http://bfpa.dreamhosters.com/nma2050/emong

Plz plz plz !!! Listen till the end lolllllllllllllll

RIP: A Remix Manifesto is a documentary that talks about a very popular music artist known as Girl Talk.  Girl Talk consists of one man named Gregg Gillis and he takes parts from different songs (usually popular ones) and creates new music of his own. It’s known as a mash-up artist, and according to the documentary, mash-up artists have stirred up quite a controversy with both the copyright company and the other artists they take their material from.

I’m more interested in the copyright problem mentioned in this film. Copyright problems began once the craze of a new search engine called the Internet was created.  It was easy for people to steal music, movies and images from the internet and use them to create their own mash-up piece.  Before the internet started, copyright actually encouraged people to be creative.  It wasn’t until websites like Napster began that musicians and other artists began suing and copyright had to make their laws stricter.  One thing I didn’t know about copyright was that they are now going as far as making it so you can’t copy a CD onto your computer.  So with artists like Girl Talk and the earlier artists similar to Girl Talk, known as Negative Land, they won’t be able to take pieces of music anymore, even if they go out and by the CD themselves first.

In this documentary, audiences’ attention is expressly brought to four main principles:

• Culture always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the future.
• Our future is becoming less free.
• To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.

Towards all these four above, actually, I agree with point 1&4 more. Culture always builds on the past. Whether it was composer/piano virtuoso Franz Liszt using Gypsy melodies in his compositions, Metallica borrowing song structures from Diamond Head or The Rolling Stones recording Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” as a “traditional, arranged by Keith Richards,” composers have always used previous works as inspiration for their own pieces. Also, to build free societies, we must limit the control of the past. There is the powerful example in 2001 which Brazil was forced to invoke their controversial Article 71 – that allows the government to authorize a local company to make a generic copy of a patented drug without the permission of the patent holder – in order to make anti-AIDS drugs available to its citizens, and at a lower rate. Hence, I agree what Gaylor says “Remixing the art, science and knowledge of the world’s culture is second nature to Brazilians and now it’s government policy.” But I don’t really think our future is becoming less free. And even the past somehow tries to control the future, it won’t be that easy to do so.

Overall, whether I agree or disagree with RiP: A Remix Manifesto, it does raise disturbing questions about the ownership of intellectual property versus the free exchange of ideas. It’s continually engaging, delivering its message with quick cuts and a dry wit. As the Information Age becomes less a media construct and more a reality, the notion of who owns what and why becomes an issue that everyone in the world must face. That’s why this film needs to be seen, in order to ferment discussion over how ideas should be exchanged in the Internet Age.

Here’s the link of my little Haiku~

http://bfpa.dreamhosters.com/nma2050/emong

In The Art of Noise, Russolo called for a new musical reality that introduced everyday noises of the modern world—natural and mechanical—into musical composition. He argued that the human ear had become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial sounds cape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. Hence, he created a sensibility towards a new sonic universe and an idea of noises as music, which resonated beyond the calamity of the great wars.

Russolo stated the human ear had adapted to a new landscape of sounds associated with an industrialized world. He put forth a conception in his manifesto of a former world veiled in silence as opposed to a modern world where musical sounds could be dissonant or atonal as in some contemporary music, but also the actual sounds of machines. This new music was to be more an imitation of the world than a traditional music composed of harmony and beauty as in the Kantian notion of the sublime.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/electronic_panorama.html

The one I pick is Ivo Malec’s Spot. According to Russolo’s breaking the timbres of an orchestra down into four basic categories: bowed instruments, metal winds, wood winds, and percussion, I can tell there are some use of those categories in Malec’s music such as the sounds of water and wind. They help a lot in creating a scene and foiling atmosphere when audiences are listening to. For me, I could imagine I was in a forest or somewhere around an old castle (maybe with vampires inside LOL). I could get the mystique just because of the sound. In my opinion, music should break out of limited circle of sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. And I truly believe technology can allow us to manipulate noises in ways that cannot have been done with earlier instruments.

In Wark’s article, there’re two points interests me – 1) whom he defines as the hack; 2) the emergent conflict between hackers and corporations.

Firstly, it’s a question of realizing that all intellectual creators are hackers. It is about realizing a common interest that has nothing to do with choices of identity, culture, or taste. Everything is a code for the hacker to hack, be it “programming, language, poetic language, math, or music, curves or colourings” and once hacked, they create the possibility for new things to enter the world. What they create is not necessarily “great”, or “even good”, but new, in the areas of culture, art, science, and philosophy or “in any production of knowledge where data can be extracted from it.”

Secondly, what hackers have in common is that they have to sell the products of their intellectual labor to corporations who have a monopoly on realizing its value. Hackers invent the idea, but corporations control the means of production. The laws that used to protect hackers — copyright and patent — have been subtly changing over the course of the last few decades to protect corporate owners of existing “intellectual property,” not individual creators of new ideas. I think the vectoralist class (as Wark calls) controls the means of realizing the value of what hackers create. They control the vectors along which new information moves. New information could be in the form of a digital file or a little pink pill. The form doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the class interest of the vectoralists lies in making ideas a form of exclusive, perpetual, and global private property.

Wark insists everyone who actually creates “intellectual property” could consider themselves part of the hacker class — and as having convergent interests. He argues that new information comes from the hack. It doesn’t matter if you are a writer, an engineer, a philosopher, a teacher, a musician, a physicist, if you essentially produce new information – it’s a hack. Honestly, I used to think hackers as a class of people who are really good at computer or internet system like programmers. However, I think Wark’s opinion is understandable and reasonable after reading his article. Therefore, I agree that hackers are creators who produce new concepts, perceptions, and sensations out of the stuff of raw data. In one word, I think we can all be called “hackers” as long as we bring new ideas into the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTGD29gEuKs&feature=youtu.be

“Each page in the flip-book corresponds to an individual piece of artwork that, along with all the other drawings, makes up a movie when its filmed by an animation camera.”

As we all know, a flip book is a collection of combined pictures intended to be flipped over to give the illusion of movement and create an animated sequence from a simple small book without machine. Flip books are often illustrated books for children, but may also be geared towards adults and employ a series of photographs rather than drawings.

Flip books are not always separate books, but may appear as an added feature in ordinary books or magazines, often in the page corners. From a few pages to more than a hundred, in order to flip them over easily and give the right place to the shown sequence, about 30 pages is ideal. Some books also use the technique to create animation by setting a series of pictures on the outer margin of pages or by using the flip book to support a demonstration, especially regarding sport.

Flip books are essentially a primitive form of animation. Like motion pictures, they rely on persistence of vision to create the illusion that continuous motion is being seen rather than a series of discontinuous images being exchanged in succession. Rather than “reading” left to right, a viewer simply stares at the same location of the pictures in the flip book as the pages turn. The book must also be flipped with enough speed for the illusion to work, so the standard way to “read” a flip book is to hold the book with one hand and flip through its pages with the thumb of the other hand.

The magic of flip book touches everybody, no matter the age or nationality. As you do not need peculiar knowledge to use it, it has a universal characteristic. Those who enter the world of flip books are more often interested in the funny aspect rather than the content itself.