Search Results

Captioners need to be able to identify sounds from the past, not simply describe sounds phonetically. Songs, lyrics, and other television show themes may also need to be identified in the captions. Cultural literacy can also be applied at the global level of the individual television series: recurring sounds over multiple episodes can take on a special resonance. Captioners need to know which series sounds are significant and how they have been captioned in previous episodes. For the most part, cultural literacy has not been included in our public discussions of quality captioning or what captioners need to know. Accuracy and completeness – two key criteria for measuring quality – tend to be defined technically and simply: a misspelled word, a dropped caption, a poor transcription. Drawing on a range of examples, this chapter explores how captioning is more than an empty skill or decontextualized practice. Captioners need to draw on a deep well of knowledge – how much and what kinds of knowledge are always dependent on context – in order to identify significant sonic allusions, including allusions that have been remixed, (re)covered, and/or recontextualized.

This chapter examines Antigone: Insurgency (2007) — a response to state measures taken in the name of national security in the USA and Canada after 9/11 — staged with a cast of three. The script treated Sophocles' text as a score into which modern material was interpolated. For example, Creon's first speech drew on both that of George Bush at ground zero on 14 September, and another by Canada's former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Antigone's list of fellow resisters included names that many would have characterized as terrorists. Yet the play ended with a vision of reconciliation: Creon holding the dead Antigone, posed like the pieta. The deconstruction of the text in Antigone: Insurgency mirrors the seeming destruction and chaos of post-9/11 society.

This chapter studies how Charles Chesnutt's engagement with Victorian literature forms a plot of its own. This plot develops over time and ultimately brings to the surface aspects of this engagement that remain submerged in his earlier work. Chesnutt not only leverages Victorian literature to tell the stories he wants to tell but also takes a more critical stance toward his intertexts, probing and exposing shortcomings in their treatment of race. Borrowing the title of his last novel, then, the chapter suggests that Victorian literature is Chesnutt's quarry: both source and prey. Here, the double-edged nature of this engagement manifests itself most fully and strikingly when Chesnutt seizes on Victorian references to an identity as marginal and marginalized in that literature as it is central to his own writings: that of the racially mixed individual, the mulatto.

Chapter 6 moves from futures depicted on screen to the audiences who take them up and respond to them by highlighting grassroots cultures of video remix that have flourished since the early years of the digital age. The speculative modes of cultural production and reception among science fiction media’s feminist fans showcase queer possibilities that emerge from efforts to push back against the pressures of dominant media temporalities. Their creative methods are the focus of this chapter, which highlights a practice that has emerged from obscurity to some influence in the last ten years: the subcultural art form of fans making music video, or vidding. The chapter uses the term “critical fandom” to center the affective and political temporalities of creative fan works that reimagine the racialized and gendered economies of digital media production and consumption. It analyzes several fan videos in depth to develop a theory of the form, then turns to queer, feminist, decolonial engagements with the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009). Finally, the author’s own video remix practice is discussed as a way to incorporate the insights of this form into scholarly production.

Neither Dayan and Katz (1992) nor Andrew Hoskins (2004) could have foreseen the impact of the post-broadcast era on the re-articulation of the televised Live Event. Television news archives now exist in sliced, spliced, sampled montages of edited footage (some faithfully, some creatively, some of dubious quality) on Youtube. The boundaries between television and film become blurred as past ‘media events’ are remediated cinematically by amateur directors. Scholars, politicians, ideologues, students and surfers can access the Gulf War in constantly buffering sound/vision memory bytes that are syntheses of CNN footage and Hollywood films. This chapter tracks and analyses the remediation of broadcast television news of the Gulf War through Youtube, as (media) history is mycasted into an ironic, playful and performative critical reflection upon the past.

The afterword picks up on a thread suggested at the conclusion of several of the chapters in Sampling Media: that sampling is a dynamic, concrete paradigm for thinking through both pedagogy and scholarship. Just as to sample is to repurpose an existing material or practice, so, too, sampling becomes an instrument for teaching across the curriculum and for revitalizing the concept of academic conversation. The afterword reiterates the potential intimated by several of the chapters, that sampling be appreciated as critical methodology and as pedagogy; it also looks forward to elaborating sampling beyond mere technical gimmick as a broad conceptual means of critique—that is, as “sampling studies.”

Restrictive remixes are mash-ups or other kinds of recombinatory works that consciously follow or deploy predetermined rules, templates, or algorithms in the creation of new texts. As opposed to the “anything goes” school of remix culture, certain artists and practitioners embrace constraints, rules, and mathematical logics to generate a new mix or the next combination. Restrictive remixes are a vital and influential part of contemporary remix culture. This chapter views the historical roots of constrained digital remixes through the lens of the Oulipo: a group of French writers and mathematicians who founded a workshop in 1960 based on the concepts of constraint and potential. Finally, this chapter investigates the creative, critical, and mythological potentialities of restrictive remixes through three seminal works: DJ Freelance Hellraiser’s song “A Stroke of Genie-us,” DJ Danger Mouse’s album-length mash-up The Grey Album, and Lenka Clayton’s agit-prop video Qaeda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet.

This chapter explores how the DJ-remixer, previously a marginal figure, has become an established part of the North Indian film music industry, and how film music is today experienced in not one but multiple versions, or remixes. It traces the history of nightclubs and dance culture in Delhi and Mumbai, and also the recent history of Times Music, Sony Music India, T-Series, and other music companies. It is based on interviews with music company executives, DJs, musicians, and listeners, and also on news sources.

The number of clips streamed on YouTube stretches to the sublime. This chapter provides close readings of popular YouTube videos with the aim of identifying broader generic features. YouTube’s special qualities derive partly from the clips’ brevity and the ways they’re often encountered through exchange with others: a clip interests us through its associations with colleagues, family, friends, and communities. Often clips get forwarded because there’s an intensity of affect that can’t be assimilated, either humorous or biting. Some of the aesthetic features that define YouTube include (1) pulse, reiteration, and other forms of musicality, (2) irreality and weightlessness, (3) scale and graphic values, (4) unusual causal relations, (5) parametric volubility and intertextuality, (6) sardonic humor and parody, (7) condensation, and (8) formal replication of the web.

Related to the convergence between old and new media has been the profound transformation in the way power and information are distributed across society, geography, and technology. Thanks to low-cost digital authoring tools and pervasive digital networks, knowledge and culture have become easier to produce, publish, and disseminate. This has blurred the boundaries between producer and consumer, and between public and private. This chapter examines four domains that have flourished with the emergence of a culture of networked publics: amateur and non-market production, networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, niche and special-interest groups, and aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation. To illustrate these domains, the chapter presents four case studies on news blogs, viral marketing, anime fandoms, and amateur and remix music.

The Internet has become a popular medium worldwide for politicians and government officials to spread their message. Two examples represent a turning point in the use of the Internet in politics and highlight how democracy might be transformed online, one relating to 9/11 and the other to the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. This chapter examines whether the Internet promotes democracy or if it is a new public sphere. It argues that the Internet is a convivial domain that allows various political uses to thrive and new tools for political criticism and commentary to emerge. It looks at how activists use the Internet to advance democracy by comparing online efforts to promote deliberative democracy and democratic mobilization. It also considers new types of political participation that cannot be classified as mobilization or deliberation: blogging and remix.

This chapter discusses copyright’s inability to accurately identify authorship, use and infringement and explores how different creative industries come to their own understanding about how these practices are governed and managed. Through a study of sampling, music licensing and the production of contemporary art, I detail these governance and management practices and discuss what happens when copyright struggles with relational interactions. I end the chapter by suggesting that understanding authorship as a brand could potentially help to manage these tensions, while also suggesting that policy narratives around copyright law and its relationship with creative industries needs to change in recognition of these difficulties.

This chapter explores the practical challenges and opportunities of the current moment in visual activism. Via a series of situated observations from Syria, Burma, the US and elsewhere, it focuses particularly on the ways in which videos, testimonies and imagery of human rights violations are shared from sites of crisis, remixed, and re-purposed by both ‘distant witnesses’ and NGOs. The chapter considers how these image operations reflect the increasingly porous, expanding boundaries of participation in the field of human rights and their impact on issues of representation, unexpected circulation, and other ethical considerations in human rights practice. It also explores how the concept of the live news broadcast is being up-ended and up-dated through the practice of livestreaming from situations in Egypt, Burma, Africa, and Brazil. Within this context the author discusses the possibilities of live and immersive witnessing for human rights, and the conceptual, ethical and practical possibilities of image and experience-based activism at the intersection of trends in live and immersive video, ‘co-presence’ technologies for shared experience at a distance, task-routing technologies and distributed movement technologies.

Steampunk, itself composed of two wildly divergent sub-terms—a backwards-looking and conservative “steam,” and a forward-looking chaotic “punk”—creates an inherent tension between historical fidelity and transgression. It is at this paradoxical junction between backwards glances and chaotic destruction that Steampunk constitutes its primary creative tension. Through sideshadowing and alternative histories, this chapter tests the rhetorical relationships that the aesthetics that Steampunk creates. The juxtaposition of historical memory and aesthetic transgression of implied boundaries creates an inherently rhetorical set of relations. In examining how related aesthetics of Nazipunk, cowboypunk, and other punk mashups play with similar material gestures, this chapter reformulates the rhetorical canon of memory. To demonstrate how Steampunk and alt-punk emerges with aesthetic subjectivities in the conversation that accompanies images, this author recounts how participants in a game of “Too Steam, Too Punk, or Just Right?” at the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference played along and/or resisted particular constructions of historical play in real time. At this hybrid performance/presentation, audience members both challenged, and were challenged by the presenter to defend a choice in a social media space. The emergence of subjectivities, stylized aesthetic gestures, and contrastive historical stances all outline the presence of a rhetoric that needs exploration and articulation. This chapter finally examine show Terry Gilliam’s movies Brazil and 13 Monkeys pit nostalgia against the political and ideological realities of a global postnational culture. Even though Brazil and 13 Monkeys are not customarily discussed as a Steampunk work, they rely upon the same tension between nostalgia and punk to enact their satirical critique. The use of a retrograde aesthetic in service of technology critique offers the opportunity to see how this rhetoric operates both aesthetically and culturally.