Digital Remixing from the Picket Lines

The dearth of posts as of late has had much to do with the fact that my TA Union at York University has gone on strike and I've been editing for the CUPE strike video committee. These excellent films made by activists and students can be seen at cupestrikevideo.wordpress.com

In the midst of this, renowned video artist John Greyson, whose incredible commitment to appropriation can be discerned from his film manifesto on cultural recycling "Uncut" (1997, has created a digital remix to support the strikers.

Please watch:

My War with Chevrolet on Wikipedia

You may all remember my posting last year detailing Chevrolet's viral marketing campaign which spawned several hundred parodies and resulted in some very bad publicity for the company. If you don't, you can read the wikipedia post about this below. Several months ago, this page had all the details about the embarassment this caused but when I returned to the page last week it had been scrubbed. I re-entered this information and ONE DAY LATER it was scrubbed again. I think these commercials were a landmark moment for digital remixing and hope that anyone reading this now might go to the Tahoe wiki page and make sure the company isn't pulling more funny business.

Thanks!

The Apprentice make-your-own-ad contest

The 2007 Tahoe was featured on and promoted through Donald Trump's TV series, The Apprentice, where the two teams put together a show for the top General Motors employees to learn about the new Tahoe. Also, The Apprentice sponsored an online contest in which anyone could create a commercial for the new Tahoe by entering text captions into the provided video clips; the winner's ad would air on national television. This viral marketing campaign backfired however, when hundreds of environmentally conscious parodies flooded YouTube and Chevy's website critiquing the vehicle for its low gas mileage. Though Chevrolet initially made a statement saying they would keep these adds on their site the company eventually took them off. The negative publicity that these commercials garnered eventually led many marketing and p.r. firms to question the effectiveness of user generated advertising.

Peter Tscherkassky and Gustav Deutsch: The Contemporary European Contingency

Manufraktur (1985, Peter Tscherkassky)


Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky)


Happy End (Peter Tscherkassky)

180º - Investigação de Gustav Deutsch (Nuno Lisboa)


Gustav Deutch- review - Borealis ´06

Clash of the Political Remix Trailers

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Digital Remixing on Appropriation

A new vid on appropriation & culture jamming. wooooo!

Mondegreens, Animutation, Fanimutation and YouTube Poop

Somewhere beyond experimental remixes lie a number of small, self-contained groups which promulgate their own styles and tendencies, oblivious or indifferent to the outside world’s recognition or spectatorship. One such underground exists on YouTubePoop.com where these relentlessly absurdist remixers (also known as “poopers”) trade in the bizarre and incomprehensible. A YouTubePoop video frequently uses nostalgic children’s cartoons, Internet memes, public figures and subjects them to crushing transformations and manipulations which focus of three frame forward-reversals (not unlike Martin Arnold’s method of repetition taken to extreme measures) and create jarring, atonal melodies and disconnected rhythms. These remixes are modeled on the frenetic style of contemporary television taken to their teleological end point where images fly across the screen and are sometimes barely perceivable. Titles of films are taken from the Captain Beefheart / Frank Zappa school with films called John Conner’s Cookie Game is Up Due to Popcorn Malfunction.

On the margins of these experimental works lie remixers who have coined their own grammar and style which lie outside of any precedent set in found footage film history. These remixers trade on the humor, absurdity and unbridled originality of their works for their success. A quintessential figure in this area is Buffalax (AKA Mike Sutton), whose name has become a verb in many remixing circles after receiving over ten million views since 2008. A Buffalax film depends on humorous mondegreens (a word referring to misheard lyrics or phrases) of Indian pop music videos which are subtitled on the bottom of the screen. Sutton inventively finds English words which seem to roughly approximate the Hindustani lyrics, constructing absurd songs over hysterically kitschy videos. This mode of filmmaking stems from comedian Neil Cicierega’s “animutations” (also known as fanimuation) in which music in languages other than English are coupled with pop-culture images, subtitled with mondegreens and composed using Adobe Flash Player.

Below are some examples:

Cut-Ups and Mashups

Always a bittersweet moment when you find someone's been doing what you do , but much, much better. I discovered these cut-up films from Augart Media recently and can't stop watching them. Though this format may drive some of you crazy, it has been an interesting one for me to explore. These works combine film footage and construct musical or percussive songs from it. Weird--wonderful--and a little annoying. Like Martin Arnold on speedy LSD.