A free programming tool that allows anyone to create their own animated stories, video games and interactive artworks has been developed.
Primarily aimed at children, Scratch does not require prior knowledge of complex computer languages.
Instead, it uses a simple graphical interface that allows programs to be assembled like building blocks.
The digital toolkit, developed in the US at MIT’s Media Lab, allows people to blend images, sound and video.
“Computer programming has been traditionally seen as something that is beyond most people – it’s only for a special group with technical expertise and experience,” said Professor Mitchel Resnick, one of the researchers at the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT. (more…)
(This text has been recently added to the section titled Remix Defined to expand my general definition of Remix.)
The following summary is a copy and paste collage (a type of literary remix) of my lectures and preliminary writings since 2005. My definition of Remix was first introduced in one of my most recent texts: Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats, commissioned by Turbulence.org. Many of the ideas I entertain in the text for Turbulence were first discussed in various presentations during the Summer of 2006. (See the list of places here plus an earlier version of my definition of Remix). Below, the section titled “remixes” takes parts from the section by the same name in the Turbulence text, and the section titled “remix defined” consists of excerpts of my definitions which have been revised for an upcoming text soon to be released in English and Spanish by Telefonica in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The full text will be released online once it is officially published.
It is a truism today that we live in a “remix culture.” Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas – music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food – are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well. (For an expanding resource on remix culture, visit remixtheory.net by Eduardo Navas.) Here are just a few examples of how remix continues to expand. In his 2004/2005-winter collection John Galliano (a fashion designer for the house of Dior) mixed vagabond look, Yemenite traditions, East-European motifs, and other sources that he collects during his extensive travels around the world. DJ Spooky created a feature-length remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1912 “Birth of a Nation” which he appropriately named “Rebirth of a Nation.” In April 2006 Annenberg Center at University of Southern California ran a two-day conference on “Networked Politics” which had sessions and presentations about a variety of remix cultures on the Web: political remix videos, anime music videos, machinima, alternative news, infrastructure hacks.[1] In addition to these cultures that remix media content, we also have a growing number of software applications that remix data – so called software “mash-ups.” Wikipedia defines a mash-up as “a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”[2] At the moment of this writing (February 4, 2007), the web site www.programmableweb.com listed the total of 1511 mash-ups, and it estimated that the average of 3 new mash-ups Web applications are being published every day.[3]
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.
Students practice drawing because of graffiti’s connection to hip-hop.
This is one of Brazil’s Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.
The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country’s most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often buy cytotec ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.
It is good to see Brazil in the news for a positive reason: today’s New York Times talks extensively about a government program investing on hip hop culture as an incentive to keep kids in school. I had not read about the program before even though it was conceived by minister of Culture Gilberto Gil in 2003, but I highly agree that the government needs to open its eyes to finding new and improved ways of giving a chance to kids and teenagers growing up in empoverished areas. I am sure that in Brazil many conservative taxpayers have an issue with funding rap and graffiti art, but as Mr. Gil put it “you’ve now got young people who are becoming designers, who are making it into media and being used more and more by television and samba schools and revitalizing degraded neighborhoods.” Sometimes all it takes is a little creativity and less prejudice to make a difference.
WHAT do flying plastic pigs, dancing daisies and robotic Barbie dolls have in common? An iPod.
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Lars Klove for The New York Times
With more than 90 million players sold worldwide since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has spawned a lucrative accessories industry. At least 3,000 types of iPod extras have received Apple’s blessing — mostly no-nonsense options like cases, earbuds and amplified speaker systems, including the $300 SoundDock line made by Bose.
But another trend is developing, one more playful and not always with Apple’s approval or knowledge.
Call it iSilly, a growing number of products in which fun is emphasized over function, and cute or irreverent often trumps wow. All of these items, some costing as little as $10, have been created to plug into an iPod — or, in many cases, any audio source that has a standard 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.
If the concept of “The Beatles, remixed” saddens you, know that original Beatles producer George Martin was at the helm for this project, which serves as the soundtrack to the Vegas-based Cirque du Soleil show of the same name. The 26 mashed-up tracks here were augmented with additional instrumentation and vocals performed by The Beatles themselves, culled from hours of original demo and master tapes, with pieces of 130 songs ultimately represented in some form.
Alexis Petridis
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian
The Beatles Love
In about 2002, the bootleg mash-up was big news. A hopelessly named phenomenon that involved producers illegally mixing two unlikely old records together to make a third, the mash-up made celebrities of some strange figures – Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and secretive producer Richard X among them – but the Beatles may have been the sub-genre’s true stars. They were involved both in its artistic zenith – the Grey Album, on which Danger Mouse pitted Jay-Z’s rapping against music from the White Album – and the moment when mash-ups meandered into pointlessness: Go Home Productions’ Paperback Believer, which used two fantastic records, Paperback Writer and the Monkees’ Daydream Believer, to make a noticeably less brilliant third.
Text and image source: Ubu Web
A video documentary combining exhibition footage of the Situationist International exhibitions with film footage of the 1968 Paris student uprising, and graffiti and slogans based on the ideas of Guy Debord (one of the foremost spokesmen of the Situationist International movement). Also includes commentary by leading art critics Greil Marcus, Thomas Levine, and artists Malcolm Mac Laren and Jamie Reid. Branka Bogdanov, Director and producer. NTSC-VHS 22 min. 1989Â
New media products and programming developed rapidly in the past year. Jeffrey Brown takes a look at the largest media stories of 2006, including the rise of YouTube and the ongoing struggles in the newspaper business.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes, the big stars of what we can call old media were in the spotlight in 2006, notably when Charles Gibson and Katie Couric traded mornings for evenings.
But another old media mainstay, Time magazine, passed over the anchors and other newsmakers, and instead selected as its person of the year, “You.” That’s you, the viewer, reader, listener, and more and more creator of news content.
During the heyday of debates on post-modern, at least one critic in America noticed the connection between post-modern pastiche and computerization. In his book After the Great Divide (1986), Andreas Huyssen writes: “All modern and avantgardist techniques, forms and images are now stored for instant recall in the computerized memory banks of our culture. But the same memory also stores all of pre-modernist art as well as the genres, codes, and image worlds of popular cultures and modern mass culture.” [1] His analysis is accurate – except that these “computerized memory banks” did not really became commonplace for another fifteen years. Only when the Web absorbed enough of the media archives it became this universal cultural memory bank accessible to all cultural producers. But even for the professionals, the ability to easily integrate multiple media sources within the same project – multiple layers of video, scanned still images, animation, graphics, and typography – only came towards the end of the 1990s.
