Rich Remix The Language of Video Appropriation

Its Politics, Poesis, and Best Practice

A USC Digital Humanities Summer Tutorial Instructor: Amber Rae Bowyer arbowyer@usc.edu

We call it “remix video…”

a.k.a. “collage film…” a.k.a. “video essay…” a.k.a. “found footage…” a.k.a. “mashup…”

… and more…

•   USC undergraduate students will receive a $1,500 stipend for course completion •   Non-credit course taught by a USC Mellon Digital Humanities Ph.D. Fellow •   Course meets twice a week for 2-hr sessions at USC during June (exact days/times TBD)

The practice of making new movies from older ones is as old as filmmaking itself, but lately has adopted such a surging status in popular culture that even academia has begun to reckon with remix as an idiom of expression all its own. If appropriating and recontextualizing images is a kind of a language, how do we define its literacy? Who speaks this language, who are its poets, and what is its vocabulary? What is the status of a canon in a mode that continually cannibalizes the past? In this course, we will encounter the long history of moving image appropriation. We will collect varied politics that have been the practice’s continual companions, and work through their theories in order to become sophisticated readers and writers of remixed video. We will interrogate the claim that persons of a certain age are digital natives with media literacy untethered to everything that came before the digital era. A particular interest in remix is advisable, and some experience with software to the purpose will be advantageous. Application Procedure: Undergraduate students at USC who are interested in applying for enrollment should send a résumé and cover letter (explaining their experience and interest in the course topic) to digitalhumanities@dornsife.usc.edu by Friday, April 21, 2017. In the subject line please include: “USC DH Summer Tutorial Application – Title – Your Last Name.”

Schedule (subject to change) What is Video Remix and Why Use It?

1. Reading: Virginia Kuhn, "The Rhetoric of Remix." Screening: Selected Pop and Scholarly Remix Works Discussing: Remix in classes and in the wild, The Rich Remix Zine 2. Reading: William Wees, Recycled Images, selections.

Screening: Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, Rose Hobart, A Movie Discussing: Remix across media and history

Radical Politics and the Avant-Garde 3. Reading: Jonathan McIntosh, "A History of Subversive Remix Video before YouTube:

Thirty Political Video Mashups Made between World War II and 2005." Screening: Selections from McIntosh Discussing: Why Politics? 4. Reading: Guy Debord, “A User’s Guide to Détournement”

Screening: Can Dialectics Break Bricks, Removed, Outer Space, Loose Ends Discussing: Rhetorical Style in Remix Technological Empowerment vs. Postmodernism 5. Reading: Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect, selections Screening: Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Music Videos, Dream On Discussing: Access, Context, Simulacral Culture 6. Reading: Michael Zyrd, “Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin's

Tribulation 99.” Screening: Spectres of the Spectrum Discussing: Culture Jamming Digital Praxis 7. Reading: Horwatt, Eli. 2010. "A Taxonomy of Digital Video Remixing: Contemporary

Found Footage Practice on the Internet." Joshua Green and Jean Burgess, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, selections

Screening: Symphony of Science “We Are All Connected,” Downfall videos, Manifestoon, A Fair(y) Use Tale

Discussing: Readers, Writers, and Prosumers 8. Discussing: Tutorial Results and Zine Workshop

Assignments Annotations: In the spirit of the cut-up, the writing component for this tutorial takes the shape of a

collaborative digital zine that will track our journey as remixers and remix historians. For every reading and screening we encounter, there is a page in the zine. You will be responsible for contributing a response to either the reading or to any text that reading refers to, at the rate of one annotation per class session, for 8 total. There will be a maximum of only two annotations available per assigned reading, however, so you will likely have to branch out and discuss connected readings or other texts. Multimedia content and hypertextual structure is encouraged in these annotations and the style of voice should be engaged but need not be stilted.

Video Remix and Essay: This tutorial exists to deepen your video remix consciousness and repertoire. For a final project, you will produce a video remix project of personal significance to you and an accompanying statement putting it in context in a manner of your choosing. These videos and their rationales will comprise the final chapter of the Rich Remix zine.