Music like Water

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“Free is complementary. Free is not the opposite of pay. We see there is no cannibalization with free.”
— Jamendo CEO Laurent Krantz

“There’s a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists. Not bad for artists. So maybe we shouldn’t be stopping it all the time.”
— Douglas Merrill, EMI’s newly appointed president of digital music group

There are several reasons why it’s interesting to look at the evolution of music production, distribution and consumption, as a way of trying to grasp the development of new socio-cultural as well as economical paradigms in the context of network culture. First of all, music, as a means of cultural expression, discloses itself as universal meaning. It has captured all angles of the world, embraced people’s lives regardless of culture, place and time. It might well be a language in its own right. As Anthony Storr once wrote: “Music exalts life, enhances life and gives it meaning. It is both personal and beyond the personal, it remains a fixed point of reference in an unpredictable world. Music is a source of reconciliation, exhilaration and hope that never fails.” Music is primarily held to be a phenomenon that is physically experienced, as if the listener is filled with sound. So I guess it is quite unique since it does not simply bring an external symbol to the attention of the listener, but rather gathers meaning from within the listener him- or herself – It’s not music as a representation of some other idea or expression that generates meaning. In the past, it was as much a social event as a purely musical one: before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. But since the rise of the music industry, along with the institutionalisation of Western copyright law – emphasising limited duration, fixation and the action of individual authors rather than collectives – musical expressions have increasingly been “de-socialised” (see also previous post). Music — or its recorded artifact, at least — has become a product, a thing that can be bought, sold, traded, and replayed endlessly in any context. In his Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali famously commented that “never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector”. But, there are stonger forces at work, as David Byrne notes in his nice article in Wired, “this upended the economics of music, but our human instincts remained intact (…) We’ll always want to use music as part of our social fabric: to congregate at concerts and in bars, even if the sound sucks; to pass music from hand to hand (or via the Internet) as a form of social currency; to build temples where only “our kind of people” can hear music (opera houses and symphony halls); to want to know more about our favorite bards — their love lives, their clothes, their political beliefs. This betrays an eternal urge to have a larger context beyond a piece of plastic. One might say this urge is part of our genetic makeup.” And now, as almost everybody seems to agree, it’s time to get rid of the business models that kept the music bizz hostage for so long. The traditional record companies are under crossfire. A deep distrust – to put it mildly – has settled in as a direct consequence of the past decennium of arrogant efforts of “putting the genie back into the bottle”, while demonizing their own customers, the people whose love of music had given them massive profits for decades (including, very recently, wonderful services like Oink, a popular and very efficient torrent site that was specialized in music or, indirectly, also Sonific, a streaming music widget that had to close down due to a “unworkable” music licensing scenario. As founder Gerd Leonhard stated: “we neither want to engage in so-called copyright infringement nor do we have millions of dollars available to buy our way in when it is abundantly clear that doing business under the existing rules of the major labels will simply amount to economic suicide”). Not that music bizz bashing is anything new: musicians like Steve Albini have been fulminating for quite some time now, and they have been right. Tom Waits once remarked that “People are so anxious to record, they’ll sign anything (…) like going across the river on the back of an alligator.” But why would these alligators care about some bad vibes or discontent musicians? They had it all under control. But now, the heat is on, more than ever. What has been obvious for some for years, has become an issue that has spread over the media like a virus. Recently an article in the Wall Street Journal concluded that “for all the 21st-century glitz that surrounds it, the popular music business is distinctly medieval in character: the last form of indentured servitude.” In a talk with David Byrne about the major labels, Brian Eno said: “Structurally, they’re much too large, and they’re entirely on the defensive now. The only idea they have is that they can give you a big advance — which is still attractive to a lot of young bands just starting out. But that’s all they represent now: capital.” And In January the Guardian published a poisonous article by Simon Napier-Bell, who has been working in the bizz for over 40 years, as manager of the Yardbirds, Japan, Boney M and Wham!, amongst others. He stated: “Artists were never the product; the product was discs – 10 cents’ worth of vinyl selling for $10 – 10,000 per cent profit – the highest mark-up in all of retail marketing” and “for 50 years the major labels have thought of themselves as guardians of the music industry; in fact they’ve been its bouncers. Getting into the club used to be highly desirable. Now it doesn’t matter any more.”

It doesn’t matter anymore, since recording costs have declined to almost zero, just like manufacturing and distribution costs. Musicians are increasingly able to work outside of the traditional label relationship, experimenting with online distribution, like Radiohead of course (albeit their stunt seems to have been more of a marketing gimmick), Trent Reznor and so many other less-houshold names (see previous post), or just defecting major labels, and getting in bed with… concert promoters (Madonna left Warner Bros for Live Nation – a spinoff of the much disliked Clear Channel. For a reported $120 million, the company — which until now has mainly produced and promoted concerts — will get a piece of both her concert revenue and her music sales. Recently also Jay-Z defected his longtime record label, Def Jam, for Live Nation, for a roughly $150 million package, that includes financing for his own entertainment venture, in addition to recordings and tours for the next decade) or … coffee houses (since last year Starbucks’ label, Hear Music, has signed singer-songwriters like Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and Carly Simon, but last week the label has been turned over to Concord Music Group) and/or other commercial companies and media ventures (Groove Armada with Bacardi, for instance, Prince with The Mail on Sunday, or Junkie XL with game publisher Electronic Arts). It’s becoming a business on itself: Harvest Entertainment is just one of the start-up companies which partners brands with musicians, like, in their case, Placebo or Madness). Labels as we know them now WILL disappear, as the roles they used to play get chopped up and delivered by more thrifty services. Musicians themselves can not only use their own site or MySpace (who don’t pay royalties, by the way) to promote and distribute their music, but also various services like Tunecore, the Orchard, Speakerheart, CDBaby, Nimbit, Snocap, Musicane, INDISTR or AmieStreet (interesting enough they use demand-side dynamic pricing to sell its music. Amazon is one of their investors) – see Coolfer for more examples. “On demand” services like Rhapsody (owned by RealNetworks, recently partnered up with Yahoo Music Ulimited), Napster (which paved the way for P2P, but now a pay service, owned by the Private Media Group, an adult entertainment company) or (maybe) Total Music (a new service by Universal, announced in october 2007) are also dipping, be it very carefully, their toe into the future of the so-called “Music 2.0” (yeah, we like buzz words). According to Gerd Leonhard, the author of The Future of Music and the new book Music 2.0 (downloadable on music20book.com), the music bizz, or the creative producers themselves, should try to monetize the existing behaviour of the user, and metering the use of music on a per-unit base (as iTunes does) is no way to do that. Music should be like water, he says: on tap. You can get as much as you want and you will not have to pay by the song. Want more music? Just ask and listen to it. This is one of the reasons why DRM is being abandoned. Even among the most conservative jackasses in the business it is being being admitted that it is a very ludicrous idea that you cannot share music, which is by many considered to be an essence of music. There is active discussion about flat-fee structure for music at major labels where once this idea was laughed out of the offices (hell, some even start to see positive aspects in P2P file sharing – see quotes in the beginning of this piece). You can now purchase MP3 files for download without DRM from all four major labels on Amazon, emusic and a growing list of music destinations, including the new MySpace Music service. The predictions that an unprotected format would kill sales have simply not been true. But subscription and licensing services are just one possible model. After all, there are lots of indications that the Internet really demands a “free” business model (I posted about Chris Anderson’s “free” models before. However, “free” doesn’t imply that everything should be given away for free – be aware of the “web 2.0” rhetorics! See for example the arrogance of Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace). In this idea of network culture content flows “freely” in abundance, and “attention” is the (yet another) new buzzword. As Kevin Kelly wrote: “copy of digital content will most likely be free or feel like free (…) the key is to offer valuable intangibles that cannot be reproduced at zero cost”. This is about creating values through ubiquity, not through scarcity.The print world already gave up their subscription models and developped new business models, based on free content and online advertising. Page views are worth a lot more to an advertiser than the amount you can get someone to pay for a subscription to them. The way media is consumed online, via search and social distribution, requires that the content is free to distribute and consume. This is why, as Fred Wilson writes, the “discovery/nagivation” layer, on top of the content layer is so important. It’s in services like last.fm (see earlier post), pandora (kind of personalized radio, streams custom listening channels based around a listener’s favorite band or song, using advertising revenue to pay for it), the hype machine (blog search & listen), and playlisting services like project playlist (now being sued by the labels.. sigh), iMeem (now being sued… sigh. update: was being sued, but now seems to have deals with the labels, see comment below), Mixwit, Mixaloo, Muxtape, Songza or Alonetone (I’ve written about some of these exciting ‘virtual’ mixtape machines before. I guess it’s just a matter of time before they will be targeted by RIAA & co. as well). It’s also gonna be in Bill Nguyen’s lala.com project, that mixes social networking with music trading and buying, and is now setting up a new service that will offer unlimited on-demand streams of music (update 29 May: Lala has a new plan: selling song streams for 10 cents a piece. One reason for Lala’s change in direction is that the idea that free music can be used to promote music purchases is fading in general) Qtrax is another ad-supported venture, that promises a “legal” P2P music jukebox, with free downloads for its users (so far Windows only, I’m afraid). In March Qtrax has begun to sign contracts with some major record companies. It seems that the service uses DRM, to help prevent songs from slipping onto “unauthorized” networks, and establish the play counts that will help to figure out how much to pay artists, labels and publishers.

But, not surprisingly, the most exciting initiatives might actually come from independent labels and music-loving individuals and collectives. The blogosphere is of course a matrix of micro-music-channels that are ‘narrowcasting’ their longtailing creations and findings – be it podcasts of eclectic, genre-bending music mixes, or digital rips of out-of-print or hard-to-find records (check out Mutant Sounds, FM Shades or – thanks Bongo Man – awesome tapes from africa) – to their hungry subscribers using MediaRSS (widgets are used for further (re)distribution). You’re interested in Central European Polka, Japanese psychedelic music, or electronic music from the Middle East? No doubt there’s a blog somewhere out there where you can discover and download stuff you haven’t even dreamt of. These “BlogJ’s”, muses Paul Resnikoff, are the “digital-age editions of ‘analog’ radio personalities such as the BBC’s John Peel (rip) (…) Hundreds of niche-obsessed BlogJs will emerge, becoming trusted opinion leaders that will draw 10s if not 100s of 1000s of networked music fans that will discover new music this way – strictly by lifestyle i.e. genre and sub-sub-sub-sub genre. Much like it used to be in music-television; coolness and credibility will rule here.” It’s interesting how these blogs are amalgamating with, sometimes integrating into social networks. Like Stereogum, a bit of a gossipy music blog, that recently gave away OKX: A Tribute to OK Computer and just started up Videogum. Or, more to my taste, RCRD LBL, an ad-supported blog annex label, founded by Peter Rojas (Gizmodo and Engadget ) and Josh Deutsch (Downtown Records). The site offers free MP3 downloads with a description of the bands and songs from its own artists, plus selections from its partner labels (such as Warp, Kompakt and Ghostly). The site has widgets for playlists, photos, tour dates, and fans and the site has a social networking aspect too, in that you can create a profile and become a fan of a band. Peter Rojas in an interview with Wired: “It’s something I’d been kicking around for a while, as someone who loves music blogs, and saw why it had been so difficult for them to become a real business. And I think the biggest reason is that the music on them was very rarely legal. And labels have seen the value in getting the music out there on music blogs, but I thought it was an opportunity to take things to a different level and try to help the artists participate in the upside of creating a site that has an audience (…) I think that’s an important thing about blogging in general, or niche media, is that you have to be honest about who you are and what you’re about and who you’re doing this for. This isn’t meant to be the be-all-and-end-all of the music industry, it’s just meant to be a great place where people who are into this kind of music can get it from those kinds of bands”.

All hail to subjectivity and transparancy. All hail to trust and openess. Seth Godin might be right when he argues that the music bizz isn’t about A&R or brand management anymore, but more about tribal management: “make the people in that tribe delighted to know each other and trust you to go find music for them. And, in exchange, it could be way out on the long tail, no one wants to be on the long tail by themselves, the polka lovers like the polka lovers, they want to be together. But that you, maybe it is only one person, technology makes this really easy, your job is to curate for that tribe. And if you can curate for them guess what the [musical] artists need…you! Guess what the tribe needs…you! You add an enormous amount of value by becoming a new kind of middleman (…) The internet is the ability to get any song you want in front of the people who want to hear it with huge reach and no barriers. What matters isn’t how many, it’s who”. (see Godin’s schedule below for a nice overview of paradigm changes). Of course Musicians themselves try to manage their own “tribes”, via social networks like MySpace or Facebook or their own controlled (boutique) spaces, like Radiohead’s Waste Central, 50 Cent’s This Is 50 or Kylie Minogue’s KylieKonnect . An interesting model is Einsturzende Neubauten’s neubauten.org supporter project (in phase 3 now), an attempt to continue producing music through online support of fans, who for a financial contribution, can interact with the musicians (and other supporters) and get loads of exclusive stuff: not only CD’s and DVD’s, but also webcasts which provide insight in “the working process of the band at rehearsals and recording”. Other musicians rely on their fanbase or community to get their own e-hustle on, like MC Hammer’s DanceJam, Ice Cube and DJ Pooh’s UVNTV, or WeMix.com, founded by Ludacris’ company Tha Peace Entertainment, that wants to be a “user-generated record label”, where artists can join the community, upload their creations, collaborate digitally with fellow artists and have the potential to sell their work (“Top-rated performers become eligible to bypass the traditional A&R process and collaborate directly with Ludacris and other top music stars, thereby creating an entirely new way to launch a career”). But this tribal management approach is also part of P2P file-sharing services, like the now defunct Oink, that allowed users to connect similar artists, and to see what people who liked a certain band also liked. Similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, it was possible to spend hours discovering new bands on Oink. Some services are trying out similar (though legally and industrially approved) approaches, like I Think Music, an online network of indie bands, fans, and stores, which enables them to create and sell a catalog of music to the public, manage and display content online, network between buyers, sellers, and creators of music, as well as manage revenues from the sale of digital music files. It’s basically an experiment in trying to digitally emulate the romantic views of the good ol’ A&R and retail experiences (which, as the relative success of New York City’s Other Music shop prooves, is still as valuable as ever. What they offer is specialisation and quality control, resulting in a trust relationship – see also online shops like the great Boomkat). ithinkmusic.com supplies the tools to build your own online retail shop (like Liquid Crunch did, for example), without all of the headache of stocking, shelving, cataloguing, orders, returns and the general day to day business of running a physical shop. Magnatune is yet another project that is really trying to regain a trust relationship with consumers as well as musicians — its tagline is “We are not evil”. Magnatune makes non-exclusive agreements with artists, and gives them fifty percent of any proceeds from online sales or licensing. Users can stream music in MP3 format (no DRM) without charge before choosing whether to buy or not. Most controversially, buyer can determine their own price, and may download music they have purchased in WAV, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC encoding formats. What’s more: all of the tracks downloaded free of charge are licensed under a Creative Commons “by-nc-sa” license, which allows sharing, and non-commercial use for free, as well as new works to be created as long as they are also licensed under the same CC license (Magnatune maintains close organizational ties with the ccMixter project). You can get more CC music via CommonTunes, a listing of user-submitted freely-available music from all over the web, searchable and tagged by keyword. More music aggregating is being done by CloudSpeakers (founded by Adriaan and Chris Bol, based in the Netherlands), a “music-oriented news reader on steroids, backed by a social network where users can build profile pages, add media from the site to them, leave comments, and so on” and MusicBrainz, a project that aims to create an open content music database. Similar to the freedb project, it was founded in response to the restrictions placed on the CDDB, and aims to become a kind of structured “Wikipedia for music”.

All these applications and services – and there are many more out there – are just some of the pieces of a big puzzle that will define the future of the way music (and media in general) is going to be produced, distributed and consumed, and while puzzling we’ll discover that there is not one model, but many different ones. The music industry is rapidly undergoing a process of “Creative Destruction“, a process that might eventually lead to an abundant, open and transparant music business where all the music is available to everyone and discoverable via search and social discovery. What matters now, in the words of Gerd Leonhard, is that “the music industry is in the throngs of this powerful shift from ‘having distribution’ as a gatekeeper to ‘having people’s attention’ as the holy grail. It boggles the mind, but it is now no longer relevant (or shall we say… sufficient) to have distribution, i.e. to have a replication facility, a retail network, reserved shelf space at the point-of-sale, or frequency slots (if you are radio company), or a satellite in orbit, or a cable network – what really matters is how many people care about what’s IN your network!”

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PS: Leonhard has also another, pretty scary take on what the future may bring, influenced by Cory Doctorow’s Overclocked.

(image on top uploaded by Lady Pain, found on the blog of Fred Wilson)

Economies of the Commons / Report

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“Given material abundance, scarcity must be a function of boundaries.”
— Lewis Hyde,The Gift:Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 1979-83

I didn’t really notice untill Florian Schneider mentioned it: during the ‘Economies of the Commons’ conference in Amsterdam, the formal academic world was highly absent, especially in the audience. Not that anybody seemed to care: the conference prooved to be a quite dense and stimulating context where a compositum of archivists, media affaciondos, cinema buffs, cultural producers and thinkers delivered and discussed hands-on experiences and theoretical, out-of-the-box, at times spiritual charged and utopian musings on the (potential) value of audiovisual archives in the network society. The general threads were, on the one hand, the lookout for new business models, and, on the other hand, the exploration of the idea of the “commons” and the reconsideration of the current framework of intellectual property rights, which, as everyone seemed to agree, is an immense burden. “Fuck it”, screamed organiser Eric Kluitenberg euphorically at the end of the conference, “we can’t let ourself be hindered by legal or institutional absurdities (I’m paraphrasing here, sd). Let’s just do it”. Right on.

Looking back on the two days of talks (I didn’t go to the legal seminar on the first day), it’s not easy to find a focal point, now that I’m involved in a digitisation projecty myself, torn between the weight of concrete numbers and schedules, such as the ones that were mentioned during the numerous project presentations, and the enthrilling theoretical propositions, made by Florian Schneider and Anthony McCann, amongst others. Peter B. Kaufman, former political scientist (specialised in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, as was made clear during his talk), documentary film producer and president of Intelligent Television, did struck a balance between theory and practice in his opening keynote speech, in which he drew on the work of Karim Lakhani (“principles of distributed innovation”), Yochai Benkler (who coined the term “Commons-based peer production” to describe a model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects), and his own Intelligent Television (Their “Economics of Distribution” study is investigating current financing models for independent educational media; revenues that such film and video productions have realized from sales and licensing and other distribution; and the potential for new, alternative models of video and film distribution in the digital age). He started with the observations that we are all producing and consuming audiovisual content “in silico” (performed on computer or via computer simulation) nowadays, for one thing because the costs of the necessary tools and storage capacities are declining dramatically, and thanks to P2P networks the tresholds for distribution are down as well – he gave the anecdote that music distributed through iTunes can be downloaded for free in an average of 8 minutes after its release. The demand and usage statistics for online video are astounding. The engagement with video has changed from “read–only” to “read/write”: millions of original new videos, remixes and mashups are posted on MySpace, YouTube and Google Video, AOL Video, Facebook, and newer sites and platforms such as Revver. Indeed, according to one estimate, almost half of all video online today is user–generated. All this has unleached a fundamental problem for the current system of copyright. Kaufman quoted one of the researchers working on Tribler (P2P software for video file sharing) at Delft University of Technology and De Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, saying that if peer production continues to evolve at the current rate, it will be impossible to uphold the current legal framework much longer. It’s time to embrace these new paradigms and use them to our advantage when disclosing culture heritage. There are now several examples of business cases that support the economic wisdom of providing certain sectors of society, and sometimes the public as a whole, with materials and information for free (In another talk at the Creative Archive launch, Kauman said “It is not for nothing that Universal Music, the world’s largest online music company, hired Sean Fanning, the founder of Napster, to design its new business plan moving forward”). As Kaufman writes: “Librarians, curators, archivists, and the private sector have joined forces with the objective of ‘creating universal access to knowledge anywhere and everywhere’; librarians have begun speaking of building the ‘global digital library’; and, museum curators have spoken of ‘heading toward a kind of digital global museum’ — cultural and educational institutions are increasingly moving to embrace even more remarkable social media and the power of what the technology world calls Web 2.0”. Even private initiatives have made it clear which type of models could be used to distribute this kind of content. And now the recession in the U.S. has unmasked the market fundamentalism that has dominated the economics over the last three decades, as a sham, it should be clear that the regulation of markets should be reconsidered. Economic uncertainty is driving everybody to look for new models. For example, Harpers Collins recently announced a new “publishing studio” to test some new sales strategies. Basically, profit-sharing with authors will be substituted for cash advances and the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies will be eliminated. The already mentioned Tribler is a great example of a new model in the world of video, for which the researchers envision an e-commerce model that connects users to a single global market, without any controlling company, network, or bank. They see bandwidth as the first true Internet “currency” for such a market. This paradigm empowers individuals or groups of users to run their own “marketplace” for any computer resource or service. The regulation, always an issue in a decentralized environment, is done by an internal “web of trust,” a network between friends used to evaluate the trustworthiness of fellow users and aimed at preventing content theft, counterfeiting, and cyber attacks. Other examples mentioned by Kaufman were NYPL Labs, which provides a window into the overall digital experience of The New York Public Library, WGBH Lab’s Sandbox, loaded with rights-free archival footage, CW channel’s “ Lab” where users can create video mashups and Conde Nast’s Flip.com, an online forum for girls (millions of them) to create multimedia “flip books” full of video, photos, and other postings — mirroring the looks of their school lockers and MySpace pages. Now with the arrival of Joost — “infinite choice … combining the best of TV with the best of the Internet,” from the founders of Skype and Kazaa — it may well be “fair to say,” as one analyst put it, “that the democratization of video delivery is officially under way.” It is becoming clear that digitization initiatives for cultural materials are taking place in the context of a new, exhausting cultural expectation: people believe they have an access mandate, a new, almost inalienable right to work with video, as with text, online. They have come to expect it. With this paradigm as a basic assumption it’s just a matter of finding sustainable ways for commercial companies and noncommercial institutions active in culture, education, and media to make certain materials widely available (preferably for free), something for which we have to learn to develop balanced public-private partnerships (see also the Good Terms project of Intelligent Television).

Echoes from the broadcasting world
These challenges are now addresses by most broadcasting institutions. Some of these projects were discussed during the conference. Pelle Snickars of the SLBA (Swedish National Archive of Recorded Sound and Moving Images) talked about the transition from network television to web based networked TV. The SLBA is currently developping some projects in which they are trying to redefine the idea of the “archive” (no longer a defined space with items on its shelves but a time based and networked storage system) and bridge the gap between the old broadcasting regime and the today’s participatory culture.
Poppy Simpson of BFI Screenonline decribed and contextualised the Creative Archive and Screenonline projects. The latter has made some BFI content available, but embedded in a “walled garden”, only for “educational” uses (defined by the National Educational network) in GB. They made use of the “public lending rights” arrangement (like the libraries), which is basically a system in which a vast amount of money is distributed to the rights holders. All content is categorised an contextualised, and they are now moving to hybrid models, lookin into models of tiered (layered) access and the use of EPG’s (Electronic programme Guides), platforms, media players and on-demand services such as Hulu, launched by NBC and Fox, and the BBC’s iPlayer and Kangaroo project, a commercial portal that would pool TV content from the major UK broadcasters. The Creative Archive project is all about re-purposing content, providing (in the near future) “online editing tools” that can be used by the users to remix stuff (some work will be commissioned to artists in residence as way to encourage use). Due to rights problems though all this will happen, once again, in a walled garden, which questions the definition of “public value”. In that context, Poppy also mentioned BBC Jam, an educaional project launched by the BBC in January 2006, offering multi-media educational resources for free. It was suspended in March 2007, after allegations from some competitors in the industry claming that the service was damaging their interests (a similar case happened in Germany).
Tobias Golodnoff of the Dansk kulturarv , who are working together with the Broadcasting corporation, the Film Institute, the National Museum, the Royal Library, the State Archives and the National Art Gallery, argued that the value of the archive is generated by its use. They developped several case studies in which they tried out a few interactive models, playing around with playlist and tagging systems etc. With the Bonanza project they invited the public to participate in the preservation project by voting which audiovisual material should be digitized in a first phase. The deal with the copyright owners is similar to the model used in GB, based on a lending agreement. In order to ensure the continuation of these projects (and not waste precious resources on the continuous refreshing of the service) they’d like to develop everything in open source.
Roei Amit presented the model used by INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel), which is based on a pretty conventional commercial logic, differentiating between B2C and B2B services. At the moment 2/3 is publically funded. They have been working on the digitalisation for about 6 years, and the total of 1,5 mil hours of radio and Tv programs should be done by 2015. INA provides a VOD platform, where content can be downloaded and streamed with the INA player (can be used on different platforms). It has an editorialised interface where current affairs are scooped with archival material. But Amit draws attantion to the fact that access is not enough to stabilise the model, it’s important to provide an “added value” to maintain the interest.
Later that day Beeld & Geluid director Edwin van Huis gave a brief overview of the Images of the Future project, which is supposedly “the biggest digitization project for moving images in Europe”, which is now researching different distribution models and services, for education used, the creative industry as well as the general public. The bottom line of this project was nicely synthesised in a report on their research blog: “They were able to get the massive sum needed for this kind of project by using not the cultural argument (”this is our heritage – please save it!”) but by making an economic equation which had to prove that the government would get a 20-60 mil euro return upon investment (total: 173 mil for 2007-2014). Or in other words by convincing them that the Dutch audiovisual heritage is valuable simply because it sells”.

The European avalanche
Several European projects were presented as well, such as Videoactive and the European Film Gateway. I couldn’t shake the impression though that most of these high-budget projects were just chasing their own tales and had a hard time to define (and communicate, not in the least among eachother) their goals and priorities, and especially, find balanced organisational models, that could work on a long term. Let’s hope the Europeana platform (“Connecting Cultural Heritage”) can create some kind of overview on the chaos of European heritage initiatives, ‘caus it’s damn hard to keep track (other projects in the past and present include: BRAVA (BRoadcast Archives trough Video Analysis), PRESTO (Preservation Technology for European Archives), PRESTOSPACE, ECHO (European Chronicles On Line), FIRST (Film Restoration and Conservation Strategies), TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe) and many many more). According toEuropeana’s Jill Cousins it’s all about bridging the gaps, between users and content providers, content and copyright, the European, the national and institutial level, funding and goals (creating sustainibility and long-term vision), production and R&D. Apart from issues of interoperability, usability, governance and cross domain communication, it’s even more important, she implied, to understand the differences. This is something that is forgotten too often in these kind of cross-domain digitalisation projects, and it was also mentioned by Florian Schneider: we have to welcome the differences, not try to delete or synthesise them.

The Post Scarcity Paradigm
Other project presentations during the conference focussed on uncommon business models and open environments for the distribution and/or production of AV content. There were of course, the “anarchistic” projects like Ubuweb, represented by Kenneth Goldsmith, whos “fuck you” attitude on stage might have been refreshing for some, but always on the verge of arrogance. But Ubuweb is a wonderful and necessary initiative, one that hasn’t got any business plan at all, or an interest in creating a community or having user interactivity. This initiative is being run by volunteers only, supported by a few technical partners. Ubuweb never clears copyright on anything, selected content is just being drawn from a variety of sources on the net, with the only condition that it’s out of print (or “absurdly priced or insanely hard to procure”). Apparently they hardly get any cease and desist orders, and if they do, they just take the content offline. The “hall of shame“, where the names of people who sent a c&d are published, is a bit over the edge, especially because no explanation is given. I’m sure that quite some filmmakers just feel that the internet – or compressed video formats – are just diminishing their work, and in many cases, they are right. This is an ethical issue that borders on the visibility vs quality debate: of course, it’s (for most cultural producers, not all) important that their work is seen, but the way it is presented – the medium, the spatial conditions etc – is also PART of their work, as it can have an immense impact on the way it is experienced, don’t forget that. But anyways, apart from these issues, Ubuweb is a great propagator of the gift economy, while its contempt for the ubiquitious web 2.0 discourse is a stance in itself. As it says on their site: “essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally ‘be free'”.
The positive utopy was also something Jamie King, one of the guys of League of Noble Peers is striving for. He mainly talked about their Steal This Film series (documenting movements against intellectual property), which, to their own surprise, turned out to be some kind of a hit on the net (see earlier post)- the first one was downloaded about 4 mil times in 1,2 years, while the second one, released in January, has already been downloaded by approximately 1 mil people, via Bittorrent networks only. All of this is financed through donations, a system the League of Noble Peers wants to develop further via VODO, which stands for “Voluntary Donations for the Post IP generation”. Basically VODO’s aim is to provide a revenue stream for creators of media content, shared through P2P networks. Via a series of technologies would-be donors can be smoothly connected to these creators wherever their works are shared. King forsees a 10-15% of the users giving donations, of which third parties (Pirate Bay, VLC) would recieve a cut – the service costs have to be paid of course (f.e Stage6 recently went bankrupt. Jon Philips refered to the piracy market in China, where the focus is now on streaming HD content via broadband, feasible because of this use of advertisements). VODO is in any case a promising initiative, looking forward to see how it works out.
Another interesting case was Blender, which was presented by Ton Roosendaal, who runs the Blender Institute. It’s an open source 3d modeling software package (with quite an intense community activity supporting it) that works with a pre-financed model, in which customers can preorder a work, which is distributed online for free, with a CC licence. It’s all about openess and freedom, for the producers themselves as well: they sell a concept, but the design and development is all theirs, without constraints. Other sources of funding include educational services and sponsoring – f.e. Blender Institute’s first open 3D-animation film, ‘Big Buck Bunny’, is made with the support of Network.com, the grid computing initiative of Sun Microsystems (Blender could use valuable CPU-hours to test the system).
These are all examples of the potential of the “post-scarcity” paradigm, as Richard Prelinger pointed out in his talk, refering to Kevin Kelley’s post ‘Better than Free. Kelley describes the Internet as a “super-distribution system” that has become the foundation of our economy and wealth”. The digital economy is run on a river of FREE copies. “Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. (…) How does one make money selling free copies?” Prelinger had a question in return: who is paying for the gift economy and who controls the compounds, the net, the indexes etc? During his talk he reflected on the nature of the audiovisual archive, its changing significance and meaning and its implicit social contract (“public archives shouldn’t only speak for the rightsholders but for the society as a whole”), defined above all by access. “Access is a spectrum, openess is a practice” he stated, a tension he tried to explore with his own Prelinger archives, which holds about 60,000 “ephemeral” (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, holding approximately 4,000 titles on videotape and a smaller collection of film materials acquired subsequent to the Library of Congress transaction. Getty Images represents the collection for stock footage sale, and almost 2,000 key titles are available for free via the Internet Archive, of which there were 8 million downloads in 7 years. So on one hand you have free content, downloadable in MPEG2 and usable with a CC licence, on the other hand you have the services offered by Getty, who can research the collection for specific topics and deliver highest-quality material in all formats. They warrant that footage is clear for your use and supply written license agreements. They charge license fees for use of footage. Amazingly, since the Prelinger archive is online, the revenue has gone up with 120%. So there’s an interesting dynamics going on here between “fee” and “free”, although Prelinger himself has some questions about the phenomenon: what if more and more content becomes available, will that model remain sustainable? And sure, there is a new interest in unedited archival footage, which is being remixed, reedited and recontextualized , but won’t the so-called “remix culture” dissolve in “style”, which comes and goes? He also stressed the importance of local, small-scale, DIY projects, as “new ideas originate in the periphery” and of course, there’s also the basic truth that lots of big-scale digitisation projects are already anachronistic as we speak.

Business models
One panel focussed on the search for sustainable business models. Harry Verwayen of Kennisland pointed out that that archival institutions have to look at the network culture for inspiration. He mentioned several possible “open” (as contrast to “closed”) business models: the suscription model, pay per view/ download (ODE), free + added quality (Prelinger Archives), freemium (+ service) (Flickr, Linkedin), advertisement (NY Times), sponsorships (Memory of the Netherlands, Google Books), and community engagement (Tribler).
Jan Velterop, CEO of Knewco discussed some of the open models used in scientific publishing. Information, says Velterop, is open, that’s its “natural state”, so how can the free flow of a certain kind of information, that used to be available only in closed environments, be made sustainable? The key is that the one who has the biggest interest, is the one who pays. Velterop sees three potential sources of funding: the reader (via suscriptions for example), the author (advertising) and third parties (sponsoring). Most business models seem to be moving to the author or the sponsor as source, instead of the reader. Of course, in the research publishing community, driven by a peer review process, the authors – and the universities – have a big interest in publishing as wide as possible. Some publishers, like Springer, make arrangements with the authors (or university departments), who can choose to make their articles freely available worldwide on the Internet, for a fee.
Jonas Woost talked about Last.fm‘s model (now owned by CBS, by the way), based on a process of ‘scrobbling’, ‘collaborative filtering’ and user’s ‘discovery’. Recently they launched an on-demand service, so user’s can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website, at least in the US, GB and Germany (not yet in Belgium). Each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about their subscription service, which will give unlimited plays and some other useful things. With the on-demand service, according to Woost, the transaction per user grew with 60 %. Besides the suscription model, revenue is made in two more ways: advertising and ‘affiliate links’ (directed to 3rd party retailers, this has gone up with 190%, thanks to the on-demand system). Artists and labels get paid every time someone streams a song. Music on Last.fm is perpetually monetized, which means the rightsholders get paid based on how popular a song is, instead of a fixed amount. In the discussion afterwards, INA’s Amit remarked that it will be hard for AV archives to gain a sufficiant, or any, income with B2C side like LastFM. As there will be more and more content available, the value of the archives might be pushed further away into the Long Tail, which might be problematic for B2B too.

On the Commons
Finally, throughout the conference, there were some people who tried to grasp the concept of the “commons” in theoretical propositions. Joost Smiers, Professor of Political Science of the Arts who’s currently preparing a publication titled Imagine! No copyright. Better for artists, diversity and the economy (together with Marieke van Schijndel), gave a furious talk in which he questioned the philosophy backing our present copyright system and the agenda of commodification, driven by short-term economic interests. Smiers argued that we cannot go on with a system that favours huge cultural industries more than the public interest. He traced the coming into being of the modern tradition of the “author”, referencing Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author in which he writes that “in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person, but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose “performance” – the mastery of the narrative code – may possibly be admired but never his “genius”. The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, or as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person'”. In some non-Western societies, Smiers said, creating is, or was, an ongoing process of changing and adapting (this was also mentioned eralier on in a talk by Shubha Chaudhuri, Director of the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) of the American Institute of Indian Studies in New Delhi). But the private appropriation of cultural resources and the introduction of the notion of copyright has changed societies, Western and Non-Western, in a radical way. Expressions became “desocialised”. Now, with the introduction of global digital networks, there is ever more resistance against the hollowing of the public cultural domain. For, if ownership and decision-making concerning cultural life is being controlled in a substantial manner by just a few cultural industries worldwide, then fundamental human rights and democracy are in danger. We have to find a new balance between the commons in the cultural field and the right of artists to make a living from their work. Conglomerates should be cut down, copyright should be abolished, so there would be nor more “bestsellers” (product of falsified marketing), or stars. Countries should have the rights to regulate their cultural domain in favour of cultural diversity.
David Bollier from On the Commons tried to define the commons as a matrix where socially created value is generated and cultivated, as a macro-economic and cultural force in its own right. The public domain may once have been a wasteland for things unnecessary to all, but is now the place where creativity peeks, as we can see in community-based inventions such as open software, wikis (even the CIA uses one now: the Intellipedia ) and the likes. Referring to Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Eric von Hippel’s Democratizing Innovation as well as Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue by Benkler & Nissenbaum, he drew out four strategies to sustain the commons: protecting the integrity of the commons, devising new models for understanding value, inventing new hybrids that blend the market economy with the commons, and finally the active support of the government (just as it supports the market).
In his thought-provoking talk Anthony McCann did however have some critiques on the narratives and rhetoric imbedded in the “commons” discourses, used by Bollier and others, suggesting that these often quite confused and confusing discourses tend to work more in the spirit of a Trojan horse than an analytic tool, and tend to be consistent with inadequate models of expansion and commodification, the primary features of the process and practices of “enclosure” (a term that is variously equated with privatization, commercialization, and the marketization of everyday life). McCan stated that much of the coherence in rhetorical deployments of “commons” discourses comes from narratives of “enclosure”, and that this poses a danger to the “commons” (and to democratic process). A lot of things seem to be put beyond debate, like the central assumptions of copyright, as well as the expansionary dynamic of enclosure (and capitalism). In a paper titeld Enclosure Without and Within the “Information Commons” McCan writes: “Rather than being about uncommodified spaces, uncommodifying, non-capitalist, non-propertized social relations, notions of “the commons” tend to refer to always-already commodified resources, always-already commodifying management of resources, or an always-already commodified space of propertized resources. The resources become “givens” of the discourse, and the focus shifts from things to the management of things”. The main problem is that the possibilities of conceiving of “the commons” in terms of uncommodifying social relations, or in terms of resistance to the dynamics of enclosure, are decidedly limited when resources are the focus of attention. McCan’s analysis of “enclosure” differs in significant ways from that offered by apologists of the “commons” (=enclosure as a vague threat, the commons as an unquestioned good). He came to understand enclosure as a broader social process, a social psychological and political process which operates in and through the very particular practices of very particular people in very particular circumstances. His greatest concern is the creeping commodification of everyday life, especially the technological, political, economic, and legislative enclosure, and this tends to happen because either we don’t realise that resistance is even an option or we don’t care to resist. His talk was basically a call for resistance and awareness, as he identified commodifying contradictions in ‘commons’. As an alternative he proposed a ‘politics of gentleness’ as a predominantly uncommodifying ethic, a possible and powerful politics in our lives, and a way to distantiate ourselves a bit form our current obsessions with digital technology. A quote from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series provided a nice backfrop for his musings: “Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps.
Florian Schneider provided some more food for thought with his talk on “imaginary property“, which was similar to the one he gave at the Video Vortex conference. His basic question is: what does it mean to own an image in an information society which has become an image economy, in the age of immateriality, characterised by a post-format condition? “While the bourgeois conception of property has been characterized by anonymity and pure objectivity, today it seems to be the opposite way around: In the age of immaterial production, digital reproduction, and networked distribution – property relations need to be made visible in order to be enforced. Property exists first of all as imagery and rapidly becomes a matter of imagination. A contrary way of reading “imaginary property” could also be understood as the expression of a certain form of possession or ownership of imagineries”. The aim of Schneider’s project is to “further complicate and increase complexity around property affairs rather than reducing them towards a level where one could fall back into the illusion of an alleged identity of “myself” and “my own” that may have characterized the era of possessive individualism. The project aims to demystify existing property relations and to trace the links with the emergent development of reproductive forces. And it tries to speculate on concepts of a worldwide redistribution of imaginary property” He argues: “beyond mere possession it seems to be a matter of imagination: an act of determining space and time, a rule of production. From invention, creation and distribution to recognition, exhibition and conservation, images are subject to an infinite variety of operations that are not only characterized by ongoing conflicts about the power of producing, possessing and processing them. In fact, images are the products of struggles for imagination. Images manage their violations rather than obviating them or preventing them from happening. In the era of digital reproduction and networked distribution ownership of images has turned into the challenge of implementing solutions that are executed in real-time. Ownership means assigning a set of permissions that specify an ever differentiated level of accessability or ‘access without access’: Who has got, right in this moment, the permission to read, write and execute imaginary property?” Schneider proposes to turn the platonic world of image production on its head and try to think of the image as a storage unit for framed information. It is impossible to differentiate between an image that is “my own” and “not my own”, when we can’t even be sure if it’s “real” or not. Ownership can only be defined as a social relationship between an owner and another potential owner in reference to an object. Images are, after all, the products of the struggle of imagination and, in a way, all image constructions are a sort of pirate-copy of reality. When it comes to images, there’s no innocence.

(Image: fragment of a ‘Cinema Redux’ composition by Brendan Dawes, who explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. This image is made by processing Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film.)

Ghosting the Image / Program

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The recuperation and citation of images is a film practice as old as cinema itself, and one of the principal strategies within the traditions of avant-garde film and video. In so-called «found-footage films», bits and scraps from the media reality surrounding us are not only taken out of their context and accorded new meanings, but also serve as a basis for critical reflection and analysis. For recycled images call attention to themselves as ‘images’, as products of the cinema and broadcasting industry, as part of the endless stream of information, entertainment and persuasion that constitutes the media-saturated environment of modern life.

The film and video works featured in the programme Ghosting the Image disrupt the usual rhetoric of the media spectacle, characterized by stability and linearity, and turn it against itself. By destabilizing dominant narrative structures and exploring the limits of representation, these works reveal how time, perception and memory are organised. By dismantling the illusion, these films and videos unmask the ambiguity and vulnerability of images, revealing what is being systematically ignored, repressed or left out. As if for a moment the veil of our eyes was lifted, only to find a world of images staring back at us.

Curated by Stoffel Debuysere and Maria Palacios Cruz for the Courtisane Festival, Ghent, Belgium (21-27 April 2008). A selection of these films will also be shown at WORM, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (8-9 May 2008).

1. Thu 24.04 23:00 (Cinema Sphinx) // LATE NIGHT TALES

Peter Tscherkassky
Outer Space

AT, 1999, 10’, 35mm, b/w, sound
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Fragments of a Hollywood horror movie were recycled, recaptured and re-exposed frame by frame, resulting in a disquieting confrontation with the codes of narrative-representational cinema and the unearthly qualities of the film apparatus. This is a penetrating cinema that tears itself apart, a journey of self-destruction exploding into unimaginable beauty.

Pere Portabella
Vampir Cuadecuc

ES, 1970, 67’, 35mm, b/w, sound
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A hallucinatory reflection on the conventions of horror film. Portabella, a key figure of the Spanish underground film scene, not only documents the shooting of Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula, but also creates, by the means of for instance eliminating colour or using an eerie electronic soundtrack, an alternative version of the original story, revealing at the same time the ways cinematographic illusion is constructed.

2. Fri 25.04 23:00 (Cinema Sphinx) // DISSONANT RESONANCE

Ken Jacobs
Perfect Film

US, 1986, 22’, 16mm, b/w, sound
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The rushes of a news report on the assassination of Malcolm X, just as they were found on a bin. Jacobs: “A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, ‘editing,’ the purposeful ‘pointing things out’ that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle, we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all.”

Arthur Lipsett
Fluxes

CA, 1968, 23’, 16mm, b/w, sound

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Lipsett unfolds his pessimistic vision on the ‘condition humaine’ in an associative jigsaw of found footage. The juxtaposition of divergent episodes of history and popular culture of the 20th century culminates into “a phantasmagoria of nothing”, a somber but urgent reflection on the alienating effects of science and technology, the ruling religions of the Western world.

Abigail Child
Mercy

US, 1989, 10’, 16mm, colour, sound

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The last chapter of the series Is This What You Were Born For?, Child’s investigation on the cultural construction of gender identity, sexuality and voyeurism. Through a rhythmic collage of industrial and self-made recordings, pieces of dialogue, music and noise, she dissects the games the mass media play with our private perceptions, drawing the attention to what happens in the margins, the gazes, poses and gestures we ourselves are hardly aware of.

Peter Kubelka
Unsere Afrikareise

AT, 1966, 13’, 16mm, colour, sound

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In 1961 Kubelka was hired to document the African Safari of a group of European tourists. Afterwards he hijacked the recorded material and edited it into an analysis of the many layers of violence present in the hunt, the gaze of the hunters and the film itself. The fragmentary and asynchronic montage of images and sounds generates a multitude of connections and associations which, in their turn, evoke a number of metaphorical interpretations.

Stan Brakhage
Murder Psalm

US, 1981, 17’, 16mm, colour, silent

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A filmic exorcism of a murder fantasy, drenched in repressed memories and fragments of violent media culture. Brakhage combines educational film footage, television war coverage and Disney cartoons and creates a silent meditation on the world of children today; a world fully surrendered to the mercy of destructive forces. Inspired by some passages of Dostoevsky’s The Diary of a Writer.

3. Sa 26.04 15:00 (Cinema Sphinx) // REMEDIAL RESPONSE

Luther Price
Jellyfish Sandwich

US, 1994, 17’, S8mm, colour, sound

A hypnotic pattern juxtaposing shots of Hawaiian beaches, Chinese ideograms, aerial bombing footage and American football reads as a vague dream sequence, reinforced by a slightly accelerated medley by the Carpenters. With his films Price tries to take a grasp on the breaches, breakdowns and eventual collapse of family, society, body and life itself, in the face of unstoppable philosophical forces.

Naomi Uman
Removed

US, 1999, 6’, 16mm, colour, sound

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Using nail polish remover and household bleach, Uman erased the female figures from an old and forgotten porn film. The wriggling holes in the film become erotic zones, blanks on which a fantasy body is projected, creating a new pornography.

Cathy Joritz
Negative Man

DE/US, 1985, 3′, 16mm, b/w, sound

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By drawing directly on the celluloid, Joritz comments sarcastically on the speech of an American TV presenter. In a time span of a few minutes he becomes the object of a continuous transformation that is draped on him like a second, celluloid skin. Joritz’s drawings not only serve to adjust the image but also as a way to unmask the representation of authority.

Owen Land
Fleming Faloon

US, 1963, 7’, 16mm, colour, sound

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The first 16mm film by Land (formerly known as George Landow) is told to be a source of inspiration for Warhol’s Screen Tests. The image of a staring TV presenter is subjected to a series of manipulations, questioning the optical ambiguity of cinema. Land suggests that if we accept the reality offered to us by the illusion of depth on the flat plane of the screen, we can then willingly ascribe anything as real.

Maurice Lemaître
Un Navet

FR, 1976, 31’, 16mm, colour, sound

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A sparkling example of Lemaître’s ‘anti-cinema’, in which he exhorts the audience to revel in cinematographic disgust. He comments tongue-in-cheek on a series of outtakes of commercial films, provocatively summoning the audience to react, and at the same time creates a sensual experience by manually colouring and drawing directly on the film.

4. Sa 26.04 16:30 (Cinema Sphinx) // STORIES UNTOLD

Robert Ryang
Shining

US, 2005, 2’, video, colour, sound

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A remixed trailer for Kubrick’s The Shining that adds a totally new meaning to the original, turning the horror classic into a romantic comedy family flick. In doing so, Ryang dismantles the strategies used in conventional Hollywood trailers, revealing them as torturing pretexts and false promises in a tight narrative corset. This video also set a trend for the wave of mash-ups on the Internet.

Matthias Muller
Home Stories

DE, 1990, 6’, 16mm, colour, sound

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A collage based on clichés and stereotypes of 1950’s and 1960’s Hollywood melodramas. Muller transforms a range of female gestures and movements into a grammatical construction of paradigmatic elements and condensates them into an elegy of fear. The film does not only comment on the gender politics of classic cinema, but also exposes our own voyeuristic gaze.

Luther Price
The Mongrel Sister

US, 2007, 7’, 16mm, colour, sound

A handful of unrelated scenes from obscure instructional and fiction movies were edited together into an intense and shocking psychodrama. In his works – very often unique prints – Price creates a staggering universe of penetrating images, insistent rituals and disrupted film material, in which he deals merciless with his obsessions; hermetic but visceral evocations of emotional disturbance on the verge of psychosis.

Martin Arnold
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy

AT, 1998, 15’, 16mm, b&w, sound

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Third part of a trilogy in which Arnold deconstructs a series of classic Hollywood films, through a process of compulsive repetition. Scenes and gestures are surgically dissected and moulded into neurotic rhythms, turning the hidden messages of sex and violence inside out. The stuttering sounds raise the underlying tensions until they are on the verge of bursting out.

Nina Fonoroff
Some Phases of an Empire

1984, 9’, S8mm, colour, sound

A reconfiguration of images from Quo Vadis, the 1951 epic Hollywood spectacle, rephotographed and edited into a densely layered contemplation of themes such as power, sexuality and aggression. The soundtrack, which includes a spoken version of the children’s book “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm”, accentuates the subjacent tensions in the original film.

Ken Jacobs
The Doctor’s Dream

US, 1978, 25’, 16mm, b/w, sound

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A reinterpretation of a 1950’s television drama. Jacobs reedited the film radically, starting with the shot that was numerically the middle shot, followed by the shots that came inmediately before and after, only to continue skipping back and forth. The deconstruction of the linear structure unravels a strong sexual echo, hidden in the triviality of the original story.

Maurice Lemaitre
The Song of Rio Jim

FR, 1978, 6’, 16 mm, b/w, sound

A homage to Hart and Ince, mythical ancestors of the Western film. The narrative structure on the soundtrack develops as a traditional cowboys-and-indians tale, but the spectator is denied any access to a visual representation of what is being heard. The screen remains black, leaving us to our own memory and imagination. The radical use of monochrome images questions the basic conditions of cinema, exploring the relation between hearing and seeing.

5. Sa 26.04 19:30 (Artcentre Vooruit) // TIME AFTER TIME

Saul Levine
The Big Stick / An Old Reel

US, 1973, 11’, 16mm, b/w, silent

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Levine spent six years reediting 8mm prints of some of Charlie Chaplin’s shorts which he juxtaposed with television images of an anti-war protest. A self-study in montage, narrative ascesis and the amazing power of caustic rhythms, it serves at the same time as a a subtle comment on the duality of society in North-America, torn between passivity and activism, privilege and exclusion.

David Rimmer
Bricolage

CA, 1984, 11’, 16mm, colour & b/w, sound

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A reflection on the nature of the cinematographic image and the quality of perception, based on a diverse range of television footage. Rimmer isolates specific passages, intervenes radically on the texture and structure of the film and explores the relation between statis and movement. The repetition, deceleration, and spatio-temporal dislocation of images and sounds provoke the building of a metaphysical tension.

Keith Sanborn
Operation Double Trouble

US, 2003, 10’, video, colour, sound

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A “détournement” of a propaganda film produced by the American army. By repeating each shot twice, Sanborn pushes the strategic manipulations of the original, both in terms of montage and ideology, bare to the surface. The echoing effect destabilizes the transparency of the narrative codes and provides an insight into the functioning of audiovisual media and our way of relating to it.

Kirk Tougas
The Politics of Perception

CA, 1973, 33’, 16mm,colour, sound

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Segments from the trailer of The Mechanic, an action flick with Charles Bronson, are continuously repeated over a period of a half hour. The sound and image quality constantly deteriorate until both picture and sound assume the status of “noise”. The “mechanic” Bronson, as a protagonist of destruction caught in an endless loop, is a metaphor for mechanized perception, photographical reproduction, cultural production and consumption.

6. Su 26.04 16:30 (Cinema Sphinx) // GLANCING BACK

Vanessa Renwick
Britton, South Dakota

US, 2003, 9’, 16mm to video, b/w, sound

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An intriguing film built out of portraits of children on the streets of a deserted city in the 1930’s. Their brutally honest staring gaze betrays an image of a world without images, as well as the perspective of an uncertain future that already belongs to the past. James Benning: “Not only found footage, but a found film made 60-some years ago directly addressing contemporary structural concerns.”

Brian Frye
Oona’s Veil

US, 2000, 8’, 16mm, b/w, sound

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A short screen test of Oona Chaplin, her only film-record, is reconstructed into an intense meditation on seeing and being seen. The original shot was rephotographed, mutilated, exposed to chemicals and even buried. The result is an unearthly film portrait, with occasional spots of black emulsion, creating a continuously shifting exchange of glances between the image and the spectator.

Lewis Klahr
Her Fragrant Emulsion

US, 1987, 10’, 16mm, colour, sound

An obsessional homage to Mimsy Farmer, a 1960’s sexploitation movie star. Strips of cut-up 8mm film are glued into a collage, projected and re-photographed. Klahr’s internal montage emphasizes the materiality of film and uncovers the subtle incisions and gestures of the not-too-subtle narrative original.

Morgan Fisher
Standard Gauge

US, 1984, 35’, 16mm, colour, sound

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An autobiographical account of Fisher’s experiences as an editor in the commercial film industry during the early seventies. Filming a succession of divergent film scraps rejected at the editing stage, Fisher comments on the origin and meaning of each image, thus exploring the mechanisms and conditions of film production, in both its materialistic and institutional aspects.

Thanks to Dominic Angerame (Canyon), Martin Arnold, Joke Ballintijn (Montevideo), Christophe Bichon (Lightcone), Brigitta Burger-Utzer (Sixpack), Abigail Child, Pip Chodorov (Re:voir), Benjamin Cook (LUX), Xavier García Bardon (Bozar Cinema), Morgan Fisher, Nina Fonoroff, Brian Frye, Helena Gomà (Films 59), Michaella Grill (Sixpack), Will Hanke (no.w.here), Ken and Flo Jacobs, Brett Kashmere, Richard Kerr, Helena Kritis (MuHKA), Saul Levine, Marie Losier, Mark McElhatten, JJ Murphy, Mark Nash, Pieter-Paul Mortier (STUK), Pere Portabella, Luther Price, Vanessa Renwick, William Rose, Robert Ryang, Keith Sanborn, Mike Sperlinger (LUX), Astria Suparak, Peter Taylor (Worm), Anabel Vázquez, Mark Webber, Karl Winter (FDK)…

In Digital We Trust

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“While there are great benefits to digital technology, if you embrace it today, you are giving up guaranteed long-term access which you have with analog film.”
Milt Shefter, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Digital Motion Picture Archival Project

Let me tell you: the more I’m getting involved in the whole audiovisual digitalisation business, the more confused I get. There’s not only the continuous going-back-and-forth between the issues of preservation of the past on one hand and anticipation of the future on the other (that might be the thing I’m having trouble with most of all), but there’s also the the difficult decision-making process, influenced and clouded by so many powerful, mostly industrial, forces. What to make of this, for example: a recent SUN Microsystems report estimates the cost of ‘digital film’ is about ‘half the price’ of analogue, while another report, published by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, says it’s nearly ‘twelve times higher’! Of course, these costs depend on many complex variables and on their interaction (uses of the content, quality for digitisation, type of content, categories of users, etc.), but still.. it’s hard to make any kind of sense of this kind of ‘findings’, especially when it becomes clear that lots of industrial-based concepts are unsufficiently defined or at least ambiguous. To make things even more complicated, all eyes in the cinema business might be directed towards the digitalisation of film, but this kind of blind all-digital push-mentality might destroy more than we can imagine. An European research project, called FIRST (FIlm Restoration and conservation STrategies), published a few years ago, was not only unable to quantify the costs involved in the digitisation of large collections of film materials, but also conluded that digitisation is NOT a preservation strategy for film, at least not yet: film remains the safest carrier for high quality, high value film content. There are so many misunderstandings about this, even in the professional areas of cultural heritage, so again: digitized content does NOT replace the analogue film original, which means (the cost for) digitalisation is in addition to activities in the analogue domain.

Digital preservation sets out to preserve the “shape and substance” of images or sounds without preserving the format, or the support…. or the original experience. Is this acceptable for film, which has its particular “look and feel” that has inpired, and keeps on inspiring (f.e. there seems to be emerging a new generation of 8mm and 16mm filmmakers. Go to any ‘openminded’ filmfestival and you’ll notice) so many wonderful forms of cultural expression and experimentation? Archivists are widely divided, but would, in the end, agree that it is better to preserve what is possible, than lose a film image entirely. Furthermore, restoration of film can only be done in a optimal fashion, if the original film image is retained. Surely, analogue restoration is often extremely labour- and time-consuming and therefore very costly, and only a few films get the full restoration treatment to the degree that they deserve or need, but then again digital technology is not expected to be cheaper and will definitely not increase the numbers fully restored. Technology companies claim that they have achieved efficient single-image compression schemes (spatial or inter-frame compressions) that are indistinguishable from uncompressed images, but let’s not forget that these compressed images, in effect frozen in time, use, space and quality, can’t be worked on again to improve a restoration or extend quality to provide an new access version for an improved projection system – and technology always keeps improving.

So film is here to stay, at least untill further notice, and it cannot be discarded just because its content is digitized for today’s access on DVD, for VOD etc. Of course, the advent of these digital delivery modes and channels offer unprecedented opportunities for film collections to provide access to their holdings, so digitalisation is still worthwhile, particularly in a context where the traditional theatrical screening model is not responding to a growing demand anymore (According to data published by The Hollywood Reporter, only about 19% of total revenue for the six largest movie companies came from theater showings. The remaining 81% represents revenue generated through DVDs, TV, pay TV and VHS. Let’s hope the traditional film theatres survive, especially the smaller ones. I wouldn’t wanna miss the magic light and sound of filmprojection). But the management of this proces, as well as the cost structure, is extremely complex (see image), not in the least because an important part of the process must take place long before the content is actually transferred, and some of the most critical deeply interconnected decisions influence the whole process. These strategic decisions, for example the mode of distribution and delivery, will decide the resolution and technical characteristics of the digitised content, or the selection of the content to be digitised, and these are positioned all along the chain. This is complicated by the fact that you have literally dozens of ways that a piece of content can be viewed, depending upon the licensing rules, from theater to mobile to broadband to any number of devices in different formats. The methods and processes by which they go from higher resolution to lower resolution have to become increasingly more efficient.

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Sure, more and more filmmakers shoot their movies on digital cameras and perform post-production on computers; the studios distribute the films to theaters via hard drives, tape drives or satellite; and then cinemas show the films using digital projectors. So that should reduce the problems, no? NO way. In the AMPAS report mentioned (“The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials”), the authors point to the facts that current 2K digital quality is inferior compared to 35mm film, that digital storage media has a shorter lifespan than film, and the annual costs for preserving film archival masters ($1,059 per title, $8.83 per running minute) is still (at least according to them) a lot cheaper than preserving a 4K digital master ($12,514 and $104.28). Much worse, to keep the enormous swarm of data produced when a picture is ‘born digital’ pushes the cost of preservation to $208,569 a year, vastly higher than the $486 it costs to toss the camera negatives, audio recordings, on-set photographs and annotated scripts of an all-film production into the cold-storage vault. One case study states that a two-hour feature film would take up about 129 cartons or cans, which are normally stored in vaults often located in underground salt mines. “Nobody paid any attention to what the budget was because it wasn’t significant,” says Milt Shefter, the project leader on the AMPAS Science and Technology Council’s digital motion picture archival project.

To make things worse, there’s also the amount of information that is generated nowadays. While a director using 35mm film might shoot 15 or 18 minutes of film for every minute used in the final movie, “that ratio goes up tremendously when you go to digital,” says Shefter. “It encourages more use.” For instance, because film doesn’t need to be loaded into the camera, the cameras just keep shooting – even as the director steps out from behind the camera to talk with the cast. Adding to the amount of data created in the making of a typical movie are the files generated during the post-production process, when the footage is turned into a sellable product. Directors believe they have better control when the movie goes to digital. “You can do so much more in the post-production process in digital than [you] were ever able to do in film,” says Shefter. As an article in Computerworld states: “the bottom line is that movie studios are in a position of having to maintain hundreds of terabytes of data for the material associated with any single motion picture, content that’s barely or rarely cataloged or indexed”.

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In an article titled “The Afterlife is Expensive for Digital Movies” the Times says that all (blockbuster) movies, including all movies shot in digital, are still preserved onto analog film “At present, a copy of virtually all studio movies — even those like ‘Click’ or ‘Miami Vice’ that are shot using digital processes — is being stored in film format, protecting the finished product for 100 years or more.” Not that the traditional film storage is so great, considering that “only half of the feature films shot before 1950 survive”, and lots of film is rotting away in archives worldwide (remember that broadcasters such as the the BBC, for example, are known to have destroyed or erased many of the programs saved in its videotape and film libraries to make room for new programs). But at least, that we know, while the questions and concerns about digital storage are still very much unknown, as Shefter says: “To begin with, the hardware and storage media — magnetic tapes, disks, whatever — on which a film is encoded are much less enduring than good old film. If not operated occasionally, a hard drive will freeze up in as little as two years. Similarly, DVDs tend to degrade: according to the report, only half of a collection of disks can be expected to last for 15 years, not a reassuring prospect to those who think about centuries (The question of the long-term reliability of disk storage was the topic of many studies, see here). Digital audiotape, it was discovered, tends to hit a “brick wall” when it degrades. While conventional tape becomes scratchy, the digital variety becomes unreadable.”

Now acetate-based films and their related materials are more likely to be archived in climate-controlled facilities with fire suppression systems, where film master can be preserved up to 100 years and more. Digital tapes and disks that have replaced acid-free cartons and steel metal cans used for film “have not proved to be a significant successful method of preserving this information.” Some users reported to the AMPAS that the materials on the drives couldn’t be accessed after only 18 months. For example, LTO4, the current standard for tape drives in the movie business, which became available in 2007, is unable to read the contents of tapes written in the LTO1 format, the standard in 2000. “If you’re dealing with a technology where you have to make a decision about what to do with it somewhere within a four- or five-year period, you have to know you’re going to migrate it [or] get rid of it,” explains Shefter. The studios’ solution: to generate the majority of the revenue in that period before they have to make migration decisions. The academy’s report also mentions some examples of the so-called “triage on the fly” process. Broadcaster ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) for example runs a huge server farm where, after a week’s collection of broadcasts came in from professional and college sports, somebody – usually an intern – would go in and erase much of the data to make room for the next week’s broadcast content. “That’s a microcosm of what is going to happen in the industry,” says Shefter.

“We are already heading down this digital road … and there is no long-term guaranteed access to what is being created. We need to understand what the consequences are and start planning now while we still have an analog backup system available.” Shefter notes that a requirement for any preservation system is that it must meet or exceed the performance characteristic benefits of the current analog photochemical film system. According to the report, these benefits include a worldwide standard, guaranteed long-terms access (100-year minimum) with no loss in quality, the ability to create duplicate masters to fulfill future (and unknown) distribution needs and opportunities, immunity from escalating financial investment, picture and sound quality which meets or exceeds that of original camera negative and production sound recordings, and no dependence on shifting technology platforms. If these terms can’t be agreed on, the data explosion could well turn into digital movie extinction…

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Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

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“It is the cinematic image that has expressed in a particularly profound manner this new condition of the image as the inscription of a blank beyond, a closure to the senses, internal to the world and to the very activity of the senses… this beyond that is part of our world, that which makes our eye experience its own blindness as the dimension of futurity (and of an immemorial past)”
— Eyal Peretz, ‘Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses’, 2007

Brian De Palma is an angry man. His latest film, ‘Redacted’, leaves no question about that. De Palma has always been a passionate and critical filmmaker, making cinema that is in itself meta-cinema, smuggling ethical as well as structural concerns in blockbuster narrative films, making the viewer examine what happens in- as well as outside the frame (a friend actually called De Palma “the Michael Snow of Hollywood”). In most of his films he reflects in one way or another – although not always in a very subtle way – on the ambiguous power of images, the mechanics of image-making and the complicity of the viewer in the process, but in ‘Redacted’ (see also earlier post) his critical eye is not only directed to the role and impact of media, but to a world that is slowly but surely loosing its sense of humanity and thruth, a world that is no longer mediated by images, but is becoming all image. De Palma is, as Emmanuel Burdeau of Cahiers du Cinema writes, no longer solely interested in putting other images than the media’s in front of us; “it is no longer to put the truth behind the images that are hiding it; it is not the search for the right point of view, the quest for the initial shot of the film to be as thrilling as it is impossible. We are no longer in a Brian De Palma film. The task at hand is simply to offer a certain way of laying out existing visuals: horizontally, as flat and glistening as the screen these lines are written on.”

‘Redacted’ is a remake of sorts. The director refers several times, sometimes literally (the interrogation scene, the confession in the bar etc. – it’s funny to see how he’s copying parts of his own films now) to his 1989 Vietnam drama ‘Casualties of War’, which had a similar subject. But it’s also a remake of images that are available on the internet, on blogs, forums, social network sites; images that De Palma discovered while doing research and that shocked him to the bone. ‘Redacted’ is based on the true story of a teenage Iraqi girl who was raped, killed, and burned by American soldiers, told as if discovered in bits and pieces scattered about the Internet. The images are mostly recreations or reinterpretations of actually existing footage: an American soldier’s video diary (titled ‘Tell Me No Lies’), a French documentary about routine searches at checkpoints, surveillance camera footage, Iraqi television news casts, and video files on assorted web sites. Through this collage-like approach and the use of new media forms, De Palma explores the very implications of the documentary form and the tension between what we see and what we want to see – the sweet little lies we have become accostumed to.

“What fascinated me was that here was a new set of styles that provided a new way of telling a story I’d told before. I also tried to make you aware, as a viewer, that the images you’re seeing and the way they’re constructed can be presented to create any point of view. You think this is real because of the form it’s in, and of course it’s all fictionalised. So maybe you should think twice when watching a report by an embedded journalist who’s running around convincing you everything is real, authentic and spontaneous.”

De Palma shows no cynicism in using internet images and digital procedures, but rather embraces the potential of the net as a way of making visible the images that are refused by the mainstream media, a medium that is not (yet) as corrupted as television is.

“What I’m trying to do is to make the viewer aware of the techniques that are used to present supposedly the truth to them. They sit there and watch their television screens, and see these embedded reporters and infomercials from Iraq, and how well things are going in Iraq, and they think that’s the truth. In anything on television, somebody is selling something – whether it’s a product, whether it’s a policy. You look on television, this is a commercial medium and everything is for sale. Once you understand that, then you can understand the medium a little better. The web is not so corrupted because there is not that much money involved. Believe me, when the money gets in there, it will probably go the way of television. We’re living in an era where everybody is performing all the time, and posting their performances on the web. Plus there’s reality television, where you’re supposed to believe all this stuff is real, and of course it’s made up.”

The result is a provocative investigation of formal cinematographic conventions and the schizophrenic relationship between reality and fiction, while at the same time De Palma adresses his trademark themes: voyeurism, violence and the relationship between the individual, the image and history in a media environment (btw it might not come as a suprise that De Palma was slaughtered by the press and the audience in the US – f.e. Bill O’Reilly of the right-wing Fox Network called De Palma “a vile man and [‘Redacted’ a] vile film … If even one [new terrorist] enters the fight and kills an American, it’s on Brian de Palma … During World War II, President Roosevelt, the liberal icon, would have put De Palma in prison”). ‘Redacted’ is however also a contemplation on how, as cultural theorist Paul Virilio has remarked, audiovisual media have generated a new relationship with death and disaster, how the spectacle takes the place of critical distance. The space between the camera and the event, screen and viewer is so reduced that death is practically tangible. While De Palma hardly ever turns his camera away from the atrocity, at the same time he seems to propagate a critical, self-reflective distance. In ‘Redacted’ for instance there are some scenes that are staged like a amateuristic Brechtian theatre play.

“One of my favorite aspects of documentary film is how people have a natural way of turning into actors – and often very bad ones – when a camera is pointed at them. Redacted makes conscious commentary on this by breaking a pivotal scene in half, first with the characters aware of their being filmed, second with their being tricked into thinking the camera has been turned off.”

As other recent films, such as Romero’s ‘Diary of the Dead’, ‘Redacted’ is also a reflection on the implications of the all-video, all-the-time society, where reality TV is always on. As Romero said in an interview: “the world is a camera these days, and it seems to be part of the collective subconscious”. An article in Newsweek describes this culture of overexposure, talking about the “Look at Me Generation”, for whom image has replaced “essence”. As an example they quote filmmaker Errol Morris, director of ‘The Fog of War’ and ‘The Thin Blue Line’ who has just finished his new film ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ ‘SOP), about the torture scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib Prison and the shocking photographs that lead to it. In his “non-fiction horror movie”, as Morris calls it, he investigates just how the Abu Ghraib photographs came to be taken, what they revealed and how they were interpreted by the media, exploring what he calls “the irony of images”. In the film we see the dozens of photos the soldiers—most of whom were in their teens and early 20s at the time—took of the prisoners they abused, and of each other, posing and goofing around. In some of the shots with the prisoners, other soldiers’ cameras are visible as well. Their eagerness to document themselves seemed to blind them to the consequences of creating a record of their actions. The pictures not only resulted in the guards’ downfall—without the photos, there would have been almost no proof of crimes—but they may have fed their ugliest impulses. As Morris says, “I often think that if cameras had not been present, these events would not have occurred.”