Finalising Proposal & Group Production

Original Proposal:

“I proposed to take 6-12 photographs that in some way involve everyday objects or settings in alternative ways that give rise to and raise awareness to current social issues in society such as technological mediation, poverty and consumerism/capitalist culture. My main focus is to incorporate themes discussed in different texts such as….  Vejby, R. & Wittkower, D. (2010). Spectacle 2.0. Facebook and Philosophy, edited by DE Wittkower. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court. pp97-108. By considering the everyday as a spectacle, we could compose images in a similar framework by constructing the images as spectacles by sing basic and seemingly dull everyday objects to construct and image that directly address issues of spectacle and capitalism. I intend to manipulate representations by talking juxtaposing material (everyday objects) and use them to portray the themes being explored. The spectacle text also discussed the “derive”(drift) and the “detournament” (subvert/create new meaning), I intended to subvert everyday object to create awareness to such issues through the use of photography”

Word Count – 165

Group Proposal:

The proposal chosen was by Ray, we will work together in a group of three consisting of Brandon, Ray and Charlotte.

“Our Everyday is saturated with adverts and signs, slogans, labels and directions.

Imagine an ‘ordinary’ British Kitchen, one which has a television on the counter and a table. On the table is all the supplies you would need for a weekday breakfast. Cereals, Bread, Orange Juice, Tea, Milk. There are magazines and newspapers on the table, open to show large, colourful advertisements. The television blares away a commercial, or a TV show which disclaims its use of Product Placement. The oven, the fridge, the microwave, the toaster and the kettle, all display a logo to denote its manufacturer. The clothes of the family sat around the table, a school logo on a jumper, a sports logo on a cap, a designer logo on a handbag.

What if all these adverts, slogans and labels just disappeared?

What effect would this have on us? Would we notice? Would it bother us?”

“This image of Times Square illustrates how my could work, I propose to create 8 – 12 Photographs, which are paired up, with 1 photograph showing the original image, and the other showing an edited version, where the adverts, branding, directions have been removed. ”

This week’s reading… Remix Culture

Deuze, M. (2006). Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principle Components of a Digital Culture. In: The Information Society. 22. London: Routledge. pp63-75

Discussing and exploring the subject of Digital Culture, the Deuze text breaks down the complex understanding of how Culture and transformed and redeveloped into a sphere of computerisation and its implications of the media industry. His understanding was based around 3 components; Participation, Remediation and Bricolage.

Also taking into around influences such as  industrialisation, globalisation, and capitalism but on a wide scale analysing the transition and convergence between producer and consumer. A crucial factor in this transition was the rise of the internet and digital culture using examples such as Indymedia and weblogs (online citizen journalism). Now more than ever today, we reuse, recycle and recreate media and represent it in another ‘remixed’ form blending new and old content. “…digital culture: remediation as in the remix of old and new media, and bricolage in terms of the highly personalised, continuous, and more of less autonomous assembly, disassembly, and reassembly of mediated reality.” (2006: 66).  Deuze outlines how the digital culture and media industry are bound up by participation. Participation and activity are crucial, the ‘Multitude’ (Political way of addressing the masses) are now engaging in a more interactive and participatory media with rise of technologies such as Web 2.0 and YouTube, allowing individuals to produce and distribute there own media blurring the lines between producer (once elite) and consumer. “In short: In the proliferation and saturation of screen-based, networked, and digital media that saturate our lives, our reconstitution is expressed as:

1. Active  agents in the process of meaning-making (we become participants).
2. We adopt but the same time modify, manipulate, and thus reform consensual ways of understanding reality (we engage in remediation).
3. We reflexively assemble our own particular versions of such reality (we are bricoleurs).”

 Convergence is another crucial element of understanding digital culture, convergence between producer, consumer and old and new. Remediation; blending of old and new but also Distantiation “…meaning being deeply immersed in the system while at the same time attributing legitimacy and credibility to a self-definition of working against or outside of the system as well as reforming the system from within.” (2006 : 70). The idea of remediation and distantiation links greatly with capitalist culture, although trying to break free from a capitalist system it is impossible to completely detach oneself form it (E.g. Freeganism; Living from the waste of others in order to protest against capitalist modes of living > although, unconsciously reliant on the waste system of capitalism)

Bricolage refers to remixing, more today; an evident component of contemporary culture, we take media and other objects and rearrange and remix them in various different ways to create an alternative version of the original. Take this example… ‘The Clock’ by Christian Marclay; recreating a temporally accurate measurement of time by taking various different clips from films that show a time and rearranging them in the order of a 24 hour clock. This is a contemporary example of “remix culture” itself and Bricolage in particular. Although Deuze’s texts makes vivid the paradoxical nature of contemporary culture, whilst allowing  great connections to be established world wide it also promotes individualisation and isolation.

Hands, J. (2011). @ is for Activism: Dissent, Restistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture. London: Pluto Press. pp170-181 & pp 73-16

This text discusses the transformation and convergence of Digital Culture but in the context of peer production using examples such as Wikipedia.  “A common-knowledge resource built collaboratively  and organised by a set of simple protocols represents an informational commons, flaws and all, whose only funding comes from voluntary contributions.” (2011 : 176). Peer production practices, “…referred to by Yochai Benkler as ‘commons-based peer production’, which he defines as

a socio-economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the internet, the hallmark of this socio-technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals… who cooperate effectively  to provide information, knowledge or cultural goods (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006 : p 394).” (2011; 176-177). Similar to the last text, issues in contemporary media are bound up by capitalism, today more than ever even the most unregarded actions of daily life are being commodified… Checking Facebook, clicking a link your sister shared and doing a simple Google search; data such as this is tracked and recorded and the sold on the companies and industries in order to target and maximise probability of making sales.

However, peer-production also goes against commodity and capitalism,“…peer-produced commons serve for ‘free’ certain needs and wants outside the market, and the more they challenge its dominance the more likely they undermine the commodity form”. (2011 : 177). serving as a considerable threat to capitalism as it removes the commodification from the process of production, we arguable in a utopian society would thrive from gift economy rather that capitalism.

Although, peer-production is seen to be an efficient way of working and producing goods as it  [cited in @ is for Activism] “… ‘harnesses impulses, time and resources …. that would have been wasted or used purely  for consumption. Its immediate effect is therefore likely to [to be] increased overall production’ (p.122)”. (2011 : 178) the text states that it would be beneficial if the market would adopt such practices rather than oppose them. “Benkler’s ideal is the reinforcement of a free-market liberalism Web 2.0-style. He posits that this will enhance freedom and create worker autonomy – a delusion that represses the fundamental nature of the exploitation of labour and the relations of capitalist production.” (2011 : 179) but we also need to consider that “…capitalist hegemony and the rule of empire – hence the need for self-felective, self-conscious planning beyond the emergent capacities of multitude, and this need to develop QARNs focused on expanding the commons to find ways of withdrawing free labour from expropriation by capital.” (2011 : 179) examples of this would include open source software, referred to as ‘Commonism’ “… – a system in which, just as the commodity is the basic unit of capitalism, and exists in an endless pattern of circulation, a common unit would be a ‘good produced, or conserved, to be shared’ (Dyer-Witheford, 2007). The circulation would be between three domains of the common – the ecological, the social and the networked – which would cancel out the circulation of market commodities.” (2011 : 179).

Later, it is  discussed how that the three domains mentioned above influence capitalist commodity, “…capital is failing in the ecological domain it is draining common resources unfairly and irreplaceably; in the social domain it is reducing the majority of the world population to poverty and producing a  ‘planet of slums’, while the rest becomes a ‘planet of malls’; and in the network domain it is failing to realise the potential of cooperation and efficiency, instead trying to ‘stuff these innovations back into the commodity form’. With a commons-focused approach, the ecological commons would be characterised by ‘conservation and regulation’, and the social by a basic income, designed to redistribute wealth and uncouple the servitude of labour from survival and dignity. Finally the networked commons would be freed to reproduce and circulate knowledge, know-how and open channels of interaction – a ‘commons of abundance’ in which all three domains would be interlinked by a ‘circulation of commons’ (Dyer-Witheford, 2007).” (2011 : 180) although for this system to work effectively, large amounts of planning is needed… “The planning needed to succeed in such a system would need to bear some resemblance to, or be underpinned by, quasi-autonomous recognition networks – currents running through the multitude. The form of the QARN would be well suited to democratic collective decision-making in this context – able to take advantage of the capacities of scale-free networked working with the conscious effort to maintain anti-power law.” (2011 : 181)

Similar to the first text, participation is outlined to be a key factor in society and contemporary media production and circulation and how the internet is a fundamental technology that allows this phenomenon.  Remix  culture refers to “…taking all kinds of texts already in the public domain, and – with the aid of cheap consumer electronics – cutting them up, sampling them and mixing them together, so that new contexts generate new meanings , and then re-circulating them on the internet, or any other medium available.” (2011 : 73). Often blurring the lines between production and consumption with individuals often producing, consuming and distributing content for free such as Indymedia, Wikipedia and weblogs. “…it is challenging the most sacred unit of capitalist exchange, the commodity – in effect de-commodifying it by extracting it from the circuit of capitalist exchange and transforming it into a good within a gift economy.” (2011 : 74). The internet and technology has had a substantial influence on the direction of digital culture transitioning from analogue to digital and cyber media which can be easily manipulated  and copied. The text uses the example of “RiP! : A Remix Manifesto, an open-source documentary created in 2009. The Remix Manifesto exemplified the sheer power of the multitude in terms of participatory and bricolage media.

Here is a link to the complete documentary…

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/rip-remix-manifesto/#comments

Examples of Remix Culture…

Donald Trump in Game of Thrones…

http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2015/s4410705.htm

The Clock by Christian Marclay…

References:

TopDocumentaryFilms (2008) topdocumentaryfilms. Available from: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/rip-remix-manifesto/#comments [Accessed 24 February 2016]

Hands, J. (2011). @ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in Digital Culture. London: Pluto Press. pp170-181 & pp73-16

Deuze, M. (2006). Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principle Components of a Digital Culture. In: The Information Society. 22. London: Routledge. pp63-75

Heinz (2016). Heinzwatties.co.nz/. Available from:http://www.heinzwatties.co.nz/Careers/Vision-Values [Accessed 26 February 2016]

Kirkova, D. (2013) Selfridges ‘Silences’ iconic brands Marmite, Heinze, Levi’s and Dr Dre by removing words from packaging for no noise initiative. Daily Mail Online [Online] 10 Jan. Available from:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2260134/Selfridges-silences-iconic-brands-Marmite-Heinz-Levis-Dr-Dre-removing-words-packaging-No-Noise-initiative.html [Accessed 26 February 2016]

Bromwich, K. (2014). Soft Guerilla by Kyle Bean – in pictures. The Guardian [Online]. 8th June. Available from:http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/jun/08/soft-guerilla-kyle-bean-in-pictures [Accessed 26th February 2016]

HLG films. (2011) Christian Marclay, The Clock [Online] Available from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac [Accessed 26th February 2016]