NM&PD, paper 3, theory

The previously described video collages provide copious amounts of reflection and critique of the dominant voices within political discourse, but the manner and function the objects influence this discourse is still unknown. While presumed to be dissident, understanding the videos as sites of empowerment will establish their existence and meaning in opposition to the hegemonic structure of political discourse. The arrival at this understanding will require an exploration of both the attributes of the videos and their medium, as well as an exploration of the actual effect the videos have within the discourse.

Before exploring the video collages as sites of empowerment, however, a review of the objects’ attributes is in order to once again establish them as sites of potential voice. In particular, the videos’ digital, mutable, and fluid characteristics permit their use in a critical idiom, the same idiom which could be potentially be used in opposition to the hegemonic forces at play within political discourse. Since the video collages are created from found material, there needs to exist a library from which an appropriate lexicon might be derived. Such a library can only be made practical with the benefits afforded by digital technology, such as the ability to capture, replicate, transfer, and distribute content as needed, as often as possible. The internet-based media environment takes these attributes to an extreme by providing myriad opportunities to procure existing material for later repurposing in a video collage. For example, as of the 2008 presidential campaigns, it is common practice to release videos of candidates making all manner of speeches and statements online. The videos of these speeches are in a format that is easily captured by a computer, mixed with other digital objects such as music and other videos, and then distributed online once again.

But the simple availability of digital materials does not set them apart from the existing digital mediascape sufficiently to permit the creation of a new political voice. Instead, the digital materials that constitute the video collages must also be mutable. Like the imographs described by Burnett (Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, 130), the video and audio that constitute the video collages can be “transformed and networked” within editing applications to greater enhance their plasticity. It is not enough to simply juxtapose the elements of a collage with each other, but the elements must actually combine so that they might reassemble into a pastiche with more potency than the simple sequential combination of elements might have. Apropos of my earlier example, the potency of rx2008’s “Bloody Sunday” piece in which President George W. Bush sings the lyrics to the popular U2 song is inextricably tied to the fact that Bush actually sings the lyrics instead of the song simply being juxtaposed with the unadulterated content of the State of the Union Address from which the original footage originated.

And finally, the movement of the final collage is requisite for the creation of a novel voice because, without a means to distribute the object to other participants within the mediascape, the video can not be seen, heard, and understood, and can certainly not constitute a voice. In fact, the style of distribution, what one might call “sharing” in the parlance of the day, challenges traditional conceptions of speaker and voice in such ways that the voice becomes many, propagated by social websites such as YouTube and blogs, and “recommended” by many individual actors on sites like Digg.com and del.icio.us. In this way, the videos become fluid, spreading virally, being shared transmedially, and being “spoken” in multiple contexts which affect the meaning of the object just as the bedrock of a river ultimately determines the path the water’s flow assumes.

Have established the attributes of video collages that allow them to be sites of a potential voice within contemporary political discourse, our gaze must turn to the ways in which the videos are impregnated with meaning, and the ways in which that meaning might influence the discourse and its participants. Of interest to this analysis is the manner in which the videos are produced and consumed, with special regard to authorship in both of these modes. I previously described the videos as intertextual, interactive, and subversive, but absent from previous analysis is the very creative manner in which the videos come to be. Specifically, since collage, bricolage, and mash-up are at the very essence of the objects, there exists an implied collage artist, bricoleur, and DJ making informed, conscious, and meaningful choices that, once congealed together, establish the collage as a site of agency and empowerment. In other words, there exists in these objects an author and, as I propose, this author exists in multiple capacities that increase the influence of the voice afforded by the objects.

The snippets of audio and video that comprise the video collages resemble a cacophony of individual voices from multiple sources: music, political debates and speeches, television and movie clips, and many more. If just jumbled together in a video editing application, these pieces would be simply a hodgepodge of elements removed from their context and juxtaposed with each other. Yet, it is through the deliberate assembly, layering, and ordering by the collage artist that places these individual voices in dialog with each other and, eventually, amalgamates the conversation into an intertextual whole that transcends the individual voices from which it the object is constituted. Landow addresses in his analysis of authorship in a number of ways. Firstly, he describes the process of choosing pieces of a hypermediated environment particularly agentic. In a sense, the layering of different media objects, such as the replacement of audio from one video with that of another, is a authorial move in such that the collage artist is becomes responsible for the new meaning that results from the combination.

Landow goes on to describe the “collaborative” ways in which the collage artist works in opposition to the individual voices that will constitute his eventual product. “Collaboration,” he writes, “also includes a deep suspicion of working with others…which exalts the idea of individual effort to such a degree that it, like copyright law, often fails to recognize, or even suppresses, the fact that artists and writers work collaboratively with texts created by others (Landow, 137-138).” Through the collaborative assembly of other video and audio objects, then, the collage artist is enabled to create not simply a dissident, but even oppositional voice that contravenes the voice, intent, or meaning of an existing media object. Landow later writes that this oppositional collaboration underpins much of our intellectual endeavors, yet it is never fully recognized because the mediums of traditional forms of authorship obscure the intertextual dialog. (Landow, 138) Video collages as described here, however, are extremely forthright about this relationship—the very words and meanings of the original texts are reappropriated to form the new meanings of the collage.

The video collages, as products of a creative process, can therefore be interpreted as sites of subjective meaning produced by the collage artist and imbued with his or her intents and purposes. This suggests to me that the collages certainly represent a novel voice within the mediascape, but, while one voice in the darkness might only be a beacon that suggests a thin, rocky shore, the democratizing empowerment suggested by my earlier explorations is looking for evidence of a mountain silhouetted against the starry night sky. It is through the reversal of the traditional author-reader dialectic where we find the basis for this more momentous shift.

It is through the lenses of postcolonialism and the fluidity of the digital medium that the true empowerment of the video collages becomes evident. As described above, the fluidity of the digital medium allows the video collages to be shared among many viewers. Also discussed in a previous analysis was the manner in which these videos become interactive when experienced online and in varying contexts. “The video becomes a dynamic object,” I wrote, “imparted with interaction and change by the mediascape that surrounds it… [This] creates the potential for the video to be participatory, and reinterpreted depending on the context it is shared in, the manner in which it is viewed, and the changing circumstances which surround the lifecycle of the object.” (Dillon, 2-3, Paper #2) The participatory nature referred to here specifically addresses how the viewer of video collages creates his or her own meanings through the creative interpretation of the combination of media objects. Just in hypertext, where users establish their own paths through networked texts, the viewers of video collages, while being addressed by the creator’s own intents and meanings, also draw upon their own understandings and interpretations of the audio and video to create their own meanings. In a sense, the images and sounds are encoded pieces of meaning that must be decoded to understand their meaning: the viewing of a satirical piece like “I’m F*cking Obama,” by video collage artist Hugh Atkin1, draws on a plethora of sources, from the Sarah Silverman song about Matt Damon, to the media obsession with Hillary Clinton’s crying at the a campaign event. The viewer-cum-author assembles these pieces into a whole for their own, independent of the meanings intended by Atkin.

Further, Landow describes hypermedia, like video collage, as a rich site of postcolonial criticism. By allowing alternative voices to spread on a mass scale and by allowing these voices to be interpreted on a subjective basis by a multiplicity of authors, he might say, the hegemonic forces of the contemporary political discourse are allowing “the empire to write back” to the emperors. (Landow, 345) This speaks to the ability of digital media to expand vastly beyond the confines established for its engagement with the discourse. Again, the fluidness of the media and the subjective authorship permitted by the assembly of voices has allowed the novel voice created by video collage to splash all over and around the hegemonic dialogs endemic to political discourse.

Video collages are, then, voices that reflect a new empowerment that affords a new kind and class of participation within political discourse. This certainty allows further analysis to question the quality and actual effect that this participation has within and on the discourse as a whole.

~ by Gabriel on June 30, 2008.