Aidan Delaney
This article is concerned with a mode in digital filmmaking that uses appropriated material to make political commentary that runs counter to the source-materials’ dominant ideology in which it borrows from. By introducing a category of digital film making known as ‘political remix video’ it will assert how such a subgenre can be used to critique power structures and interrogate social myths thorough acts of subversion and détournement of copyrighted or ‘un-common’[1] media. Introduction
Text by Aidan Delaney Keywords: artistic appropriation, culture industry, détournement, digital video, remix, Situationist International. By un-common I am referring to what is exclusory from the commons, i.e. copyrighted material and intellectual property. This term was suggested by the conference organisers for the panel title, Remixing the Uncommons, in which my original version of this paper was presented. [1]
Remix by definition is to combine or re-edit existing media into something new. The term came from the practice of making alternative mixes of musical recordings during the 1960s in Jamaican dub music but it soon spread across multiple genres and grew in popularity during the disco era (Brewster & Broughton, 1999). Remix practice today expands across a variety of media including audio, video and web technologies. New terms such as ‘mashup’ have been created to address specific stylistic concerns with remixed media and new medium–specific subgenres are emerging. One such subgenre in the discipline of digital filmmaking is referred to as PRV or ‘political remix video’. It is a movement of underground filmmakers who intentionally critique mainstream media by borrowing media texts, usually copyrighted, and subvert them to create new and altered meanings through acts of remix. This activity is not without it criticisms both - creatively and legally; but it does lend itself to a critical textual engagement. It also operates at a level where transformative works can become scholarly through subversion and critique of dominant ideologies. Furthermore, PRV can be seen as aligning with free culture movements through its rejection of copyright restrictions and appropriating protected material. This paper will investigate political remix video as a discourse in Libertarian Marxism, aligning it with the Situationist International’s ideology of re-appropriating media assets to work against mainstream culture. It will begin by establishing remix as an aesthetic practice. It will then compare remixing to the Situationist International’s activity of détournement, before finally offering a hypothesis of the purpose of political remixes.
What constitutes as a remix? Remix is not an entirely new activity; it is more specifically an act of appropriation within the digital realm using pre-existing media assets. There has
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