Category: Flog

This week I failed by locking myself into an idea for the remix project. I was really excited about the prospect of using the Booker 25 hour speech on the Senate Floor and I thought I could make a good comentary with it. However, as I began working on it I realized it was becoming more reminiscent of a tiktok edit of a politician than a remix in the way I wanted. Part of the problem is I realized I hadn’t fully formulated my idea, but more just saw the Booker video as enough to base my project.

This wasn’t ideal because I ended up spending a lot of time working on this video to only realize that it wasn’t formulating into an effective project. This was frustrating because I felt like I wasted my time. However, in my independent study I did a reading about the I’m not being biased bias, where stuborness can lead to one not be willing to change their idea. I embraced this idea to evaluate what I was doing with my project, and realized it would be best to just change to a new direction.

Something challenging about this project is that the time for it is 3-5 minutes. Alot of my ideas I realize could not go along for that amount of time, which has been challenging. As I have continued working on the project, I keep reminding myself to think about the timing and making sure the point can extend into 3-5 min.

This week was definitely challenging for me in terms of skill. I’m getting used to a new medium, and while I have a lot of ambitions when it comes to audio-visual manipulation, it’s taking me some time to really understand the remixing process. It’s not necessarily coming quickly, but it is definitely coming along.

Once I decided on my narrative, though, I had a lot of fun finding clips. A large reason I chose my particular topic — Trisha Paytas — is because of how much internet content I can derive from it. Trisha has a notorious digital footprint, and I wanted to play into that by rearranging her different eras to form a new story.

While I have a pretty clear idea of what clips and media I want to use, I am constantly tempted to keep digging through her and third-party content to find more “treasure.” It’s easy to get lost in the hunt.

In terms of technical skill, I’ve been playing around in DaVinci Resolve. It’s definitely a learning curve, but I’m getting more comfortable. Even though it’s slow, it’s exciting to see the pieces starting to come together.

LF

Brainstorming for Hack 4 was the central task for me this week. I am still finalizing my idea and juggling various types of sources to fit into a particular medium of remix. I am most comfortable with digital art, so that seems the ideal medium, but video editing opens up a new direction for my idea that I’m still considering. Also, my work will mainly incorporate sources in other languages, like Arabic, so I also have to figure out how to make the remix engaging to the class while remaining authentic for a different audience that I intend it for (populations of Muslim countries).

Other than the hack, I have been exploring more of the activities from Tuesday’s class, specifically the AO3 and similar archives. I find that they make a strong argument about content moderation that challenges several social attitudes, at least at Davidson and in the US, towards non-heteronormative sexual practices, ageism, and the concept of “perversion”. This activity inspired much of the direction I am taking with Hack 4.

This week wasn’t filled with too many failures until Thursday (yesterday’s class period). During class, we had a workshop day in which we began our remixes that are due on Tuesday. I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do and which rules to break, so I was feeling quite prepared (remixing three songs together). When I started remixing the songs I chose (using Logic Pro and a feature that lets you split the stems of the song, isolate vocals, drums, etc.), I ran into some issues with tempo, key, and bleeding audio. As I began to combine the different songs together, I noticed that there were slight variations in tempo, causing the audio to become unaligned and unlistenable. There were also some weird frequencies throughout the isolated vocal tracks which made the overall song sound super strange. I didn’t have enough time to correct these failures in class yesterday, but this morning (just a few hours ago) I decided to switch songs. This change drastically improved my remix and I am super proud of how it turned out and I am looking forward to sharing it with the class. One upcoming failure, however, is that it is my birthday on Sunday and I know I’m gonna have to grind out this artist statement then

**Side note – I was scrolling through the flog page on the class website and for some reason my Flog 9 is empty there? Even though I have stuff written on that on my WordPress site?

Anyway in this week’s flog I will be talking about Hack #4 and my failed ideas so far. I was initially thinking of doing something similar to class last week where we talked about the Obama remix controversy. I then realized that I wouldn’t be able to add depth to this project because it feels more two dimensional. After steering away from this idea and images, I was thinking of something more video related such as remixing existing music videos, movies, or commercials. Three ideas stand out to me:

1. Remixing music videos of songs that sound similar (inspiration from Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know and Doechii’s Anxiety)
2. Beauty advertising commercials (inspiration from my senior comm studies thesis on beauty brand advertising and diversity and inclusion efforts)
3. Creating something absolutely meaningless (what would I make? I have no idea)

I’m still working through these ideas to see what would best fit the “rules” of the remix and which rules to break. I was thinking of breaking rule #3 about having the remix have some sort of meaning, and instead create something absolutely meaningless. Then I realized, that in itself is creating meaning and is critiquing something. I feel like that could also be something I focus on as well, that juxtaposition of creating something so meaningless that it creates meaning. TBD on what I decide for my project but I guess y’all will see on Tuesday!

This week I did not encounter many failures that pertain to this course (personally, that’s another story), though I have had some challenges brainstorming my fourth hack. Our class discussion on Tuesday inspired several possible ideas:

• Remixing movie genres in a new trailer
  1. Ideas that show promise:
     • Rick and Morty as tragedy
     • Black Mirror as propaganda ads
     • Hannah Montana as a prisoner of her identity
     • Murder Mystery at F
  2. Ideas I’ve ruled out:
     1. Challengers as a duel to the death
     2. Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a local murderer

One concept I’ve had more creative success with is a video remix showing a celebrity’s descent into “madness”—I’ll elaborate more on this as my project develops.

My main concern isn’t the artistic vision behind my project but rather the technical skills required. While I consider myself fairly tech-savvy, I have limited experience with audio/visual editing. However, with sufficient time and effort, I’m confident I can make it work.

Another concept I’ve been wrestling with this week emerged from Kuhn’s “The Rhetoric of Remix,” specifically her references to Berger’s Ways of Seeing. This text has been particularly significant to me in the last year, as I drew from Berger in considering new “ways of seeing” in the age of AI. I found this contextualization of how new media and images affect our perception of the world, and how we can express such changes through the media itself, extremely impactful. In the context of remixing, this means taking “art of the past into a language of images” (Berger) alongside modern audio/visual capabilities.

LF

Well . . . here I am again doing my Flog on a Sunday night. I, like a lot of my fellow classmates it seems, can not remember to post by Flog by Friday Night. I think it is because Friday night is typically the one night of the week when I do not do any homework, so it gets overlooked. This week, I am going to treat it as homework to do before class on Thursday, and then I will update it after class (hopefully) so that it gets done on time. This is a MAJOR MAJOR fail as it is not like me at all to simply forget to do something or not do it on time. This week, I will do better.

Last week was really interesting to me. I loved the discussion on Tuesday that we had as a class surrounding the Obama remix image. I felt like I could have talked about it all day. I have gone back and forth a couple of times after class about my feelings surrounding that image. It seems that when I put my shoes in the photographer’s position, it changes how I feel. This form of copyright seems so subjective to me, which I find interesting because I never really thought about this as such an opinion-centered discussion. I also loved the reading for Thursday and our discussion of the Commons. I always find it fascinating when there are ideas or places that society just treats a certain way, and it is implied that everyone will follow them. It is a really interesting view of social norms, and I had never thought about it in terms of the Internet before.

I am getting excited for Hack #4 and hope the readings and class — because I will not be here on Thursday — will be super insightful and helpful for starting that process. I have found that there is normally one thing said or mentioned in class/readings that immediately sparks my brain and gives me my initial idea.

This week we talked about digital commons, a concept that is very new to me. I could not understand the meaning of the word “commons” at first, just as I could not understand why the cafeteria was called “commons” when I was a freshman, which may have something to do with my lack of understanding of the context of English. For this concept, I think of the Facebook Marketplace, but Dr. Sample says it’s more of a trading platform. So I realized that digital commons should be something more based on helping each other. Then I was thinking about our next Hack. The issue of creativity remains the main concern. I do have some good ideas, but they are not necessarily effective in expressing a socially meaningful topic. Also, a rule has to be broken, but must have a good justification? What should I do? I need a very strong reason to convince Dr. Sample. I kind of want to adapt something based on something I’ve done in one of my previous classes, but I haven’t decided how much to adapt and in what direction.

Similar to last week, the concept I struggled the most with was deciding what is original and what is not. For example, the iconic poster of Barack Obama that went viral during his first campaign. Shepard Fairey created a poster of Obama during his first campaign that read, “HOPE,” across the bottom of it. This poster was a photo of Obama with a ton of different shades of red, white, and blue making up the shading of his face and the background. After this poster came out, it was established that this photo in this poster was based on a photo taken by an AP freelance photographer, Mannie Garcia. Garcia received no credit whatsoever for this poster that went extremely viral during Obama’s campaign. This then brought up a huge debate about whether or not Garcia should have received some form of credit and been able to reap some benefits from the photo she had taken. Personally, I think she should receive a great deal of credit. Majority of my classmates in class agreed with my thought process on the whole deal. One of my classmates brought up a great point that sort of put the nail in the coffin for me in believing that Garcia should receive almost all the credit. My classmate pointed out that in the original photo, all of the shading is the same, just in black and white. This made us realize that it almost looked as if a filter was put over the original photo and that was it. To me, this made it seem like Garcia practically did all the work in designing that poster, but gained nothing from it.

Another concept that I sort of struggled with was deciphering what was a digital commons and what was not. At first, I thought that just any open, digital forum was a considered to be a digital commons, but this is not the case. For example, I thought sites such as eBay and Etsy were forms of a digital commons, but they are not. I was informed that was are more so just considered digital marketplaces. They do not fit the free and openness categories of a digital commons as people are often competing again one another to either buy or sell particular items. Oftentimes in digital commons, users help each other out and support one another with even asking.

For me, the hardest thing about this week was deciding what is considered to be creative and original versus what is considered to be uncreative writing. Similarly, we were trying to tackle the debate of if “uncreative writing” is considered to taking an influence from something and what is stealing and copyright. To look at specific examples of this, we looked at textual mashups through Markov chains. This tool that we were using in class allows us to be able to put in various texts, and it combines them into a shorter length (chosen by the user), to then get a completely new text that uses a random combination of text you selected. For example, Dr. Sample put in a bunch of random Taylor Swift lyrics, and it essentially created a whole new song with already existing Taylor Swift lyrics. Half of the time, the text generated make no sense as they are a random combination of phrases, but I still consider this to not be creative writing as the user is not producing any new writings.

Another specific example of this debate that we looked at was some music copyright cases. Some of my classmates and I looked into Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” versus Spirit’s “Taurus.” Spirit filed a copyright dispute claiming that Led Zeppelin stole the opening guitar riff from their song “Taurus.” Eventually, Led Zeppelin won the dispute and the court ruled that the riff was not stolen. Personally, I think the right decision was made as it was only one small portion of the song that was inspired by another small portion of Spirit’s song. I do think that when this happens in music though, the artist taking inspiration must contact the other artist and see how they feel about it. I can definitely see both sides and am sort of split on how I feel. This is definitely a debate that will continue to go on for a long time. The more music that is made, the more difficult it will be to come up with completely original melodies and rhythms.

This week wasn’t particularly eventful, as we mainly had readings to complete. Overall, I’ve been feeling very tired and haven’t been sleeping well, which has definitely affected my energy levels. That said, I do feel like I’m improving when it comes to the readings — I’m understanding the material better, and I think that’s starting to show in my class participation. I’ve been more engaged in small group discussions and feel more confident contributing to conversations overall, which is a small win I’m proud of.

One thing that’s been on my mind is that I still don’t have a clear idea for Hack #4. To be honest, I haven’t taken the time to sit down and really think it through yet. My goal is to come up with something solid before the weekend ends, especially since this upcoming week is packed with tests. I’m definitely not looking forward to it — it’s going to be a tough one!

I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do for my hack. I had the idea that it would be interesting to remix songs and videos as some kind of commentary either on American politics or big corporations/monopolies. I feel like there are lots of existing songs that critique similar topics, or I could alternatively try to find songs that are in contrast with the video clips I’m using. I have a bit of experience with After Effects and Audacity so I plan on using those tools for my remix as of right now. 

I also toyed with the idea of using ai in some form of commentary on pollution and global warming, though I’m not sure if that will really work for this project since a person didn’t create what I would be remixing. If I primarily used ai I would also have to break the three distinct time periods rule, unless I managed to find ai programs from different eras (which is possible, it would just limit what sort of material I’d be working with for some portions). 

Overall I’m not really decided on what I’m going to do, so I’ll probably do some sort of test to see how well I can actually remix songs. I only have a little bit of experience with music, so if it doesn’t work out I’ll still have time to switch to an idea that’s less audio intensive.