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".