Critical Commons

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports the use of media for teaching, learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students, educators and creators. Critical Commons provides information about current copyright law and its alternatives in order to facilitate the writing and dissemination of best practices and fair use guidelines for scholarly and creative communities. Critical Commons also functions as a showcase for innovative forms of electronic scholarship and creative production that are transformative, culturally enriching and both legally and ethically defensible. At the heart of Critical Commons is an online tool for viewing, tagging, sharing, annotating and curating media within the guidelines established by a given community. Our goal is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments.

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Technologies of History Interactive

The interactive iteration of Technologies of History is a case-study, an opportunity to put into practice some of the arguments I have been developing over the past few years thinking about the entangled relations among media, history and memory. These arguments, in fact, may only be fully articulated through media. By this I do not mean simply taking advantage of the digital format for providing media supplements or illustrations, but literally aiming to think through the media under analysis, developing relationships between media elements themselves, rather than privileging the discursive affordances of text over images. Technologies of History draws substantially on the ideas developed in my book manuscript of the same title, but the interactive format allows for a much more detailed and nuanced form of engagement with the historiographical models under consideration. In some ways, then, this project is not primarily about the JFK assassination; but the dense layers of mediation to which this historical event has been subjected provide a particularly rich set of opportunities to think about the construction of history itself.

Although certain aspects of the design may initially appear to resist easy navigation, our aim is neither to frustrate the user nor indulge in aestheticized design experiments. The project presents several clearly defined modes of exploration, beginning with the “Analyzer,” in which media elements are subjected to a process of tracking and fragmenting designed to simultaneously reveal and obscure the contents of a film or video clip. The user may then follow connections that are suggested by either the video segment or its accompanying text to explore further text arguments or a connection between two media clips. Each connection that is made is logged in the user’s history and may be revisited at any time. The experience of moving through the project is therefore intended to be partly experiential and partly curatorial; users may select from categories of content that are based on genre, format or (primarily) threads of historiographical concern. The multiplicity of opportunities for revelation or chaos function as both a metaphor for history’s own lack of resolution and as a rhetorical strategy for resisting narrative closure.

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What is DIY Video? (Parts I & II)

Digital video, circulated among communities, friends and the Internet at large, is becoming one of the primary ways we tell stories about ourselves, our interests, opinions and passions. The videos we find online are as varied as the conversations we have in our everyday lives, but there are also themes, techniques, and shared source materials that tie together diverse genres of DIY video. This two-part documentary video was Produced and Directed by Steve Anderson and Mimi Ito as the culminating event of 24/7: A DIY Video Summit in February 2008.

What is DIY Video? Part I opens with a video telling of the threads and commonalities that have emerged from our viewing of DIY video in different genres. Curated through a collective process involving the curatorial and conference committee for 24/7: A DIY Video Summit, this video traces the “meta” context that frames what we see as a new golden age in DIY video production. The program is organized as segments that feature video and response, the use of common source material, shared topics, and shared techniques in different forms of DIY video.

Part Two of What is DIY Video? features videos that stood out among the thousands that we viewed as part of our curatorial process as the most outstanding and compelling DIY video works. Together, these two programs document and define a moment in the rapid evolution of user-generated video. Both videos are distributed freely online for download and have been widely screened in festivals, conferences and in educational contexts worldwide.

What is DIY Video? is available for viewing/downloading on the 24/7: A DIY Summit website, along with links to many of the projects included in the video.

IML Island in Second Life

IML Island is an experimental learning environment created in the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life. Development of the island was supported by the USC Provost’s Technology Enhanced Learning Seed Grant Initiative (2007-08) and developed in part by staff members of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy and students in CTIN 478: Designing Multi-User Online Game Environments (fall 2008). Documentation of the development of the island may be found here and here. This space represents a significant intervention in pedagogical uses of virtual environments, the vast majority of which are modeled after physical spaces and do not take advantage of the unique affordances of a virtual environment. IML island is deliberately non-representational, choosing instead to refer metaphorically to spaces such as the Panopticon, theorized by Michel Foucault as an exemplary structure for thinking about cultures of surveillance and our own position as subjects who are both viewer and viewed.

To visit IML island, it is necessary to create an account in Second Life (this is easy and free), after which you may follow this link to teleport directly to the island.

You Wouldn’t

Would you start a war? Loot a pension fund? Circumvent the Constitution? Monopolize the media? Unless you are a government official or a corporate executive, chances are, YOU WOULDN’T!

You Wouldn’t is an activist resource and DIY hacking guide to encourage the creation of political remix videos. It includes links to some of the most important organizations and individuals doing work in the field of copyright reform and cultural production that relies on the protections of fair use and it informs site visitors how to create their own remix videos and distribute them through covert channels. The site launched anonymously in July 2006, along with the video Abuse of Power.

Abuse of Power

Abuse of Power is a parody of the MPAA’s anti-piracy videos that consumers are forced to watch at the beginnings of DVDs and in movie theaters. This video was released anonymously and copyright-free onto the Internet in summer 2006 and has received more than one million views and inspired numerous related parodies.

Underlying the parodic goals of the video are a number of serious issues. The tools and networks of the digital age offer great potential for participation, sharing and creativity, but media conglomeration and expanding copyright protections threaten our ability to speak using those tools. We need to educate ourselves about copyright law and resist the efforts of organizations like the MPAA and RIAA to curtail the rights of media consumers. The conventional wisdom is that things will only change when there is movement on three fronts: law, technology and popular practice – we hope this video will encourage others to become more active as users, creators and remixers of existing media.

Abuse of Power screened at the Pacific Film Archive and is included on the Piracy in the Pacific DVD ROM (2006)

View Abuse of Power on the Internet Archive or on YouTube

Subservient President

The Subservient President is a political parody of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken advertising campaign. The Subservient President attempts to give ordinary people a momentary sense of what it’s like to be a wealthy Bush campaign donor or an oil industry executive. Just type a command into the database and watch the President take your order – anything from “dodge the draft” or “get arrested for drunk driving” to “start a war in Iraq” or “give tax breaks to billionaires.”

Underlying the overtly satirical aspects of the project is the fact that American politics increasingly seem like they are being made-to-order, catering to public opinion polls and the whims of centrist, “undecided” voters rather than being guided by social needs or ethical principles. With the 2004 Presidential election looming, The Subservient President proposed a darkly humorous counterpoint to the media hype and superficial campaigning that sometimes stand in for legitimate political discourse in this country.

The Subservient President launched anonymously in July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston. After being picked up by bloggers covering the convention, the site was visited by more than 12 million unique users and received widespread media coverage, including a feature story on CNN, as part of a new generation of politically motivated web art. It is included in the Rhizome ArtBase and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Documentary Assassination

Documentary Assassination is a database documentary created in honor of the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination. It was created using The Korsakow System and is based on archival footage from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. The Korsakow System was developed by Florian Thalhofer, Willem Velthoven and Heinz Emigholz at the University of the Arts, Berlin [Universität der Künste, Berlin]. Documentary Assassination premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in November 2003. This work represents one of my earliest experiments with the idea of computational historiography and is designed to allow users to remix and recombine materials from a government documentary created to articulate a single, unambiguous narrative of the events surrounding the JFK assassination. Documentary Assassinationis not copyrighted and no rights are reserved. Both the project files and archival materials may be freely copied, remixed and redistributed with or without attribution.

Vectors interactive Editorial Statement

For the inaugural issue of Vectors, Tara and I worked with our Creative Director Raegan Kelly to design an editorial statement that would model some of the aspirations of the journal. Just as Vectors excusively publishes work that could not exist in print, our editorial statement resists passive reading. Reader-users must generate the text from a blank screen by typing in keywords, which are then dynamically arrayed onto a concept map of the issues and theoretical context motivating the journal. The interplay of text and interactivity is further placed in a dialectical relationship with the code that generates the visualizations via a coder’s debugging window that exists alongside the statement text. For me, this was one of my first experiences with collaborative writing, as well as working with a designer who was responsible for the programming and graphical realization of the project. By the time the process was complete, I could no longer discern where my own writing ended and Tara’s began. Although anathema to certain ways of thinking about academic writing, the creation of this project, which was partly a conceptual exercise, partly an experiment in collaborative writing and partly about the iterative process of interaction design, was the only way we could imagine launching a journal whose explicit goal was to redefine the potentials of scholarly production.

The text that accompanied the interactive Editorial Statement (also co-written with Tara McPherson) is reproduced here.
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The Recalcitrant Panopticon

The Recalcitrant Panopticon is a live action 360 degree interactive cinema production created by students in CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision during the spring semester of 2003. This project emerged from work with the Interactive Media Division’s Immersive Lab, which conducted a range of experiments in interactive panoramic cinema using an eight-camera, 360 degree recording and editing system. The multi-camera system uses a game console and controller to deliver fully navigable, live action video. This work is specifically designed to explore the properties and limitations of immersive experiences in relation to the codes of cinematic narrative.

Recent research in immersive cinema at USC focused on two courses: CTIN 532: Interactive Experience Design, taught by Mark Bolas and Michael Naimark, and CTCS 478: The Frenzy of Vision, taught by Steve Anderson and Susana Ruiz. The two courses may be thought of as functioning in tandem on a conceptual level, providing divergent platforms and prototypes for exploring the possibilities of immersion as realized on a psychological level as well as in a volitional, interactive environment.

Ironically, immersive technology, which at first glance seems to represent another step on the path toward realism, also suggests ways of questioning our fundamental relations to space time, knowledge and visual perception. Interestingly, the majority of work in both classes yielded projects which departed from the representational conventions of realism, depicting fragmented, disjunctive, or deliberately distorted spaces. In gravitating toward conceptual investigations of space and perception, several of these projects resisted the presumptive ideals of immersive media. Work with the 8-camera 360 degree system, for example, resulted in two completed projects – The Zooetrope and The Recalcitrant Panopticon – both of which eschew the narrative preoccupations of conventional cinema in order to explore notions of space, movement and embodied spectatorship as an alternative to traditional storytelling.