*There's some very good stuff in this erudite article, but it sure is friendly toward the ideological allies of left-wing Canadian media academics. You'd think, from reading this, that no artist had ever detourned any socialist realism. Like, say, Ai WeiWei trying to throw a "river crab" dinner party in a studio that the Chinese authorities are demolishing.
*When you construe a media revolution like vernacular video as poor leftie guys stealing content from rich capitalist mainstream corporations, you leave yourself helpless to be blindsided by Tea Party tactical media. Appropriated and detourning stuff from the leftie art scene is the second-oldest trick in the book: "things find their own uses for the street." Anybody of any ideology can play – it's not like the keyboard freezes if you didn't go to art school.
*The deeper problem is that mashups are so cheap and sleazy; they're about as disruptive and subversive as dressing in garbage bags held together with safety pins. Not that there's anything wrong with that!... however...
http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/cultborr/chapter.php?id=8
(...)
"In the past, the economic difficulty for (often insolvent) artists to obtain film footage resulted primarily in the use of B-films, film waste and ephemeral materials as opposed to more expensive mainstream film prints. The introduction of the inexpensive VHS standard playing and recording format created new non-institutional archives (in the form of video stores) and offered the option of home spectatorship.
"This encouraged new generations of found footage video artists to recycle mainstream films, which subsequently transformed the avant-garde technique from one that engaged with the "left-overs" of cinematic production to a new practice that critically examined popular culture. The economy of moving image storage technologies has directly impacted the kinds of found footage films made.
"Today this trend continues with online archives which can be accessed freely, albeit often illegally and remixed easily with editing software. The reciprocal archive that is YouTube, in which every video uploaded can be downloaded for a remix, has resulted in a remarkable number of videos which often, though not always, engage in a critical dialog with mainstream media. [1]
"A prominent example of one such dialog occurred in 2007, when the television show The Apprentice coordinated with the Chevrolet car company and attempted a viral marketing campaign that gave internet users a platform to edit footage and music for a contest to design an advertisement for their new low fuel economy large size SUV – the Chevy Tahoe. Instead of a glossy new car ad, they were bombarded with satirical commercials, which flooded their website and the internet with messages about the environmental irresponsibility of buying the vehicle. This was not just an example of viral marketing gone bad, it was symptomatic of a collision between digital technology, contagious media and remix culture.
"This event, and the many others like it, have contributed to a utopian discourse around digital remixing amongst scholars and individuals within the community looking to celebrate new methods of media critique, the possibility of bottom-up media distribution and an open dialogue between individuals and an increasingly concentrated mass media machine. ..."
*stolen from some helpful guy on Twitter whose name I can't be bothered to remember because I'm too busy sticking it to the Man with culture-jamming YouTube uploads
