Академический Документы
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Культура Документы
Owen Gallagher
First published 2018
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Introduction 1
Critical Remix Video 1
Conclusion 271
Figures
1.1 Photoshop collage to oil-painted portraits, 2014 11
1.2 Sub-genres of Remix Video by Gallagher, 2017 25
1.3 Screenshot from Disney’s “101 Dalmatians,” 1961
(Featuring “Silly Symphonies,” 1929) 28
1.4 Screenshot from MTV’s launch video, August 1, 1981 28
1.5 Screenshot from “Election Collectibles,”
Bryan Boyce, 2001 30
1.6 Google search for “Remix Products,” 2017 32
2.1 Pope Benedict XVI brings reform to the Catholic Church 48
2.2 “Vote Different” by Phillip de Vellis, 2007 58
2.3 “Go Forth and Revolt” by go4thREVOLT, 2011 60
2.4 “I’m a Ginger” by Jacob Saucier, 2010 63
2.5 “Primetime Terror” by Joe Sabia, 2011 66
2.6 “Planet of the Arabs” by Jackie Salloum, 2005 67
2.7 “Hitler Reacts to the Hitler Parodies Being Removed
from YouTube,” 2012 77
3.1 “Enda Kenny Meets Simon Cowell”; “Bertie Ahern on
Dragons’ Den” 92
3.2 The Noun Project Logo, Representing “Person, Place
and Thing,” 2017 94
3.3 Communicative “Reaction Face” meme categories 96
3.4 Post Newtonianism (War Footage/Call of Duty 4
Modern Warfare) by Josh Bricker, 2010 105
3.5 Jeremiah Wright painting a picture of US aggression by
Diran Lyons, 2008 106
3.6 Four congresswomen “Photoshopped”
at Capitol Hill, 2013 117
3.7 Floating Chinese government officials meme, 2017 117
3.8 Tiananmen Square protests—“Photoshopped,” 2007 118
3.9 “The Kuleshov Effect” by Lev Kuleshov, c.1929 120
3.10 Postproduction techniques in CRVs 122
x List of Figures and Tables
4.1 “Miley/O’Connor Mashup—Nothing Compares to a
Wrecking Ball” 132
4.2 “Workers Leaving the Lumiére Factory in Lyon” 139
4.3 Still frame from Universal Studios 100th Anniversary
trailer, 2012 160
4.4 Google search for “Iwo Jima cartoon” 162
4.5 Evolution of the “Big Brother” representative form 163
4.6 One-dimensional linear political spectrum 165
4.7 One-dimensional horseshoe political spectrum 166
4.8 Two-dimensional political spectrum 167
4.9 The Nolan chart 167
4.10 The “Political Compass” 168
4.11 The rational spectrum 169
4.12 Erickson “NPOV” political chart 170
4.13 The Critical Spectrum of Economic, Social and
Political Ideology (CSESPI) 171
4.14 Dominant and alternative ideologies visualized using
the CSESPI model 173
4.15 Moving image ideographs in the sample CRVs 175
5.1 “Vote Different” / Apple “1984”, side-by-side comparison 219
5.2 Patrick Cariou, “Yes Rasta,” 2000 and Richard Prince,
“Graduation,” 2008 223
5.3 “Still Life with Chair Caning” and “Guitar, Sheet
Music, Glass,” Pablo Picasso, 1912 224
5.4 Screenshots of “Every Hitchcock Cameo Ever” and
“Every Donald Trump Cameo Ever” 225
5.5 Evolution of the term “intellectual property” 232
5.6 Screenshots of top 5 most viewed CRVs on YouTube 241
5.7 “Dramatic Chipmunk” meme v. Carmax commercial 242
5.8 US copyright term extensions, 1790–1998 247
5.9 Evolution of Movie Media Vehicles, 1981–2012 248
5.10 Suite of Creative Commons Licenses 250
Tables
1.1 Sub-genres of Remix Video (Gallagher, 2017) 24
1.2 Innovative practices enabled by Sampling and
Remixing (Gallagher, 2017) 37
1.3 Examples of Intertextual Clusters (Gallagher, 2017) 38
2.1 Syntagmatic categories identified by Metz (1974);
Hodge and Tripp (1986) 51
2.2 Examples of deductive, inductive and abductive
reasoning (Gallagher, 2017) 56
List of Figures and Tables xi
2.3 Potential communication problems in CRVs
(Gallagher, 2017) 68
2.4 Creative remapping of existing metaphors
(Gallagher, 2017) 74
2.5 CRVs featuring new metaphors (Gallagher, 2017) 75
3.1 Reasons for increased public impact of CRVs
(Gallagher, 2017) 109
3.2 The use of humor as a rhetorical device in CRVs
(Gallagher, 2017) 110
3.3 Postproduction video techniques used in CRVs
(Gallagher, 2017) 123
3.4 Reasons for lack of professionalism in CRVs
(Gallagher, 2017) 123
4.1 Dominant and alternative ideologies evident in the
sample CRVs (Gallagher, 2017) 173
4.2 Ideological comparison of the sample CRVs
(Gallagher, 2017) 182
5.1 US copyright cases involving fair use (Stanford Law
School, 2017) 218
5.2 A copyright holder’s exclusive rights over a cultural
work (17 USC, § 106, 2017) 244
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Preface
This is my third book on remix. I have spent the past number of years
co-editing two collected volumes on remix studies with my colleagues
Eduardo Navas and xtine burrough—The Routledge Companion to Re-
mix Studies (2015) and Keywords in Remix Studies (2017). For these
books we collected more than sixty diverse contributions from all over
the world, considering remix from multiple perspectives, such as eth-
ics, aesthetics, history, politics, and practice. These volumes have been
important in helping to establish remix studies as a field of enquiry in
its own right. Having the privilege to work so closely on these texts
provided me with the opportunity to see the state of the art of remix
theory and practice—a global overview of remix studies. Through these
experiences, I observed a distinct lack of consensus among scholars and
practitioners in relation to the varying aspects of remix. There are many
competing ideas, conflicting theories, and an apparent tendency towards
presenting remix as a kind of all-encompassing cultural concept. In ad-
dition to this, while conducting research for my Ph.D., I noticed a shift
towards the commodification of the remix concept and its increasing
cooptation by commercial interests. The meaning of remix was being
stretched and diluted and one of the primary aims of this book is to
address this ongoing problem.
Our previous book contributors come from many different back-
grounds, with a diverse range of motivations and goals in writing about
remix, offering multiple perspectives. Remix studies is truly an inter-
disciplinary area, so we included contributors with backgrounds in
media studies, art history, philosophy, rhetoric, cultural studies, com-
munication studies, visual culture, digital humanities, film studies,
music, sound studies, literature, new media, critical theory, linguistics,
sociology, law, philosophy, and politics. While such diversity is certainly
a positive thing, enabling us to represent many different points of view,
at a certain stage it becomes important to reach some kind of consensus
on fundamental terms and concepts in order to be able to move the dis-
cussion forward, or risk an intellectual impasse where further progress
is impeded.
xiv Preface
Remix studies is now the subject of numerous research projects and
is taught as part of many courses at universities, colleges, and technical
institutions around the world, primarily in the USA, Canada, Europe,
and Australia. I have also personally taught remix as part of a number
of undergraduate courses in the Middle East, including filmmaking, an-
imation, and game design. I actively encourage my students to create
remixed content for their various projects, and the production of remix
video, in particular, has been my primary focus for some time.
I have been researching, practicing, teaching, and writing about remix
for over a decade now. My remix journey really began around 2007
when I wrote my Masters thesis on the “remix revolution,” published a
few widely-circulated political remixes, and founded TotalRecut.com,
a website dedicated to remix videos. I pitched the idea to the Kauffman
Foundation and was lucky enough to win an entrepreneurship scholar-
ship to the US to explore the potential of turning Total Recut into a busi-
ness. I was almost coopted by capitalism at that point; however, there was
no money to be made, and it turned out that Total Recut aspired towards
more social libertarian ideals. While in America, I made a point of trav-
eling to meet some of my heroes to talk to them about remix—Professor
Lawrence Lessig at Creative Commons in San Francisco; Professor
Henry Jenkins at MIT, Cambridge; and Professor Kembrew McLeod at
the University of Iowa. I was so inspired by our conversations that I de-
cided to host a video remix contest on Total Recut, and Lessig, Jenkins
and McLeod agreed to be judges. The contest was a relative success and
received entries from all around the world, producing three-minute re-
mix videos on the topic: What is Remix Culture? Following the contest,
Total Recut developed into an online community of video remixers, and
a growing archive of remix videos, resources and copyright education.
In the intervening years, I continued to publish my own remix videos
online and dedicated five and a half years of my life to researching remix
for my Ph.D., which enabled me to formulate many of the ideas you are
about to read in this book, now updated and remixed to reflect the con-
temporary political landscape. In contrast to the majority of publications
on remix to date, which tend to focus on music, art, and literature, this
book considers examples of remix video, tracing the history of film sam-
pling through the lens of the moving image arts, reframing aspects of the
debate on remix in relation to existing sound, image, and text-focused
studies. Critical remix video (CRV) is arguably one of the most potent
and powerful forms of remix, capable of educating, persuading, and en-
abling social and political change, similar in many ways to persuasive
advertising, documentary filmmaking, and political propaganda. In the
present political landscape, CRVs are more important than ever. In fact,
there are now so many Trump remixes circulating online, I could write
another book just about them! (…I’ve already started collecting the best
ones on criticalremix.com).
Preface xv
Each chapter in this book presents a series of insights about critical
remix video from various points of view and poses a series of thought-
provoking questions. Each section provides a contextual introduction,
analytical methods, case studies, and findings, as well as numerous il-
lustrative examples. The media analysis tools deployed in Chapter 2,
Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 are potentially transferrable to many other
types of short-form video content and could be useful in future studies
of TV commercials, political ads, music videos, short films, and video
games.
There are many possibilities for the future of remix. I strongly believe
that CRVs can have an impact on the world—they can influence people,
alter opinions, raise awareness, and expose wrong-doings among those
we elect to represent us and make decisions about society on our behalf,
ultimately controlling many aspects of our daily lives. CRVs are a po-
tentially powerful tool for political change. I would encourage everyone
who reads this book to download some footage from YouTube, edit it
into a remix video, and then publish it. If your video receives a take-
down notice, file a counter notification and make sure it gets reinstated
on grounds of fair use. The process of making remix videos is so much
easier these days. The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been. A
decade ago, when I made my first remix videos, I needed a whole suite
of software just to convert the video files into compatible formats for
editing—a very slow process—and even then, they were often 240p or
less, lower quality than standard definition television. Now you can eas-
ily download up to 8K video at 60FPS from YouTube and most content is
available in at least HD quality. Thanks to standardized codecs and for-
mats like H.264 and MP4, most video formats now play nice with each
other. There is rarely a need to convert footage and if you have to, video
editing and conversion software is fast and easy to use. Most published
video content can be downloaded from YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion,
Kodi, or through a Google search, and used as source material in remix
videos. It is my hope that reading about the CRVs in this book will in-
spire you to make your own remixes—to express your unique point of
view on whatever issues are most important to you.
The number of critical remix videos online has grown exponentially
since I started working on this book, but the once-edgy veneer of remix
has now been largely coopted by capitalist interests. In spite of the some-
times dystopian tone in parts of this book, I remain hopeful. We live
in very interesting times—a reality TV star real-estate tycoon is Pres-
ident of the United States; regressive copyright proposals are working
their way through the legal system; net neutrality and online privacy
are threatened by big business; civil wars rage around the world; pov-
erty and unemployment are rising; climate change disasters are on the
increase—and many people are reacting by publishing, watching, and
sharing more remix videos than ever before. In researching this book,
xvi Preface
I have read every other book and article on remix I could lay my hands
on and I believe the contents herein represent the most up-to-date liter-
ature on remix you will find in print. However, remix is in a constant
state of rapid change and development, so I would encourage readers
to check out the book’s companion website, reclaimingremix.com, for
regular updates.
In closing, it would be remiss of me not to mention the irony of pub-
lishing a book about remix under a relatively restrictive traditional copy-
right arrangement. This apparent paradox has been acknowledged by
myself and my co-editors in both The Routledge Companion to Remix
Studies and Keywords in Remix Studies; however, the message in this
book is certainly more openly critical of copyright than either of the
previous publications. Ultimately, as you will read in the final chapter of
this book, I propose an alternative system to the existing copyright re-
gime, but that is a long-term ambition that will take some time to come
to fruition. For now, outdated copyright law is the system we currently
have in place, and within which we must operate if we wish to publish
credible books that will be widely publicized and hopefully read by our
intended audiences.
There is also a certain irony in the problems associated with using
copyrighted images in a book like this, which focuses on the analysis of
sampled images from beginning to end. While it has become standard
and acceptable to reproduce a single frame of a film or video in printed
form (especially for the purposes of research, analysis, or critique), when
it comes to other types of images—photographs, illustrations, and com-
pany logos, for example—it is more difficult to publish such images
without permission from the copyright holder, who may often charge
for the privilege. Luckily for this book, the vast majority of images used
are stills from videos so it has been possible to include over fifty images
to accompany the textual analysis and discussions of remix. The trend in
recent discourse has been towards counting the entirety of culture, and
more, under the heading of remix. It is now time for us to acknowledge
that not everything is a remix.
Acknowledgments
In this chapter, a case is made for the claim that the presence of sampled
content in a remix video affects the process of visual semiosis to the ex-
tent that previously understood meanings of particular visual signs are
altered and updated through recontextualisation. The ability to recall the
meaning of a specific visual sign and immediately understand it points to
the fact that its meaning is stored in memory as a result of having been
perceived in the past. It is not necessary to undergo the process of inter-
preting the sign again, as the brain has already done so on a previous occa-
sion. However, in the case of remix, previously perceived and understood
signs are presented in a very different context, which causes a moment of
realization in the viewer, during which comparisons are made between
the old and new meanings and a reinterpretation of the previously under-
stood signs occurs. Thus, in remix, echoes of visual signs in their original
context are ever-present and the process of visual semiosis occurs quite
differently than it does in the case where cognition is achieved upon first
perception of a given set of signs in a non-remixed text. It is argued in this
chapter that when a viewer watches a CRV without having previously seen
the source material, comprehension of the text is incomplete. However,
when the source material is watched in its original context after viewing
the remix, the meaning of the remix is updated in the viewer’s mind to ac-
count for the new information. Through the analysis of a sample of CRVs,
the process of visual semiosis in remix is demonstrated, concluding that
comprehension requires prior familiarity with the source material and a
lack thereof can result in aberrant decoding of the visual signs in the text.
Many scholars, such as Sonja Foss14 and Göran Sonesson,15 claim that
images alone are not capable of providing the degree of rhetorical com-
plexity necessary to formulate a thesis and communicate it effectively.
Navas16 and others have explored the potential of remix to communicate
as a visual language in its own right. This chapter argues that critical
remix videos do possess the potential to communicate propositions vi-
sually. However, the strength of a CRV’s argument diminishes as the
Introduction 5
degree of manipulation or alteration of the source material increases.
Sequences of images presented in succession generate narratives, which
may take the form of propositions, communicated visually, supported
by compelling evidence in the form of sampled source material. The
more manipulated a remix is, for example, by juxtaposing footage out
of context to produce false associations and meanings, the less trusted
its validity and the less persuasive it becomes. In such cases, the credi-
bility of the evidence provided is called into question, especially where
the manipulation is deliberately concealed to deceive the audience into
thinking that the remix might be “real.” It is concluded that the most
effective examples of remix as argumentative visual rhetoric are those
that provide valid evidence to support their claims and either minimally
alter the source material or make explicit the remix process instead of
attempting to conceal it.
Notes
1 Owen Gallagher, Ideology in Critical Remix: A Visual Semiotic Analysis
(Argentina: IAVS Conference, 2012).
2 Lev Manovich, 2013; Rosalind Krauss, 2000; Noël Carroll, 1996.
3 Sandra Moriarty, 2002; Theo Van Leeuwen, 2001; Winfried Nöth, 1998;
Roland Barthes, 1977.
4 Kenneth Burke, 1966; Keith Kenney, 2002; Michael Hardt, 2005.
5 Antonio Gramsci, 2011; Slavoj Žižek, 1989; Michael McGee, 1980.
6 David Gunkel, 2016; Eduardo Navas, 2012; Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss, 2010;
Aram Sinnreich, 2010; Lawrence Lessig, 2008; Eli Horwatt, 2009.
7 Lev Manovich, What Comes after Remix? (USA: Manovich.net, 2007).
8 Kirby Ferguson, Everything Is a Remix (USA: Everythingisaremix.info,
2011), www.everythingisaremix.info.
9 Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (New York:
Springer Press, 2012).
10 David Gunkel, Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix (Boston:
MIT Press, 2016).
11 Tom Durley, Medium Specificity in Film and Video (USA: tomdurley.com,
2005), www.tomdurley.com/v1/essay_medium.html.
12 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-
Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
13 Noël Carroll, “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously
I nvented Arts: Film, Video and Photography,” in Theorizing the Moving
Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
14 Sonja Foss, Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice (Illinois: Wave-
land Press, 2004), [Originally Published 1989].
15 Göran Sonesson, Current Issues in Pictorial Semiotics (Toronto: Semiotics
Institute Online, 2002), www.univie.ac.at/wissenschaftstheorie/srb/cyber/
soneout.html.
16 Eduardo Navas, Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling (New York:
Springer Press, 2012).
8 Introduction
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1 The Specificity of
Intertextual Media
Distinctive Characteristics of
Remix Video
Figure 1.1 P
hotoshop collage to oil-painted portraits, 2014.
Courtesy of Owen Gallagher.