DMA Video Project

Final Project for DMA Spring 2011. Comparison of traditional and contemporary musical culture of the Montagnard Dega people. I do not own any of the clips, including those from Mondega's music videos. Check him out.

DMA project brief

I am interested in the musical culture of the Montagnard people. My research has showed that this aspect of their artistic culture was rich in their native land, but I want to know how strong it has remained here, how much it has changed or been influenced by our music/culture, and in what ways the young Dega people are carrying on and/or changing the tradition. If at all possible, I would like to contact the rapper Mondega who is garnering attention in mainstream hip-hop culture. If nothing else, however, I would at least like to go and film some Montagnard people performing and talking about some of their traditional and new contemporary musical. In order to make my project successful, I will definitely need to get a concrete idea of how/when I can meet with these people, and what people I can have as aid in communicating with the Dega people.

sites.google.com/site/mdagreensboronc/
slusser4.glogster.com/false/
www.minglix.com/search/montagnard
wn.com/Montagnard_Dega
www.minglix.com/search/montagnard
www.youtube.com/user/phohoa
blog.mtviggy.com/.../qa-with-montagnard-freedom-rapper-mondega/

DMA week one

These images- me in a place of origin and a mosaic image- are meant to correspond with my week one in-studio post.

DMA HW week 5

Artists today are reshaping our culture, whether it be through reimagining art and our cultural past or challenging the conventions of today. Take the artist Issa, formally Jane Siberry, who was the first artist to allow people to choose what they paid for her music, even if it be a cool $0.00. When the average price for a download ended up being more than the average price of an itunes download, she demonstrated the virtue in an open artistic environment in which the people who actually care about the art can assign their own value to it, rather than government and record labels determining its value and distributing it as they please. However, Issa is part of a small, yet growing, minority, and copyright law still hinders the way that people can access and use what the experience in culture for artistic purposes. The graphic novella Bound By Law illustrates how even with the legal protection of Fair Use, corporations can make it so expensive legally to test the copyright waters that there really isn't anything that has been created by someone else that is truly free for a next creative mind to use. The Remix entry on Wikipedia explains how copyright laws often pertain to how closely the remix resembles the original, and how much the original artist (or legal or commercial entity that owns the work, or "product" from their standpoint) cares that someone else creates their own vision of it. Tim Wu sums it up in his article on tolerated use: "(Today we have) a copyright law that covers almost everything we do in the digital world... so expansive and extreme that the very firms that first sought it cannot even make use of it". So we end up with different degrees of "tolerated lawbreaking", and different artists risk themselves to different degrees in order to remix culture. Justin McIntosh and Pogo are two remix artists who have used traditional Disney animation for different purposes. McIntosh mixed classic Donald Duck footage with audio clips of Glenn Beck in order to use Donald as a metaphor for the American who is senselessly put into a state of paranoia by blinding following political propaganda. Pogo, on the other hand, was originally sanctioned by Disney to remix their classics, but they didn't approve of his impressive Snow White remix and he was only allowed to individually distribute it after his contract had been terminated. Nonetheless, both remain on Youtube and the public's overwhelmingly positive response speaks for itself. This trend is evident as well with The Story of Cosmetics, a short film on Youtube that was posted independently. The piece is a perfect example of how a short Youtube video, free for anyone to view, can serve a great and powerful cause, such as bringing to light the way that corporate interests and corruption of government causes us to be constantly polluted from the things we buy and consume, under the "toxins in, toxins out" model. Independent digital art such as this is proving to be the new movement of creative control in our society, where creative control doesn't imply control over the monetary profit of one's creativity, but control over what impact one's creativity has on culture. This self-reliance can be seen with the band Atomic Tom, who released a video of themselves performing a song on a subway exclusively on iPhone app instruments, since their real instruments had been stolen. Although the band has stated that the backstory of the stolen instruments was fictional, the fact that they were able to adequately perform the song using nothing but smart-phones proves that a new era of artistic ingenuity is rising in the age of digital media.

DMA week 4 HW

Write a blog entry about creativity, influence, ownership, and art in the digital age.

I've watched the film "RiP: A Remix Manifesto" before I took this class, but viewing it now specifically as an artist who lives in a world that is undeniably dominated by technology and inextricably digitized, it achieves its goal with me personally; it is extremely unsettling. The Remixer's Manifesto, as it is called in the film, partially states that culture always builds on the past, and that the past always tries to control the future. This is virtually inarguable; Jonathan Lethem explains in The ecstacy of influence how literature, one of our older art forms, has and always will adhere to this principle as he provides the example of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1956) is strikingly similar to Heinz von Lichberg's tale of the same name from forty years earlier, though it is impossible for anyone to truly judge whether Nabokov intentionally sampled story elements from Lichberg or if the earlier story had subconsciously influenced him so much that he couldn't help but write the story. Culture, and art, more specifically, has proven to be governed by this principle and process. Steve Dixon's "Digital Performance" shows us how the basic idea of such new age forums of digital art as an IMAX theater are just a part of a natural artistic evolution from such things as the friezes of ancient Pompeii. As my professor Bob King has stated in one of his podcasts, digital media can be defined technically and ontologically, but its historical definition explains that it's merely the industrialization of mental labor, and that it's just the most recent step in a long history of technology that is itself a small step in a large anthropological history. It makes sense then that the development of modern media with the daguerrotype (the first photographic machine) and the development of computing machinery with the analytical engine occurred at roughly the same time in the nineteenth century, as Lev Manovich relates in "New Media". The essence of all of this information is that both art and technology are constantly evolving human "phenomenons", if you will, that by their very nature sample from and utilize their past in order to create their future, and that these governing principles have made the dawn of digital media inevitable. The problem is that the potential for digital media to connect the world electronically to share ideas about art and media has become, for some, an even greater potential for profit. Copyright laws that were originally intended purely to protect artists are now ways for incomprehensibly large corporations to harness the communication that occurs digitally over the internet and reinterpret it as a commercial market. As Lawrence Lessig says, we are now criminalizing an entire generation (technically I'm of the generation, not a "raiser"), but the motivation is one of profit, not of protecting artistic creativity. Artists like Girl Talk who blatantly use other artists' music to create his own are only doing what artists of any medium have done throughout history; the digital age has just made it far more apparent and far more accessible to the masses, which allows for far more legal and commercial attention to be paid to the "issue".

DMA week 2

Each and every moment of each and every day, we are engaging in a constant, continuous, subconscious process of framing everything we see and experience in our world and environment. Again, this process is subconscious; we may not have any intention or even awareness of it, but we perpetually “frame” our outward experiences in order to interpret, analyze, make sense of, and assign concrete definition, meaning, and value to the things that surround us. That last one, value, is important. We frame things relatively, and determine their place within the entire “framework” by assessing their relation and degree of proximity to other elements of the framework. As George Lakoff says when he speaks about socially scientific framing and metaphors, we become engrained with concepts from a young age, such as the idea that more is up and less is down, that define how we think of these terms, and how we internalize the what the word means for us, which usually derives from the actual meaning of the word. This example of Lakoff’s is directed more towards the topic of linguistic metaphors, but it is essential to the overall concept of framing and how affects the way we value our world; when words, concepts, and ideas can be so simply manipulated, or simply used with versatility so that they begin to carry more weight or conjure different mental images or emotional responses than they are essentially there to do, they truly alter the way that we see the world. This is both an exhilarating and terrifying notion; as an artist, I see immediate virtue in it because it basically explains they way that any art is achieved. I could use the framing of shots or the editing of a film to metaphorically explain this explanation of metaphors, but it can most simply be shown with poetry: poems and poetic forms of writing or lyricism use words in an order and rhythm that evoke far stronger emotional responses than any other literary type can, regardless of whether similar diction is used. So framing can be exciting, in that we can accept that it’s an unavoidable part of human nature and embrace it to make art that ultimately elevates and expands the way that we frame our world. However, our world is unfortunately not only framed by our own natural intuition or by artwork. Advertisers are masterminds of framing, and know exactly how to do the work of framing what we see for us- to subliminally message us- and to assign meaning and value to the world for us. The PBS program “The Persuaders” addresses the way advertisers seek to become an inescapable part of the physical environment around us so that we have no way of framing by our own instincts because what we are trying to frame is already part advertisement. They blur the line so that we may actually believe that buying a certain brand of sneaker or paper towel actually merits the same principles of value and judgment that one would apply to any other aspect of life or relationships. What’s truly scary is that art, or at least an understanding of the way art affects the human spirit, is a part of what has helped advertising to grow from the bright and shiny tangibility of the 20^th century to the visceral, everyday part of life that ads play in our experience today. In the PBS program, Andy Spade is seen creating an ad campaign for a new airline that seeks to portray itself as the advocate of the modern person while adhering to a low fare model. Spade creates an entirely artistic ad that appeals to (and in doing so, frames the viewer’s understanding) of the viewer’s identity without any mention of planes or prices. The marketing execs are skeptical, but what’s scary is that Spade isn’t crazy; the most successful contemporary ad campaigns of the biggest corporations have almost all utilized this method of visually creative and stimulating ads that both make us forget that we are taking the role of the consumer and cause us to enthusiastically embrace it. By appealing to our emotions rather than just our pragmatism and senses, we apply the same framework of values that we would to the important aspects of our lives to what we buy and consume, and the degree to which we feel we need to consume is increased dramatically. So, I accept the fact that I constantly frame the world and people around me in order to be able to understand it. And that’s what framing is to me: it’s the way we make sense of the world. What’s troubling is that so much of the frames I already have in me are not a result of my own cognition but have been instilled in me by other people, and yes, companies, that can and will easily change the way we define things for their gain. Scary stuff.

Week One In-studio

My name is Will Young. I'm from Greensboro, NC, and have an older and younger sister. I'm not sure when my family came to the United States originally. My father is a doctor and my mother is a realtor. In the United States today, the main concern for a young person is being able to make a living. The economy is weak and as a result, young people who are fortunate enough to receive a good college education are graduating and having almost as hard of a time searching for work as those who the non-college route. For me, digital media is mainly helpful for practical purposes, like schoolwork. I have never had to grow food for my or my family's sustenance, but I think that would be interesting. I guess I've always been interested in art, but I probably fully realized it when I was in high school. I would advise any teenager newly arrived in the U.S. to basically focus on getting work and basically to make sure they can support themselves when need be before getting distracted by the disorienting American culture. I have traveled outside the country some, my favorite place so far being Uganda. Visiting there was an eye-opening experience that made me realize how differently people around the world really live. I have no idea what matters most to me; the best I've figured out up to this point as far as a "life philosophy" is concerned is to do my best to keep myself and those I care about happy and to see that whatever I do doesn't make the world a more negative place, if not to actually improve it.