Open Video Alliance

This week GUADEC, the important meeting of the open source GNOME community, becomes the first event worldwide to be streamed live in WebM.

WebM is a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. It replaces Theora as the preferred free format for HTML5 video. Flumotion, a leading company in online video streaming technology and services, is streaming the GUADEC conference from July 28—30th live in the new WebM video format.

Flumotion is on the cutting edge of open video streaming, and frequently demonstrates the agility of open source development. Within 20 hours of VP8’s release, Fluendo integrated the new codec into its streaming software. 28 hours later, Flumotion provided the first demo of a live stream in WebM.

OVA has partnered with Flumotion on the Filmmaker Summit at Slamdance and the Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig. We’re pleased to announce that we will be working with Flumotion to offer a WebM stream of the upcoming Open Video Conference, this October 1-2 in New York City.

Every three years, the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress meets to determine exceptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What’s anti-circumvention? It’s the part of the US digital copyright law that prohibits breaking digital locks on content, such as DRM and content scrambling. Typically, breaking these locks is a federal offense—even if the locks are being broken in the service of a perfectly legal creative process, like video remix.

Yesterday morning, the Librarian of Congress issued its ruling to announce several important (and broad) exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The Register of Copyrights and Librarian of Congress designated six particular exemptions, though the first has the most direct effect on video creators:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos

In other words, college professors, film and media studies students, documentarians, and noncommercial artists can now legally use technology like Handbrake to bypass DVD encryption systems and capture sample video clips.

Though this is a huge and welcome step in the right direction, the ruling limits the excerpts to “short portions”—a purposely undefined term that implies fairly short clips—and is a sort of last resort exception; users can rip DVDs if utilizing another method, such as filming a screen, is reasonably out of the question (MPAA argued against this ripping in its presentation to the copyright office last year, claiming that educators should instead record clips off a TV screen with a videocamera). The ruling also only covers “criticism or comment,” just two of the factors that tend to characterize fair use (news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research are a bit more attenuated). Though the noncommercial exemption tends to cover most instances related to online and educational video, many people were left out of this group of exempted users.

Other major exemptions announced this week permit the jailbreaking of smartphones (such as the iPhone) to allow for external applications and the connection to other wireless networks; bypassing video game DRM for security research; bypassing encryption on computer programs protected by obsolete dongles; and circumvention of ebook DRM for text-to-speech purposes when no other text-to-speech alternative is available.

Requests that were considered but not approved included bypassing DRM on streaming video, bypassing CSS on DVDs in order to play on Linux machines, and bypassing DRM on media and software that depends on an authentication server that has been disabled.

These changes are great news, though their limitations are evident. And Linux users are still treated as second-class consumers of media. Still, it will be interesting to see how these rules play out until the next DMCA review three years from now.

For further reading, this quick piece by Nick Bramble, fellow at the Yale ISP, brings up further questions and calls for explanations regarding many of the changes. Read EFF’s press release here.

Check out the official, longer description (pdf) for explanations behind the ruling.

Photo by 37Hz on flickr

Got two minutes? Want to help protect the net, and have a chance to meet face-to-face with lawmakers?

“America’s Got Net” is a nationwide YouTube-based competition asking a burning question—why do you love the Internet? How has it empowered you, helped you start a business, serve your community, find a job (or a spouse!), connect with others, participate in society and democracy? With net neutrality on the line, everything you love about the Internet is at risk. Make a video for America’s Got Net so Public Knowledge (and other net-neutrality defenders on the hill) can carry your message directly to lawmakers.

It’s easy to join in—just make a video that’s under 2 minutes explaining why you love the internet, upload it onto YouTube, and tag it “#AGN2010”. That’s it! Submissions will be accepted until midnight PST on July 31, 2010. Winners will be judged based on the power of their story as well as creativity, coherence of message, and potential impact of message. For further details about submission, please refer to AGN’s info page.

Videos that are 720p or higher will be automatically transcoded to WebM!

Pad.ma, short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, is an Indian open video archive. All videos on pad.ma are freely available to watch or to download for non-commercial use, and the website is open source under the GPL, or General Public License.

Part of pad.ma’s mission is to provide an opportunity to view material that lives “outside the edits.” The available footage isn’t necessarily what you would see in films or other video sites, and is densely annotated with text and transcripts.

Pad.ma is a leader in contemporary digital archiving practices, and is currently at work on a new software framework and interface for the summer of 2010. According to the site architects, “the focus here is on annotation, cross-linking, downloading and the reuse of video material for pedagogy, research and reference.” This makes it a valuable resource not only as a free and open source video site, but as a developing library of unique and educational content.

We sat down with the folks behind pad.ma to discuss the site’s development, and the relationship between video, art, technology, and viewership online. In the process, we learned more about the conceptual background for their design, online video as it relates previous generations of the moving image, and what to expect from pad.ma in the future.

Open archives are an important topic at the upcoming Open Video Conference, and a number of developers and archivists from Pad.ma will be represented. By promoting free and open access, publishing content that may otherwise go unnoticed, and seeking new meanings and uses for material in a digital format, they are actively engaging with the process of building an archive for the 21st century. Read on for the interview.

How did Pad.ma come together?

Pad.ma: At present Pad.ma is cared for by 0×2620.org (0il21.org) from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore and CAMP, based in Mumbai. ALF had been doing significant research around IP and Piracy, including authoring for example the Guide to Open Content Licenses (2004), prior to pad.ma’s inception. Oil21.org, as it was known then, had been working with digital distribution and its effects: textz.com, v2v.cc and Pirate Cinema etc. for a while. When we all met again in Berlin during the G-8, in the summer of 2007, they had just finished the first version of 0xdb.org. In Bombay, CAMP’s (earlier chitrakarkhana.net) own autonomous video projects had emerged from a critique of conventional documentary form and politics, including looking at art more generally, as a “distributive” practice.

Another starting point came via Majlis, an established NGO working in Bombay in the cultural field, who had an on-going video archiving project, Godaam (Godown). Over many months of conversation with the NGO, with documentary filmmakers and other cultural practitioners, the idea of making the footage available in the public domain (which was not without resistance) was pushed forward. ALF and Oil21.org entered the conversation at this stage, and a formal collaboration towards an online video archive was born. Point of View, another NGO based in Mumbai also came on board.

In the winter of 2007 we all began working intensely on the code, on the content and on the licensing framework in Bombay. Pad.ma emerged from this process and its beta version was launched in February 2008, with over 100 hours of content, fully under the GPL (with a specific PGPL, pad.ma general public license for the content).

Can you talk a little bit about the use of text on your site? How does it fit in to the overall project for people who may be less familiar with interacting with video in this way, or contributing to it?

Pad.ma: In the days of silent cinema, there would often be a person, a ‘Banshee’, who would play the role of providing the sound/commentary/annotation to what was happening on screen. His version of course sometimes elaborated the image, sometimes it was in contradiction, but often brought to notice things that would sometimes be missing. We can also see a similar approach in the work of thinkers like Benjamin who saw their task as an excavation of the debris of modernity to bring to light the simultaneously enchanted and quotidian aspect of a proliferating commodity culture. In the era of the hyper image, one of the challenges is to think through what a banshee technology would consist of, of what writing practices could bring to light a different relation to the image and the idea of the archive. The challenge for us is how to intervene in an environment where the image is collapsed into an economy of information. I don’t think we have an answer yet, but Pad.ma is an experiment at trying to look at the practices of reading and writing as existing simultaneously with the image, and not merely as a supplement to the image.

What are the uses for this author or user generated text?

Pad.ma: The user on Pad.ma can locate precise moments in the video either through transcripts, description, keywords or annotations by academics, historians, filmmakers on the video, and also download this specific clip. The user can display, re-use and remix the videos. Multiple users can annotate on all the videos – and these annotations act as separate layers on the video, and explain, refute, contextualize the video. This allows space for many meanings to be remixed and altered, rather than only a singular, factually verified account. Pad.ma is a response to many of the anxieties around visual cultures and image politics as well; that if our experience of the media saturated world is not any longer about only seeing images, but constantly reading and seeing visuals, where reading becomes a process that is compliant to procedures of hegemonic power (technological, political, advertising and corporations). In the Indian context, Pad.ma is also a response to censorship or blocking (and to over-saturation of images that fills the void).

The text on pad.ma is of two primary types, apart from the basic metadata and clip descriptions that are provided on the info pages.

There is usually one layer of transcripts, where the motivation is to provide a transcript or translation (into English, or now other languages) of what is being said in the video. This is meant to provide deep text-based searchability across the archive, and an account of the video that is asubjective, or “true” to the video material. We are starting to experiment with voice-based transcription and other ways to speed up this process.

The second type, annotations, have a completely different function. The first layer of annotations is done by the original contributor, who may or may not be the author of the video. There are many cases for example of “found” materials, or materials such as film clips that are being annotated by scholars or enthusiasts. At the moment the bulk of textual annotation is done, as part of the archival process, by the original contributors. There is not much of a “comment” culture on pad.ma, and this is perhaps a factor of the interface, which requires you to mark a section of video, and be logged in, before you can annotate it. This is partial to more engaged, longer text pieces that the kinds of comments you might find on youtube or nico nico douga.

The most interesting types of user-contributions to the archive so far are text-pieces that span several, say a dozen, video clips. These are either invited contributions from people writing about a particular issue within the archive, or people writing elsewhere who can reference sections of video on pad.ma, by giving a link with timecode in-out, such as: http://pad.ma/Vfrbgdjr/00:09:19.320-00:09:58.919

Pad.ma “layers” all annotations and transcripts, so that when you play a video you come across a number of different textual entries. This means that we are not moving towards a canonical ‘description’ of the video material through text, but a multitude of voices speaking about and through it.

Recently, you conducted a workshop in Beirut to share your work with archival groups there. What do you see as Pad.ma’s role with these kinds of workshops, and how is it expanding?

Pad.ma: It has been a fascinating experience working with groups and archives in India over the past two or so years, and to get people’s perspectives on the possibilities they see for a text-annotated video archive. Workshops such as the one in Beirut are vital to bringing in more perspectives, as well as enlivening the debate around online archives in general, including issues of property and privacy. Going forward, we’re doing a workshop in Bangalore later this month that aims to work with content-makers, but for the first time we’re also having an intensive workshop sessions with coders to explore uses of the Pad.ma API and also re-imagine use-cases for a heavily annotated archive such as pad.ma. So, I think in some cases we provide a valuable service to people with content that may otherwise be lost due to years of sitting in cupboards, and on the other hand, we also hope to open up the possibilities of usage of this material. Some of the most interesting possibilities of the archive will emerge once people really get into using the website to do what they want – whether that means using the API to create a mash-up on their own site, or write new kinds of stories across video materials, or things we haven’t thought of yet.

What’s to come? Are you looking for any help, contributions, sources, technical work?

Pad.ma: From the onset, the software has been built as an open source project, and as such we’re extremely happy to have people use it, fork it, write patches, etc. The current code-base and bug-tracker lives at http://wiki.pad.ma/. The upcoming release is a complete re-write, being developed using the Django frame-work. You can follow development and get access to all the source at https://wiki.0×2620.org/wiki/pandora. If you are interested in development, please join the mailing list @ https://mailb.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev and you can generally find us on IRC @ #pad.ma on irc.freenode.net.

The second Kaltura Developer Meetup in NYC is coming up next Tuesday evening, July 27 at Kaltura HQ.

Grab some pizza and drinks and learn about the new Kaltura CE 2.0—a self-hosted open source video platform. The Kaltura developer community will also prepare towards the Open Video Conference hackathon this October 3rd.

Please register at the Meetup page. See you there!

Registration for OVC is now open—sign up before August 1st for lower early bird rates!

OVC is heating up. Keep an eye out for some big speaker announcements, and a preliminary list of accepted sessions, starting next week.

Damian Kulash, lead singer and guitarist of the rock band OK Go, will give a talk at this year’s Open Video Conference.

OK Go is perhaps best known on the web for its mega-viral “Here it Goes Again,” the famous music video of the band dancing on treadmills. OK Go choreographed and shot the video themselves, and posted it to YouTube in 2006 without the record label’s permission. A legion of bloggers and positive word of mouth helped popularize the video and launched the band into the stratosphere. “Here it Goes Again” has been transmitted over 200 million times and counting.

Since then, OK Go has produced a number of other massively viral videos, each more creative than the last (be sure to check out the amazing video for “This Too Shall Pass,” for which the band built an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine). The videos have been an effective promotional tool and have continued to earn the band exposure. But earlier this year, a decision by the band’s record label to forbid embedding videos on blogs and other social media created a small controversy. The move frustrated fans and followers, and views dropped precipitously. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000,” Kulash explains in a recent New York Times op-ed.

As one of the bands to most successfully leverage the web, OK Go are at the center of a discussion of how artists can reap success from sharing and open networks. In addition to being a major creative force, Kulash and company are also outspoken advocates for an open internet—in 2008, Kulash served as a lead witness for a House judiciary committee hearing on net neutrality.

Join us this Fall to hear from Kulash about the relationship between artists, their fans, and the new distribution channels. And keep an eye out for more information about Open Video Conference. Registration begins next week!

Firefogg is an open source browser plugin that automatically converts videos to open formats. Sites like Wikipedia use it to streamline conversion and uploading in a single step.

Firefogg 1.2, has just released, adding WebM support and a host of other features. There are now three easy options for users to endcode to WebM—VLC, Miro Video Converter, and Firefogg. With Chrome, Firefox and Opera browsers all shipping WebM in the near future, the project is demonstrating how agile open source development can be.

This year’s Open Video Conference will feature a panel on the ongoing conflict between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Burning Man festival.

Each year, Nevada’s Black Rock desert plays host to the Burning Man festival. Tens of thousands of people make the pilgrimage to celebrate self-reliance, creativity and freedom. It’s a week of fire art, bad techno, art cars, combat boots, and more.

For some time, the organization behind the event has enforced a highly restrictive set of policies around photography in Black Rock. Through its ticket sales and online terms of use, the Burning Man Organization claims ownership over all photos and videos created at the festival.

Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Corynne McSherry criticized these rules in a post at EFF’s Deep Links:

Those Terms and Conditions include a remarkable bit of legal sleight-of-hand: as soon as “any third party displays or disseminates” your photos or videos in a manner that the Burning Man Organization (BMO) doesn’t like, those photos or videos become the property of the BMO.

The BMO also limits your own rights to use your own photos and videos on any public websites, (1) obliging you to take down any photos to which BMO objects, for any reason; and (2) forbidding you from allowing anyone else to reuse your photos (i.e., no licensing your work no matter what is depicted, including Creative Commons licensing, and no option to donate your work to the public domain).

Burning Man argues these restrictions protect attendees’ privacy. People do wacky stuff out there—in various states of undress and sobriety—and they need to be protected. But EFF thinks attendees’ freedom of expression, and their copyrights, must be respected. How do you balance both concerns?

In a interesting turn of events, Burning Man, the EFF and Creative Commons have entered into negotiations to transform the largest counter cultural art gathering in the world into a legal platform for human readable language and free culture.  Will it work? Will it crash? What will they as a team decide?

Join us for a real world ethics question, with insights into the governance of online video platforms, privacy, autonomy, and freedom of expression. Throw in panelists from Burning Man, EFF, and Creative Commons—and giant burning wicker man—and you have one interesting discussion.

The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. This mission encompasses a comprehensive strategy of policy analysis and reporting, public campaigns, investigative research, grantmaking support, and open source technology. Together, these efforts improve the quality of public discourse, empower citizens through access to information, and hold political figures and institutions more accountable. Sunlight shares our passion for free expression and healthy public discourse on the web, and we’re very excited to have their support for this year’s Open Video Conference.

Join us this October 1-2 in NYC.

The Open Video Alliance is looking for volunteers for the Open Video Conference 2010. Volunteering gets you free conference registration, an Open Video Alliance t-shirt, and a warm feeling inside.

There’s lots of ways to help out. There will be an informational meeting in July for New York-based volunteers, but we welcome volunteers from all over. If you’re interested, let’s get in touch.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf of VideoLAN will explore the past, present, and future of the VLC media player this October at the Open Video Conference.

The VLC player, by the non-profit VideoLAN project, is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files. It’s also some of the best software around.  With nearly half a billion (!) downloads, it’s among the most ubiquitous and indispensable open source projects in history. VLC will play anything you throw at it, and it is continually embracing the cutting edge.

Version 1.0.0 of VLC media player was released on July 7, 2009, culminating 13 years of development (in fact, Jean-Baptiste announced the release of 1.0 at last year’s Open Video Conference!). At this year’s OVC, he will talk about the genesis of VideoLAN, the difficulties in creating award-winning software in a non-profit setting, and the future of the project—which includes an ambitious video editing suite.

Join Jean-Baptise in others in exploring the future of online video, this Fall in New York City. Visit http://openvideoconference.org for more.

Eirik Solheim of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) will return to the Open Video Conference this year.

The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) is the biggest broadcaster in Norway with 16 local offices, three national TV stations, 12 national radio stations and major web sites. It’s been leading the way with a number of open video experiments, including CC licensing and BitTorrent distribution.

Eirik works in the development department of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. He is leading projects involving internet services, interactive TV, social media and broadband strategies. He’s consulted with Accenture and has worked hands-on digital production as a sound designer, editor, steadicam operator and photographer. He’s also a prize-winning blogger at eirikso.com.

Last year, Eirik blew us away with a hilarious lightning talk about YouTube and cultural difference based on his experience with NRK. This year, he’ll be expanding on those themes as one of several public media luminaries who will discuss strategies for “being the best provider of your content.”

Check out http://openvideoconference.org for more on Open Video Conference 2010.

We’re delighted to have the help of the smart people at American University’s Center for Social Media for the Open Video Conference. The Center organizes the important Making Your Media Matter conference and authors critical research to further the theory of fair use.

In addition, the Center hosts screenings, symposia, and film festivals related to social engagement. Particular focus is placed on fair use, human rights and film,  and the future of public media. Check out www.centerforsocialmedia.org for more information.

We’re looking forward to collaborating with the Center for Social Media on OVC 2010!

Tim Shey from Next New Networks will be speaking at OVC 2010 about how a small media startup embraced Creative Commons and built an audience of tens of millions of viewers per month.

Tim is one of Next New Networks’ founders and is the head of programming and creative development. Tim has spent fifteen years as a designer and producer of projects on television, mobile, and the web. He co-founded Proteus in 1996, a pioneering interactive agency that was responsible for first-ever nationwide interactive TV broadcast using mobile phones during FOX’s Super Bowl XXXVI.

FOMS—the Foundations of Open Media Software Workshop—is coming to New York on October 3rd and 4th, on the heels of the Open Video Conference. If you are a technically-oriented developer who is planning to make it to NYC for the Open Video Conference, you might want to plan on extending your stay.

FOMS is a action-oriented workshop designed for individuals that work on open audio and video software. This year, FOMS will have a special emphasis on the new WebM format announced by Google, Mozilla, and Opera. We will identify and close technology gaps to help progress WebM towards a baseline codec solution for HTML5.

FOMS workshops have been held in the week prior to linux.conf.au for the past four years. This will mark the first time it comes to North America, and we are thrilled to see it happening.

If you would like to attend, please contact foms-committee(at)lists.annodex.net or register online, and visit FOMS for full details.

Tubefilter has joined as a media sponsor of the Open Video Conference 2010. Tubefilter is a digital entertainment company specializing in the emerging Web TV industry in all its forms.

In addition to the indispensable Tubefilter News, they created and host the Streamy Awards to highlight breakout online programming and honor breakthrough web content. The annual ceremony features innovators and tops stars from throughout the online entertainment industry with award categories including Performance, Directing, Writing, Editing, Visual Effects, Sound, and more.

Tubefilter also founded the International Academy of Web Television, a non-profit organization devoted to artistic excellence and technical innovation in the digital entertainment industry realm.

We’re excited to have them on board for OVC2010 and encourage you to check out Tubefilter for more information.

Creative Commons has announced their Catalyst Grants Program, an effort to fund projects around the world devoted to increasing access and openness. Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation that makes it easier to share and build upon the work of others, by providing free licenses with clear permissions about copyright, remix, and authorship. The Catalyst Grant program supports individuals and organizations that make use of Creative Commons to better their programs or create new ideas.

Until the end of the June, you can apply for a grant from Creative Commons. If selected, you can receive anywhere from $1,000 – $10,000 for your project.

If you’d like to support the Catalyst Grants program, you can help by donating to Creative Commons.

This year’s OVC will host a MemeFactory performance all about viral internet videos.

A meme is a cultural message that gets shared and expands as it is passed from person to person. Some memes—like the famous Rick Roll—have cemented their place in internet lore, with a vocabulary and humor all their own. Others may leave you scratching your head.

That’s where MemeFactory comes in. MemeFactory is a whirlwind tour of web culture: three guys operating three projection screens, triptych-style. Your tour guides will introduce you to hundreds of memes over the course of an hour, providing breathless narration throughout.

A MemeFactory performance is an hour of sensory overload, but it’s fast, fun, and informative.

We talked with Stephen Bruckert, Patrick Davison, and Mike Rugnetta of MemeFactory to hear a little more about the group’s interests and their plans for OVC. Read on for their interview.

What is MemeFactory about?

MemeFactory: MemeFactory is a performance lecture about internet media trends. What that boils down to is that we’ve found an excuse to show funny pictures of cats and videos of people doing silly dances to an audience for 45 minutes or so.

The performance is very heavily structured around the media fragments we’ve collected. We’re aiming to show the audience that not only is there a ton of collaboratively produced media on the internet, but that it’s also all really interrelated, and actually kind of an important part of our current cultural situation.

And also, [it's] about being funny. Really the main point is that its funny.

Why do you do it?

MF: Secretly, the show was 100% spawned from the idea [that] it would be really fun to make this and share it with our friends. Being that we’re big internet dorks, we have this basically endless supply of esoteric inside jokes, and we wanted to share with everyone. To let everyone in on the joke.

But it didn’t take us too long into creating the first MemeFactory to realize that the emergence of a real, active digital culture says some interesting things about our position in history. It might seem a little high-falutin’ but we really think the model of collaboration exhibited by Anonymous and other online communities is something which will have a profound effect in real life.

What role does audience participation play in your research and performances?

MF: The idea that anyone in the audience, any Joe Internet—regardless of their Photoshop experience or lack thereof—can be the creator of an awesome, influential and most importantly hilarious piece of media is central to MemeFactory. We always make something at some point in the show to illustrate the point that it really is easy. You don’t need a studio, you don’t need a nice expensive camera. You don’t need illustrator. Just a familiarity with the culture and the desire to express yourself —possibly through the grammatically lacking ramblings of kitty.

What are you planning for OVC?

MF: Needless to say the show will be video-centric. But other than that—we don’t want to give away any secrets. We’re working on getting some really interesting performance mechanics down and are working on some bits of technology to do some really interesting and awesome stuff during the show.

What else are you working on?

MF: We do a fair amount of research with the Web Ecology Group based out of Cambridge, MA working on a comprehensive and holistic model of the internets and the folks that use it. This includes looking at the capabilities and characteristics of all layers of the net—design, technical, interactive—and the ways people use them to create culture and further the history of the web.

What We Know So Far—the performance company of which MemeFactory is a part—has a residency as part of The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space program at 14 Wall Street. We’re developing a piece called Forwards/Backwards, which is a 15 minute long palindrome about Time Travel, performed by members of the Brooklyn based band ArpLine.
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A big thank you to MemeFactory. We look forward to their performance in October!

Photo credits: mandiberg / neoneuromancer

The Re/Mixed Media Festival 2010 is this Sunday, May 30th at the Galapagos Art Space in Brooklyn. The first of its kind, the festival is devoting an entire day to film, music, fine art, and fashion related to remix culture and creative fair use. From the festival’s producers, The League of Independents:

“The RE/Mixed Media Festival is a means of contributing to the ongoing conversation about remixing, mashups, creative appropriation, copyright law, fair use, and the freedom of artists to access their culture in order to add to and build upon it.  While there are several conferences and events addressing these issues, they tend to be discussion-based, featuring lectures and panel discussions about policy.  LOFI believes that one of the best ways to make the public aware of these types of issues is by demonstrating the types of art and culture that remix touches. To that end, on May 30th they will transform Galapagos into a multimedia art space for a full day/evening of remixed film, video, music, performance, sound, painting, photography and fashion.  Panel discussions will include artists talking about the pros and cons of appropriation and collaborative art, moderated by social media activist and author, Deanna Zandt; a talk about DMCA takedowns with Elizabeth Stark and Kenyatta Cheese; and a panel on ‘Extending Game Culture’ featuring Jesper Juul, Paul Jannicola, and Kerria Seabrooke, and moderated by Josephine Dorado.  The event is free and will also be streamed live on the festival’s website at www.remixedmedia.org.”