Remix Culture Spotlight: Walking on Eggshells

What legal anachronism has to do with Bob Dylan, Picasso and Family Guy.

We’re big proponents of remix culture here because at the core of our mission lies the idea that creativity is merely the ability to combine all the existing pieces in our head — knowledge, memory, inspiration — into incredible new things. Last year, we featured a brilliant panel with Shepard Fairey and CreativeCommons founder Lawrence Lessig titled Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, followed closely by the excellent documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto.

Today, we bring you Walking on Eggshells: Borrowing Culture in the Remix Age — a new documentary from Yale Law & Technology, offering 24 densely compelling minutes of insight into various facets of intellectual property in the age of remix. From appropriation to sampling to creative influence to reuse, the film is an anthology of conversations with some of today’s most notable remix artists and media theorists, exposing the central paradox of contemporary copyright law: How can something originally intended to incentivize people to create serve to hinder new forms of creativity?

You’re not gonna tell me ‘oh, that’s not creative because you’re using someone’s sampled piano note’ There’s no question that at some point using other people’s recordings is 100% your creativity, and at some points it’s 0% your creativity. Then it’s even trickier because sometimes it’s just this recognition — you recognize that this fits, and isn’t that recognition something amazing that maybe no one else recognized?” ~ DJ Earworm

Let’s just take Bob Dylan or somebody like that, whom we take for granted. Does he have a grocery list, an inventory of all of his influences, all the people he has plagiarized and taken from and sampled? These are things that are part of creativity. They are previous things, previous artworks, previous entities. They already exist. Nothing comes out of your ear, out of thin air.” ~ Joy Garnett

For those of us living on the remix side of things, the film’s thesis is hardly groundbreaking. But what makes it important is that it adds another voice to one of the most necessary and urgent creative conversations of our time, building on a narrative that will continue to bend an antiquated law until it breaks and makes room for a more inclusive, era-appropriate conception of creativity.

via GOOD

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Market Maketh Man: Distortions of Democracy

Equilibrium, apathy and what John Stuart Mill has to do with medical marijuana.

You may recall filmmaker Temujin Doran from The Art of Protest, a cunning short documentary about the democratic deficits of today’s political protests. Doran has just released his latest film, Market Maketh Man — an ambitious analysis of several models of liberal democratic doctrine — and today, we sit down with him to talk about democracy, innovation, and the cultural responsibility of filmmakers.

What do you think will be the single most important social or cultural shift, trend or innovation to define the course of democracy in the next decade?

I think that most people are confident in the power of the internet to be a tool that champions our individuality and be a strong force for a more democratic, pluralist society. In some ways this is defendable; social networking, blogging, and online forums can very quickly marshal together like-minded people with potential to bring about dramatic governmental change.

Never before have these tools been so prominent in election campaigns, and in the future they will increasingly define these events and perhaps too, the course of governance. But I think in the coming decade, the internet may be revealed as something that has in fact homogenised society, and stunted our freedoms.

Our thirst for individualism in our lives has become, in a sense, the new conformism; and this has made us predictable. It will be interesting to see how politics and business will attempt to exploit this.

What role do you see documentary filmmakers playing in the past, present and future of democracy? How has this role changed over the past decade?

Perhaps the biggest change in this role is the increasing number of people can do it. It used to be a somewhat privileged position; but thanks to the affordability of film equipment nearly anyone can be a video commentator or journalist on matters that they find important. Via the internet, they can also reach a wide audience. But is this always a good thing? I find it a very troubling question, as it is something that I am also directly part of.

In the same way online commentary functions, it seems perilously close to the world of celebrity culture,; in which an individual’s opinions are marketed as media commodities.

If you look at news channels, they now all rely heavily on eyewitness videos shot from mobile phones or hand held cameras, as well as emails and texts from viewers — what they call “user-generated content.” News groups flaunt this as a kind of open democracy, but it can dangerously simplify the complexities of the modern world with melodramatic “human interest” angles.

How do you think capitalism has altered the vision for and practice of democratic rule?

For much of the western world I think Democracy will always be seen as the route to liberty, but what capitalism has done is to change the meaning of liberty, change the notion of what it is to be free, in both the eyes of the politicians and the electorate. It has replaced any sense of altruism, with selfish individualism, and established the “empire of the self,” turning the world we inhabit into one enormous advert for the life we are apparently lacking. In doing so it has handed the powers of authority to systems of control outside of government, and paralysed the ability of politics to transform the world for the better.

I think the most important thing to understand is that, in many ways, the greatest proponents of the capitalist framework have now become its audience – in short, us.

For more of Doran’s work, including drawings, photography and other films, see Studiocanoe, his creative project. And for a closer look at the evolution of capitalist propaganda, be sure to revisit the excellent BBC four-part documentary, The Century of the Self.

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Sparrow Songs: Twelve Films in Twelve Months

Darkroom epiphanies, the creative merit of empathy, and why cell phones are the future of cinema.

The world is full of interestingness and talent, and Brain Pickings has been on a mission to unearth it for years. So we’re always delighted to come across likeminded cultural treasure-hunters who seek to document the fringes of human fascination. Which is why we love Sparrow Songs — a new project by filmmakers Alex Jablonski and Michael Totten (Rize), releasing one short documentary per month, every month, for a year.

Each of the twelve films spotlights an interesting person or project, from a musician who records a full-length album every month to the secret life of a Los Angeles puppet theater to a portrait of a donut shop. Cinematically shot and beautifully directed, the films are a promising exercise in filmmaking innovation — and judging by the filmmakers’ track record of previous critical acclaim across high-profile festivals like Sundance, Tribeca and True/False, they’re bound to strike a chord.

Today, we sit down with Alex and Michael to talk about the vision behind the project, emotional curiosity, and creating an audience for nonfiction film in the age of transmedia storytelling.

Hey Alex and Michael. Tell us a bit about your background, your brand of creative curiosity and what inspires you.

Alex: I went to grad school at UCLA where I got turned on to documentaries. Sparrow Songs is my first project out of school. For me this project is less about creative curiosity and more about emotional curiosity. I hear about these places or these lives and wonder what they feel like. I want to know what there is to be learned there. We go and experience the people and the place and then the creativity comes into play with Michael and I working together to try and find a way to convey those feelings and that reality.

Michael: My initial interest in photography stems from my uncle, who in his youth built a darkroom in my grandparent’s basement. In the 7th grade I discovered that same darkroom along with all his old black and white negatives. At the time I didn’t have a camera so I experimented with printing his photos, most of which were of him and his friends getting high. The images were so mysterious and poetic, it seemed there was a story behind each of them.

Those photographs inspired me to begin shooting and started me down the path of filmmaking. I also have a lot of people I’m inspired by, some of whom are: Bill Henson, Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard Prince, Anna Gaskell and Harmony Korine.

How did the two of you partner up and what was the inspiration for the project?

Alex: Some of the inspiration came from the tradition of street photography — Helen Leavitt, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Joel Sternfeld, etc. I asked myself what those folks would be doing if they were starting out now and these short, intimate and portable portraits felt like a good answer. The inspiration also came from John Wood and his Learning Music project.

Michael had just gotten back from a job in Afghanistan when we met through a friend. I mentioned the project to him and he seemed interested. He has a wonderfully calm and peaceful energy and I… well, I don’t. It felt like it’d be a good balance.

Michael: Alex and I originally met on a music video that I was shooting. Then months later we randomly ran into each other in an alleyway behind my studio in Echo Park. Alex told me about Sparrow Songs and asked me what I thought. I loved the idea, a week later we shot our first episode.

What’s your process in curating the themes, subjects and people to make documentaries about?

Alex: I’ve just been trying to follow my intuition; with only a month to make each film you can’t have too many false starts or you wind up way behind. One thing that has really stuck with me — especially in the moments when I feel like the film we’re making is going to be terrible — is something Howard Suber, a professor at UCLA, said:

‘With enough compassion you can make a film about anything.’ I think that’s true, if you look deep enough into any life or any place, you’ll find something compelling.”

The past decade has seen a massive spike in documentary filmmaking, bringing the genre from the fringes of cinema into the mainstream of popular taste. What factors do you think have facilitated this? How do you anticipate documentary film will evolve as social media and everything they enable — worldwide connectivity, citizen journalism, crowdsourcing, instant news, transparency — continue to take hold?

Alex: For the audience, I think the political environment of the last ten years made documentaries feel more urgent and more needed than before. From the filmmaking side, the work has changed so quickly, almost across the board the films have become much more cinematic in scope and feel. And that’s important because this is the new journalistic form; this is the new essay.

Our generation’s Woodward and Bernstein aren’t going to be writing for a newspaper, they’ll be making nonfiction films. And the way those films are consumed will be different: the next film that changes the world won’t be seen in a movie theater — it’ll be posted on Facebook or watched on an iPad and emailed along.

Michael: In an odd way, reality television opened people up to the idea that maybe reality can be entertaining. Along with that you had the advances in technology, the ‘digital revolution’ that made making documentaries much easier for independent filmmakers. People now had the means to tell the stories they were passionate about. And then with Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock you had documentarians becoming household names. As far as the future goes, we’re only a couple years away from a moment when every phone has a video camera in it. At that point, to some extent, everyone will be a documentary filmmaker.

Why “Sparrow Songs”?

Michael: It sounds good, it feels right. The project changes with each film and I think the meaning of the name does too.

Alex: That’s true. Like a lot of things with this project, the idea came first and then the meaning(s) emerged. At first the name seemed to mirror what we’d be doing — making these pieces and just releasing them out into the world, just doing it for the sake of doing it.

More recently though it seems to me that a bird singing in a tree is something you can either stop and look at and appreciate or something that you can just ignore. I think the subjects in our films are like that, they could just as easily go by unnoticed but if you pause and look a lot can be revealed not only about them, but about the world around us.

Watch all the films online for free on the Sparrow Songs website or the Vimeo channel, and get an exclusive peek at the creative process behind the films on the project blog.

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