenact an alternative version of a fratricidal family drama. As the two young men act the same play over and over, the pathos of a visitor gives their puppetry particular emotional investment. When Krapp had to answer the familiar question about when videogame content would be enough to make someone cry, I thought about how machinima could probably bring about this same emotional power of an "off" reinactment, as Walsh's play demonstrated.

Theory You Can Dance To

In preparation for the conference on The Internet as Playground and Factory, Virtualpolitik friend Trebor Scholz is inviting people to go to an online archive of video clips of the presenters and then create a new composition from the components.

Download the clips from Vimeo and remix them with some great dance beat. The material is licensed under a creative commons license. We'll feature the best submissions at the ...event and archive all mashups on the conference website.

Contestants have until November 11th, so get your open source video and audio editing software ready!

Plastic Ono NoNos

I wouldn't want to devote this blog to every remix contest out there, but this one that features the memorably discordant Plastic Ono Band seems to merit attention from would-be digital composers.

It is available under a Creative Commons license, but also contains the following disclaimer:

You can mix, sample and remix the “The Sun Is Down” samples as much as you like for your own pleasure and personal use, and you can combine them with your own original sounds and music.

Your mix must not contain any elements of copyrighted material, unless you yourself own the copyright (i.e. it's your own music). This means you must not include samples of songs by other artists, or samples from movies, TV shows, or video games. Any remixes containing any of these elements will be deemed ineligible and disqualified from the competition.

Support Troop

This send-up of 9/11 nostalgia and conspiracy thinking theorizing uses the Star Wars storm troopers to look back at the attack on the Death Star as a tragic event.

NewTube Music

This new mix by Steve Porter uses the cut-together voices of pop music mega-stars to support his claims that "YouTube music" is "experimental" and "rebellious" rather than derivative and that it expresses values of individualism, innovation, and integrity.

Photos of the Disaster

When I started this blog over four years ago 9/11 was a regular category of content when it came to political ephemera online and how people imagined interactivity in the context of the Internet's modes of participatory culture. Each year, 9/11 moves farther from what was once its central role in Internet discourse. The year I taught this seminar on the rhetoric of September 11th on the Internet, I had three colleagues teaching similar classes.

This year several people have pointed to this Flash video with music by Enya, which was posted on the URL that houses the September 11 Digital Archive. This defense of former president George W. Bush and its patriotic posturing seems a strange choice for a site supported by the American Social History Project and the Center for History and New Media, which are known for their progressive intellectual agendas.

The provenance of the video is difficult to locate, since it doesn't even do much to cite its visual sources, with the exception of acknowledging the copyright on a famed photo of firefighters raising the flag. We see a credit to "Steve" at powforum.com, but the URL is now defunct and only serves as a portal to opportunistic advertising. Several people have thanked Alan Charles Kors of the University of Pennsylvania history faclty, for publicizing this video. In his Wikipedia article, Kors is shown receiving a medal from former President Bush, and he is known for his accusations of liberal bias and hegemony on campus from his affiliations with the conservative campus group The Fire.

Yet, given the fact that the site easily refers visitors to polemical animated anti-Bush content from Flash animator Mark Fiore, collecting political ephemera from elsewhere in the political spectrum should seem to be part of the archive's core mission.

For Old Times Sake

Okay, other bloggers may be tired of the Downfall meme, but I feel compelled to include every iteration created in response to an electoral contest, corporate failure, consumer revolt, or current event. Here's a hyperbolic one about Obama's back-to-school speech.

Update: And, there had to be a version to commemorate the Taylor Swift/Kanye West dust up.

Alberto, the Musical

Data visualizations have played with how the phrase "I don't recall" becomes a motif in congressional hearings. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used the phrase several times, as this YouTube remix with a classical music cantata makes clear.

Thanks to Allen Glazier for the links.

Return of SonicJihad

Yesterday I traveled to Utrecht to interview the Dutch gamer at the center of what I have called the "SonicJihad debacle," which opens the first chapter of the Virtualpolitik book. In addition to giving the creator of the Battlefield 2 fan film with the Team America soundtrack that was mistaken for a jihadist videogame by the House Intelligence Committee a copy of my book, I also gathered new material for a forthcoming essay in Error: Information, Control, and the Cultures of Noise, which will be out in 2010 from Continuum. Although SonicJihad no longer spends much time playing videogames, he has provided some more commentary on cultural misperceptions involving the MidEast/West divide and computational culture in the remix above. He has also included the following disclaimer to clarify its audience and purpose.

This video is NOT intended as a propaganda tool or a Jihadi recruiting video. This video is being exclusively published by me on the PlanetBattlfield site (I'll try to upload it on Youtube for the ones that can't download the big file). Anybody posting this video on other sites will take his or her own responsibility!

I repeat this is a Battlefield video for the community only.

Trailer Trash

Although the New York Times is taking the "blockbuster trailer" of James Cameron's Avatar very seriously, YouTube doesn't necessarily treat the impending debut of the film with the same gravitas. A number of Avatar trailers on the site only lead to Rick Rolls, and despite a number of DMCA takedown notices, a number of variants of this humorous jibe at computer-generated animation continue to appear.

A Flare for the Dramatic

I really hate the look of digital lens flare that is manufactured in postproduction software packages, particularly when its used on images that were created without a camera, as in the case of the CGI in films like the 2005 The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. This send-up of the over-use of the effect in the new Star Trek film illustrates how strange the combination of an aesthetic from an obsolete technology with celestial imagery of coronas and other otherworldly lighting could be.