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FCJ-104 Materialities of Law: Celebrity Production and the Public Domain
Esther Milne Media & Communications, Swinburne University of Technology The brand’s image and its customer’s self-image will be refracted through the ‘prism’ of a star’s persona and produce a new set of perceptions … the reason it is tricky is that celebrities are unusual brands in that they talk back and they may also change their behaviour, their views and their perceived personality quite quickly, literally making them not the person they used to be and certainly not the individual with whom the brand originally partnered. — Pringle, Celebrity Sells Saddam Hussein wants to keep advertisers from using his picture in unflattering contexts. Clint Eastwood doesn’t want tabloids to write about him. Rudolf Valentino’s heirs want to control his film biography. The Girl Scouts don’t want their image soiled by association with certain activities. George Lucas wants to keep Strategic Defense Initiative fans from calling it “Star Wars.” … Uri Geller…
FCJ-103 James Brown, Sample Culture and the Permanent Distance of Glory
Steve Jones University of Sussex But here I am, the man Who started it all, and I’m glad, ‘Cause I’m number one, original, I know I’m bad ‘I’m Real’, James Brown Perhaps unsurprisingly, the James Brown song ‘I’m Real’ (1988) features the man himself lending a vocal turn (or two) to the track. The song contains numerous lyrics regaled from James Brown’s earlier hits (including ‘Make it Funky’ (1971)) and also James Brown vocal samples from ‘Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine’ (1970) and ‘Get on the Good Foot’ (1972). This chronologic duality is the starting point of the problem that concerns us here. Funkalicious. The question is simple (even if the answer is not). Why sample James Brown’s voice when the man himself was in the studio recording a vocal? What purpose could it serve, especially when he was already replicating moments from previous hits? During…
FCJ-102 Sputnik Baby
Ian Haig School of Art, RMIT University Psycho maniac interblend, shoot it up! Ever since punks were spotted walking through the rain soaked dystopic future streets in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner(1981), a certain image of punk has been associated with ‘the future’; a kind of futuristic punk chic that also clearly owes something to the future agro of Alex in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the Class of 1984 (1982), where punks ruled the roost in a high school teen movie set in the year of Orwell’s famous novel. We also recognise the post apocalyptic mohawked road warriors of Mad Max 2 (1981) and not to mention countless other mid-eighties sci-fi video fare, where the futuristic punk with heavy eyeliner and day glow hair has made an appearance. The images of this punk-inspired look from an already exhausted dystopic future must have activated the imagination of Tony James, the guitarist from UK punk band Generation…
FCJ-101 How can you be found when no-one knows that you are missing?
Lisa Gye Media and Communicatons, Swinburne University ‘What the reader sees will not be what he hears’ James Joyce may have said this of Finnegans Wake ‘Since we have already said everything, the reader must bear with us if we continue on a while. If we extend ourselves by force of play. If we then write a bit…’ Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 1981:65 Script Don’t get me wrong. Australians make a lot of very fine and worthy films. In the torrid vernacular of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia The Movie, Crickey, you’d have to be a drongo not to know that Aussies make a shitload of bloody ripper flicks – strewth, they’re bonza mate, they’re really fair dinkum yarns with the best scenery and actors and stories that this bloody great big brown land has to offer. They’re absobloodyfuckinlutely faaaaannnntastic. Mate. Cobber. The only problem is nobody actually seems to want to see…
FCJ-100 Cultural Modulation and The Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art
Ross Rudesch Harley Professor of Media Arts, University of New South Wales Screenshot: ‘Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop (Episodes 0-2)’ (2007-08) Soda_Jerk Pop Art’s ability to mash highbrow and lowbrow culture paved the way for Pop Tronic’s essentially mono-brow outlook… Pop Art strayed from Pop Tronics by whoring itself to generative creative arts such as painting. This violates the Zero Originality Clause of Pop Tronic which states “Under no circumstances must the Pop Tronicist stray from the sanctioned triad of operations: Copy, Cut and Collage.” (Soda_Jerk, 2009) 1. In this article I want to reflect briefly on a number of themes to do with the cultural modulation of post-digital remix culture in the context of Australian contemporary art. In particular, I focus on some key figures who have contributed to a particular aesthetics and politics of audio-visual remix. In linking these artistic precursors to current forms of remix, I…
FCJ-099 The Renewable Tradition (Extended Play Remix)
Mark Amerika Professor of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Quoting from his own short story ‘Death of the Novel’ Obviously there’s no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before. The only thing that’s sure is that we move, and as we move we leave things behind–the way we felt yesterday, the way we talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back. (Sukenick, 1981: 35) The quote comes from ‘Death of the Novel’ a fictional short story by Ronald Sukenick to introduce his artist essay ‘The New Tradition’ which is collected in the groundbreaking anthology of artist poetics entitled Surfiction The New Tradition (Sukenick used to tell me) is the one we’re always on the cusp of inventing by…
FCJ-098 ‘Web 2.0’ as a new context for artistic practices
Juan Martin Prada University of Cádiz, Spain The economic model for what is called ‘Web 2.0’ is based on promoting the desire to share and exchange things, an attempt to make profits from the voluntary collaboration of its users and its potential for compiling data and making them available to the public. The new companies operating on the Internet base their role on promoting cooperative communities and managing access to the data and files contributed. This business model increasingly tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the product, integrating the user and the files he or she contributes into the actual service being offered. The inclusive logic of ‘Web 2.0’ The user and his or her contributions are the main content being distributed by networks. They channel and use as an economic force the desire felt by a multitude of…
FCJ-097 Co-creation and the new industrial paradigm of peer production
Michel Bauwens[1] Dhurakij Pundit University, Bangkok/volunteer at the P2P Foundation[2] Albert Boswijk, of the Amsterdam-based Center for the Experience Economy, asked me a set of interesting questions: What is the reality behind so called best practice co-creation concepts? Are these lipservice to co-creative approaches? Are you really in the driver’s seat or are you just being made to believe that you have influence on the outcome? What are the building blocks of co-creation? Which conditions are required? Are organisations really prepared to allow customers to influence and control their organisation and therefore become a co-creative organisation? To understand the reality or illusion behind projects claiming to practice co-creation or co-design, one must look at the polarities of power and control that determine the context in which the co-creative processes take place, with on the one hand the communities of external collaborators, and on the other hand the corporate entities. But…
FCJ-096 The Digital Given: 10 Web 2.0 Theses
Ippolita Italy Geert Lovink University of Amsterdam Ned Rossiter University of Nottingham, Ningbo 0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years? 1. News media is awash with ‘economic crisis’, indulging in its self-generated spectacle of financial meltdown. Experts are mobilised, but only to produce the drama of dissensus. Programmed disagreement is the consensus of daily news. Crisis, after all, is the condition of possibility for capitalism. Unlike the dotcom crash in 2000-2001, when the collapse of high-tech stocks…
FCJ-095 Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical Ontogenesis
Ganaele Langlois, Fenwick McKelvey, Greg Elmer, and Kenneth Werbin Infoscape Research Lab, Ryerson University 1. Web 2.0 and its Critical Contradictions At the 2007 International Communication Association Conference, Web 2.0 was highlighted as an emergent topic of research with a keynote panel entitled ‘What’s so Significant about Social Networking? Web 2.0 and its Critical Potentials’. One of the thought-provoking moments during the panel was the juxtaposition of two very different and at first, contradictory theoretical approaches to the relationships between Web 2.0 and user-generated content. While Henry Jenkins focused on the democratic potential of online participatory culture as enabling new modes of knowledge production, Tiziana Terranova argued for a post-Marxist perspective on Web 2.0 as a site of cultural colonization and expansion of new forms of capitalization on culture, affect and knowledge. The juxtaposition of these two very different critical approaches did not simply rehash the old divide between cultural…
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