Before the Internet revolution, we copied cassette tapes on personal stereos, and photocopied text onto sheets of paper edged with grey. Whether for greed or simple pleasure, this was our way of sharing culture. However, since digital technology came to town, reproducing culture has become faster and easier, and the ways we interact with other people and with media has changed dramatically.

Numerous different forms of content are transferred between people and places. The enormous number of channels opened up by the internet – unimaginable in traditional broadcast media (Doctorow, 2008, 69) – means that information of all kinds proliferates. Much of the information passed around the Internet is ‘culture’ (and by ‘culture’ I mean products of an artistic or creative nature, often with an educative and/or entertaining purpose). The networks of the Internet see an enormous amount of culture being created and re-created, copied and distributed. The Internet enables sharing between peers like never before. Lawrence Lessig explores this in his book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, stating that we are seeing ‘an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself: an effect upon how culture is made….the Internet has induced an important and unrecognized change in that process’ (Lessig, 2004, 23).

More than just sharing, ordinary people at home are able to create their own content, a process that is largely facilitated by the fact that the tools of digital technology are more readily available (Howard-Spink, 2004). Much editing software is now affordable for home users, while others are available for free download on the Internet. The consumer of culture now has the opportunity to change those very objects she views, reads and listens to. To modify, adapt, cut up, and build upon an existing work was previously a limited practice; but with the vast array of information and cultural items now available for downloading, sharing and transferring between devices – and the tools to modify them – re-creating is no longer restricted to professional studios.

With these new practices that digital technology has enabled come new opportunities for creativity. Before digital technology – and most importantly, before the Internet – creative works were produced and consumed, and those roles were enacted separately. That paradigm of the user/consumer has significantly shifted, so that the distinctions between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpretations blend into a single continuum (Levy in Jenkins, 2002). The model of “produsage” proposed by Axel Bruns accurately describes the way in which people increasingly interact with online media, creating content as much as making use of it (Bruns, 2007, 1).

This movement of ‘user-led content creation’ is re-defining the boundaries of creativity, most noticeably through the process of “remixing”. A remix (also seen in the form of a “mash-up”, which generally uses fewer sources than a remix) takes original tracks and combines them into one new blend. Originating amongst music DJs, remixing has extended to video as well and generally refers to the method of cutting up existing forms of culture and putting them back together to create something new (Howard-Spink, 2004). Like other forms of culture, remixes were originally the domain of those with professional equipment but have now become everyday practice – only a glance at YouTube will tell you this.

The amount of content on the Internet is, practically speaking, infinite, and when this is made accessible along with the means to modify and build upon it, the creative process is somewhat changed. In a shift from ‘a Romantic legacy that tells us that art must spring from the mind of a uniquely talented creator’ remixing culture undermines this modernist notion and introduces the idea that creativity does not belong to ‘a special class of creators’ (Howard-Spink, 2004). Thus creativity is democratised. This vast amount of accessible content also presents a dilemma of copyright – how can every user be expected to find every creator for every item they might post onto the Internet? (Doctorow, 2008, 68).

The law never used to be concerned with the creation and sharing of non-commercial culture, controlling only that section of culture produced for commercial ends (Lessig, 2004, 24). An exclusive hold on ownership of such commercial culture was allowed by copyright law in the twentieth century, but as the Internet became a primary site for cultural dissemination and production, things changed. As Lessig states, ‘[f]or the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before’ (Lessig, 2004, 24).

What this attitude of ‘all rights reserved’ ignores is the reality that creative processes have never been isolated from the times and places in which they were produced. Individual creators certainly deserve recognition for the works they create, but to imagine that culture is not contributed to by many and varied influences is to forget the human impulse to share and create communities around culture. The strictures of copyright law have been accepted for so long because it is ‘a polite fiction that has been mostly harmless throughout its brief history’, but the Internet reveals the disjoint between the idea of sharing and building upon culture and exclusive control of culture (Doctorow, 2008, 83).

Remixed culture, set on the stage of the Internet, is where ideas of participation and interaction, community and sharing can intersect. My video remix, titled ‘Build/Create > Change’, picks up several threads from the idea of collective change as a result of the Internet and digital technology. From audio samples that pick up on key words such as ‘create’, ‘together’, ‘build’, ‘new’, ‘change’ and ‘distribution’ I spliced together music and speech from many different sources to create a single cultural object on one theme – culture that everyone can participate in. The visual side of my project used video and digital photographs from an even wider range of creators to build on the message conveyed by the audio samples. One of the main objectives I had was to take images of building physical objects and remix them in a context that gave them a new meaning – that of building culture out of what already exists.

In the process of sourcing my material and deciding what to use, I came across some remixes, both of music and video, which were ultimately useful to my concept. The result was that amongst the ‘original’ content, I have remixed remixes. This is a kind of picture of the idea that culture is not created in a vacuum, but draws (consciously or otherwise) on what has come before. Not only does my video visually and audibly represent the creation of new content out of old, it participates in the very practice it is speaking about.

Creating a remix video has expanded my knowledge of digital culture and the possibilities the Internet opens up for sharing and participation. By involving myself in that very process of ‘produsage’ – albeit in one small corner of the entire world of user-led content creation – I have come to understand more clearly why a different framework for ownership of created works is necessary in a digital landscape. After all, in the words of the Creative Commons, ‘creativity always builds on the past’.

CRITICAL REFERENCES:

Bruns, Axel (2007) ‘Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation’ Paper presented at Creativity & Cognition conference, Washington D.C., USA, 13-15 June 2007. http://produsage.org/files/Produsage%20(Creativity%20and%20Cognition%202007).pdf (accessed 30 October 2008)

Doctorow, Cory (2008) Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2008. http://craphound.com/content/Cory_Doctorow_-_Content.pdf (accessed 29 October 2008)

Howard-Spink, Sam (2004) “Grey Tuesday, Online Cultural Activism and the Mash-up of Music and Politics.” First Monday 9.10, 2004. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_10/howard/ (accessed 29 October 2008)

Henry Jenkins, ‘Interactive Audiences?: The “Collective Intelligence” of Media Fans’ in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book, London: British Film Institute, 2002. web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/collective%20intelligence.html (accessed 23 October 2008)

Lessig, Lawrence (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf (accessed 30 October 2008)

REMIX SOURCES:

Photos:

Thomas Hawk, ‘Step’ (photo), July 21 2005, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/27598027/, CC BY NC 2.0.

photoJENic2, ‘Lighthouse Stairs’ (photo), September 9 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennydinardo/243055350/, CC BY NC 2.0.

Thomas Hawk, ‘She Climbs’ (photo), May 17 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/148632756/, CC BY NC 2.0.

radiant guy, ‘Hey you! Climb to success!’ (photo), November 9 2005, http://www.flickr.com/photos/lexrex/61841422/, CC BY NC 2.0.

flamingoo, ‘stairs’ (photo), April 8 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/pewits/127885345/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

Torley, ‘Scenes from my SL (2007-08-02 to 2007-11-11) 210’ through ‘Scenes from my SL (2007-08-02 to 2007-11-11) 213’ (photos), July 27 2008, CC BY SA 2.0.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2706110169/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2706111295/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2706112013/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/2706931508/

Matti Mattila, ‘Construction site – Week 12’, 14, 17, 18, 20. (photos), March 21 2008, CC BY 2.0.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattimattila/2348869837/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattimattila/2391410947/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattimattila/2442045301/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattimattila/2455953279/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattimattila/2498248409/

Steffe, ‘4 photos I took today’ (photo), November 20, 2005, http://www.flickr.com/photos/steffe/65118195/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

Latente /dev/null. ‘Polaroid 600 Manipulation – Torri di Lorenteggio’ (photo), March 6 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-coli/2315051432/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

Latente /dev/null, ‘Polaroid 600 Manipulation’ (photo), March 11 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/e-coli/2326890389/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

I, Timmy, ‘the grabbing hands…’ (photo), May 30 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/apoptotic/2540055580/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

hidden side, ‘Addio Polaroid’ (photo), February 9, 2008, http://www.flickr.com/photos/hidden_vice/2251780221/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

Darwin Bell, ‘what are word for’ (photo), November 30, 2005, http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/395970515/, CC BY NC 2.0.

Darwin Bell, ‘wired to go’ (photo), November 30, 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/310941758/, CC BY 2.0.

Chalky Lives, ‘Panograph’ (photo), July 30, 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/traitlinburke/201009136/, CC BY SA 2.0.

Chalky Lives, ‘Tokyo Skyline Panograph’ (photo), July 30 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/traitlinburke/201627863/, CC BY SA 2.0.

Chalky Lives, ‘Lower East Side – New York City Panograph’ (photo), August 1 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/traitlinburke/203561085/, CC BY NC SA.

Bolandrotor, ‘look! gold!’ (photo), September 25 2007, http://www.flickr.com/photos/bolandrotor/1438898121/, CC BY NC 2.0.

Ben Harris-Roxas, ‘Suburbs’ (photo), December 4, 2007, http://www.flickr.com/photos/photosydney/2085204048/, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

B Tal, ‘The Skyscraper’s Battle With The Heavens’ (photo), July 8 2006, http://www.flickr.com/photos/b-tal/185198606/, CC BY NC 2.0.

Videos:

justin.blip.tv, ‘iSummit ’06 Opening Panel – Lawrence Lessig’ (video), June 24 2006, http://blip.tv/file/44308/, CC BY.

MusicFilmBroth, ‘art pod the build mr 14.9.08.wmv’ (video), September 16 2008, http://blip.tv/file/1266869/, CC BY.

Matchbook Films, ‘Brick Wall (Run IX)’ (video), February 16 2008, http://blip.tv/file/673306/, CC BY NC SA.

Apperceptions, ‘The Winning Spirit of Collaboration’ (video), January 12 2006, http://blip.tv/file/9587/, CC BY NC SA.

dcd, ‘Collaboration’ (video), October 6 2008, http://blip.tv/file/1329908/, CC BY NC.

Creative Commons, ‘Building on the Past’ (video), July 24 2007, http://blip.tv/file/314905/, CC BY.

Creative Commons, ‘Wanna Work Together?’ (video), June 29 2007, http://blip.tv/file/285260/, CC BY.

Creative Commons, ‘A Shared Culture’ (video), August 21 2008, http://blip.tv/file/1192356/, CC BY NC SA.

C’est le Toon, ‘Eindhoven Skyline’ (video), May 29 2008, http://blip.tv/file/945098/, CC BY NC.

Lawrence Lessig, ‘5 minutes to withdraw’ (video), February 25 2008, http://blip.tv/file/693889/, CC BY.

EyeSteelFilm channel, ‘*Trailer* RiP: A Remix Manifesto’ (video), October 6 2008, http://blip.tv/file/1329162/http://blip.tv/file/1329162/, CC BY NC SA.

Music/Audio:

duckett, ‘THIS IS OUR MUSIC (Thruewiddit mix)’ (music), June 27 2008, http://ccmixter.org/files/duckett/15556, CC BY 3.0.

Blackberry, ‘Certain Death (Still Alive Remix)’ (music), October 8 2008, http://ccmixter.org/files/Blackberry/17059, CC BY NC 3.0.

Gregory Carr, aka Mr Gosh, ‘Dialog 2’ (audio), http://www.mrgosh.com/audio2.html, CC BY NC SA 2.0.

Gregory Carr, aka Mr Gosh, ‘Night Sounds’ (audio), http://www.mrgosh.com/audio2.html, CC BY NS SA 2.0.

This critical exegesis of my podcast, ‘BabelSwarm’, will briefly explore how the interactive, audiovisual, virtual art project of BabelSwarm exemplifies certain aspects of participatory culture, those of collective intelligence, interactivity and community. The internet has given rise to new communities that are connected across the globe, and with it the potentials for gaming, social networking and other activities, such as art, have expanded. BabelSwarm connects with ideas of community through the virtual, amongst other things, but the breadth of possible discussion – and the complexity of the art project itself – also presented me with a challenge when creating my podcast.

In ‘Interactive Audiences?: The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans’, Henry Jenkins identifies three key characteristics of participatory culture. While the second and third are less specifically relevant to my project, the first – new tools and technologies that enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content (Jenkins, 2002) – is fundamental to a project such as BabelSwarm. The potential for interactive experiences is hugely amplified by digital technology, and particularly the connecting nature of the web. BabelSwarm fits into participatory culture both as an artwork that is created with digital technology, and because of its location within Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual world that attempts to literally give people a ‘second life’. While still restricted by technological limitations and the economic concerns of the company that controls it (Clemens, 2008: 15), Second Life sees people re-creating themselves as avatars, making friendships, buying land, decorating homes, getting married, being buried, and numerous other simulations of real-life activities. Constructing art in Second Life is one such pastime, and is now being supported in the real world. BabelSwarm, as an art installation in the virtual world, was funded by the largest grant yet seen for a Second Life project (Clemens, 2008: 2).

Second Life – and other similar virtual worlds and forums – fosters community on a global scale. Members are from all around the world, and accessing the same online world from innumerable locations. It’s a prime site for communities to form in ways never possible before. Pierre Levy predicted this result from the impact of internet technologies in stating that, ‘we are passing from the Cartesian cogito”—I think, therefore I am—“to cogitamus”—we think, therefore we are.’ (McGonigal, 2007: 1). Unlike the example of I Love Bees in Jane McGonigal’s essay on collective intelligence, BabelSwarm does not present a problem to be solved, and is without an implicit purpose in the way that online games have goals. This initially presented me with a challenge when thinking about the project from a theoretical standpoint. It seems to be that BabelSwarm does not produce or use a collective intelligence so much as it exemplifies it. It is like an enormous picture of collective intelligence.

Jenkins writes about the collective intelligence of media fans and uses Pierre Levy’s Collective Intelligence to discuss the new knowledge space that emerges when boundaries between groups and nations break down. The internet has enabled this knowledge community, which operates on the principle that no one knows everything, but everyone knows something (Jenkins, 2002). This concept is acted out by swarm intelligence: picture a group of beings without a single being governing them. By their local interactions, in pockets of individuals you might say, the group as a whole can achieve greater ends than were possible on their own. It is a picture of sharing and communication – and BabelSwarm fits right in.

>Each of the letters in BabelSwarm have been separated from their place within the word they were born in; but each letter is also programmed to search out those letters on either side of its original position. There is no all-encompassing order, but small interactive movements by each letter to reform some whole.

Interaction is also present on the part of the human user. The tower of BabelSwarm consists of words and letter that have been spoken (in real speech) and translated via software into 3-D images (in the virtual). The installation could not exist without that speech. There is also the response evoked by an avatar’s contact with letters – if hibernating, the letter will be reawaken, but if in seeking mode, it will be obliterated. Every new interaction changes the structure of the installation, building on what was previously done.

These thoughts on BabelSwarm’s significance are very perfunctory, since the project is relevant in various discussions, whether of language and history, culture and the arts, online games and the virtual/real divide, or otherwise. It is fascinating from any angle (literally and metaphorically), and hopefully the podcast I have created reflects this.

babelswarm

Clemens, Justin (c.2008) ‘BabelSwarm’. http://www.iconinc.com.au/acva/babelswarm_essay.pdf (accessed 11 September 2008).

Jenkins, Henry (2002) ‘Interactive Audiences?: The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans’. http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/collective%20intelligence.html (accessed 11 September 2008)

McGonigal, Jane (2007) ‘Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming’. http://avantgame.com/McGonigal_WhyILoveBees_Feb2007.pdf (accessed 11 September 2008).

The Cherry Blues Project, ‘Cosmic #1’ (Music) n.d. c.2007, http://www.opsound.org/artist/thecherrybluesproject/, CC BY SA 2.5

The Cherry Blues Project, ‘Blue Space’ (Music) n.d. c.2007, http://www.opsound.org/artist/thecherrybluesproject/, CC BY SA 2.5

Macroform, ‘Lying Down’ (Music) n.d. c.2008, http://www.opsound.org/artist/macroform/, CC BY SA 2.5

Acclivity, ‘OlgaNR1.mp3’ (sound recording) 2006, http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=14261, CC SP 1.0

Dobroide, ‘cave.large.hall.mp3’ (sound recording) 2005, http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=4203, CC SP 1.0

Dobroide, ‘voc.art.gallery.wav’ (sound recording) 2006, http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=15656, CC SP 1.0

Anton, ‘keyboard-typing.wav’ (sound recording) 2005, http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=137, CC SP 1.0

Fast forward to the 1990s and later, and the advent of new media has seen significant changes in how we make use of information. Digital technology’s golden child, the internet, has provided the ideal platform for the database, which organises information in a vastly different way to narrative. What, if any, are their links? Are database and narrative purely oppositional?

Our experience of ’story’ might change in this new atmosphere, one where actual lives are immersed in virtual worlds, and users/producers remix and create their own media. Is narrative being reshaped? How might this affect our experience and understanding of the world?

READINGS:

Hardy, Barbara (1977) ‘The Nature of Narrative’ in The Collected Essays of Barbara Hardy, pp. 1-13. [This is in hardcopy in the library, or PDF attached. (3.5Mb)]

Manovich, Lev (2001) The Language of New Media. ‘Cultural Interfaces (pp. 69-93); ‘Illusion, Narrative, and Interactivity’ (pp. 205-211); ‘Database and Narrative’ (pp. 225-228); ‘Navigable Space’ (pp. 244-252); ‘Digital Cinema and the History of the Moving Image’ (pp. 293-296); ‘The New Temporality: Loop as a Narrative Engine’ (pp. 314-322). [In Reserve section of library, unfortunately. You can access a few pages on Google Books.]

www.craigbellamy.net [a blog about web 2.0 developments], especially http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/10/26/new-media-and-cultural-
form-narrative-versus-database/

Cameron, Andy. ‘Dissimulations: illusions of interactivity’ in Millenium Film Journal 28 (Spring 1995). http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/Dissimulation.html

Brown, Neil et al (2003). ‘Interactive narrative as a multi-temporal agency’, in Future Cinema: the cinematic imagery after film. http://icinema.unsw.edu.au/pdf/interactive_narrative.pdf For background information, go to http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_tvis_II_1.html

If you want to, you can try Facade, an interactive narrative! [download via BitTorrent.] http://tomidblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/presentation-of-digital-narrative.html For a user’s feedback, go to http://interactivestory.net/

SOME QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT:

1. To what extent does narrative filter/shape your experience of life?

2. How does the database foster interactivity?

3. In the absence of linear plots and other narrative qualities, what makes an ‘interactive’ narrative a ‘narrative’?

4. If database is becoming ubiquitous, does this mean a break from the past? Or simply remixing of traditional forms?

5. What is the role of temporality in traditional narrative, and how might interactivity be affecting that?