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THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF [CTRL] - C: DIGITAL REMIXING AND CONTEMPORARY FOUND FOOTAGE PRACTICE ON THE INTERNET

ELIJAH HORWATT

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

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1*1 Canada The Work of Art in the Age of [CTRL] - C: Digital Remixing and Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet

By ELIJAH HORWATT

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies of York University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

©2009

Permission has been granted to: a) YORK UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES to lend or sell copies of this thesis in paper, microform or electronic formats, and b) LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA to reproduce, lend, distribute, or sell copies of this thesis anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats and to authorize or procure the reproduction, loan, distribution or sale of copies of this thesis anywhere in the world in microform, paper or electronic formats.

The author reserves other publication rights, and neither the thesis nor extensive extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's written permission. Abstract

This thesis explores the phenomena of moving image appropriation by online communities of activists and amateur editors, called digital remixing, and attempts to connect this movement to the experimental found footage film and video art movements. Through an analysis of the political, rhetorical and aesthetic strategies enacted by digital remixers, this thesis maps the trajectory of moving image appropriation from Soviet re-editors just after the Russian revolution, to the avant-garde found footage filmmaking movement in North America, to the appropriation of mainstream films by video artists, and finally to digital remixing itself. Looking even more broadly at appropriation art in the 1980s, this thesis deconstructs some of the semiotic principles involved in the pilfering and transformation of extant cultural materials for use in radical ways by artists and activists alike. Finally, this thesis describes machinima, a new form of appropriation nascent to digital media.

IV Acknowledgements

First I would like to acknowledge the incredible support of my thesis advisor Michael Zryd, who helped me to shape what was once an impossibly large project, forced me to carefully consider my arguments and encouraged new lines of investigation into found footage and experimental media practices. His dynamic and thoughtful example as a scholar and teacher has had an indelible impact on my writing and teaching praxis. Whenever I find myself facing a dilemma in my writing, research and teaching, I will forever stop and ask myself, "what would Mike do?"

Janine Marchessault introduced me to the rich art community in Toronto through my research with her on the Visible City Project. Giving me great personal freedom to explore Toronto's video art scene, Janine initiated a new and rich area of investigation for my research and played a major part in my study of the appropriation art movements of the 1980s. Her incredible vitality and ambition as a scholar, editor and active participant in the Toronto arts community has energized my own practice and redefined my understanding of the role of a Professor.

The innumerable conversations I have had with my colleagues in the graduate film department in a large and close class have greatly impacted my development of ideas and arguments. Casual discussions with my peers about projects and problems I was facing in my research became the catalyst for some of the strongest arguments I pursued. I owe a great debt of gratitude to all of the members of my class for their engagement in dialogue and in their support of my project.

A whole community of digital remixers helped turn me on to work I was unfamiliar with and offered new ways of thinking about digital remixing. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Martin Leduc, who encouraged a variety of new areas of investigation and was the first person I met personally who was both a student and practitioner of digital remixing. I also benefited greatly by the writings and thoughts of remixer Jonathan Mcintosh, whose efforts helped me understand the great importance of digital remixing as a form of media critique.

My comfort and stability in Toronto would be impossible to imagine without the love and support of the Knox family, who accepted me into their homes with great warmth and hospitality and made me feel like one of their own. My stay in Toronto would also be impossible without the incredible support of my own family, David, Jean, Joshua and Yirat who from a great distance, helped me feel connected to my home, family and made me feel like I was still involved in the lives of my niece and nephew. Finally, to Jessica Knox, the person who brought me to my favorite city in the world, who introduced me to a fantastic academic institution, who supported me throughout my time at York and whom I love with all my heart.

v Table of Contents

Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi List of Figures vii Introduction 1 Chapter One A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet 13 Chapter Two The Antecedents of Digital Remixing: Evolving Tendencies in the Avant-Garde 39 Chapter Three New Media Resistance: Machinima and the Avant-Garde 84 Conclusion 105 Bibliography Ill

vi List of Figures

Fig. 1.1: Indiana, Robert. Love. 1966 24

Fig. 1.2: Right: General Idea. AIDS. 1989 24

Fig. 2.1: Prince, Richard. Untitled (Living Rooms). 1977 65

Fig. 2.2: Jorn. Asger. The Avant-Garde Doesn't Give Up. 1962 76

vn Introduction

The idea for this thesis derived from the simultaneity of my interest in found footage film practices in experimental cinema and what can only be described as an explosion in video remixes on the newly launched web video portal, YouTube in 2005.

Though it is clear that both of these tendencies in moving image appropriation share an underlying connection through their recontextualization of cinematic images, I became aware of a variety of more explicit linkages in the aesthetic and political strategies within these works. Though initially, I was drawn to digital remixes because they appeared to be a cheap apparatus for filmmaking and because they allowed artists, many of whom were amateurs, to engage in a critical dialog with popular culture, it became clear that they were also part of a resurgence of moving image appropriation made relevant to a new generation of artists through digital technologies.

Found footage filmmaking refers to the practice of appropriating pre-existing film footage in order to denature, detourn or recontextualize images by inscribing new meanings onto materials through creative montage. A central practice of the North

American and European avant-garde film movements, found footage films often transform extant images in radical ways, challenging traditional conceptions of authorship, ownership and copyright through examinations of media representation and repression.

In the last four years, this practice has been given a new life on the Internet with the proliferation of online digital video files, developments in editing software and the draw of video distribution portals like YouTube. This new form of found footage

1 filmmaking has transformed the technique from an avant-garde/experimental moving- image practice to a powerful egalitarian tool for the critique of mass media. As the practice has become popularized to include amateurs on the Internet, there is evidence of an incipient reciprocal relationship between the found footage films of the avant- garde and those online, which I refer to as digital remixes.

I argue that the practice of transforming digital moving images by amateurs on the Internet represents a continuation in the development of found footage filmmaking and possesses its own unique aesthetic and rhetorical contributions. While I outline a trajectory linking digital remixing to earlier found footage practice, this trajectory is fragmented, schizophrenic, and sometimes parallel rather than continuous.

My research interests began with the problem of attempting to reconcile how groups of young amateur video editors across the Internet came to adopt cinematic techniques pioneered by avant-garde found footage filmmakers. Rather than finding tacit connections or obvious acts of stylistic influence, my research suggests that appropriation is an impulse which implicitly suggests certain strategies that do not necessarily need to be taught to be understood, as they are deeply enmeshed in a cannibalistic popular culture which constantly appropriates texts for the purposes of critique, contemporization, or parody.

My thesis draws the aesthetic linkages between avant-garde found footage film and experimental video art and attempts to locate works, which directly influenced digital remixers. Instead of discovering a large group of remixers who were fans of avant-garde / experimental found footage filmmaking (as I had secretly hoped), I began

2 to notice the repeated reference to certain intermediaries between the more established video art movement and subsequent digital remixing communities within the culture jamming movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. These artists acted as intermediaries between institutionally backed and critically recognized video art appropriators (e.g., Dara Birnbaum, Nam June Paik and Mark Rappaport) and a community of editors and amateurs on YouTube. Stealing strategies from media collectives like Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) and Negativland, which had videos placed on YouTube in its nascence, digital remixers began downloading clips from YouTube and other sources and constructing video assemblages which addressed popular culture, often in critical ways.

In the last four years, Internet video sharing portals have become the platform for an explosion of digital remixes in the form of mashups (multiple source materials amalgamated together), re-cuts (altering the meaning, genre and intention of material through creative editing) and machinima (a portmanteau of machine and cinema, utilizing the 3D virtual environments from video games to create films). These forms of found footage all appropriate copyrighted images to produce subversive, stimulating, and critical works of art, which allow individuals to engage in a dialogue with the materials of culture and media.

The unprecedented distribution and popularity of these works can be attributed to the easy and cheap processes of digital video extraction (also known as ripping), free downloadable editing software, and the unparalleled success of YouTube. The process has turned amateurs into directors, producers, and writers who can potentially compete

3 with the professionals in reaching audiences. Digital remixers find themselves most often engaged in the process of media critique and detournement, invoking the possibility of bottom-up media distribution and an open dialogue between individuals and an increasingly concentrated and powerful mass media machine.

The concept of the detournement, one of the great contributions to political art by the Situationist International, is defined by Greil Marcus as "the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one's own devise"

(Marcus 168). The detournement is a unique form of appropriation, which redeploys the grammar of familiar cultural materials in order to deliver radical messages. Though a detournement is often associated with the appropriation of a cultural object and a rhetorical transformation of that object so that it denounces itself, the technique was often used in a very different way by Situationist practitioners (who were skeptical of simple negation) to fill in word bubbles of Sunday morning newspaper comics with radical political statements. Politically, the Situationists believed detournement would be a "powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle" and that it would awaken "a literary communism" in contemporary art (Debord, Wolman 21).

One notable contemporary example of a detournement (which was relentlessly resisted by a corporation) occurred when Jonah Peretti, an MIT media lab graduate attempted to exploit shoe company Nike's "Nike iD sneakers" which allowed consumers to design their shoes with a custom word or phrase sewed into the side of the shoe. When Peretti requested "sweatshop" be emblazoned on the side of his sneakers to acknowledge the company's record of relying on dangerous labor

4 conditions for production, Nike refused despite his own compliance with the terms of service for the promotion, which only prohibited copyrighted words or profanity.

Unfortunately, this detournement was never fully realized.

Chapter One of this thesis presents a taxonomic breakdown of the aesthetic strategies of contemporary forms of digital remixing, and attempts to draw linkages with antecedent forms of appropriation in art and the moving image. This taxonomy starts from Paul Arthur's designation of two dominant approaches in found footage film practice—one which focuses on the materiality and metaphorical qualities of images and another which attempts to recast the rhetorical intentionality of the image (Arthur:

59). From these designations I link the processes of trailer remixing to operations similar to those enacted by Surrealist artists. Trailer remixes appropriate the discourse, style or materials of multiple films and re-imagine or amalgamate filmic texts into the context of the film trailer. I argue that this process resembles certain Surrealist operations, namely the collage and the exquisite corpse. The surrealist approach to appropriation tends to stress the chance encounter implicit in the finding of objects and the hallucinatory effect of juxtaposing objects in a text that does not seem to accommodate them. According to art critic and theorist Hal Foster, the surrealist approach to appropriation derives from patterns of collection that necessarily lead to a repurposing of found objects (Foster: 1995).

Political remixers are a subculture of radical editors on the Internet who appropriate copyrighted images from film and television to produce critiques of media.

These remixers construct intricate montages from found media materials to produce

5 scathing critiques of popular culture by revealing social engineering through endemic racism, sexism, homophobia and commodity fetishism. In addition, many remixers are interested in detourning and reversing the attempts of corporations to whitewash their pasts and promote themselves as good corporate citizens. I look closely at the rhetorical operations and experiments of Soviet re-editors and Situationist filmmakers in order to uncover strategies, which link these practices to works of political remixing. The Soviet re-editors were a precursor to the post-revolutionary film industry and trained filmmakers like Esther Schub, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuhleshov in the art of editing. The occupation of these re-editors was to transform Western films into pro-Marxist texts through sophisticated transformations to films and their inter- titles. This form of "politicized recalibration," as critic Paul Arthur calls it, signifies a different form of found object outside of the Surrealist objet trouve and all that this designation implies. Instead, the appropriator is more interested in the rhetoric of the original materials and in preserving the illusion of cohesion. The Surrealist approach to found objects rips images and materials from their context and places them in a background emphasizing their discontinuity, whereas the politicized recalibration of images seeks to recast the meanings of materials but preserve their syntax.

The goal of Chapter One is to show the persistence of certain aesthetic and rhetorical strategies across the century despite lack of an apparent tacit knowledge of antecedent practices by digital remixers. While many artists from the found footage film movement sought to disrupt the visual discourse of film and television, digital remixers seek to preserve it despite introducing radical or aberrant messages. Digital

6 remixing occurs on a semantic level and preserves the syntactic structures of commercial media. I examine the ways digital remixing can be critiqued for parroting hegemonic visual discourse.

Chapter Two gives greater time to examining antecedent forms of art and moving image appropriation and explores how technological innovations influenced the materials used by found footage image-makers. Additionally, this chapter attempts to promote a theory of appropriation as a form of semiotic intervention and rhetorical transformation that replaces significations from images with new and often inverse meanings. Drawing from ideas by Umberto Eco and other semioticians, I argue that all forms of remixing are the result of "aberrant decoding" or the (often intentional) misreading of a text to produce deviant meaning.

In the past, the economic difficulty for (often insolvent) artists to utilize footage from mainstream film prints resulted primarily in the use of b-films, film waste and ephemeral materials. Technological developments in media storage and screening from the VHS and VCR to digital video encoding and the Internet connected computer have initiated a movement towards the use of mainstream film images as well as the use of materials from television and other user generated content. These materials have had a great impact on the works created.

In several brief case studies, I examine how patterns of collection by video artists and found footage filmmakers like Christian Marclay and Matthias Miiller share strategies with works of digital remixing. I argue that this tendency to assemble disparate fragments from archives is part of a pervasive strategy of making sense of and

7 drawing connections between the seemingly infinite number of images from the archive. The structuring of these images usually occurs as an effort to assimilate a multitude of images into lexical patterns or themes or to emphasize how they diverge from one another. I explore how such patterns are also reflected in works of digital remixing.

One way in which I explore the parallels between appropriation artists and digital remixers is the introduction of the concept of a "more authentic original." This idea has been discussed with great frequency in relation to the re-photography of appropriation artist Richard Prince who infuses commercial images with subtle and sometimes imperceptible alterations causing a sublime realization of the manipulation inherent in these images. These images, which in their untouched state attempt to promote a product as desirable, are instead transformed to produce the opposite effect through the stripping away of artifice.

Additionally, I examine the problems raised by theorists and critics when making "corrections" to archival images from the past. Though I initially believed this form of transformation was inherently progressive, I have come to understand the problems inherent in speaking to the past from the privileged vantage point of the future. In this section I construct a debate between critic Sharon Sandusky, who promotes the concept of the revision and correction of potentially traumatic images of identity and the contrasting ideas of critics Joel Katz and Catherine Russell. Russell argues against the concept of correction in her book Experimental Ethnography: The

Work of Film in the Age of Video, preferring instead a less dualistic approach and one,

8 which also attempts to account for why such images exist in the first place. I also examine some key examples of parallel strategies of correction between video art appropriators and digital remixers.

My thesis argues that several artists acted as intermediaries between video art and digital remixing. These intermediaries helped to develop a new syntax focusing less on conceptual image making practices than on more explicitly political forms of media critique. I argue that hip-hop music and graffiti culture have played a major part in developing the new grammar of digital remixers. This influence extends further than the simple act of sampling in hip-hop music, but relates more broadly to the aesthetics of the sample, which are characterized by repetitions with subtle transformation and a specific form of collage aesthetic emerging from hip-hop. The language of graffiti is a guerilla discourse that appropriates and disrupts the privatized "public sphere" by its refusal to work within the required economic structures that preclude advertising, such as the rental of sign space, the adherence to city signage codes and the obedience to advertizing regulations.

Furthermore, I outline and examine the shared illegality of distribution common to both graffiti writing and digital remixing. As mentioned above, from my research and conversations with digital remixers, I have come to identify the video collective

EBN and the multimedia group Negativland as early purveyors of digital remixing aesthetics. These artist fused hip-hop sampling aesthetics and a punk attitude distinct to culture jammers in videos that were widely disseminated through underground channels outside of traditional art communities like nightclubs and music festivals. These

9 communities exchanged tapes, recorded late night radio shows and recorded concerts forming an early form of what would eventually be called viral video.

Chapter Three moves away from the direct appropriation of images and looks towards the new frontiers of reuse offered by digital media and software. Machinima is a process of recording videogame play and transforming it into a cohesive narrative, often with added dialog and music. Creators of machinima will construct a story and render it visible through in-game camera features or avatars recording action within the real time 3D environment of a video game. After the footage is captured and edited, actors provide voices to produce what looks like 3D animation through the use of a video game platform (either a console or a PC) and an editing program. Machinima does not appropriate imagery in the same way that found footage filmmaking does.

Instead it appropriates the software engine of a videogame and introduces what might be called "transformation" by playing games in ways they weren't intended. Thus the ephemeral and immediate quality of videogame play is transformed into an enduring cinematic text, which often critiques the game that supplies the imagery.

The genesis and evolution of this form of digital appropriation is highly unusual and provides an appropriate bookend for my thesis. This technique is first employed by a subculture of game players or gamers who had mostly amateur training in film. But later, established avant-garde filmmakers and video artists (like Peggy Ahwesh and Phil

Solomon) utilize machinima to create experimental works. In this situation, we see the inversion of the framework I establish for digital remixers who lift many of their techniques from earlier avant-garde film movements, though the community is not

10 necessarily aware of this direct influence. Chapter Three attempts to provide a means of understanding machinima and its critical relationship to video games as similar to early video art and its relationship to television. This chapter builds upon the taxonomy of digital remixing in Chapter One and attempts to delineate the major forms of machinima, constructing categories which range from machinima's documentary features to its experimental use by both established experimental filmmakers and outsiders.

My methodology for this thesis involves a detailed analysis of the shared appropriation strategies between three distinct moving image movements: the North

American avant-garde from the late 1930s to the 1970s, international video art since the

1980s and the digital remixing movement which is characterized initially by works from 2003-2005. After settling on the two paradigms of moving image appropriation, characterized by the Soviet re-editors and the American Surrealist Joseph Cornell, I trace the trajectory of these two tendencies through the three aforementioned moving image movements and note critical similarities in aesthetic and rhetorical strategies.

After drawing connections between the works, I attempt to locate the technological and historical contexts in which these movements developed from and map out an evolution of found footage ending with a new and distinctly digital form of moving image appropriation. Finally, my thesis explores the political stakes mobilized by these movements, which often seek to challenge dominant methods of representation.

My thesis places mashups, re-cuts and machinima into the same artistic tradition as the experimental / avant-garde film and video art with a number of shared

11 techniques, philosophies and historical trajectories. This formulation is decidedly controversial because many of the practitioners of digital remixing appear to be oblivious to the avant-garde's history and aesthetic techniques. The arguments and historical trajectory mapped out in my thesis implicitly challenges the notion of an avant-garde made up exclusively of highly educated artists interested in developing new aesthetics to challenge dominant modes of art-making. Instead, I hope my thesis will support a broader notion of an avant-garde that includes many individuals and amateurs who employ interruptive techniques in order to construct media critiques.

12 Chapter One A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary Found Footage Practice on the Internet

"To rewrite modernity is the historical task of this early Twenty-First Century; not to start at zero or find oneself encumbered by the storehouse of history, but to inventory and select, to use and download." (Bourriaud 93)

"The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes." (Debord, Wolman 15)

This chapter delineates the various forms of digital remixing and attempts to outline the two major aesthetic strategies employed in these works by analyzing approaches to found footage filmmaking outlined by critic Paul Arthur. This chapter introduces a trajectory which links some of the earliest practices of moving image appropriation to contemporary digital remixing by examining aesthetic and rhetorical strategies permeating all found footage practice. Though this taxonomy is also infused with historical examples of movements that share strategies of appropriation, it focuses first on introducing these practices so that they may be explored in more detail in the second chapter.

Moving image appropriation was transformed with the introduction of the inexpensive VHS standard playing and recording format into public circulation. VHS tape and VCR players created new non-institutional archives (in the form of video stores), which offered the option of home spectatorship and enhanced the access of source materials for artists working with appropriated media. These new technologies encouraged a generation of found footage video artists to recycle mainstream films, subsequently transforming the avant-garde technique of found footage filmmaking from

13 one that engaged with the "left-overs" of cinematic production to a new practice that critically examined mainstream culture. The economy of moving image storage technologies has directly impacted the kinds of found footage films made in the 1980s.

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 may be downloaded again for yet another remix has resulted in a remarkable number of works, which often, though not always, engage in a critical dialog with mainstream media.

A prominent example of one such dialog occurred in 2006, 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, environmentally conscious 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 a failed viral marketing campaign; it was symptomatic of a collision between digital technology, contagious media and remix culture.

This event, and the many others like it, has contributed to a Utopian discourse around digital remixing amongst scholars and individuals within the community looking to celebrate new methods of media critique and an open dialogue between individuals and an increasingly concentrated mass media machine. In many ways, there is something to celebrate. Numerous digital remixes intelligently and critically engage

14 with popular culture by revealing social engineering, endemic racism, sexism and homophobia, and by subverting the commodity spectacle in ways even Guy Debord could applaud. However, not all remixers are engaged in radical critique. As art theorist

Hal Foster argues, works of appropriation art may reveal a "fetishism of the signifier" and simple perpetuate spectacle rather than transform and deconstruct it (Foster,

Recodings 175). This fetishism of spectacle has a prominent place in some digital remixes, which uncritically parrot ideology and in some cases transform progressive works of art into banal internet memes full of juvenile cynicism and irony.

Despite ambivalent attitudes over what the bulk of digital remixes will amount to, it is clear that they represent a radical shift in found footage filmmaking, with distinct subcategories and tendencies from avant-garde antecedents, a wholly new method of distribution, an open accessible archive of source material, and a much larger audience. This stands in stark contrast to avant-garde works of the past which utilized actual film or video footage, were edited on flatbeds and AVID machines, were screened in underground theaters or museums and galleries and distributed (frequently at high cost) by a small number of artist run co-operatives and distribution centres.

As a distinct and autonomous practice, digital remixing requires a taxonomy to classify its major trends and approaches in order to be understood as both a continuation and shift in the trajectory of moving image appropriation. Though taxonomies necessarily run the risk of categorical oversimplifications, I have created classifications that I believe appropriately address divergent practices in such a way that I hope not to stumble into such traps. The two dominant modes of digital remixing,

15 political remixes and trailer remixes, curiously resemble the two approaches of found footage filmmaking outlined by Paul Arthur in his terrific essay, "The Status of Found

Footage." Arthur writes:

Within European avant-garde circles of the '20s and '30s, found footage was reworked through editing techniques emphasizing fantastical, previously ignored formal or metaphoric qualities in otherwise banal scenes, a method of "estrangement" found in films by Rene Clair, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttman, and Charles DeKeukeleire. A second tendency, evident in the work by Esther Schub, Dziga Vertov, and Joris Ivens, offers a politicized recalibration or inversion of scenes culled from "official" newsreels and more marginal materials; in doing so it anticipates the collage ethos which has dominated the last 30 years of American documentary (Arthur 59).

Using Arthur's enunciation of these two tendencies, I hope to draw connections between the political transformations of the Soviet re-editors in political remixing and the Surrealist juxtaposition and estrangement found in trailer mashups and recuts.

Political Remix Video

The preferred mode of discourse by the radicals in the digital remixing community, political remix video or PRVs (a term coined by pioneer remixer Jonathan

Mcintosh) are used as a platform for activists of all kinds dealing with issues of identity, poverty, violence and consumerism in contemporary culture. Video collective

Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) and the San Francisco Bay Area band

Negativland pioneered this form of activist remixing with videos that touched on copyright law and the military industrial complex through the 1990s that came to prominence in the nascent "culture jamming" community. These two groups provide an important link between the video art community, which comes with characteristically fine art attributes like formal screening spaces and government support, and the many

16 amateur (so-called) content creators of the internet who screen online and cannot profit from their work.

A decade later, during the second Iraq War, Jonathan Mcintosh, a young media activist and artist, began making an impressive series of political remixes under nearly identical circumstances to those of EBN co-founders Joshua Pearson and Gardner Post.

I elaborate on this influence in chapter two, in the section "Charting the Direct

Influences of Digital Remixers." Early Mcintosh remixes built upon EBN and

Negativland's incendiary juxtapositions of pop-culture and the military industrial complex and developed into some of the most rhetorically sophisticated remixes on the web. In his remix of a Kodak commercial called Share Life: Iraq Tour, two young women take a car tour through a city carelessly snapping photos as they pass landmarks that subsequently appear on screen as photographs—however Mcintosh transforms the commercial by altering the pictures so that they become grisly photographs from the front lines of the Iraq war. Mcintosh's intention of highlighting the highly conflicting registers of television advertising in the presence of lethal warfare is a dominant feature of remix culture, as evinced in other works like his detournement of a Chevron ad campaign called The Power of Human Energy called The Real Power of Human

Energy (2008)—in which a gruesome mosaic of Iraqi atrocities and abuses by

American soldiers are conjoined with an inventive montage (in which a bullet slowly

Artist Jonathan Mcintosh has made a poignant critique of the industry coined phrase "User Generated Content" because it implies media used to attract visitors to websites in order to deliver commercial content. Instead Mcintosh suggests the term "Do It Yourself or DIY, as it more correctly describes the political remix community.

17 enters the body of a man only to come out of the nozzle of a gas pump) shown as a

narrator explains Chevron's honorable social conscience.

For myself, the most poignant work of this kind is also the most austere, taking

its title and narration from DOW Chemical's The Human Element (2008) ad campaign

placing it over the infamous footage of a naked young Vietnamese girl, Phan Thi Kim

Phuc, whose clothes and skin have been burnt off after a napalm attack. The work

makes a powerful impression on the viewer, emphasizing the sinister irony of DOW's

attempt to promote itself as a good corporate citizen while solidifying the connection

between DOW Chemical and their invention and production of what is still one of the

most repugnant and inhumane weapons of mass destruction ever invented—napalm.

Political remixes that deal with corporate identity can successfully disrupt ad

campaigns designed by corporations as a subterfuge to counter bad press and terrible

environmental and sometimes criminal records. These works, called "identity

corrections," (Mcintosh 9), a term borrowed from activist group The Yes Men, are a

powerful way of working against corporate identity management, which attempts to

rewrite corporate histories by promoting positive associations for the public. The term

refers to the process of appropriating the identity of a corporation in order to reveal a

suppressed truth about its history or practices.

Another important figure bridging the gap between video art and digital remixing, Bryan Boyce has the distinction of being distributed by Video Bank (which

counts Harun Farocki and Barbara Hammer among represented artists) and having large view counts on YouTube. Special Report with Bryan Boyce (1999) integrates footage

18 of news anchors whose speech is replaced with the disembodied mouths of actors from

1950s horror films. The video humorously transforms broadcast news anchors as harbingers of bad news into doomsday prophets, alien forces controlling the discourse of the country, insulting average news viewers for their gullibility and confessing their role in creating the tone of paranoia which rules American national discourse. Boyce employs "identity correction" by editing the speech of public figures so that in the mind of the remixer, their actions are synonymous with their words. This process is described by found footage filmmaker Craig Baldwin as "media jujitsu", or the act of "using the weight of the enemy against himself (Bruyn)—a way of forcing propaganda to dismantle its own claims. This technique has been used (and abused in many cases) in innumerable remixes of speeches by figures in the Bush Administration, transforming words and editing the ex-president to declare, in the case of Edo Wilkins's remix The

George Bush Speech You Never Heard (2006), "I hope you'll join me in expressing fear and selfishness. We will embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We can be summed up in one word; evil." The remix George Bush Apologizes (2006) transforms a press conference with Bush and forces him to make a heartfelt apology for the war in Iraq—a kind of liberal fantasy played out with "real life" actors. This technique, of course, can be used in any manner by a remixer, inviting conservative remixers to construct their own misleading phrases from the words of politicians.

At the heart of political remixing lies an impulse to rebut mainstream media and promote contemporaneous critiques of culture through alternative channels free from endemic corporate censorship in journalism. One recent critique of found footage film

19 leveled by theorist Adrian Danks suggests that the technique represents the artistic exhaustion of the avant-garde which has "retreat[ed] to the past in order to uncover hidden meanings within what can now be reconfigured as fixed cultural, political and social movements and histories (largely of the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s)" (Danks

250). We might understand digital remixing as a prominent example of how found footage image making has become relevant again to new generations through the appropriation of contemporary images in an effort to address pertinent socio-political issues.

The pervasive tone of these works demonstrates a deep suspicion of media itself—specifically the authoritative voice of journalism and the persuasive techniques of advertising. Much political remixing depends on deconstructing how desire is created through images as evinced in the work of remix collective Wreck and Salvage.

In their rapid-fire montage of advertisements that appear between children's programming, the video Saturday Morning (2008) illustrates how gender stereotypes/behaviors and eating habits are reinforced for children. The work, which appropriates both the advertisements and the unrelenting speed in which images appear on television, depicts how commercials shape desire through repetition. Other remixers focus on the repressive and hostile role media can play in acculturating the attitudes of filmgoers towards certain identities. Jacqueline Salloum's epic film-historical collage

Planet of the Arabs (2006) does more than just highlight the pervasive portrayal of

Arabs as terrorists, but digs through the archive to reveal strategies and tropes, which pervade Hollywood cinema in regard to Arab characters. Diana Chang compiled a

20 remix looking at racist caricatures in Disney films, which is only the most recent remix to analyze the studio with predecessors looking at gender and the portrayal of masculinity. In 300: This Is Revisionism (2008), the film 300 is examined as a work of

"rightwing revisionism" and is textually analyzed to highlight the film's homophobic, racist and conservative agenda.

Appropriated materials are often used in political mashups for educational purposes to subvert the source material and mold it into a new and radical ensemble of images. Manifestoon (1995) purloins cartoon images to illustrate the first chapter of the

Communist Manifesto, while A Fair(v) Use Tale explains copyright law through the cut-up words of Disney characters, a bold move considering the company is the most litigious studio in the world. In The Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade (2006) subtitles are used to superimpose the story of trade agreements, the WTO and the various protest groups that have interceded on these issues over scenes from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The malevolent Sauron in the film is a symbol of corporate power who uses "free trade to rule them all." Gandalf becomes Noam Chomsky and various characters come to embody the labor movement, environmental activists and radical historians.

The strategies enacted in political remixes can be traced back to one of the earliest practices of moving image appropriation pioneered by the same filmmakers who developed montage theory while working in the Soviet film industry. As Paul

Arthur has suggested, one of the principle techniques in found footage filmmaking is the "politicized recalibration" of images which first occurs after the Russian revolution,

21 when two departments of the Soviet film system were founded to re-edit films from capitalist countries to reflect pro-communist ideology. Among these re-editors were four towering figures of Soviet filmmaking and montage: Lev Kuleshov, Esther Schub,

Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov (Tsivian 332). These re-editors radically altered

Western films through sophisticated editing techniques, transformations in inter-titles and complete excising of certain characters for Soviet audiences both to reflect Marxist ideals and to confirm Soviet suspicions about western capitalism. In these state sponsored editing activities the appropriation of film objects for the purposes of ideological transformation begins—and reappears again in the political remixing movement.

Soviet film transformations had many incarnations and utilized a variety of source materials, which went beyond reimagining contemporary filmic fiction as

Eisenstein details. In the following case, we see the attempt to produce a Marxist history. Eisenstein gives an anecdote to explain just how this was performed with the

German film Danton (1924), which dramatized events during the French Revolution.

Eisenstein explains a transformation that dramatically alters the film:

Camille Desmoulins is condemned to the guillotine. Greatly agitated, Danton rushes to Robespierre, who turns aside and slowly wipes away, a tear. The sub­ title said, approximately, 'In the name of freedom I had to sacrifice a friend ...' Fine. But who could have guessed that in the German original, Danton, represented as an idler, a petticoat-chaser, a splendid chap and the only positive figure in the midst of evil characters, that this Danton ran to the evil Robespierre and ... spat in his face? And that it was this spit that Robespierre wiped from his face with a handkerchief? And that the title indicated Robespierre's hatred of Danton, a hate that in the end of the film motivates the condemnation of Jannings-Danton to the guillotine?! (Eisenstein 11).

22 The re-editors turned Danton's spit into a "tear of remorse" through minor alterations that transformed the meaning of the film to reflect positively on Robespierre. This kind of transformation does not only interject a Marxist reading, it in effect creates a kind of revisionist history sympathetic to their view of the French revolution.

One of the most ambitious works of the Soviet re-editors attempts to explore how dramatically a single text can be transformed by editing techniques. Yuri Tsivian writes about Lilya Brik, an editor involved in various aspects of filmmaking with the

LEF:

I wrote a screenplay with a parody title Love and Duty. The entire story of the film would go into the first reel. The other [four] reels would acquire a completely new meaning as a result of re-editing alone...nothing to do with the original plot. Re-editing alone, not a single shot would be added! The style of the proposed film would change from one reel to another: sensational drama.. .a film for teen-aged audiences...American comedy (Tsivian 47).

This idea explores how multiple significations are offered by the same images purely through the manipulation of sequence and inflection. Here we may see how the experiments in cinema by Lev Kuleshov have tremendous resonance for works of found footage that attempt to use the metaphorical, expressive or ambiguous nature of images to produce a multiplicity of meanings.

Though these remixes enact critical transformations of content, both the remixer and re-editor perform the same aesthetic strategy of replicating the grammar of the source material. The words may have changed—but the language is still the same.

What distinguishes the Soviet re-editors from other found footage filmmakers is that their transformations occur clandestinely—camouflaging the semantic alterations by maintaining the syntactic elements. This technique has lived on in culture jamming and

23 detournement from artists as diverse as the Billboard Liberation Front and the appropriation of Robert Indiana's 1966 Love Painting by General Idea.

(Fig. 1.1: Left: Indiana, Robert. Love (1966); Fig. 1.2: Right: General Idea

AIDS (1989).

This replication of the grammar of source material is an important component of political remixes, which seek to mimic the "high production values" of corporate advertising but disturb their content. Additionally, this aspect of digital remixing initiates another stark contrast with its video art predecessors. While video art appropriators vied to disrupt the grammar and narratives of plundered works, digital remixers overwhelmingly work within the structure of the images they appropriate.

Narrative, style, grammar and language are only rarely transformed in the works of digital remixers. Instead these elements are replicated and the content, context and meaning become the site of revision. These works of detournement are marked by the artist's desire to camouflage their transformations, almost as if to insinuate them back into the mediascape as authentic and original works.

24 As works of art, political remixes can be critiqued for their parroting of hegemonic visual discourses, rather than adopting less authoritarian modes of speaking back to the media. Furthermore, the correction or revision of traumatic images can be a hubristic undertaking that does not necessarily seek to understand the conditions, which spawned the original images but rather is a self-congratulatory form of art-making for both the remixer and spectator. By this I mean, as artist Barbara Kruger has observed of works of appropriation, that they may "merely serve to congratulate" the spectator for their "contemptuous acuity" (Kruger 1041) in identifying flaws in ideology rather than the more complex task of identifying how such images came to fruition. Catherine

Russell discusses critic Sharon Sandusky who suggests that "successful works of art" that cull from the archive are a "'cure' to the dangers of the past.. ."(Russell 243).

Russell does support the idea of archival revision or correction, but rather argues for works which "promot[e] a schizophrenic dispersal of discourses of mastery, authenticity, and authority through fragmentation, cutting up, and interruption" (Russell

243). This understanding of revision is far more sympathetic to film and video-makers who are self-reflexive enough to avoid making claims as authoritarian and myopic as the materials they have sought to examine. In this way, filmmakers can avoid simply perpetuating the authoritarian and repressive hegemonic visual discourses they seek to debunk by taking a careful approach that gives the viewer the agency to draw their own conclusions. Clearly, political remixers partake in a more aggressive form of archival intervention sympathetic to ideas of Sandusky. They are more interested in harnessing

25 the direct and familiar language of popular cultural forms like commercials than in escaping authoritarian forms of communication.

The Trailer Remix

The emergence of digital remixing can be attributed in part to editor Robert

Ryang's 2005 reedit of a trailer for a contest put together by the Association of

Independent Creative Editors (Halbfinger). Ryang, who works at the PS260 editing house, re-cut a trailer for the Stanley Kubrick film version of the Stephen King horror novel The Shining (1980), transforming the appropriated footage into a schlocky romantic comedy set to Peter Gabriel's maudlin song "Salisbury Hill." His transformation, called Shining (2005), was initially hidden on a URL connected to the

PS260 site, which after only two days of circulation caused servers to crash from web traffic. The video's circulation in the film community was swift and shortly after its creation film studios scouting talent called Ryang.

Since this watershed moment in viral video, hundreds of young disciples have made their own trailer mixes. Remixers built blogs, created contests, wrote commentary and started online communities supporting trailer remixing. At thetrailermash.com, new works are posted several times a week where remixers have spirited debate over each trailer's merits. At totalrecut.com, a site devoted to appropriated film works of all kinds, you can download editing software, read literature about copyright and fair use, connect with other remixers and watch remixed work of all kinds. Over the last two years, trailer remixes have become increasingly sophisticated, leveling prescient critiques at films and how they are marketed, produced and politicized. That said,

26 trailer remixes do not necessarily have a serious agenda; many are sophomoric and some can be downright nasty. They do not possess the same level of criticality present in PRVs; instead they should be understood as exercises in the reimagining and blending of disparate cultural elements in the same category as exquisite corpses and other Surrealist techniques, as I will explore later.

Easily the most popular form of digital remixing, trailer remixes do not simply parody the narrative of a film, they mock the entire marketing apparatus of films—the trailer, a form stuck somewhere between the province of art and marketing. Trailers, like television commercials or political advertisements, are based on years of audience studies, current trends, and often, outright fabrications. The cliches of the trailer have become so standardized and predictable that nearly any plot can be transmogrified into a trailer formula to alter the genre. This is not to say that effective trailer remixes can be easily executed; their success is predicated on a highly media literate creator who can deconstruct and recreate the nuances and technical devices employed by the film preview. The editor's skill appears in the music choices, sound cues and scene selection required to inscribe an entirely new meaning. Like the Soviet re-editors and political remixers, trailer remixes tend to imitate rather than disrupt the grammar of commercial cinema—attempting to "pass-off their transformations as authentic through the use of certain film industry cliches like FBI warnings, MPAA ratings cards, studio logos, cast and crew cards and dramatic trailer narrators in the style of the late Don ("In a world...") LaFontaine.

27 Trailer Re-Cuts

While I use the term digital remixing to refer broadly to all forms of digital found footage manipulation, a number of categories appear under this general umbrella.

When discussing trailer remixing, there are two forms present: mashups and re-cuts. I refer to a trailer re-cut when the genre of a single film is detourned, such as Shining, or

10 Things I Hate About Commandments by Mike Dow and Ari Eisner, which transforms the biblical epic The Ten Commandments (1956) into a high school comedy reminiscent of Ten Things I Hate About You (1999). This re-cut appropriates the discourse of another genre though it only utilizes images from one film. Sergei

Eisenstein once commented that effective montage, as a critical and interruptive form could be employed by considering the formula: "Degree of incongruence determines intensity of impression..." (Eisenstein 50) This might help us understand why the most potent remixes unite what might be seen as dialectically opposite genres. An effective remix, critic Scott Mackenzie suggests, is predicated on the "ability to make the familiar unfamiliar through humorous dialectical juxtapositions" (Mackenzie 14).

Examples of this include the romantic re-cut Taxi Driver (2006) about naive first love and the Tom Hanks comedy vehicle Big (2006) transformed into a thriller about pedophilia. Citizen Kane: Tha Remix (2006) takes Citizen Kane (1941) and reframes it in the discourse of urban gangster films complete with a Tupac soundtrack and graffiti fonts for title interludes. These works transform the meanings of a single film by transforming the soundtrack, inter-titles, narration and tone so that it reflects a new genre.

28 Trailer Mash-ups

While trailer re-cuts create detourned readings of films, mashups are an amalgamation of multiple source materials, which are montaged together to produce exquisite corpses from film fragments. The term was first used in conjunction with art to refer to the radical combinations of songs made by Jamaican club DJs. A trailer mashup combines images or sound from at least two films. This tradition of conjoining two films together can be traced back to some of the earliest Surrealist experiments with cinema, specifically those by Andre Breton, who, along with other friends enjoyed

"nothing so much as dropping into the cinema when whatever was playing was playing, at any point in the show, and leaving at the first hint of boredom—of surfeit—to rush off to another cinema where [they] behaved in the same way..." (Breton 73). Breton's game was meant to aid in creating radical combinations of images and in many ways is a precursor to American Surrealist Joseph Cornell's landmark found footage film Rose

Hobart (1935). Critic Fatimah Tobing Rony encourages such an interpretation when she writes that "[t]he key elements of chance, disruption, and dislocation, and the refusal to accept the passive status of the spectator by actively creating their own montage in their heads, already enacted certain Surrealist characteristics of found footage film"(Rony

131). For all these reasons Surrealism, in the tradition of Max Ernst's collage novels,

Breton's associative word games and method of film viewing described above should be considered as vital to the invention of found footage filmmaking and its second rebirth in America at the hands of Joseph Cornell.

29 The Surrealist use of shocking juxtapositions had incredible humorous power in their hallucinatory elocution through chance encounters between cut out words or through methods of automatic writing. Max Ernst described this method as "the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a place which apparently does not suit them" (Hauptman 33). This describes the trailer remix—a work that amalgamates the discourse, style, structure, genre or footage of multiple film works all within the controlled and laconic confines of the film trailer.

A number of strategies are employed to successfully integrate multiple source materials together for trailer mashups. At their bare bones, mashups are composed of a montage from disparate films, which are given continuity through creative scene selection and editing. This technique itself is also found in Cornell's Rose Hobart but was most famously used by the recently deceased found footage filmmaker Bruce

Conner. In Conner's A Movie (1958) a famous sequence uses disparate images to suggest a continuity of action with humorous results. Critic William Wees explains: "A submarine captain seems to see a scantily dressed woman though his periscope and responds by firing a torpedo which produces a nuclear explosion followed by huge waves ridden by surfboard riders." (Wees, 1993:14) Conner's assembling of narrative depends both on his own skill in selecting images that provide a sense of narrative continuity, but also relies on the spectator's inherent desire to construct narrative and meaning even when confronted with apparently disparate elements. This form of montage relies heavily on the uniformity of film grammar in mainstream films. In the mashup You, Me and E.T. (2007), remixer Brianimal has characters from the film You,

30 Me and Dupree (2006) converse with the alien from E.T. (1982) simply by cutting back and forth between the medium shots from the two films. It is worth noting here that remixers frequently use monikers both to evade legal issues stemming from copyright claims and as a means of creating a more easily identifiable product. Like graffiti artists before them, remixers use monikers to build their reputations and signal signature styles.

Mashups frequently use overdubbing, a practice which involves dropping the soundtrack of a film and creating new dialog or using dialog from another source. This technique was notably executed in both Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily (1966) that transforms a Japanese Spy film into an absurdist comedy and in the Situationist film by Rene Vienet Can Dialectics Break Bricks (1973) that transforms a Korean

Kung Fu film into a Marxist polemic. Mashups that use overdubbing techniques find sound from one film and synch it with the mouths of actors from another film.

Contemporary mashups tend towards the absurd when employing overdubbing, as featured in works like Sesame Streets (2006) which utilizes dialogue from a host of

Scorsese films put into the mouths of the characters from the titular children's show, or

2001: Goodfellas (2006) where HAL's docile voice is replaced with Joe Pesci's brutal portrayal of a mobster from Goodfellas (1990). These works find their humour in a

North American context, which ridicules dubbing, though this distinct cultural position would not be shared by many Europeans and Italians in particular, who have become accustomed to language dubbing.

31 Frequently the titling of these works themselves will be humorous juxtapositions as in All That Jaws (2008) and Brokeback to the Future (2006). These titles are likely derived from the titles conceived by music mashup artists who compounded the titles from source materials amalgamated together. Artist John Oswald uses this humorous compounding with song titles in his Plexure album, featuring songs with titles like "Ozzie Osmond" and "Marianne Faith No Morrissey."

Apocalypse Pooh (1987), a mashup that does not utilize the trailer format, pioneered many of the techniques employed in contemporary trailer mashups. The mashup utilizes the score and dialogue from Apocalypse Now (1979) and synchs it to the animated characters in the Winnie the Pooh films. The film, made by Todd

Graham, a student of the Ontario College of Art and Design, was originally made for presentation at underground film forums. However, the work was resurrected on the

Internet and imitated to no end. Critic Scott Mackenzie contributed an elaborate history of the film and argues that it "successfully condenses the entire allegorical, mythological and grandiose narrative of Coppola's film and provides a critical meta- commentary on both Apocalypse Now and the Winnie the Pooh featurettes" (Mackenzie

11). Graham's work is one of the first to test the conjoining of dialectically opposite genres and benefits from working outside of the grammar of the film trailer.

A number of popular subgenres have appeared in the trailer mashup community, focusing on certain films or tropes. Brokeback Mountain mashups usually look at homosocial relationships or spaces and construct a gay subtext by including the

32 inimitable Gustavo Santaolalla score to the film with the same inter-titles from the

Brokeback Mountain trailer. Clearly some of these works express homophobic attitudes, while others remix queer texts in playful and humorous ways. Brokeback

Mountain mashups are many and multifarious; some seek to restructure the film as heterosexual (like Mount Brokeback, which presents an Evangelical Christian awakening shared by two men), while others simply employ a queer reading of a film

(like Top Gun: Brokeback Squadron, or the mashup of the sequel film 2 Fast, 2

Furious called 2 Gay Bi-Curious). Ultimately the fun of these works is in their queering of familiar stories—satirizing the way films are marketed and sold to audiences and the absurd caricatures of masculinity that lend themselves so well to a queering of the text.

Experimental Digital Remixing

Though most digital remixing departs radically from avant-garde/experimental found footage film, other filmmakers have emulated found footage antecedents by exploring non-narrative methods. In the case of Trinity: A Martin Arnold Tribute

(2006), the remixer Jason Moon deconstructs the movements and words of televangelist

Jan Crouch through an elaborate montage that emulates (though also diverges from) avant-garde found footage filmmaker Martin Arnold. In this case, and in a number of others, experimental remixes may work as a form of homage and imitation beholden to some earlier found footage pioneer. In Cry All You Want (2006) by Scott McElroy, an educational film about juvenile delinquency becomes a Freud-laden psycho-sexual coming of age story with a shattered narrative that is only comprehensible because the images are so archetypal. The film owes much to Su Friedrich and Jay Rosenblatt in its

33 deconstruction of troubling and problematic images of the past and in its exploration of childhood through found images.

In Cosas de Mujeres / Women Things (2007), by Javier Piano, images of women from four iconic European films are united to invoke a collective conversation between the characters. The soundtrack has been replaced by four tones, each a leitmotif for a character, which correspond to the first letter of the last name of the four directors of the films. Piano writes, "I can say that it was made following a path in the beginning: A, B, C, D (Antonioni, Bresson, Cocteau and Dreyer), and I try to make a tone for each one of the women that correspond with that musical note." As the film progresses, the tones begin to form melodic passages and the conversation becomes more intense and violent. In artist Videohead boy's Basic Film Terms (2008) a kitschy and cliched educational film explaining the terms used to describe film editing (shot, sequence, cut, etc) is put though a rigorous deconstruction and manipulation elaborating upon the film terms being described.

Many remixers 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 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 video depends on humorous mondegreens (a word referring to misheard lyrics or phrases) of Indian pop music videos that are subtitled on the bottom of the screen. Sutton inventively finds

English words that seem to roughly approximate the Hindustani lyrics, constructing

2 Personal correspondence with Javier Piano, July 4* , 2007.

34 absurd songs over 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.

The remixer Augart turns non-musical moments from films into percussive tour-de-force rhythms, which use screams, car explosions, marching and everything in between. His video works resemble the experimental music of artists like Steve Reich and Alvin Lucier, who depend on complex vocal manipulations through repetition. All of his videos set out to explore certain shibboleths of Hollywood movies, like screams or car crashes and the subsequent sounds used to convey these moments and sequences.

The work becomes a kind of curated archival collection reminiscent of Christian

Marclay's compounding of musical sequences in Video Quartet (2002).

Appropriation as a Form of Cultural Resistance

Critic Hal Foster argues that artists who appropriate materials find the locus of their power in the process of reconstituting meanings onto signs in order to disrupt the

"monopoly of the code" (Foster, Recodings 173) constructed, presumably, by an elite of cultural producers. Foster invokes Baudrillard's assertion that "semiotic privilege represents... the ultimate stage of domination" and maintains that appropriation can disrupt the bourgeoisie's "mastery of the process of signification" (Foster, Recodings

173). This process has also been associated by critic William Wees with Umberto Eco's idea of aberrant decoding (Wees: Ambiguous Aura, 4) in which the reader chooses to read "the text in an unpredicted way, producing a deviant meaning" (Hanes).

35 Appropriators can impose new meanings or disrupt accepted meanings through inventive transformation. These transformations are often viewed as legally suspect because they challenge cultural meanings in a world where signification is often controlled; either through repressive components of copyright law or through communications restriction by controlling state apparatuses like the Federal

Communications Commission in the United States.

Historically, artistic appropriation has been troubling for art critics and audiences alike for the irreverence towards the idea of the original and an uncomfortably close proximity to notions of plagiarism visible in the strategy. Critic

Matthew Higgs writes, "implicit in all acts of appropriation and montage are the undercurrents of theft and violence (the act of cutting and dismemberment)" (Higgs

93). Collage, one of the earliest forms of artistic appropriation, can etymologically be traced to a slang term for an illicit love affair (Hoffman 5). Even the term mashup comes from the Jamaican patwa term for destroying something. Critic John C.

Welchman suggests, "There is.. .always a violence implied in appropriation; and the violence of the cut is always accompanied by the aggravated wound of separation"

(Welchman 24). Indeed, appropriation art has historically been considered suspect, raising serious questions about the value of art, the concept of authorship and perhaps most importantly how it is we define art itself. Nevertheless, artists, filmmakers and musicians have employed appropriation for a diversity of purposes and with just as many strategies.

36 Artists construct critiques of materials at the site of their transformation. The artistic repurposing, modification and denaturing of material has parodic dimensions which, as Critic Linda Hutcheon argues, is "one of the major forms of modern self- reflexivity; it is a form of inter-art discourse"(Hutcheon 2). Hutcheon suggests that parodic works are an important part of a progressive culture because "parody is one mode of coming to terms with the texts of 'that rich and intimidating legacy of the past"

(Hutcheon 4). The unifying principal, which seems to hold true for all appropriators is the wish to take a second look at a text. This second look is frequently motivated by an antagonistic relationship between the artist and the text and the wish to transform the text to reflect this opposition. The efforts of digital remixers on the Internet to interrogate images of culture is a process of working through, rebuttal, criticism, interrogation and decoding of the highly disposable and ephemeral materials of contemporary culture. This process is a form of retribution or resistance. Video artist

Nam June Paik described his installations as a response to mass media when he stated

"Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back" (Elwes 5).

Filmmaker Mark Rappaport defends his violations of copyright by saying "My excuse in a court of law would be that these images have corrupted us and it's our turn at bat"

(Rappaport 22). Many filmmakers and video artists voice variations on the belief that media has colonized our imaginations and found footage films are a means of resistance and critique—an unauthorized way of redeploying hegemonic visual discourse to introduce dissent.

Active Reception and Remixing Culture

37 To conclude this chapter, I would like to consider the "passive reception" model of media discussed at length in Bertolt Brecht's essay "The Radio as an Apparatus of

Communication" and in Jean Baudrillard's "Requiem for the Media." In these essays the current "distribution only" model of both television and radio are critiqued for their unilateral nature and non-adherence to an actual model for reciprocal communication.

Baudrillard condemns "the media as the institution of an irreversible model of communication without a response''' (Baudrillard 84). Past scholarship on so-called democratizing media apparatuses or technologies like the video camera or the Internet, have argued that such a response occurs through the use of guerilla communications channels, which speak back to mainstream media. Digital remixers are engaged in just this—a lucid response aimed at the media. The possibility of appropriating the materials of media to produce such a response changes non-reciprocal media practices, which may account for why the traditional media has been so aggressive against digital remixing practices as evinced by the many take down notices which have plagued remixers on YouTube. Most of these works are clearly protected by American fair use laws, but are still regularly prevented from Internet distribution. Umberto Eco once conceived of "groups of communications guerillas who would restore a critical dimension to the passive reception" (Eco, Travels in Hyperreality 142) of radio and television. Clearly we are seeing his prophecy enacted.

38 Chapter Two The Antecedents of Digital Remixing: Evolving Tendencies in the Avant-Garde

This chapter builds upon the taxonomy from Chapter One and focuses on technology and home spectatorship, antecedent appropriation strategies, the semiotics of appropriation, new modes of authorship, the concept of archival revision and the construction of malleable archives. In my examination of antecedent appropriation strategies, I attempt to expand upon direct connections between the video art community and digital remixing, as well as analyze pervasive techniques in appropriation art, hip-hop and graffiti culture which appear in remixes. This chapter attempts to more broadly theorize how appropriation works outside of specific mediums and draws upon a number of art critics to frame the use of existing cultural materials as a form of resistance.

In experimental film and video circles, found footage image making has gone through a sea change in the last two decades, moving away from the garbage aesthetic which favored discarded materials, industrial/educational films and lost footage, towards the use of recognizable images of contemporary culture. The changes in source material can be attributed to developments in moving image technology (i.e. the introduction of video and later digital media), developments and clarifications of fair use doctrine in the United States or fair dealings in Canada (which is still in many ways untested) and in some cases the anonymity guaranteed by the Internet. In this chapter, I will briefly outline the effect of the experimental film and video community's increasing use of popular cultural materials and the development of many of the tendencies in moving image appropriation later replicated by digital remixers. Though

39 the use of mainstream materials is a definitive element of digital remixing, a number of other important influences must be accounted for as well. The profound influence of hip-hop music, specifically the aesthetics of sampling, which are characterized by repetition and subtle manipulation, have had great impact on subsets of digital remixers. The culture jammers of the 1980s who acted like intermediaries between video art and digital remixing replicated hip-hop aesthetics, amidst a new revaluation of appropriation, occurring in hip-hop culture at that time. I will also explore how another element of hip-hop, namely graffiti culture, shares striking similarities with digital remixing, specifically their shared social status as guerilla/illegal art-making practices.

The semiotic features of appropriation are also explored in this chapter by examining the works of theorists including Hal Foster, Umberto Eco and Nicolas

Bourriaud. I will examine the remix community's reimagining of the concept of the archive as a storage space and some of the intermediary artists who brought the innovations of the avant-garde film and video community to digital remixers. Part of this chapter also addresses the shared strategies of appropriation artists and re- photographers like Richard Prince and the conceptual similarities shared with digital remixes.

The Analog and Digital Economies of Found Footage Image Making

The use of recognizable mainstream cinematic images of television and film is hardly a new development for found footage image-makers. However, this development owes much to digitization of media and the development of film spectatorship outside of theatrical environments. The economics of early avant-garde

40 found footage filmmaking made the use of mainstream materials extremely difficult.

The American surrealist Joseph Cornell, who made what is considered the first avant- garde found footage film, purchased the footage for the film Rose Hobart (1932) from

"a warehouse in New Jersey where scraps of discarded film were being sold by the pound, their only presumed value residing in their silver nitrate. For a ridiculously low price Cornell bought a batch of old footage that included East of Borneo (1931)"

(Solomon 85). Though this obscure B-picture could be obtained by Cornell for next to nothing, his own finances wouldn't permit him to purchase prints of mainstream films with some of the other actresses he adored: Lauren Bacall, Hedy Lamarr and Greta

Garbo. Financial insolvency also played a part in the work of another major American pioneer of found footage filmmaking, the sculptor and assemblagist Bruce Conner.

Conner's original vision for the ironically titled film A Movie (1958) included projecting images onto motorized objects which would alter the images for each screening through environmental changes and a projection in a constant loop. This idea for an "anti-movie" writes critic Bruce Jenkins, was outside of Conner's financial resources and A Movie was instead made into a short film (Jenkins: 188). The film was completed with materials that represented Conner's financial situation as much as it did his artistic vision, taken from newsreel footage, projection leader (which was meant to be invisible to audiences but which Conner prominently displays), exploitation films and scraps of film literally found by Conner. In Cornell's circumstance, it is not immediately clear whether or not he bought East of Borneo for the purposes of making a found footage film, however the affordability of these film prints certainly played a

41 part in their purchase for the lower-middle class Cornell.

Until the introduction of the VHS tape, found footage works focused on b-films, film waste and ephemeral materials because of the cheapness with which they could be acquired and their relative accessibility. The newfound access and affordability of the

VHS standard playing and recording format created new non-institutional archives and offered the option of home spectatorship. This encouraged new generations of found footage filmmakers to recycle mainstream films, which subsequently transformed the avant-garde technique from one that engaged with the "left-overs" of cinematic production to one that critically examined popular culture. The economy of moving image storage technologies has directly impacted the kinds of found footage films made.

Once film materials could be bought cheaply, artists begin to engage with popular materials. This frequency also coincides with the 1980s explosion of appropriation art with the likes of Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Haim Steinbach and Jeff Koons challenging concepts of originality and authorship in the art world with great critical success and controversy.

In the 1980s and early 1990s a number of found footage filmmakers began to use VHS tapes as a way to interrogate the video store archive and reconstitute meaning onto images. Artists like Dee Dee Halleck, Mark Rappaport, Matthias Muller and

Harun Farocki explore footage from institutional, state, news and video retail archives to produce archival interventions which sought to disturb, evaluate and uncover hidden meanings in footage. Muller, Halleck and Rappaport specifically focus on mainstream

42 Hollywood images to expose how cultural, sexual and gender identities are reinforced or critiqued through cinema. To plunder Hollywood images for "that which is not shown" has become the major feature of Rappaport's body of work, which would be virtually impossible to create without VHS technology to the extent that he has been called a "VCRcheologist" (Hoberman 115). In this way, Rappaport has engaged with the video store archive, which he addresses directly in his writings:

In the privacy of my living room I can speak my mind aloud and at the same decibel level as the film I'm watching. The invention of the VCR turned this active approach to film criticism into an indoor sport.. .You could rollback and rewrite your barbs until you got it just right, until you found the perfect retort, le mot juste (Rappaport 17).

With the advent of the VHS tape, the incredible proliferation of the Digital Video Disc

(DVD) and now the digital video file, the archive has expanded in size and offers unprecedented access to the layperson through both commercial archives (video stores and internet DVD rental services) and various commons archives (libraries and freely accessed internet archives like archive.org and youtube.com). This new level of access has invited a multitude of interventions that can now take place with the efficient distribution platform that is the Internet. The Internet itself appears to be the largest collective site for media archiving with incalculable storage capacity that can be accessed through open channels and frequently without the need for institutional permissions. These technological innovations have all allowed individuals to cheaply or freely access mainstream images and remix them. In addition to VCR, DVD and digital file technologies which have allowed films to be owned affordably and screened in a way which encourages a new form of spectatorship, digital editing software has also

43 been a dominant factor in the creation of digital video remixes and in the transformation of the layperson into a skilled editor.

The VCR and New Forms of Spectatorship

Technologies of home spectatorship do more than just make moving images available to frequently insolvent artists. These technologies encourage a new form of spectatorship, which allows a scrutiny and use of materials that prior to their creation were nearly impossible but for those who had occupations which allowed them to work in close proximity to film materials or to those who had the financial resources to make film ownership and screening possible. Critic Jeffrey Skoller comments on this newfound spectatorship in reference to Mark Rappaport's 1993 video work Rock

Hudson's Home Movies (1992). Skoller writes, "Rappaport has rethought [the VCR's] figuration from the proverbial couch potato sitting passively, watching endless movies, into a context that allows for the possibility of an even more actively engaged spectatorship" (Skoller 175). This active engagement is not simply the plundering of the image, it is also the critical dimension offered up by repeated home viewings.

Skoller argues, "for some avant-garde film artists, the emergence of home video technologies has opened up new relationships between the cine-connoisseur, the collector, and the textual analyst to create new forms of cultural history" (Skoller 175).

Critical home spectatorship initiates a new dimension of found footage filmmaking which allows the spectator who has spoken back verbally to her television screen to then construct a document to inscribe their commentary onto the video itself. The

VCR's native controls of pause, rewind and fast-forward offer the spectator the chance

44 to "read and reread, argu[e] with and endlessly commen[t] on" (Skoller 175). The co- presence of commentary and its object of critique is a tradition native to deconstructionist thought. According to this formulation, Hal Foster writes, "any critique of a tradition must use the forms of that tradition—must commandeer them in effect" (Foster, Recodings 53).

This idea opens up our understanding of the found footage filmmaker as a critical and analytical artist akin to the cultural critic or film theorist. Leslie Thornton says in an interview with William Wees that, "A lot of people who call themselves artists now are cultural critics who are using instruments other than just written language or spoken language to communicate their critical perspective" (Wees,

Recycled Images 99). Rappaport himself calls Rock Hudson's Home Movies "a child of 15 or 20 years of critical theory" (Rappaport 17). Rappaport's essayistic films represent a turn in the 1980s to more explicitly engage with social engineering in the media. Many films in this period express concern with the way media represents (and represses) identity and ideology by mining the "secret meanings" and hidden politics of popular media. It seems like no small coincidence that the development of home video screening technologies and the shift and revitalization of found footage filmmaking occur at the same time—not to mention the simultaneous proliferation of queer and feminist film theory. The difficulties for critics and theorists to obtain prints of films they sought to investigate are all but eliminated with video store archives and allowed for a broader group of writers to theorize social issues in cinema.

45 Bridging the Gap Between Video Art and Digital Remixing: Parallel

Techniques and Tendencies

William Wees argues in his essay, "The Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars in Avant-Garde Found Footage Films," that the use of Hollywood film images in found footage films comes from the desire to unearth repressed realities, which could not be addressed within the restrictive confines of their production. The widespread availability of VHS would make such Hollywood explorations possible and frequent. In the next two sections, I will detail strategies shared by the avant-garde found footage film /video art and digital remixing communities. In one section, I will discuss how the compilation of scenes, tropes, and motifs from a variety of Hollywood films is a strategy utilized to unearth repetition and traumatic images from the archive. The digital remixes I discuss here are distinct from earlier examples because they do not appropriate the language of Hollywood cinema as trailer remixes and some political remixes discussed in Chapter One. Instead, these works exhibit tendencies shared with avant-garde film and video art works made by artists like Christian Marclay and

Matthias Muller.

Patterns of Collection

Many appropriation artists are first and foremost, collectors. The materials collected, their visibility in popular culture and the modes of transformation implemented by the artist all help to characterize their approach to appropriation.

Joseph Cornell was well known for his elaborate collections of found objects—ordered in numbered and catalogued boxes and reconstructed into archival boxes themselves

46 turned into art objects. Critic Jodi Hauptman characterizes Joseph Cornell's artistic career as a form of "image search" or new form of portraiture utilizing "exploration, research [and] collection" (Hauptman 1). Cornell's interest in cinema revolved around the actress-muses that found their way into his box assemblages, collages and subsequent found footage films.

While much could be made of Cornell's obsessive fascination with Hollywood actresses Hedy Lamarr, Rose Hobart, Lauren Bacall and Greta Garbo to name a very few, more interesting is his method of collection. Cornell produced dossier folders of images and trinkets, some literal and others highly personal and oblique, which reminded Cornell of these individuals. He engaged in research in order to link actresses to historical figures by weaving invented stories. Cornell was also deeply interested in presentation, creating archives and "romantic museums" to commemorate his obsessions. Hauptman suggests that, "In his dedication to preservation and his labors as an archivist, he is less a surrealist and more a historian" (Hauptman 37).

Much of Cornell's work can be understood as a sophisticated method of interrogating popular images and fostering of an individual mysticism and alchemy of everyday objects. In this way, Hauptman describes Walter Benjamin as being in harmony with Cornell's ideas on collection. She writes:

Cornell's activities call to mind Walter Benjamin, a figure who similarly turned his attention to history and to the survivors of the past. Benjamin's interests— book collecting, childhood, the city, miniatures, the nineteenth century, photography, flanerie, the trivial and shabby—parallel Cornell's own. In the artist's archival accumulation of texts, quotations, and images, Cornell resembles Benjamin at work on his Arcades Project, a "materialist philosophy of history" that excavates Paris (Hauptman 37).

47 The connection between these two thinkers also leads back to the surrealist movement, as indicated by Hal Foster in Compulsive Beauty. Described as an uncanny form of found object, the ruin, referred to as the "romantic ruin," strikes an "auratic register and represents a "displaced" object that has been "outmoded" by capitalist production.

Assigning value to this outmoded object is a form of detournement to Foster

{Compulsive Beauty 127) who sees the collection of such objects existing outside of capitalist production as a subversion of that process. The romantic ruin is emphasized by the Surrealists because it is seen to "redeem the outmoded and to mock the mechanical-commodified" (Foster, Compulsive Beauty 127). The "romantic ruin" described by the Surrealists and later by Benjamin, is echoed in the language of Cornell when describing the "flotsam and jetsam..." of found objects (Hauptman 21). Like

Benjamin's penchant for a critical montage of quotes in the Arcades Project, Cornell

"began to see his collecting... as a viable, if not critical, form of art-making" (Hauptman

22). Part of Cornell's impetus towards manufacturing boxes from ephemera, was to turn the found detritus he had collected into something that could, in his own words

"transcend the dustheap & ruthlessness of time" (Hauptman 3).

Cornell's fascinations, however, do not account for what motivated his obsession with cinema. As an aesthetic form, Hauptman suggests that Cornell's

"flanerie" extended to the cinema and that the fleeting images and objects he collected on the streets were replicated by the camera. Cornell's fascination with maps and the flaneur also link him to the Situationists. Cornell's "Souvenirs for Singleton" box, made for actress Jennifer Jones, was a map made from detritus which is reminiscent of

48 a chronologically simultaneous image, "Discours sur les passions de 1'amour," by Guy

Debord, which offers a psychogeographic guide through Paris with map fragments united by red arrows. One of the connections between the flaneur and the person undertaking a derive , is the goal of both "to find." The recovery of objects is frequently associated with the pedestrian strolling through the city and coming upon some discarded artifact of overlooked importance. Collage itself is described as a kind of artistic corollary of the views of the city walker. Hauptman writes "In its accumulative structure, collage visualizes the city's temporal layering." She invokes

Rosalind Krauss' contention that collage is a form of image reading that focuses on duration—"the kind of extended temporality that is involved in experiences like memory, reflection, narration, proposition." (Hauptman 153) William Burroughs suggests that collages, or as he called them, "cut-ups" resembled the human mind's perceptual approach to the world. He wrote, "the cut-up is much closer to the actual facts of perception. As soon as you look out the window, look around the room, walk down the street, your consciousness is being cut by random factors. Life is a cut- up. . .rather than a straight linear narrative" (Burroughs, quoted in the film William S.

Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers). In this way, we might see collage as an attempt to reproduce the reality of the city dweller, walking down a busy urban street.

The search for moving images by remixers often takes place on YouTube, which allows Internet spectators to search through videos by clicking other videos

3 The derive, as described by Situationist writers entailed the aimless walking through a city but encouraged the walker to discover the elements of the city which bring pleasure and disgust as a means of discovering how to shape a new world. The act of going on a derive differs from the act of the flaneur because it suggests an explicitly critical relationship between the walker and the city.

49 associated through key-words, users and actual video responses. This allows for

YouTube users to scroll through videos without creating new search terms and, in effect, drift through the digital archive the site provides. This pattern of spectatorship, which promotes an aimless drift, a discovery of images and reuse of those materials re- imagines the urban derive as a stroll through the spaces of a digital archive.

The appropriation artist and avant-garde musician Christian Marclay was deeply influenced by artist Bruce Conner and employed found images in his visual artworks for years before moving into the cinematic milieu. However, unlike Conner, Marclay was interested in using recognizable materials rather than ephemeral industrial or educational films. Critic Jennifer Gonzales suggests, "For Marclay, it is crucial that the films he uses are recognizable, that they spark a memory in the viewers who see them.

The individual film clips are not merely archival, they parallel our memories of them"

(Gonzales 63). The importance of recognizable materials to these artists cannot be overstated. Part of the pleasure of the spectator when viewing these materials is experiencing the nostalgia and memories they elicit in the spectator.

In terms of appropriation, Marclay has said that "To be totally original and to start from scratch always seemed futile. I was more interested in taking something and making it mine through manipulation" (Seliger 136). All of these strategies come to paint a picture of the artist as collector and archivist. Hal Foster suggested, "the classic site of the surrealist derive" was "the flea market..." (Foster, Compulsive Beauty 159); a site that Marclay explores in his own work. Jennifer Gonzales suggests that though

"nearly all of Marclay's works rely upon readymade images, objects or texts, they can

50 also be called 'archival'" (Gonzales 56). She argues that Marclay is overwhelmingly dealing with historical and cultural memory—inscribing new meanings onto the work through his transformation of the materials. Sometimes the materials are simply curated—as in his piece Arranged and Conducted (1997) in which Marclay "arranged, with frames abutting, more than a hundred prints, drawings, paintings and photographs drawn from the permanent collection of the Kunsthaus, each depicting a musical event." (Gonzales 57) These materials have not been altered—they have been dropped into a new context, yes, but the overwhelming sense is that they have been selected and organized anew.

Once digital media became the paradigm of home spectatorship and editing, moving image appropriators could transform materials with a newfound ease and on a larger scale. Christian Marclay has produced three significant works appropriating mainstream images and sounds with the use of digital video. Marclay's three major film works, Telephones (1995), Up and Out (1998) and Video Quartet (2002), are compiled from recognizable films edited based on an organizing principal Marclay has set out to explore. In Telephones, Marclay has constructed a "seemingly plausible linear dialogue between historically (and spatially) unrelated characters" (Higgs 88) by appropriating clips from mostly Hollywood films of actors on telephones. Up and Out uses the images of Antonioni's film Blow Up (1966) and blends the film with the soundtrack to

Brian De Palma's homage to the film, Blow Out (1981). His most ambitious work,

Video Quartet, features over 700 DVD clips from films of actors "playing instruments, singing or making noise" (Higgs 88). The film is a quadriptych, featuring four

51 simultaneous screens that are expertly arranged to create a seemingly cohesive soundtrack. The grouping of multiple sounds has features "akin to that of a hip-hop

DJ," (Higgs 89) with the pleasant collision of sounds from disparate source materials.

These works often feature the exploration of film cliches or frequently employed film motifs—the dramatic telephone conversation or the cafe piano player.

This kind of archeology of repetition in film scenes has permeated both contemporary avant-garde films and digital remixes on the Internet. In German artist

Matthias Muller's found footage film Home Stories (1990), women from disparate

Hollywood melodramas go through the same series of actions—answering a phone, receiving dramatic information, running down a lavish flight of stairs and grabbing their coat and fleeing outside. Miiller also enacted similar patterns of collecting with his epic Phoenix Tapes (1999), which examines numerous Alfred Hitchcock films.

These patterns of collection and ordering of archives is a stalwart feature of found footage today. German video artist and essay filmmaker Harun Farocki's

Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006) is a twelve channel video installation building upon the first Lumiere Brothers' film "Workers Leaving the

Factory" (1895). The installation goes through eleven decades of cinema and appropriates scenes of factory workers leaving work. In the digital remixing community these patterns of collection appear often though in many cases without the implicit political concerns observed by Farocki. In his writing, Farocki has justified this form of collecting in his call for "An Archive for Visual Concepts."

52 Many digital remixers catalog repetition in films through humorous reconstructions of tropes into a new ensemble. In Augart Media's remix Crash (2008), images of car crashes and car explosions are assembled into pulsating rhythmic crescendos. The remixer transforms Hollywood's overwrought love affair with automotive destruction into densely layered percussive experiments which reveal an incredible attention to detail and a highly patient and disciplined editor. Augart assembles other experiments by exploring screams, parades and war film images. One of his most ambitious works, YouTube Symphony (2009) is strikingly similar to

Christian Marclay's Video Quartet. In this work, Augart lifts YouTube clips from amateur musicians and layers them to construct his own experimental music piece.

The remixer AMDS, by far one of the most adept editors in the remix community, documents the use of black sunglasses as a device for imparting mystique onto characters in the remix Black Glasses (2007). The video utilizes hundreds of clips in which mostly male action heroes put-on or take-off sunglasses with a focus on the gestural continuity between each film. Unlike political remixers, AMDS does not construct a visible critique onto the materials he appropriates, but rather celebrates these films and their characters. A figure highly regarded in the remix community because of his seamless integration of multiple film images, AMDS is unlike other remixers who construct relationships between films through montage as mash-ups do.

Instead, AMDS is a collage remixer, putting multiple films into the same image. In Neo

Vs. Robocop (2007) the editor masterfully places both characters (including Charles

Bronson's character from Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Yoda from the

53 Star Wars (1977) films into the same frame. This kind of work, which celebrates films rather than critiques them, is discussed (albeit in an art context) by Hal Foster, who is concerned with appropriations that merely reproduce images rather than engages critically with them. In the last chapter of his book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural

Politics, Foster addresses appropriations which reveal a "fetishism of the signifier" or an uncritical passion for the materials appropriated (Foster, Recodings 175). This work might be a prime example of such a fetishism of spectacle and celebration of

Hollywood semiotics, which does not possess an implicit critique.

The examples above imply that the collection and ordering of archival images only occurs on a superficial level in digital remixes and do not necessarily consider the implications of the frequency of such images. But this criticism applies widely in the digital remixing community; remixers are more prone to making observations about cinema rather than examining what the prevalence of certain images might signify. This of course, does not apply to the entirety of the community. In the next section, I will focus on those digital remixers who explicitly engage in patterns of collection but do so in an expressly critical way. Before exploring these remixers, I will contextualize this practice in works of found footage film and video-making.

The Revision of Traumatic Images

As historical memory becomes the province of the moving image for new generations of North Americans, artists have become concerned with the master narratives and ideological subterfuge of the privileged groups able to produce the historical artifacts and cultural documents that comprise popular media in the 20

54 Century. The moving image archive as a site for storage and historical inquiry has been transformed by the works of contemporary artists and filmmakers into a malleable databank allowing for creative interventions into our understanding of the moving image and its pivotal role in creating historical memory. These archival interventions have revealed historical engineering by appropriating the very weapons of ideological control, revising them to reflect the traumatic and repressive realities of their creation.

In order to justify these interventions, we must consider the powerful documentary features of the photographic image and the role it plays in creating historical memory.

If the moving image archive is the physical site that instigates our investigation of this memory, the radical reconceptualization of its function can create a more progressive and inclusive reciprocality for both image-makers and spectators.

Digital remixers engage with the broader commons archive of digital video across the Internet by appropriating and transforming these images to reflect their repressive and illusory nature. I will give examples of this tendency in the works of found footage film and video-makers and draw connections with digital remixers. Critic

Sharon Sandusky refers to traumatic images as a "toxic film artifact" (Russell 243); a shard of the archive that reminds the contemporary viewer of the media's power to shape ideology and to reveal prejudices in very problematic ways. Critic Joel Katz suggests that the "agendas leak through the cracks"4 (Katz: 99) of archival films that can be dissected for their ideological leanings in a productive process of revision, a concept I will return to later. The pervasive use of ephemeral films from the 1950s is no

4 In this circumstance, Katz is referring to ephemeral films (a term coined by Rick Prelinger to refer to the industrial and educational films made for a singular purpose) but I think this designation is clearly interchangeable with other historically traumatic images.

55 accident in found footage films. This era's industrial, educational and public awareness films have been accused of repressive "social engineering," and for the "fabrication of visual evidence as a tool in ideological warfare" (Russell 242).

Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992) explores the films of the closeted gay heartthrob, Rock Hudson, whose role in the gay community has been multifaceted and contradictory, at once an iconic gay actor whose campy films were celebrated for their homosexual double entendre and the actor who "gave AIDS a face."5 Rappaport takes on Hudson's celebrated status as a gay cult actor and finds the tragedy in both the environment that necessitated his closeted status and in his death from AIDS in 1985. In this sense we can interpret Rappaport's film as an attempt to liberate Hudson from a repressive Hollywood system and give him the courage to speak the words he never could in his own life. This becomes the format for Rappaport's investigation of the images of heterosexual masculinity Hudson both personified and

(Rappaport posits) eschewed.

Once Hudson's homosexuality was revealed, his body of work was transformed from bland romantic comedies to campy gender bending farce (Dyer 31). By unearthing the sexually charged moments of these films, Rappaport can redraw history with the tools that once threatened the erasure of this truth. Found footage filmmaker Martin

Arnold supports this method of exhuming repressed artifacts when he writes:

The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction, and denial, a cinema of repression. In consequence we should not only consider what is shown, but also that which is not shown. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider (MacDonald 352).

5 This was famously said by Morgan Fairchild after Hudson's death.

56 Ultimately, Rappaport's work has helped to reveal to a whole new generation the harsh

social realities surrounding Hudson's closeted sexuality and their humorous and at

times poignant exposure. Digital remixers have engaged in similar efforts to read

media materials through appropriations that examine the ideological underpinnings of

film, television and commercials. Unlike archival interventions made by avant-

garde/experimental image-makers, digital remixes tend to focus on contemporary

media.

Remixers frequently focus on revealing the repressive and hostile role media

can play in acculturating the attitudes of filmgoers towards certain identities. I will give

two examples of how this tendency to document repetition in video art appropriation

occurs in the digital remixing context.

Digital Remixer Jacqueline Salloum's epic film-historical collage Planet of the

Arabs does more than just highlight the pervasive portrayal of Arabs as terrorists in

Hollywood films, but digs through the archive to reveal strategies and tropes that

pervade Hollywood cinema in regard to Arab characters. Another digital remix which

explores archival connections and groupings, this work compiles images from

Hollywood action films, daytime television, 1980s hostage crisis dramas and movie-of-

the-week dramatizations. Coupled with a heavy metal soundtrack, the film depicts an

outrageous collage of scenes depicting violent Arab radicalism, the presentation of

Arabs as archaic and incapable of dealing with an evolving world, images of Arab misogyny and anti-Semitism. These portrayals are punctuated with violent reprisals

57 against Arab characters by powerful and benevolent white characters that slaughter them en masse.

In the remix 300: This is Revisionism, remixer Craig Saddlemire reveals outrageous portrayals of identity in the film 300 (2006). The remix examines how this particular telling of the battle of Thermopylae idealizes the Spartans as heterosexual macho-men and demonizes the Persians as homosexual, disabled and decidedly Other.

Saddlemire argues that though sexism, homophobia, eugenics and cultural supremacy have been depicted in other films, 300 is striking for the sheer number of conservative and outright xenophobic images that constellate around this particular retelling of the battle of Thermopylae. This remix is a good example of what William Wees calls the undoing of the image. Wees writes, "To 'undo' an image means to loosen its connections to the cultural and ideological assumptions that lie behind its production and intended reception, so that it becomes available for...re-production and alternative reception" (Wees Ambiguous Aura 4). As both Jeffrey Skoller and Catherine Russell have pointed out, archival interventions and appropriations frequently take place at the site of a traumatic image.

Finally, remixer Elisa Kreisinger's work compiles numerous clips from film, television and news media to explore both the commodification of race and engendering of social stereotypes. In her remix Racial Equality - $29.95 (2009),

Kreisinger explores the commodification of Barack Obama's image as a symbol of a

"post-racial" society. Ultimately, she argues, the memorabilia that sells on street corners and on late night television represent a self-congratulatory American outlook

58 towards race that does not acknowledge the reality of disparate economic and social conditions that still exist. From compiled clips ranging from television network shopping channels to news stories on Obama's appearance in an issue of Spiderman,

Kreisinger constructs a loose commentary through a montage of voices and images. In one startling juxtaposition, an off screen commentator declares "It is blackness primarily in a commodified form that can then be possessed, owned, controlled and shaped by the consumer" which is followed by two shopping channel anchors urging the purchase of an Obama coin collection because it gives us something "concrete to hold on to."

Reasons for Revision

While many of the ephemeral materials used in these found footage films have been lost or are no longer circulated on television or cinemas, they have had a profound effect on the generations that viewed them. Critic Alison Landsberg suggests that media has the power to shape ideology through a process she calls "prosthetic memory." Drawing upon Benjamin, she cites the concept of memoire volontaire or voluntary memory described as a "conscious, willed, artificial archive" (Landsberg 17) made up of mediated narratives. As Benjamin came closer to the end of his life, he began to believe that "it becomes possible to have a mediated memory that one nevertheless experiences as real or genuine" (Landsbergl7). This idea has striking implications, not just for a particular era of media but also for all mediated realities.

First, Landsberg argues that critics like Siegfried Kracauer and Benjamin understood that these new technologies of memory "emerged in a capitalist economic system" and

59 that "mass cultural commodities—including memories—are disseminated across divisions of region, class, race and ethnicity" (Landsbergl8). This suggests that the propagandistic discourses that typified 1950s educational, industrial and commercial films were being disseminated "not simply as a means for consolidating a particular group's identity and passing on its memories; it also enables the transmission of memories to people who have no 'natural;' or biological claims to them" (Landsberg

18) This is a striking example of "Global Hollywood" as described by critic Toby

Miller, where international film markets are dominated by U.S. film exports. What we see in this exportation of media is a dissemination of "culturally acceptable" ideological and social beliefs to those who may not wish to receive them.

Critic Catherine Russell has suggested that "Once the postmodern image bank is recognized as a cultural data bank, its materials might be reformed, through appropriation, for new forms of memory" (Russell 270). This kind of reformation and transformation is found in the films of Dee Dee Halleck and Mark Rappaport. In

Halleck's film Gringo in Mananaland (1995), critic Jeffrey Skoller argues that Halleck uses her own childhood in Cuba to suggest a rift between the representation of Latin

America and her own authentic experiences. These traumatic images perpetuate a variety of stereotypes to reinforce imperialist capitalist enterprise, the necessary presence of a "white father" in Latin American politics and the intellectual inferiority and the rapacious libidinal desires of the population to name a few. Halleck oscillates between images from industrial films, most often by corporations like The United Fruit

Company, and mainstream Hollywood fare. Industrial films like Bananaland (1928)

60 and Journey to Bananaland (1953) were made for investors in these corporations to promote the positive image of the company as stewards of land in countries that weren't developed or sophisticated enough to provide for themselves (Skoller 27). The

Hollywood films used (many of which are still in circulation) are prone to depicting the specter of Marxism, which haunted wealthy foreign landowners who feared the nationalization of the tracts of land they used to grow crops. The opening of Halleck's films seeks to locate both Halleck's disconnect between the reality of life in Cuba and the mediated reality of Latin America.

Joel Katz suggest that the artist must approach archival images in such a way as to locate the ideology of the maker, rather than engage in the pervasive mocking of the participants which appears as kitsch in industrial/educational films. He writes, "A complex semiotics of archive must see film not only as a representation of what was in front of the camera, but who was behind it and why" (Katz 17). This strikes at the very core of the bifurcation between our looking at traumatic images as kitsch and reflecting upon them as an artifact of the past that must be faced and in a more complex way absorbed in order to define a more progressive future.

Joseph Cornell distinguishes himself from other found footage filmmakers in his attitude towards the appropriated images of actresses in Hollywood. Cornell was a fan, celebrating actresses like Rose Hobart by appropriating the discourse of the romantic elegy or "lament for the dead" as Critic Jodi Hauptman argues. Hauptman suggests that Cornell imagined he was creating homage and monuments to commemorate these actresses by "freezing" them (as in Rose Hobart) or by sending

61 them into the past (as with his use of an archaic form of picture processing called the daguerreotype employed for his portrait of Greta Garbo) (Hauptman 119). By imagining these women as lost or dead, he could commemorate them with romantic and dramatic images frozen in boxes like bodies in a mausoleum, which Hauptman reminds us, Adorno likened to the "museum" (Hauptman 53).

The fascinating transformation that occurs in Cornell's work can be likened to contemporary uses of found footage as critique—even while he was most concerned with a kind of elegizing of figures. Cornell was not necessarily a fan of the films that actresses he admired were in. He was deeply suspicious of the "sexual hoopla"

(Hauptman 55) contained within Lauren Bacall's first film To Have and Have Not

(1944), though he was sufficiently captivated by Bacall's image to dedicate a Dossier

(Cornell's collections of images for important figures in his life) and several boxes to her. The most famous of these boxes renders her archaic (and therefore more innocent), by constructing her as a penny arcade star. Cornell was not, however, simply a fan. He writes that he saw the film as belonging to "this age of endless dull pictures and endlessly dull movie personalities, of an incredible mediocrity and banality"

(Hauptman 55). Rose Hobart and a number of his boxes possess the same kinds of critiques that later found footage films employ, though Cornell utilizes a poetic mode to commemorate and celebrate these actresses as sensual, rather than sexual beings.

Hauptman describes these films as a kind of "fetish machine" (Hauptman 74). Cornell's work sought to transform the overly-sexualized images of contemporary film actresses into ethereal and mysterious women from a more innocent past. His transformations

62 exonerate these women from overt sexuality (a necessity for the Christian Scientist

Cornell), though they are full of sensuality. This is described by Jean-Christophe

Agnew as "a dialectic of disgust and desire" (Hauptman: 77). These transformations are both conservative in their attempt to obliterate female sexual agency and yet progressive for their "liberation" of images drawn by (and for) the male gaze.

What becomes immediately perceptible through Hauptman's arguments is that

Cornell's appropriations speak the same language of transformation that many political remixes use—the language of redemption. Though a majority of found footage film images are employed to trouble the image, to magnify or release some hidden meaning

(of a nefarious sort), political remixes reach into the archive in order to reconstitute the truth in repressive images obscuring the reality of both their creation and their claims.

Creating More Authentic Originals

The processes of archival image revision are often an attempt simultaneously to separate an image from superficial elements that express false knowledge or artifice and in turn construct a more authentic image. I first discovered this discourse in appropriation art in relation to the works of the re-photographer Richard Prince whose work reproduces commercial images through copying and photography. Prince is interested in how commercial images produce desire, but also in detourning these very images to produce a more frightening image of consumer culture and commodity fetishism. Critic Rosetta Brooks describes Prince's photo series Untitled (Living

Rooms) (Fig. 2.1) from 1977, a series of re-photographed living room sets. She writes,

"His treatment of its light, ephemeral, transient qualities actually exposes a sinister

63 underside—a vacuity, a residue of the uncanny that can be defined as the opposite of light both in terms of heaviness and darkness..." (Brooks 36). Prince's work is often described by its capacity to possess conflicting registers of humour, darkness, great depth and vacuity. In the living room series, photos meant to elicit the great style and comfort that can exist in a living space instead infer a sense of loss and emptiness. The lack of people present in the images complements the pristine furniture, suggesting the institutional desolation of a prison rather than the comforts of a modern home. Prince manages to turn what was made to induce desire and consumption into a horrific image of loneliness, alienation and excess.

(Fig. 2.1: Prince, Richard. Untitled (Living Rooms) 1977.)

Brooks' major point in this article is to suggest that Prince creates "originals that are more authentic than originals" (Brooks 38). This authenticity can only be achieved,

64 Brooks argues, by "isolating] the particular aspects that have bound the work into a cohesive and unified whole..."(Brooks 38). A complex layer of semiotic intervention takes place in Prince's work, which cannot be adequately explained through simple adjustments in light and dark, tint, hue or exposure. The "paranormal" element of

Prince's photographs, as critic John C. Welchman suggests, comes from:

a series of deferrals from transparent signification. Thus his status as an artist is held in suspension between generative and editorial functions ('somewhere between a creator and copyist')...The appropriated image itself, variously adjusted according to the 8-track regimen, and 'more a simulation than an expression', gives rise to 'a photograph that's the closest thing to the real thing' and whose effects include 'strange, disquieting presence' (Welchman 12).

Though Prince's formal achievements have no parallel in digital remixing that I am aware of, the uncanny effect of finding a text and suturing a critique into the text itself seems to resonate with the digital remixes I have discussed in the Political Remix section of Chapter One. The interruption of transparent signification and infusion of the text with a higher level of authenticity, one which acknowledges the deception inherent in the image while simultaneously attempting to address or correct it, also occurs in works like the Dow: The Human Element remix.

Prince's art is a kind of detective work, seeking to draw out the origin of an image that has been co-opted or monopolized by the marketing apparatus of corporations. Prince forces the viewer to take a second look at images to seek the rationale for this corporate monopolization, to think about how marketing has re­ assigned meaning onto the image for the spectator and also attempts to disassociate the image from the corporate name. His work uses the rhetoric of everyday advertising but renders this banality spectacular through a process of defamiliarization to approach the

65 truth of an image through rigorous examination. Brooks argues that Prince's

"unmasking" of consumer images reveals that the content does not adequately depict the representation, and that in these images there is no apparent content—only empty representations (Brooks 54).

Digital remixers also attempt to construct a kind of replacement rather than an annotation to commercial and corporate materials. The use of the discourse of television commercials is not an merely an attempt by political remixers to package critiques in a form palatable to popular culture, but instead it is done to insinuate political remixes into the mediascape that resemble in style and production values the very message they are attempting to critique. This aesthetic of replacement is perhaps what may best link the appropriation art movement to digital remixers. While found footage filmmakers have worked hard to disrupt the commercial aesthetic of films and television, appropriation artists like Prince, Kruger and Koons or other critics of media like Jenny Holzer have instead parroted the discourse of popular media to introduce their critique.

Charting the Direct Influences of Digital Remixers

Though it is easy to liken digital remixing to avant-garde found footage films by analyzing style, content and techniques, difficulties arise when attempting to chart the actual influence avant-garde works have had on contemporary digital remixers.

Certainly digital remixing at least appears to be a continuation of a trajectory the avant- garde had begun in the 1980s. Another explanation is that there were intermediaries between the video art community and the digital remixing community.

66 While Rappaport, Marclay and Muller's works are an important step towards digital remixing, they have not necessarily had a direct influence on contemporary works. What is clear is that certain artists (Craig Baldwin, Emergency Broadcast

Network, Negativland) became intermediaries between avant-garde and Internet filmmakers and are all heavily featured on the same Internet sites and YouTube channels as digital remixers. These found footage filmmakers have had a visible impact in the political remix milieu, as evinced by remixer Jonathan Mcintosh, who has written:

What I was doing had historic roots; in fact I had been partially inspired by remix works from Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN) created in the early 1990s. Arguably their most famous video We Will Rock You, brilliantly re-spliced George Bush senior's words making him appear to sing lyrics over a beat in a televised address about the 1991 invasion of Iraq (Mcintosh 1).

Emergency Broadcast Network is a group of Rhode Island School of Design graduates who began making video collages which featured sampled hip-hop/funk beats or sound beds with lyrics, composed from samples taken from entertainment and news media, which mocked, undermined or assaulted traditional American values in the 1990s.

During the 1991 Gulf War, EBN recorded televised broadcasts of the war, coupled with fancy news graphics and highly produced theme music on these networks, which EBN began remixing with other popular television and music materials. The resulting work, a highly condensed rapid fire account of the war and popular media surrounding it, was initially screened in art galleries, and then in night clubs as a multi-media band that was equal part video art collective and performance troupe. The group designed sophisticated electronic-sculptural components, similar to those of video artist Nam

June Paik. The telepodium, a podium surrounded by TV screens with mixing

67 equipment, media input sources and a microphone which combined elements of a religious altar, DJ set-up, news anchor's table and an affixed rocket launcher used to hurtle projectiles and signify the end of each performance.

While political remixer Jonathan Mcintosh cites EBN as a central influence, he was also motivated to make political remixes under circumstances identical to those of

EBN co-founders Joshua Pearson and Gardner Post. Mcintosh writes:

In March of 2003,1 found myself glued to the television watching in horror and disbelief as American bombs rained down on the people of Iraq. Like many people living in the United States, I was deeply disturbed by our mainstream media's cheerleading for war and their childlike fascination with military weaponry. As each broadcast seemed more and more void of humanity or concern for Iraqi lives, I was compelled to grab my video camera, hook it up to the screen and begin recording the carnage. Especially unsettling for me was the surreal juxtaposition of happy-go-lucky TV commercials for major brands scattered in-between news reports of an ancient civilization being laid waste in real time before my eyes. It was that absurdity coupled with my sense of outrage at the sheer injustice being perpetrated, which informed my first Political Remix Video (PRV) works (Mcintosh 1).

EBN's videos were made under identical circumstances, but during the first Iraq war.

Mcintosh would go on to produce a series of videos utilizing images from the war, military recruiting advertisements and other commercials all accessible both through his website and YouTube. After several years of self-distribution, he began to attract the attention of video festivals and activist organizations, which solicited him for work and lectures.

High and Low Cultural Blending: The Influence of Hip-Hop and Graffiti

Culture

"The essence of Hip-Hop truly is the transformation of existing objects and forms." - KRS-ONE

68 Hip-Hop music and culture have had a profound impact on the development of digital remixes, supplying a new approach to appropriation which provided the most significant aesthetic and conceptual break from the strategies of the avant-garde. The

Hip-Hop DJ's amalgamation of music from multiple sources is not utilized as an interruptive gesture, but rather in the same way the Soviet re-editors attempted to construct a cohesive syntax from mangled Western films. However hip-hop music doesn't necessarily aspire to camouflage its transformations, as it contains samples coming from well known popular music. Instead samples are used to speak in a vocabulary familiar to listeners—who can instead marvel at the ingenuity of the DJ's mastery of assembling, matching and synching music.

The first appearance of hip-hop aesthetics in video art appropriation likely appears in the work of the collective Emergency Broadcast Network which features rapid-fire cuts, hip-hop influenced beats for background music and the sampling of voices. EBN co-founder Gardner Post reflected on the influence of hip-hop in their work:

When we first heard hip-hop and the appropriation of hooks and choruses and recontextualizing them just blew my mind and I'm still just a .. .die hard old school hip-hop fan.. .That's what really motivated us. I saw what all these artists were doing with audio and I'm a visual person and I wanted to do the exact same thing but with video clips (Post).

Hip-Hop also had a strong influence on the appropriative aesthetics of artist Christian

Marclay, who insists that his work "didn't come from the appropriation strategy of the

1980s..." (Seliger 136) but rather influences like Marcel Duchamp's readymades and hip-hop music's aesthetics of appropriation. Marclay began to notice the overlap in strategies of appropriation by both the art world and counter-culture music world. He

69 suggests "Richard Prince and Grandmaster Flash were doing the same thing in the early

1980s, but with different media" (Seliger 136).

Art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud has made numerous compelling arguments linking the appropriations of hip-hop DJs with those of visual artists. Bourriaud argues in his book Postproduction that contemporary appropriations are the result of consumers acting like producers in a vein similar to Marcel Duchamp with the invention of the readymades. Bourriaud writes "A DJ's set is not unlike an exhibition of objects that Duchamp would have described as "assisted readymades" more or less modified products whose sequence produces a specific duration" (Bourriaud 38). With this formulation, Bourriaud points to the appropriator as a collector, programmer or curator selecting, matching, sequencing and re-presenting extant materials. The valorization of the DJ as an author of a unique ensemble takes place once sequences become sophisticated and complex enough to warrant such claims. Bourriaud suggests that "Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts" (Bourriaud 13).

Digital video remixes frequently exhibit the tendency in visual art appropriations to explore the dialectical relationship between "high" and "low" art; a tendency featured in the fine art context by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Claes

Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger and Andy Warhol. This dialectic itself can take place in high and low contexts. When New York City subway graffiti artists

70 Lee and Fred create a roll call of their graffiti crew using Andy Warhol's appropriated

Campbell's soup can paintings, they are speaking to high art from the vantage point of low art. Conversely, when Jeff Koons creates porcelain statues of Michael Jackson and his pet chimp "Bubbles," he is speaking from high art to low art. The history of collage is mired in this dialectic, which is illustrated by theorist Thomas Crow when he argues

"The principle of collage construction itself collapses the distinction between high and low by transforming the totalizing creative practice of traditional painting into a fragmented consumption of already existing manufactured images" (Hoffman 7). This blending of the everyday quotidian artifacts of urban life is also a deconstructive act, as it often utilizes images designed to facilitate desire and consumption in order to look closely at the messages and strategies employed within them. Crow suggests that the avant-garde existed because of the "surrender of the academy to the philistine demands of the modern marketplace" (Crow 216) and that high-low blending was a means of illustrating and critiquing this new reality. It should be emphasized that not all critics celebrate or believe in the progressive nature of high and low cultural blending. Art critic Benjamin H.D. Buchloh suggests that:

[e]very time the avant-garde appropriates elements from the discourse of low, folk or mass culture, it publicly denounces its own elitist isolation and the obsolescence of its inherited production procedures. Ultimately, each such instance of 'bridging the gap between art and life', as Robert Rauschenberg famously put it, only reaffirms the stability of the division because it remains within the context of high art (Buchloh 179).

This argument appears to quite validly point out that an avant-garde can never overcome its own ghettoization by introducing mass cultural objects and media. It would be curious to see how a popular practice such as digital remixing, existing

71 outside of the avant-garde might be assessed by Buchloh, considering it speaks to popular culture from popular cultural channels.

Graffiti appropriates localities usually reserved for licensed and therefore socially accepted modes of advertising. Whereas advertising is seen as an additive act in which images or media are added to the blank cityscape, graffiti is frequently touted as a destructive gesture that interrupts and defaces property. This act has destructive dimensions primarily because of the repurposing of walls as canvas and the inscription of messages (which are usually reserved for self-promotion) onto walls rather than on- top-of them, as advertisements do. This destructive and disruptive gesture is shared with remixers who often impose new meanings onto rather than on-top-of media. When a cultural critic critiques a text, they utilize quotations from the original and synthesize arguments. Their critique never takes place within the quotation of another writer, and therefore places commentary on-top-of texts. For remixers, transformation takes place within the quotation itself, producing a form of writing onto other media. In this way, I frame the act of remixing as a critical form of graffiti, where instead of writing one's name onto a wall, one is instead writing a response to a text onto its surface.

The guerilla channels employed by remixers are at play on the walls of every

Western city. While tackling the subject of graffiti in 1980s New York, Hal Foster suggests, "In the midst of a city of signs that exclude you, what to do but inscribe signs of your own?" (Foster, Recodings 49) Foster suggests that the (often disenfranchised) youth that see the "alien cultural codes" of advertising, are encouraged to "transgress th[is] code" and transmit their own language (Foster, Recodings 49). From Foster's

72 positioning of graffiti writers as alienated from the signs of consumption they cannot participate in, we may also glean the impetus of many remixers. After all, remixing is a form of criticism regarding the exclusive control of content, which flies in the face of the participation facilitated by the Internet that spawned video remixing as we know it.

Disenfranchised individuals form guerilla channels for communication when discourse cannot effectively take place in another context. The destruction/deconstruction of property (be it intellectual or physical property) appears to manifest itself amidst an alienated counterculture.

The remixer's alternative method of broadcasting/distribution mirrors what critic Kirk Varnedoe describes as "the urban scrawler's marginal role as anti- authoritarian bad boy.. .fantasizing] about a form of art that could communicate the most aggressive impulses directly to the public without censorship or compromise."

(Varnedoe 76) The total control allotted to the remixer and their own ability to self- distribute (though copyright holders and citizens may object to the content and force it off a website) promises a method of communication unencumbered by the restrictions

(financial, corporate and otherwise) and difficulties in creating media content on mainstream communications channels. The act of appropriation can be boiled down in some sense to the writing of one's name onto an object or work of art—the same process that motivates the countless individuals who deface the cityscape. However, while remixers may revel in the criminality of their anti-copyright practice, unlike graffiti writers they also vociferously argue its legality through fair use.

73 Varnedoe argues that subway graffiti in the 1980s was the result of the principles of modernism appropriated into a folk cultural form. He writes:

The subway writers absorbed what had become by the late seventies the commonplace of modernisms as they had permeated the entire culture—the faith in the glory of individual innovation, the insistence on a fiercely competitive battle of new styles the sense of new styles, the sense that the entire history of art, high and low should be ransacked and recycled and made one's own signature style (Varnedoe 376).

Remixers frequently use monikers both to evade legal prosecution stemming from copyright claims and as a means of creating a more easily identifiable product. Like graffiti artists before them, remixers adopt monikers to build their reputations and promote themselves as auteurs through the mastery of signal signature styles. Nicolas

Bourriaud argues that the use of monikers, which are employed by remixers and graffiti artists relates to the tendency of corporations to invent subsidiaries with distinct names to distinguish their products. Bourriaud writes:

More than a physical person, a name now designates a mode of appearance or production, a line, a fiction. This logic is also that of multinationals, which present product lines as if they emanated from anonymous firms. Based on the nature of his products a musician such as Rony Size will call himself "breakbeat era" or "reprezent," just as Coca-Cola or Vivendi Universal owns a dozen or so distinct brands which the public does not think to connect (Bourriaud 87).

The use of graffiti in works of the avant-garde has often occurred in tandem with appropriation art. Duchamp's defacing of the Mona Lisa famously contains a piece of scandalous graffiti inscribed below the smiling portrait stating L.H.O.O.Q., which when read phonetically recalls a sentence roughly translating to "she has a hot ass." Asger

Jorn's "The Avant-Garde Doesn't Give Up" (Fig. 2.2) defaces another found painting with graffiti in the foreground.

74 (Fig. 2.2: Jorn, Asger. The Avant-Garde Doesn't Give Up. 1962.)

Varnedoe goes on to say, "Graffiti as a whole is a composite phenomenon, part childish

prank, park adult insult. It is whimsical and political, amused and angry, witty and

obscene, often tending toward the palimpsest..."(Varnedoe 77). Critic Lucy Reynolds

has written that found footage films are a kind of cinematic palimpsest, though she

suggests this because they reveal the layers of written media histories and are "the ultimate embodiment of time in cinema" as these films present a "simultaneous archive

rather than a horizontal one" (Reynolds: 16). However, one could expand upon the palimpsestic properties of found footage films by highlighting the re-writing that takes place through editing, onto the image itself. In this way, the layers of meaning and

75 authorship liken found footage to the palimpsest, especially in the context of remixing, when materials are used repeatedly.

Bourriaud locates historical bodies of work as places to begin from through replicating those materials and altering them. One cannot help but remember

Situationist artist Asger Jorn's project to update paintings (which he called

"defiguration") by simply painting over reproductions to make them "modern" as previously discussed with "The Avant-Garde Doesn't Give Up." This kind of art- making questions a teleological end to the process of creating an artwork as once supposed and constructs a new paradigm. Bourriaud says that "The artwork is no longer an endpoint but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions" (Bourriaud: 20).

This kind of art making in which works are constantly revised, revisited and altered mirrors the programming algorithms for the Wiki in which a page is constantly changed

(for better or worse) under the auspices of improvement over time.

Bourriaud hits upon one of the central themes of contemporary remixing, that being the curatorial and the selection process that informs many contemporary

"postproduction" or found footage artworks. If we look at the major thrust of Christian

Marclay's found footage films, we observe that the emphasis is on the collection of materials rather than on their presentation. The artist's "definition" of the artwork implies a kind of replacement of the original coding of the work or object which indicates the transformation made through a second look, or an impulse to more closely examine a text and to produce a revision. Many contemporary modes of appropriation

76 deal with constructing "archival interventions" in which features of the archive are reproduced to facilitate transformation in their groupings and combinations.

The Semiotic Dimensions of Appropriation

One of the principal formal contributions made by digital remixing to found footage filmmaking is the introduction of even more rigorous narrative concerns featured in the attempt to create the appearance of "cohesive films" from disparate ones. For all of their absurdities, illogical linkages and bizarre associations, trailer re- cuts and mashups are still presented in the appropriated discourse of real film trailers.

They prominently feature studio logos, MPAA ratings, release dates, and cast and crew cards to root themselves into the reality of viable film marketing. The introduction of disparate source materials montaged (and sometimes collaged into a single frame) is entrenched in that famous 20th century tradition of "hypnagogic association," of playful detournement and perverse interpretation; in other words Dadaism and Surrealism.

If we accept the idea that found footage appropriations are a step closer towards

Bertolt Brecht and Jean Baudrillard's models for reciprocal communication, the process of the "response" made by found footage films appears in the "recoding" of signifiers from the source material. This process of recoding frequently occurs in found footage films as a process of intentional misunderstanding. The derivative material is

"decoded" in a way that doesn't obey the rules of the "encoder." This process is named, in a slightly different context, by Umberto Eco as "aberrant decoding." Critic William

Wees is the first theorist to my knowledge to mention this concept in relation to found

77 footage (Wees Ambiguous Aura of Hollywood Stars, 3). Theorist Daniel Chandler explains this form of reading:

Where those involved in communicating do not share common codes and social positions, decodings are likely to be different from the encoder's intended meaning. Umberto Eco uses the term 'aberrant decoding' to refer to a text which has been decoded by means of a different code from that used to encode it. Eco describes as 'closed' those texts that show a strong tendency to encourage a particular interpretation - in contrast to more 'open' texts. He argues that mass media texts tend to be 'closed texts', and because they are broadcast to heterogeneous audiences diverse decodings of such texts are unavoidable. (Chandler)

While under these circumstances Eco suggests that mistaken decoding may be the function of texts broadcast to a heterogeneous audience that may make "diverse decodings," we can take this idea to also apply to an audience that may intentionally decode the message in a way it was not meant to be understood. Semioticians identify four modes of audience decoding:

The audience member assumes the dominant hegemonic position when they recognize and agree with the full-preferred meaning offered by the media text. The oppositional hegemonic position is established when the audience member understands the preferred meaning, but disagrees with it due to their own set of attitudes and beliefs. The negotiated hegemonic position is established when the audience member opposes or has to adapt the preferred meaning. The fourth type of audience response is referred to as aberrant decoding. This is where the audience member reads the text in an unpredicted way, producing a deviant meaning (Hanes, emphasis by author).

In this model, we may presume several kinds of possible "misidentifications" occur in the process of creating derivative works. This may appear to be a slippery deduction for the simple fact that the original intention may not be as clear as it seems and that the

"encoder" or creator of the original footage may have intentionally created multiple readings. What is clear, however, is that found footage filmmakers attempt to highlight these alternative readings. Kasimir Malevitch argued the power the artist has over

78 signification, when he wrote, "The alogical collusion of two forms... illustrates the moment of struggle between logic, the natural law, bourgeois sense and prejudice"

(Hoffman 9). Malevitch's assertion suggests the revolutionary power of appropriation lies in what can be revealed through accidental juxtapositions made by the artists and the associations they might produce for the spectator. This kind of art, which reveals the psychological process of association, would later be used in the Surrealist movement.

Aberrant decoding and intentional misreading are some of the central strategies of artists associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist art movement in Europe. Andre

Breton's introduction of an artistic method and philosophy that asserted the "superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought" (Breton 75) has frequently been employed as a strategy to impose new meanings. While Breton is primarily discussing the aberrant decoding of reality into Surrealist texts, this strategy is also employed in the reading of art works as well. We might understand Surrealism as a means of imposing alternative meanings by looking at the first lines of Breton's manifesto, which question "the reign of logic" and "absolute rationalism which... allows for the consideration of only those facts narrowly relevant to our experience" (Breton 66).

Breton argues the relevance of strategies exploring "the dream" (or the unconscious) as a site for exploration in art, as a means of finding linkages between reality and dream made through often shocking associations. Collage was frequently used to provoke

79 these shocking associations in their exploration of subconscious linkages between signs or signifiers.

Eco's concept of aberrant decoding offers the reader/spectator/receiver of a message "the freedom to read it in a different way" (Eco, 1983: 138). This freedom, for

Eco, was not simply a semiotic principle he proposed. This freedom represented an opportunity for individuals to engage in what he called "semiological guerrilla warfare"

(Eco, Travels in Hyperreality 135). Eco suggests that in modern countries the seizure of political power takes place in the media, not with the consolidation of military power.

(Eco, Travels in Hyperreality 135) The freedom to decode messages in a way that does not conform to the encoder and then to recode those messages is a powerful weapon for artists to construct critiques of popular media.

Paul Arthur adds a dimension to this argument when he suggests that aberrant decoding is more localized in the text than one might think. From his vantage point, the possible misreadings of a text are located within the text itself, rather than being part of the interpretive operations of the appropriator:

Representatives of the politicized avant-garde, including but hardly limited to artists of color, contend that the horizon of possibility in appropriated images is mapped by and through ideological significations already present in the artifact. For this group, the crucial task is not the combining of "pure," unaffiliated fragments in order to construct new meanings with alternative historical perspectives, but rather the interrogation or "detourning" of collusive strands of embedded ideology in extant materials. Found footage collage is thus by definition a dialogical operation, pitting two (or more) enunciative agents against each other (Arthur 62).

80 Arthur's distinction is an important one. Some processes of aberrant decoding may take place within the text, dealing with the ideological, historical and social conditions taking place within the images themselves.

The "Author" as Producer

To conclude this chapter, I would like to consider how digital remixes fit into a wider range of labor relations and modes of production. To do this, I would like to consider Walter Benjamin's influential text "The Author As Producer." While discussing literature, Benjamin argues that the novel must not be an "isolated object" but exists in a "context of living social relations"(Benjamin 86). He insists that the true question is: how does the work deal with "the social production relations of its time."

Production and the method of production of an artistic work are of central importance in this essay and has motivated me to explore this question in relation to found footage film and digital remixing—methods which challenge capitalist modes of production through their reuse of extant materials.

Benjamin asks whether a work "underwrites, is reactionary to, or aspires to overthrow" the modes of production in the time in which the work is written. He suggests that Brecht, who coined the phrase "functional transformation to describe the transformation of forms and instruments of production by a progressive intelligentsia" was "interested in liberating the means of production and hence active in class struggle"

(Benjamin 93). However, Benjamin suggests that the intelligentsia must not merely supply an apparatus, but must also transform it "in the direction of socialism"

(Benjamin 93). These ideas seem to have a special resonance for artists who

81 appropriate moving images, specifically in the contemporary context of Internet distribution, though we must acknowledge the lack of socialist content for many creators of these works.

Historically, found footage has been deeply concerned with issues of representation and commodification in relation to moving images, an issue also present in the works of digital remixes. The use of found footage was simultaneously a "taking back" of cultural memory and the employment of a "second look" at these materials for purposes of critique and transformation. However Benjamin would have focused on the method of production present in appropriated works: the unlicensed appropriation of commercial images meant to disrupt their intentionality, the making of films in which actors, directors, writers and crew are no longer necessary and thus neither is the accompanying capital that funds such a large constituency, the creation of a community based on sharing rather than profit margins. YouTube represents a radical reconfiguration of the frequently obscure and often highly exclusive screening spaces that the cinematic avant-garde has relied upon to screen films. In other words, a malleable commons archive—though materials can be introduced and taken out.

Benjamin describes why he favors appropriation as a strategy in art (specifically in relation to painting) writing that:

[T]he revolutionary strength of Dadaism lay in testing art for its authenticity. You made still-lifes out of tickets, spools of cotton, cigarette stubs, and mixed them with pictorial elements. You put a frame round the whole thing. And in this way you said to the public: look, your picture frame destroys time; the smallest authentic fragment of everyday life says more than painting (Benjamin 94).

Though Benjamin suggests that the introduction of everyday objects into these aesthetic situations tests the notions of the primacy of the author's work, it is worth noting that

82 he does so within the context of painting. Benajmin's larger point seems to be about representation and how it can be challenged by the introduction of "the object itself rather than an attempt to manufacture an image from that object. Nonetheless, if digital remixes and found footage practices construct critiques of media, the use of that media, itself a kind of object from everyday life, fits into the wider parameters of appropriation that Benjamin argues for in this essay.

Benjamin writes that, "An author who has carefully thought about the conditions of production today will never be concerned with the products alone, but always, at the same time, with the means of production" (Benjamin 98). This issue of production is clearly an issue that has not been entirely resolved by many radical filmmakers of the past and present that employ the same methods of production as the

Hollywood counterparts they wish to critique. It is however, a kind of ringing endorsement of those who work outside of capitalist modes of production and reassign meaning through critique and transformation of extant materials.

83 Chapter Three New Media Resistance: Machinima and the Avant-Garde

"Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts. (Bourriaud 13)

"Somewhere between the video game and the CD-ROM there could be another way of making films..." (Godard 38)

In this chapter, I will explore how digital technologies and software have produced forms of appropriation, which differ greatly from found footage and digital remixing. My interest in machinima stems simultaneously from the cheap apparatus for filmmaking it offers as well as its status as a new form of appropriation unique to digital technologies. Nicolas Bourriaud's invocation of the programmer as an appropriator of digital code applies to machinima insomuch as the machinima-maker or machinimator utilizes platforms, images and data processes in an ensemble to form a new product. This kind of art-making also mirrors the practice of assemblagist or collagist taking pieces of images and objects and reconfiguring them into a new ensemble. This chapter focuses on the antagonistic relationship machinima has to videogames and argues that these features resemble the critical relationship video art shared with television. Additionally, I am interested in highlighting how avant-garde filmmakers have lifted this technique from amateurs (almost the reverse of the lifting of avant-garde techniques by digital remixers) in order to construct their own critiques of video games.

84 Digital Folk Art

It was Jean Cocteau who reminded us all that the cinema as a pluralistic and egalitarian medium could never come into fruition "until the materials are as cheap as pencil and paper." The string of technological advances in digital video technology and editing software for the personal computer have steadily brought the cost of filmmaking closer to Cocteau's Utopian vision and no group has adopted these new technologies with as much enthusiasm and resourcefulness as avant-garde filmmakers and video artists. It appeared that the avant-garde was continuing its trajectory towards the use of increasingly affordable tools and means of production. While the theoretical and aesthetic possibilities of many new "expanded cinema" technologies seem limitless, there has been a movement away from the thrifty art-making tools Cocteau once championed. The latest developments in new media technology do not share the economy that video offered nearly 40 years ago. Much of virtual reality, experimental screening spaces and location-based image production are raising the cost of experimental filmmaking and narrowing the number of people who may use these new tools.

If the success of video art seems in part attributable to the possibility of camcorders getting into the hands of a diverse group of artists, has the new media movement stifled a once democratizing technological force in the avant-garde? Was video, as a cheap apparatus for making folk art, abandoned for the more sophisticated, expensive and more intriguing tools of new media? Part of the fascination with video art as a medium stemmed from the ability of marginalized people to make art works

85 that radically challenged hegemonic visual discourses in new ways. The video art movement as we know it is predicated in part on its accessibility to people who could not afford to obtain any other cinematic apparatus. The question is, what new technologies will further create spaces for the disenfranchised to be involved in cinematic discourse? I will posit that machinima has such democratizing properties. In this sense, I hope to draw parallels to a younger generation of outsider filmmakers, or folk artists, who are engaging with video game culture much the same way video artists once critiqued television. These practitioners of machinima have aligned themselves in some unusual ways with the video art / avant-garde film movement in their technological ingenuity and their appropriation of extant mass media images all within the expressly cheap confines of the PC. Additionally, I argue that machinima represents a new form of appropriation that is unique to digital technologies and represents a continuation of the spirit of found footage image making though it possesses distinctions that should not be overlooked.

The word machinima (ma-SHIN-i-ma) is a contraction of machine and cinema first coined by the "The Strange Company" film collective, a group of gamers devoted to their own unique version of detournement also known as emergent gameplay or metagaming. These terms refer to playing games in ways contrary to the designer's original intentions. Gamers script a story and utilize in-game camera features or avatars to record action within the real time 3D environment of a video game. After the footage is captured and edited, actors provide voices to produce what looks like 3D animation through the use of a video game platform (either a console or a PC) and an editing

86 program. Machinima is unlike animation because the 3D engine that controls the images exists within the parameters of a video game. The algorithms of the game detail the behavior of avatars, weather, environmental boundaries and even provides a sophisticated platform designed to emulate real world Newtonian physics.

Various features have been offered by a diversity of games to give machinimators a wide range of environments and avatars to choose from. Some games and demo programs like SimLife, The Movies, Unreal Tournament and now

Machinimator allow for the construction of nearly any environment and avatar imaginable. In this sense, machinima does not need to exist in the confines of what would be described as a game—because there ceases to be objectives or goals to playing. Microsoft was so excited about the use of the Halo game in the hit machinima show Red Vs. Blue (produced by Rooster Teeth Productions) that they created a special machinima license6 and a new command in the sequel Halo 3 which allows players to lower their weapon, a feature "designed solely to make it easier for Rooster Teeth to do dialogue" (Thompson) as the feature has no other conceivable purpose for the game.

Just as violent video games tend to exploit chauvinistic representations and absurd caricatures of masculinity, so too did early machinima films. Beyond the drive to represent machinima games as they intend to be represented are the game constraints that drive this. At any given moment in games like Halo 2 every character is armed in some way. The virtual host of machinima talk show This Spartan Life, which takes place in the Halo 3 game, noted ironically "This place would be a lot safer if there

6 The license stipulates that derivative works may be made from Microsoft's Xbox console if they are for personal and non-commercial use. For details of the license visit http://www.xbox.com/en- US/community/developer/rules.htm

87 weren't so many guns around." It is a marvel that anything but the impetus to employ machinima to create a more cinematic spectacle of death and explosions has become a dominant facet of the technique.

Early machinima was gamer oriented, showing how to advance to new levels, discover secrets within the game or to reveal strategies and techniques for more successful game play. Machinima's comic possibilities were realized by the film Male

Restroom Etiquette (2006) which has received nearly 5 million hits on YouTube and is in the top 100 most viewed films on the site. Red Vs. Blue, a popular machinima show which ran 100 episodes and five seasons, uses absurdist humor to explore the lives of two groups of cynical soldiers engaged in a war without meaning or purpose. The characters pontificate in the appropriated style of Samuel Beckett about the pathos of their task and the meaninglessness of their existence as soldiers. The show has subsequently been used by Microsoft to promote their game console Xbox.

An experimental machinima contingency began to develop with the creation of both The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences , an organization devoted to promoting the use of machinima and heading the Machinima film festival, and

Machinima.com which provide forums, articles and a film archive for machinima lovers. Machinima is a nascent technological breakthrough, which, like video art and avant-garde films before it, radically redefines the means of production associated with traditional narrative filmmaking. The techniques employed to create many machinima films resemble avant-garde film practices; the films have a collage aesthetic, they

7 The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences should also be understood as an example of machinimators attempting to identify themselves with the Hollywood film organization The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Visit www.machinima.org

88 appropriate both the images of another medium as well as the discursive and narrative strategies of video game culture, they are acts of detournement or media resistance often entrenched in radical politics. For all these reasons, the process of machinima captured the attention of avant-garde artists and a number of open minded outsiders to begin exploring machinima's abstract and non-narrative potential.

While machinima resembles found-footage filmmaking in its appropriation of extant images and sounds, there are some notable differences. Instead of full fledged cinematic appropriations, machinima employs digitally appropriated environments, avatars, background stories and even pre-rendered sequences. Unlike traditional found footage films, the content within the 3D environment is highly malleable and needn't be fixed. This freedom radically differs from the transformation of fixed meanings implied by the use of extant images in found footage works. How we understand this appropriation is necessarily complicated, as it has no precedent, to my knowledge, in art. The use of a computer as an apparatus in machinima is shared with works of digital remixing, which largely derives images from the Internet and edits them on a computer. The selected game, it could be argued, becomes an analog for the footage used by digital remixers—though this image is partially blank in the case of machinima, and must be constructed.

While the videos are often engaged in a critique of video games the same way video art was engaged with television, this critique is not a necessary attribute of machinima. Though there is a bifurcation between machinima art as a critique of video

81 acknowledge that some works of machinima use video game systems or consoles. These are a kind of computer.

89 games and as a cheap platform for cinematic expression, the avant-garde community has employed the technique to serve both ends. This is not necessarily the case with mainstream machinima, evinced in the words of machinima pioneer Hugh Hancock9 when he said "Machinima seems to be the only way that someone like me is going to get to produce stories on the scale I want without having to spend 35 years working my way up in the TV or film industry" (Mirpaul).

Despite a strong community of experimental machinimators, Hancock's sentiment seems to ring true for most mainstream machinima. Though the technique and technology help artists work outside of Hollywood modes of production, those involved are often attempting to work within the aesthetic and narrative constructions of contemporary Hollywood cinema. Critic Leo Berkeley reiterates these issues when he writes "In an era where the narrative possibilities of interactive, hypertextual and virtual environments are opening up but have only been tentatively explored, machinima most commonly makes use of the increasingly sophisticated interactive features of recent 3D computer games to produce texts that are predominantly traditional linear narratives. It is a strangely hybrid form, looking both forwards and backwards, cutting edge and conservative at the same time" (Berkeley). However

Berkeley also cites critics Bolter and Grusin, who suggest that new media forms do not simply emerge and replace old forms—they often borrow the discursive techniques of contemporary and old media forms before innovation can occur (Bolter & Grusin)

Right now a tug-of-war over the future of machinima is playing out across the internet

9 Hancock is also the man responsible for coining the word "machinima" and actually misspelling the contraction which should be "machinema." He is currently on the board of directors of The Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences.

90 with some, like Experimental Game Lab at Georgia Tech member Michael Nitsche proposing that machinima explore non-narrative possibilities10. Most machinima theorists and pioneers are ambivalent about the move toward experimental machinima.

Though many are fascinated with new possibilities they are still keen publicists and know that machinima has a brighter (and more profitable) future in narrative form.

When talking about new media, there is a tendency to romanticize burgeoning technologies that appear to democratize the medium as the savior du jour of avant- garde cinema. Critic David Ross invokes Bertolt Brecht's seminal media essay "The

Radio as a Means of Communication" and reminds us that we often herald new forms of media because of our own Utopian expectations of what media will carry. In Brecht's words, "these people who have a high opinion of radio have it because they see in it something for which 'something' can be invented. They would see themselves justified" (Ross 172). It is easy for us to imagine the many vicissitudes and possibilities of machinima but will they ever come to light? From our current vantage point, it seems clear that video artists made large contributions to avant-garde theory and practice with their "new media." I will cite examples and make a case for machinima as a new media development worthy of study.

The numerous machinima films which detourn video games may seem like a specialized if not superfluous form of media resistance. However the preponderance of personal video game consoles has become so widespread that it has begun to have a ubiquity in the social lives of many people that begins to approach that of television

10 Michael Nitsche explores these issues often in his Free Pixel blog, specifically in the post "What Makes Machinima Good?" @ http://gtmachinimablog.lcc.gatech.edu/?p^56#more-56

91 fifty years ago. Over 117 Million Americans are counted as "active gamers" by the

Nielsen Active Gamer Study of 2005 which surveyed American gamers who played more than one hour per week. Among its findings it was discovered that "although teenagers continue to comprise the largest percentage (40%) of Active Gamers, more than 15 million of these gamers (almost 8%) are now 45 years or older, with the average age of a gamer at 30 years-old. While women make up nearly two-thirds of all online gamers, men still outnumber women in the overall video game universe by more than two-to-one" (Takahashi). While machinima appears at first glance to be an example of fan fiction, many works produced with the technique are radical critiques of video games and attempt to redefine the politics and ideology of video game culture. In this way, machinima appears to be a striking example of a grassroots media resistance movement engaging critically with culture and production. Gamers love to cite statistics comparing the Halo series, which made 170 Million dollars on the day of release to blockbuster films like Spider-Man 2, which only made 40 Million on its first day. The preponderance of these comparisons (especially in machinima films about machinima filmmaking) solidifies the machinimator's desire to link gaming as a cultural artifact worthy of academic study on equal footing with cinema.

One way of situating machinima in relationship to new media is to consider its privileged position in the critique of video game culture with the tools of the medium and the insights of those closest to it. Critic and theorist McKenzie Wark has devoted a number of theoretical tracts on gaming culture and has become an important figure among the machinima intelligentsia as evinced by his interview on the machinima talk

92 show This Spartan Life. The show, which nods ironically in its title to the national public radio show This American Life, has become The Tonight Show of machinimators all the world over. The show follows a host who interviews significant media theoreticians, avant-garde artists and open source programmers inside the violent

Halo 3 game. The game has attracted Criterion Collection creator and Voyager

Company founder Bob Stein and avant-garde found footage filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh to come onto the show and discuss issues surrounding new media, the future of digital information and the process of machinima itself. The dramatic tension of the show is centered on the fact that interviews are suddenly over if the guest's avatar is killed by another player. The creators have had to enlist professional gamers to act as bodyguards to prevent the rising number of individuals bent on disrupting the show by killing all of the guests. The show subverts the Halo 3 game by turning it into a place where people who are separated geographically can come together in a digital world to hold talks and even debate serious issues as opposed to using it as a playground for gratuitous violence.

Machinima and the Avant-Garde

The most surprising development in the machinima world so far was its appropriation by avant-garde filmmakers Peggy Ahwesh and Phil Solomon. Ahwesh's

She Puppet (2001) destabilizes the programmed expectations of how one is "supposed" to play the game Tomb Raider, chipping away at the violent and sexist representation of

"Lara Croft" the sexually idealized protagonist of the game. Ahwesh describes Croft as

"a collection of cones and cylinders ~ not a human at all— most worthy as a repository

93 for our post-feminist fantasies of adventure, sex and violence without consequence. The limited inventory of her gestures and the militaristic rigor of the game strategies created for her by the programmers is a repetition compulsion of sorts, offering some kind of cyberagency and cyberprowess for the player" (Ahwesh 77)

In She Puppet, Lara Croft shoots at nonexistent enemies and is subject to numerous moments of what Ahwesh calls "ecstatic death.'" In some sense, Ahwesh is giving Croft the radical subjectivity imbued by feminism—allowing the character to act in ways, we perceive, she has not been designed to. Ahwesh's construction of Croft doesn't adhere to the oppressive regulations of the game, even though she works within the programmed algorithms. Jonathan Miller called this use of the avatar an "image of liberation that points the way to a wholly human ideal" (Miller). Ahwesh also forces the viewer to consider the male dominated world of gaming in which men use an idealized female body as their avatar—creating a kind of transsexual space for game play.

While Ahwesh is clearly engaged in a critique of video games in her machinima, Phil Solomon's work in the medium has an entirely different purpose. This purpose relates to machinima's prospects as a democratizing and economically viable form of new media. Solomon's machinima films Untitled (for David Gatten) (2005) made with Mark LaPore and Rehearsals for Retirement (2007) take place in the controversial Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas game. In Untitled (for David Gatten)

Solomon and LaPore use glitching, a process of finding program errors (freezing, data corruption, physical impossibilities within the algorithms of the game) and exposing

94 them. The avatar in their machinima repeatedly attempts to cross the physical barrier in the game creating colorful trails of the game's landscape. As these films are difficult to find, I rely on critic Michael Sicinski, who describes the images produced as an

"unglued forest landscape, sending dripping, elongated textures and blotches of green hurtling towards the screen. But these blades of grass, even as they become mere paint- pixels, are shifted and rotated, sometimes becoming the shafts of trees, other times mere planar forms which intersect with one another and the figure himself. We are in a dense thicket of interpenetrating fields and illegible perspectives" (Sicinski).

Rehearsals for Retirement utilizes more traditional cinematic techniques while continuing to use glitching. Sicinski again writes "In the opening sequence, we find ourselves reverse-tracking away from a wood-rail fence in a forest clearing. Patches of the ground beneath us fall away into fractal-like black holes; patchy blue-green mists form rotating, 3-D volumes of gas. The trunk of a tree becomes a waterfall in the distance. Like the middle section of Untitled, this is a space of indeterminate legibility, comprised of planes upon planes, yet the tracking shot also hints at a certain level of spatial control, a touchstone of the cinema of old" (Sicinski). While the images play with the barriers of game space, they are focused on the aesthetic results of glitching rather than its relationship to game play. Solomon sees the beautiful possibilities inherent in playing the game in different ways and forcing the program to produce images that aren't ordinarily part of the game.

Avant-garde machinimator Eddo Stern has compiled what must be the largest and most sophisticated body of political machinima to date. His films, installations and

95 performances grapple with torture, simulation, military games as well as a host of geopolitical disputes with machinima produced images. A prolific video artist, member of the now defunct downtown LA media collective C-Level and a former faculty member of USC's Interactive Media Division, Stern has approached gaming culture in some fascinating ways. His work in the Hammer Museum's "Fair Use: Appropriation in Recent Film and Video" exhibit explored the preponderance of video games dealing with terrorism after the September 11th Attacks. In Stern's own words "After 9/11, there was an initial knee-jerk reaction to step away from reality in gaming.. .people didn't want to belittle the situation. But that shock only lasted a short time. Then it was just, 'Fuck it, let's go kill them'" (Willis). Stern uses these images to explore the political messages of machinima and how history and cultural experience are formed through game play.

Stern's gaming "interventions" are as interested in shaping video game culture as they are in exploring it. His work amplifies the strange relationship between reality and simulation available to video game modifiers or modders in a variety of ways. The economic advantages of machinima are secondary to Stern; he is more interested in using the inherent language of video games as material to explore through machinima.

The ideologies and politics of video games make up most of his work, which augment the subtexts of games until they are either absurd or monstrous. In the Tekken Torture

Tournament (2001) performance, "32 willing participants received bracing but non- lethal electrical shocks in correspondence to the injuries sustained by their onscreen avatars. Players wore shocking arm straps wired through a hardware/software hack of

96 the world's most popular fighting Playstation game TEKKEN 3" (Stern). In Waco

Resurrection the player's avatar is a revivified David Koresh who walks through Waco surrounded by ethereal hellfire fighting the FBI and ATF. His film Deathstar which played at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2004 is an assemblage of digitally rendered homicidal fantasies concerning Osama bin Laden from online video games set to the music of The Passion of the Christ. The music, according to one critic "subverts the programmers' intent, insisting we view bin Laden as a Christ-like figure amidst all the maiming" (Temple). Vietnam Romance recreates scenes from iconic Vietnam War films using video game generated images and MIDI sound files that correspond to the songs which played over the cinematic scenes. He uses Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City to recreate scenes of Vietnamese prostitution in Full Metal Jacket (1987) with a MIDI version of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots are Made for Walkin'". Eddo goes on to recreate the cinematic memory of Vietnam from the Huey attack scene from

Apocalypse Now (1979) with "Ride of the Valkyries" blaring to the introduction scenes of M*A*S*H (1970) with the song "Suicide is Painless."

More recently, Stern has turned his eye towards Los Angeles with Landlord

Vigilante (2006) where a cynical landlady who believes tenants are "defective human beings," instigates an urban war on criminal elements in East LA. The story is based on

Stern's and collaborator Jessica Hutchins' own exploitative landlady in Los Angeles.

Stern, like Phil Solomon uses Grand Theft Auto and plays with the documentary properties of the platform—which explores gang culture in a simulated Los Angeles.

97 Eddo's game is ostensibly a revenge scenario allowing afflicted tenants to sublimate their violent desires towards their landlords into the gaming sphere.

Outsider Experimental Machinima

Digital Curator Carl Goodman of the American Museum of Moving Images commented on machinimators in 2002 saying "What enables them to do all this is also what limits them in the end. At one extreme you have action movies and at the other you have the story that all young boys tell when they play with action figures"

(Mirapaul). But much has changed in the last six years. While the earliest entries into the machinima canon betray just the kind of narrative and aesthetic preferences one might ascribe to the average gamer, machinimators have increasingly employed non- narrative strategies to films, which reflect some prototypical avant-garde practices.

Though this group is a fringe of the machinima movement, these experimental machinima films are often touted by pioneers and machinima communities as examples that lend a new kind of legitimacy to the technique.

Ozymandias (2001), a characteristically avant-garde machinima film was made by Strange Films and is based on the Percy Shelley poem of the same name. The film features a single poetic image that takes on the narrative exposition of Shelley's text with a presentation of the poem at the end of the film. The work was enough to capture

" Machinima.com, the distribution portal of the "Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences" names three experimental / non-narrative machinima films in their "best machinima" category. Any comprehensive search for the top 10 machinima films tends to name several iconic experimental machinima films, most frequently those by Friedrich Kirschner.

98 the attention of New York Times arts columnist Matthew Mirapaul and critic Roger

Ebert, who both remarked on the incredible new possibilities the medium had to offer.

Friedrich Kirschner, a filmmaker with Moppi Productions works with creatively elastic demo engines to make some of the most respected works of experimental machinima,

The Journey. Halla, Stranger 2184 and IX. The films have oblique narratives that have startlingly original images and metaphoric properties. Using humanoid figures that often look like Banksy stencils, Kirschner creates cold multi-layered landscapes with overlapping images and a nightmarish futuristic perspective where commercial images bombard the individual.

Political Machinima

Most works of political machinima are left wing in nature excepting some pro- military war reenactments that recreate military operations in various historical theaters of war. A number of clans (social groups that play via the internet together) have developed around mutual political or personal affiliations. A notable example is the preponderance of gay gamer clans, also known as "Gaymers ." Left wing political machinima films have become more frequent and grabbing the attention of many new media scholars. Many critics were captivated by The French Democracy (2005)13, which detailed the events, and situations that led up to the French suburb riots of

October 2005. The film itself was made from the perspective of a young Parisian into the events that precipitated the riots in France—with recreations of the deaths that sparked the riots themselves. The filmmaker Alex Chan, a first generation French

12 See the blog made exclusively for Gaymers: http://gaygamer.net 13 This film may be viewed at http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id=1407.

99 Buddhist, made the film "to correct what was being said in the media, especially in the

United States, who linked what was happening, the riots, to terrorism and put the blame on the Muslim community" (Diderich). The film detailed the violent response of three black youths to the many outrages faced by young immigrants around Paris. The film was discussed by a slew of reporters after receiving a million hits in a month.14

However Chan was an inexperienced machinima maker and the film itself has little merit stylistically or technically.

This kind of political pseudo-documentary style was copied by Joshua Garrison in his rendering of the Virginia Tech Massacre with the Halo 3 game engine. The work, which some have taken issue with, insisting the subject is in bad taste for a machinima film, is a thoughtful political invective against violence using the engine to recreate the events of the massacre punctuated by title cards explaining details of the events and the systemic failings that contributed to the success of Seung-Hui Cho.

An Unfair War (2006) made by Thuyen Nguyen is an austere five minute short exploring the personal effects of war. A Middle-Eastern man is sitting at his computer in an empty house with the sound of gunfire blasts in the background. He's writing a letter (the words he types appear at the bottom of the screen) about how his family has fled the country and the peril they face on their journey. He has stayed behind to document the events that occur. Though never explicit, the man is clearly an Iraqi citizen living among a rival sect. His ambivalence about the war is iterated in lines like

"I do not care if I am 'defended' or 'liberated.' I just want my life back" and "whoever wins this war will claim a once-beautiful country which has been reduced to nothing."

14 Business Week, "France: Thousands of Young Spielbergs." December 19th, 2005.

100 The gunfire crescendos until it is deafening. The man pauses and the screen fades to black with the sound of a blast. The film ends with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi:

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?" The pathos of the piece seems to articulate the ambivalent attitudes towards "liberation" articulated by many Iraqis—what good is freedom if survival is impossible? This work seems to echo The French Democracy with a filmmaker attempting to speak for those who cannot. In this way machinima allows people to bear witness to events with tools they otherwise couldn't afford.

The Tyrant (2006), a machinima mash-up film made by Mike Munson with the

Half-Life 2 game engine utilizes a special "skin builder" which allows players to design the faces of their avatars. Munson designed a George W. Bush avatar and employs the same techniques many political mash-up filmmakers have—re-editing speeches by political figures so that they actually say what it is the artist believes they are doing.

The speech made by the avatar is a cut up version of what must be several Bush speeches until it is cohesive. Though the work is inflammatory and includes a short scene of George Bush standing stoically behind a barricade of military officers gunning down innocent civilians in a Middle Eastern courtyard, the reconstruction of Bush's speeches effectively conveys the position of many left leaning individuals.

The Machinima "Documentary"

Some machinima filmmakers have taken to documenting the world within a game by incorporating an outsider perspective and looking at the video game world through the

101 eyes of an anthropologist. These films have a mockumentary quality to them, incorporating humor and absurdity though remaining loyal to the spirit of the games they investigate. In Jim Munroe's machinima film My Trip to Liberty City (2004), we are taken on a tour of the landscape of the Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City world.

Munroe describes the city over clips of his avatar's exploration. After a crime lord calls upon his avatar to do a dubious job, Munroe decides instead to explore the city. His running monologue over the film undermines the absurd violence of the game's narrative, which clashes with his own curiosity about the world of the city. Realizing that his thuggish character may be misleading those around him, Munroe decides to

"change skins" and be the Canadian tourist he feels more adequately represents himself.

After changing into a heavy set balding man with a camera around his neck, Munroe explores the city on foot because, in his words, " I never feel like getting into a car is the best way to see a city. The best way is to walk around and get to know it. For instance here I found this little nook in an alley and sure enough there's a stairwell there that leads up to this beautiful rooftop; something I never would have found in a car." Munroe's exploration of the digital space of GTA: LC has the same outsider perspective and proposed audience as other machinima "documentaries." It does not use the lingua franca of gamer-made machinima films, nor does it have the insider humor of shows like Red Vs Blue. Instead, My Trip to Liberty City has some elements in common with the work of video artist Mike Hoolboom, who refers to his work in the

1990s as '"documentaries of the imaginary'" (Elwes 187). The imaginary space of a game is explored with the appropriated discourses of a documentary.

102 Machinimator Douglas Gayeton purports to have "found" the video diaries of

Molotov Alva, a man who supposedly evaporated from real life and reappeared in the popular computer world Second Life. These films claim to be "dispatches" from the

Second Life World, from a man who has left reality and entered simulation forever.

The film has become the object of much discussion as it was bought by HBO for release on the network in 2008 and has been entered into the academy award's short film section for 2007. This kind of falsified found-footage within the game world represents a new category unto itself—the "found-footage documentary machinima."

Machinima and New Media Resistance

The increasing use of machinima as a medium by the avant-garde and by those unable to afford basic cinema tools is reminiscent of an earlier "new media." Within a decade of the birth of video art the avant-garde had set out to define the many vicissitudes of video. The virtual renaissance of new work helped define the parameters and possibilities video had to offer; artists delineated the spatiotemporal possibilities

(Nam June Paik), the playful spontaneity elicited (William Wegman), and the appropriation of materials as a radical critique of the form and substance of television and film (Dara Birnbaum, Harun Farocki, etc). However video art was born close to the release of the Sony Portapak and appeared to be the within the province of professional artists very early on. Machinima history has played itself out differently and is seen to be more a part of the gaming community than anything else.

Machinima's attraction to many is expressly linked to what it has in common with

103 video art as a form of media resistance with the capacity to further economize on the filmmaking process.

104 Conclusion

My research shows that although it is difficult to draw a direct line of influence between digital remixing and found footage filmmaking, identical strategies of appropriation permeate a multitude of mediums including found footage film and video-making, appropriation art, photography and digital remixing. By looking at experimental found footage filmmaking and digital remixing, I attempt to show how tendencies of appropriation are transmitted across artistic movements, and more broadly, that strategies of appropriation effectively disrupt signification and promote new progressive readings of cultural materials. Though this thesis discusses appropriation through the prism of digital remixing, it is my hope that the mobilization of theories from a variety of disciplines can help synthesize strategies of appropriation for artists and activists in other mediums and aid in their effort to engage in a dialogue with the materials of culture and media.

My first chapter attempts to develop a taxonomy of digital remixing in order to liken its categories to the two approaches in found footage filmmaking developed by

Paul Arthur. The interest here is in locating two continuous strategic trajectories relating to the earliest forms of cinematic appropriation to the present manifestation of digital remixing. Expanding upon these two central trajectories in my second chapter, I investigate strategies from specific films and from other mediums, which can be summarized as archival interventions, patterns of collection, and the construction of more authentic originals through identity correction.

105 The interest in constructing moving image archival interventions as a means of complicating historical records and archival data was rooted in 1980s video art and discussed in the works of Harun Farocki, Dee Dee Halleck and Mark Rappaport.

Though I liken the strategies of these filmmakers to those of digital remixers, I attempt to show how remixers engage predominantly in contemporaneous critiques of corporations and films that do not seek to dig far back into historical memory but instead attempt to replace and correct contemporary media. I also look at collection patterns of video artists like Christian Marclay and Matthias Muller who draw from a broad archive of mainstream Hollywood films to explore prominent repetitions in cinema. These tendencies appear in digital remixed videos which seek to use "identity correction" to reintroduce information into texts like commercials, and to question how

Hollywood acculturates viewers to certain identities through the repetition of tropes.

All of these tendencies revealed a desire to unearth traumatic images and amalgamate them together or even redeem these images from the films containing them. Looking more broadly at strategies underpinning works of appropriation art, I show how the use of popular cultural materials in digital remixing shares strategies with historical avant- garde art, specifically in the 1980s, dealing with advertising images and popular iconography. The predominant strategy shared by these works and digital remixes can be found throughout the re-photography of Richard Prince, who seeks to re-produce images more authentic than their originals. The idea of locating both the artifice within an image and also pointing to the realities obscured by that deception appears throughout political remixing.

106 In this chapter, I focus on appropriative strategies in a variety of mediums, cultural practices and movements including hip-hop music, programming, graffiti, re- photography and appropriation art. My interest here is developing a basis to argue that these strategies become synonymous with popular cultural activity and have moved outside of specific historical avant-gardes to the extent that they can become an intuitive approach for digital remixers who do not have express knowledge of antecedent found footage practices.

Though digital remixing represents a radical shift in found footage filmmaking, it can also be understood as a continuation in the evolution of the technique, dramatically altered by the influence of new technologies. My third chapter seeks to look beyond digital remixing at a whole new form of appropriation nascent to, rather than localized in, digital technologies. The process of making machinima does not deal with pre-existing images per se, but with pre-existing digital worlds or software engines which must be navigated by an avatar to be constructed. Machinima radically challenges the found footage paradigm of appropriation because materials are inscribed with new meanings with more freedom than ever before. Furthermore, the cultural history of machinima is an inversion of found footage and digital remixing. In my exploration of digital remixing, I argue a thread of influence initiated by the Soviet film and Surrealist avant-gardes is visible. Parallel to this trajectory, we see how a similar group of amateurs, who work with a new form of appropriation nascent to digital technologies (machinima) influences avant-garde / experimental filmmakers who then employ the technique toward their own ends. In this chapter, I liken the relationship

107 between machinima makers and video games to the critical relationship many video artists held towards television. In this context, I aim to show how a medium can be harnessed to critique itself internally.

I argue that as the promise of digital remixing lies in the impulse to examine and rebut mainstream media and promote contemporaneous critiques of culture through alternative channels free from endemic corporate censorship in journalism. The pervasive tone of many works described in this thesis demonstrates a deep suspicion of media itself—specifically the authoritative voice of journalism and the persuasive techniques of advertising. In this context, appropriation becomes an unauthorized way of redeploying hegemonic visual discourse to introduce dissent—a radical act both in its appraisal of the contradictions of dominant ideology but also as a challenge to conventional conceptions of artistic production.

In order to frame digital remixing as continuation of antecedent found footage and appropriation art practices, I sought to explore elements informing theories of appropriation and to locate similarities and differences. Though I have mobilized a variety of practices from found footage filmmaking and appropriation art to link with digital remixing, this movement clearly distinguishes itself from earlier techniques and tendencies. The most obvious point of departure comes from the use of mainstream popular cultural forms (the commercial, film trailer, reality TV show and news broadcast) to construct critiques. One of the issues I have had to grapple with in my research is the question of form in relation to digital remixing. One line of thinking posits that works appropriating the syntax of popular culture in order to subvert it

108 inevitably promote popular aesthetics and are thereby in collusion with mainstream media—something that many film and video artists have sought to undermine and transform. Instead, digital remixers work within the aesthetics of popular cultural forms. As feminist critic Audre Lorde has famously written in regards to just such an issue, ".. .the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" (Lorde 214). This forces the question of whether or not digital remixers undermine their project to subvert the mainstream media message by parroting mainstream media aesthetics. However, dismissing remixes for this reason ignores the widespread popularity they have achieved in activist communities predominantly because they are accessible to spectators who do not have a background in art theory and aesthetics. The widespread appeal of these works derives in part from their playing within popular forms, undermining them from within. Most remixers I have encountered do not make claims that they have consciously appropriated the discourses of mainstream media. Instead, they usually insist that these popular forms are both well known and accessible to themselves and viewers (Macintosh).

As a textual and historical analysis of the aesthetic strategies, patterns of collection and technological developments in moving image appropriation, this thesis charts one trajectory of found footage filmmaking that leads to digital remixing and machinima. Doubtlessly, as this community itself begins to take part in writing the history of its influences, practices, and strategies, new threads will appear and a broader understanding of this unique subculture will be written. The purpose of this thesis is to situate digital remixing and digital appropriation within a broader historical framework

109 tfl of moving image and art appropriation in the 20 Century. Underlying the connections drawn are broader strategies persisting through the history of art and filmmaking.

Though digital remixing has been discussed prior to this thesis, it is usually in a legal context by copyright scholars. I avoid making a defense of remixing as a legal means of critiquing culture mainly because these arguments have effectively been made elsewhere.15 I am most interested in moving beyond the legal defense of digital remixing and shifting the discourse towards an investigation of its history, aesthetics, and politics. In my summation, digital remixing is a striking moment of great cultural import because it represents both the return of the discourses of collage to their folk art roots (personified by the amateur editors that make up the bulk of the community) and it is a manifestation of avant-garde aesthetics and radical media critique put to use by a sizable and diverse number of outsider artists.

15 For a lengthy legal discussion of the legality of digital remixing see Lawrence Lessig. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

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Digital Remixes and Machinima Cited (Note: These URLs are often unstable, subject to change or may be taken down due to copyright violations. Some of the original source material may be found on the DVD accompanying this thesis)

10 Things I Hate About Commandments. Dir. Mike Dow and Ari Eisner. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulkqqMXWEFs)

300: This is Revisionism. Craig Saddlemire. 2008. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwFOpYOXBO0)

2001:Goodfellas. Dir. PIE30. 2006 (http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=Qfn3Wk_LnI4)

Basic Film Terms. Videoheadboy. 2008. (http://www.yourabe.com/watch?v=mCXRX9VE7po)

Black Glasses. Dir. AMDS Films. 2007. (http://www.voumbe.com/watch?v=EWUnlQxTAAM)

Brokeback to the Future. Dir. Chocolate Cake City. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY)

Citizen Kane: Tha Remix. Dir. Kenny, Steven. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKQ 1 fvcw6qY)

Cosas de Mujeres / Women Things. Dir. Piano, Javier. (2007) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27GcMKgJfCU)

Crash. Augart Media. 2008. (http://www.terminusl525.ca/node/38381)

Cry All You Want. Dir. Scott McElroy. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlsIUDUXkwc)

A Fair(v) Use Tale. Dir. Eric Faden. 2007. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJnjC4FNDo)

116 The French Democracy. Dir. Alex Chan. 2005. (http://www.maehinima.com/filiri/view&id=T407)

The George Bush Speech You Never Heard. Dir. Edo Wilkins. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YwYaNkikEc)

The Human Element. Dir. Christian Nilsen. 2008 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkG9UHRhop8)

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring of Free Trade. Dir. Stolen Collective. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkmczhkrKYA)

Male Restroom Etiquette. Dir. Zarathustra Studios. 2006 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzO 1 mCAVyMw)

Manifestoon. Dir. Jesse Drew. 2001. (http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=C_2D_9yoYDk)

My Trip to Liberty City. Dir. Jim Munroe. 2004. (http://www.machinima.com/film/view&id:=561)

Ozymandias. Dir. Strange Films. 2001. (http://www.machinima.com/article/view &id=300)

Planet of the Arabs. Dir. Jaqueline Salloum. 2005. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MilZNEjEarw)

Racial Equality-$29.95. Dir. Elisa Kreisinger. 2009 (http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=3J FkP9QVE4)

The Real Power of Human Energy. Dir. Jonathan Mcintosh. 2008. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_dF9EjIvsA)

Saturday Morning. Dir. Wreck and Salvage. 2008. (http://wreckandsalvage.com/pure- salvage/saturdav-morning/')

Sesame Streets. Dir. Mscorsese. 2006 (http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=YiKBoLXg5Cw')

Shining. Dir. Robert Ryang. 2005. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0)

Special Report with Bryan Boyce. Dir. Bryan Boyce. 1999. (http://www.voutube.com/watch?v=HUBOU01hOt0)

117 Taxi Driver. Dir. Formula99. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_UaVUPsLsM)

Trinity: A Martin Arnold Tribute. Dir. Jason Moon. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C8Aslwhu44)

The Tyrant. Dir. Mike Munson. 2006. (http://www.youtube.corn/watch?v=DRdAikxq3mw)

An Unfair War. Dir. Nguyen, Thuyen. 2006. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clPB00fQwz4)

Youtube Symphony. Dir. Augart Media. 2009 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STko48hhzYM)

You, Me and E.T. Dir. Brianimal. 2007. (http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/22234)

Films and Videos:

Gringo in Mananaland. Dir. Dee Dee Halleck. 1995.

Home Stories. Dir. Matthias Miiller. 1990.

Landlord Vigilante. Dir. Eddo Stern. 2006.

A Movie. Dir. Bruce Conner. 1958.

Rehearsals for Retirement. Dir. Phil Solomon. 2007.

Rose Hobart. Dir. Joseph Cornell. 1932

Rock Hudson's Home Movies. Dir. Mark Rappaport. 1989.

She Puppet. Dir. Peggy Ahwesh. 2001.

Telephones. Dir. Christian Marclay. 1995.

Untitled (For David Gatten). Dir. Phil Solomon and Mark Lapore. 2005)

Up and Out. Dir. Christian Marclay. 1998

Video Quartet. Dir. Christian Marclay. 2002.

118 William S. Burroughs: Commissioner of Sewers. Dir. Klaus Maeck. Interview: William S. Burroughs, 1991.

Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades. Dir. Harun Farocki. 2006.

119