Rip, Mix and Burn!

Rip, mix, and burn

What do these terms bring to mind for you? Are they everyday tasks in your culture? Any negative connotations? While it's interesting that widely available software has the tools needed to accomplish these tasks built right in, some would argue that the acts themselves of ripping, mixing and burning are indeed acts of "piracy".

At the heart of this debate is the term, "copyright" with legal, ethical and personal issues to consider. The work of others is automatically copyrighted and requires that permission be granted before that work is re-used in other projects or forms.

When Walt Disney ‘created’ Steamboat Willie in 1928, the work was based on a parody of Buster Keaton’s silent film, Steamboat Bill. Walt Disney added his own creative input, namely animation and sound and Mickey Mouse made his debut. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and others were used as the inspiration for many Disney “classics”, including, Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Cinderella, and Peter Pan.

This borrowing was not unique to Disney or the industry. Early cartoons are filled with slight variations on earlier successful films. The difference, and what made them successful, was the brilliance of the content that was added. Animation, sound and the quality of the work were all factors that differentiated from the original, but the point to remember is that there were originals that existed and available.

In 1790, as part of our constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 determined the length of copyright protection at a term of twenty eight years and then the material became part of the ‘public domain’. While the copyright was valid, permission from the owner was needed for the work to be used by others. Once the material passed into “public domain”, citizens were free to use that content to be inspired by, build upon and bring their own creativity into the birth of something new and original. Over the years, the length of time that works are copyrighted has increased many times. Currently, copyright terms are in excess of eighty years. It is widely believed that this length of time will increase again and again.

What does this mean to you? To your children as students in a digital age? The dean of the USC School of Cinema and Television, Elizabeth Daley believes, “Education is about giving students a way of constructing meaning.” This generation is no longer influenced primarily by reading and writing, but also by images and sound and video. What if the way they were taught acknowledged the fact that they are plugged in more now than any other generation before? For students today to construct meaning, they must be free to express themselves in the digital world they live in. To suppress that curiosity and creativity by legally restricting access to all copyrighted content makes me wonder what we might miss.

Rip, mix, and burn – tasks very familiar to most students today but fast becoming dangerous unless some thought is put into our current laws. Consider the words of Lawrence Lessig:

Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture”

I hope that generations to come will have the same (legal)opportunities.

Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally

We swim in a sea of culture, of memories old and new,
and all our acts flow out in response to what we experience".

~Paul Saffo~

As new media producers, how can what we produce be considered original if our ideas and the content of our projects comes in part from what we experience of life, and culture, and other's work?

When a user produces and knowingly uses copyrighted material to profit, it is either illegal or plagiarism. What if the user produces using IDEAS of others? What if the IDEA has simply become a part of the culture and content? Do we hold users accountable for the memory of where the IDEA originated?

Saffo argues that we are in the earliest stages of creating in a world of infinite recall, where digital storage is so cheap that "all can be stored and nothing can be forgotten". Will our work as new media producers be scrutinized and critiqued the way IRS conducts tax audits? Will our information systems mature and allow for searches of combined content (photos and video and music and words and ideas)?

How then, to be creative and original? Saffo makes the point that it is the process of originality that will determine the creativity. How the IDEAS and even content are interconnected and presented in new ways might become the barometer for creativity and originality.

"I invent nothing, I rediscover"
~Auguste Rodin~

August Rodin sculpted The Thinker, which was presented to the public in 1904. Rodin began to draw at the age of 10, attended a school that specialized in art and mathematics and later visited Italy, where he was drawn to the work of Donatello and Michelangelo. Their work had a profound effect on his artistic direction. Rodin said, "It is [Michelangelo] who has freed me from academic sculpture". How much can/should we be influenced by the creativity of others and still produce "original" material?

If the Internet teaches us anything,
it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons,
where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.
~Lawrence Lessig~

"Share, Remix, Reuse - Legally"
Lawrence Lessig chairs the Creative Commons project and writes about how law should govern the exchange of information and ideas in a digital age. Creative Commons is a repository of sorts that where authors, scientists, artists, and educators can easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

He argues that there needs to be a balance between the two extremes of those who hold that material can never be reused and those who reject copyright law. He believes in the right to recreate to say things differently and that creativity and originality will suffer if recreation is not allowed.

New Media for New Generation
In reading about the issues of originality and copyrighted material, as a new media producer, I will strive to produce creative and original content. I will not knowingly use the protected work of others, except as an influence. I like the ideas of Lawrence Lessig and hope to be able to contribute my work as a "some rights reserved" project and then watch how someone else's ideas and mine recombine and become interconnected.

Links

Bush and Blair - Read My Lips (remix)

The Grey Video
Unauthorized clips from the Beatles White Album and J-Z's Black Album, combined to create the Grey Album

Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law
20 minute talk at this year's TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) annual conference

The Mom Song (set to William Tells Overture)

Creating Cinema with Your Body

When Scott began his lecture at the School of Informatics last Wednesday, he stated that his work was better understood when viewed, rather than explained, but the explanation found on his biography page sums it up nicely:

"Scott Snibbe creates electronic media installations that directly engage the body of the viewer in a reactive system. His works are designed to have specific social effects: to create a sense of interdependence, to promote friendly interaction among strangers, and to increase viewers’ concentration".

Personal Space
He showed demonstrations of some of his earliest works, notably "Boundary Functions" (1998) and "Interaction" (1999). A space in the shape of a square was defined by outside boundaries. When just one person stepped inside, no visible changes took places. As the next person stepped in, a white laser line appeared on the floor and become the defining boundary for each person's "personal space". As the people moved about in the square, so did the lines. The demonstration illustrates that personal space is thought to belong to the individual, but actually is defined only in relation to others. He used the term “proximecs”, which is the study of distance and how people use, manipulate, and identify their space. A video demonstration can be seen here (QuickTime required for viewing).

Viewers create cinema with their bodies
My favorite part of the lecture was the “screen series”, where viewers create cinema with their bodies, either with projections that respond to viewers or with projections that record viewer’s movements. While present day technologies (computer vision, simulation, and digital projection), are used in this series, there is an acknowledgement of the history of cinema and light, specifically back to the days of shadow theatre and magic lantern productions when silhouettes were routinely used.

All of the examples in this series start with a rectangle of pure white light projected on to a wall. When the viewer steps between the screen and projector, a silhouette or shadow of that person’s body is projected. In “Shadow”, the viewer’s shadow’s movements are replayed over and over until it fades away. In “Concentration”, the white light collapses around the viewer’s silhouette, resulting in a halo effect. When viewers or their shadows touch lightly, the result is a flickering light, like you might see with a loose light bulb. A stronger touch results in the white light expanding from one person to another, so that both silhouettes are surrounded.

In “Shadow Bag”, the viewer’s shadow is captured and re-projected onto a screen, but this time the results are unpredictable interactions and behaviors. Sometimes their shadow follows them, sometimes it comes at them from the other side. When the viewer’s current shadow touches the replayed shadow (which can be their own or a previous viewer’s), the replayed shadow collapses like an empty bag. The title of “Shadow Bag” refers to the theory that compares the body’s shadow to a bag that holds all of our human animal instincts.

Scott Snibbe’s art and demonstrations were the perfect illustration and wrap up of our study of immersion and interactivity. Although I could not attend the lecture, I watched it on-line and spent some time exploring his website, reading more about his thoughts and observations of his work.

Lifeblogging

A personal digital archive - your life, including e-mail, video, audio, and photographs, captured digitally and passed down to generations - known as Lifeblogging (also lifelogging). Everything captured, stored, and accessible.

What are the implications? No more lies? No more crime? Will there be social acceptance? Are there privacy concerns? Could a subpoena be ordered for a specific day and time in YOUR life?

Think this is a new concept? Think again.

"Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory."

This idea was published more than 60 years ago, at the end of World War II by Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1945. The Memex (memory extender) was to be built as a desk with various inputs and displays and further enhanced by a camera that the user would wear on his/her forehead to capture pictures when away. (1)

Fast forward to the mid 90's and MyLifeBits - a Microsoft research project described as a "lifetime storage of everything and the fulfillment of Dr. Bush's 1945 Memex vision". The experiment is described here:

Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio. (2)

Storage capacity was one of the limiting factors until fairly recently. USA Today estimates you can fit 284 days worth of your life on a 1TB (one terabyte) hard drive, which cost less than $400 in late 2006. (3)

What would your life look like when viewed by others? How much would you edit? How would your relationships change? Scott Carlson writes about his experience with "lifelogging" his own life for two weeks and his family's and strangers reactions in an article for The Chronicle for Higher Education. (4)

What do you wish you could remember?

Whose memories would you like to be able to review?

How will you be remembered?

(1) "As We May Think" by Dr. Vannevar Bush, 1945 Atlantic Monthly

(2) MyLifeBits, a Microsoft research project

(3) "So How Much Memory do you Need to Document Your Life?" by Andrew Kantor, USA Today (February 2, 2007)

(4) "On the Record All the Time" by Scott Carlson, The Chronicle for Higher Education, February 9, 2007