Scalar

We are looking forward to the beta launch of Scalar, a scholarly electronic publishing platform designed to facilitate work that includes media, images, sound and text in a robust, database-driven authoring environment. Easily accommodating any publication length, from a single essay to a book-length or multi-author work, Scalar was built to mobilize the potentials of scholarly work that provides direct access to primary media and archival materials. Developed with support from the Mellon Foundation under the auspices of the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, we are currently working with partner archives including the Shoah Foundation, the Internet Archive, the Hemispheric Institute and Critical Commons. Partner presses currently include MIT Press, Duke University Press and the University of California Press. Development of the project is guided in part by the input from scholars who have participated in the series of month-long, NEH-funded “Broadening the Digital Humanities” seminars held at USC for the past two years, with our third seminar scheduled for June 2011.

24/7 DIY Video 2010: Collective Action

Collective Action is an hour-long screening program of DIY video that premiered at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on October 5, 2010. Showcasing a wide range of online, geek, remix, and fan culture, Collective Action was curated to highlight the most recent trends and techniques emerging from the worlds of anime music videos, political remixes, fan vids, videoblogs, activist media and the YouTube scene. Produced by Steve Anderson, Mimi Ito, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro and Holly Willis, this program picks up where the 2008 event, 24/7: A DIY Video Summit left off, defining and celebrating media made outside of commercial or industrial contexts.

View or download the complete Collective Action program. Distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license

Mobile Commons

Mobile Commons is a mobile web application designed to provide access to the full contents of the Critical Commons database, allowing users to add voice-over commentaries to media contained in the system and to view media and commentaries via most internet-enabled mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad, Android and most Symbian-based smart phones.

Critical Commons

Critical Commons is a research platform and resource for media scholars and educators that launched in Spring 2009 with support from the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning competition. The Critical Commons database contains hundreds of high-resolution video clips and was recently redeveloped to include a mobile application. It is being used widely in support of classroom teaching, electronic publication and as an online space for scholarly research and writing. Along with the Shoah Foundation, the Hemispheric Institute, and the Internet Archive, Critical Commons has been selected as an inaugural partner in the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, a Mellon-funded initiative in the digital humanities. The goal of Critical Commons is nothing less than a transformation of the way media is used in research and teaching and an expansion of fair use protections for educators across multiple disciplines.

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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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Movie Tagger

Movie Tagger is a collaboration between the USC School of Cinematic Arts and Related Content Database, Inc., with a stated goal of developing “a method and system for parsing and richly tagging every movie ever made!” On a conceptual level, Movie Tagger aims to take advantage of the potentials of crowdsourcing and collective intelligence as mechanisms for the annotation and visualization of popular media. Working with a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers at the School of Cinematic Arts, we are attempting to model time-based metadata structures that are reflective of the pedagogical interests of faculty in Cinematic Arts. The long-term goal is an open, participatory system for annotating and viewing media in scholarly, commercial and popular contexts.

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.

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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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

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.

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.