Ole C Brudvik's List: Participatory Culture

Historically, engineers learned by taking machines apart and putting them back together again. Can young people also learn how culture works by sampling and remixing the materials of their culture? Might this ability to appropriate and transform valued cultural materials be recognized as an important new kind of cultural competency, what some people are calling the new media literacies? How might we meaningfully incorporate this fascination with mash-ups into our pedagogical practices and what values should we place on the kinds of new content which young people produce by working on and working over existing cultural materials? In this program, we will showcase a range of contemporary projects that embrace a hands-on approach to contemporary and classical media materials as a means of getting young people to think critically about their own roles as future media producers and consumers.

The full speaker list can be found at this sessions' website as well as a RealAudio stream.

The Media in Transitions conference is a joint effort of MIT Comparative Media Studies and the MIT Communications Forum

Summary

By Greg Peverill-Conti

[This is an edited summary, not a verbatim transcript.]

Moderator Henry Jenkins began by pointing out that there had been discussions throughout the conference of the historical antecedents of the topics at hand.  In terms of using remixing as a tool for learning, he cited Lev Kuleshov – who started what may have been the first film studies program in the early days of the Soviet Union – asking his students to re-edit Birth of a Nation and Intolerance and also pointed to the use of commonplace books in the 19th century as an example of collected/appropriated content.

The purpose of this session is to share information on a number of current projects dedicated to promoting learning through remixing content. Jenkins pointed out that engineers learn how machines work by taking things apart and putting them back together. Can the same be done with culture? The people and projects represented on this panel demonstrate that it might.

Erik Blankinship started things off by discussing his current company, Media Modifications, which develops tools for exposing and enhancing the structure of media in order to make its full creative and learning potential accessible to all. This is a theme he promises to return to throughout the course of his comments and demonstration.

If one starts with a black screen, you have the space to create a screenplay and ultimately a film or video.  In the case of his demonstration, the video was a clip from Star Trek the Next Generation. On the left-hand side of the screen the video of the scene appeared, on the right side, the text of the script.  Blankenship was able to drag and drop sections of the script which in turn reordered the words and action in the video. He described it as being similar to magnetic poetry, exposing the structure of the media and allowing it to be rearranged and reloaded.

He next demonstrated how this type of remixing and restructuring could be used to create new content.  In this case, he created a countdown by selecting and connecting numbers used by Star Trek characters in many different episodes.  Giving fans access to the structure of media – as in this case – can be a lot of fun.

This project led developers to begin further work around the idea of adaptations. In the case of the Star Trek countdown, he was able to adapt the Star Trek content to tell the simple story conveyed through the numbers in an interesting and original way.  At this point he announced adapt.tv, a soon-to-launched Web site that will provide access to tools for media adaptation.

He used adapt.tv tools to demonstrate on how people can expose the structure of media to create new adaptations.

Appropriation is central to the new media literacy. Appropriation should not be understood simply as plagerism -- that is, simply taking what someone else has created as your own property. Nor should appropriation be understood simply as resistance -- that is, refusing

or rejecting existing cultural framework. The point of appropriation is some kind of negotiation between the self and the larger culture -- an absorption and transformation of shared resources into the raw materials of one's own expression.

For beginning creators, appropriation provides a scaffolding, allowing them to focus on some dimensions of cultural production and rely on the existing materials to sustain others. For all creators, appropriation facilitates communication with others because it acknowledges the shared cultural context within which all expression must occur.

All expression depends on a balance between convention and invention or appropriation and innovation. As we develop media literacy education, we need to rethink the assumptions about the creative process which shape our current educational practices.

Metaverse meets mash-up: come June 15, there's going to be another Free Culture/Creative Commons event in Second Life, this one springboarding off the recent CC Art Show 2006 at NYU and the Sharing is Daring event at Harvard.  The object here is to take the art featured at those sites, and then remix it for an in-world showing on the 15th.  You can do the remixing with Photoshop and other standard tools, of course, but for this event, the ideal medium is SL itself.  Which is what I did with an Untitled photo by Joseph Gergel, uploading it as a texture, displaying it in-world, and using it as a backdrop for a dramatic screenshot, above.

No doubt Residents can come up with way better remixes, taking the appropriately-licensed art from here and here*, then converting them into screenshots, 3D sculptures, interactive sites, whatever.  I'm looking forward to reporting on what comes out of this.