YouTube is killing your fair use videos. Their automated filtering system, Content I.D., makes it incredibly easy for a copyright owner to immediately disable any video that contains their copyrighted content. Whether or not your use of their content is covered under fair use (or in Canada, fair dealing) provisions doesn’t matter. The software does not discriminate between legitimate content and videos that actually violate copyright law.
Now this isn’t a new phenomenon — media companies have been using Content I.D. to take down YouTube videos for quite some time. What has brought it into the public spotlight, however, is that Hitler parodies are disappearing from YouTube at an alarming rate.
I came across a fascinating art project taking place in Windsor, Ontario called the Broken City Lab, an artist collective’s response to the economically and socially plundered remains of yet another post-industrial North American city.
Broken City Lab describes what they do as a mix of social practice, performance, and activism. From the website: “The lab attempts to generate a new dialogue surrounding public participation and community engagement in the creative process, with a focus on the city as both a research site and workspace”. Their goal? To find new and creative solutions to Windsor’s economic and social miasma now that the industrial party has moved on.
Their projects are often technology based, which they use to bring in wider communities of participation. For example, the Talking to Walls intervention projected short fill-in-the-blank questionnaires and statements into public spaces that addressed issues of public and private concern — statements like:
Tear down all the _________ but leave up all the ____________.
Originally published in
POV Magazine (Spring, 2010)
Einstein on the screen
Recently, Disney, the largest children’s entertainment firm in the world, offered rebates on its hugely popular educational DVD set Baby Einstein. While the company refused to acknowledge the link, many point to the ongoing lobbying efforts by the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood as the reason behind the company’s capitulation. Apparently, research shows that little Abdul or Suzy can’t learn much at all from screen media, that is, if they’re under two years old.
Disney had marketed Baby Einstein to eager parents and created the impression that toddlers could indeed benefit cognitively from screen media, maybe even picking up a little physics along the way. But the information proving the contrary was all in the documentary Consuming Kids by the Media Education Foundation, an organization of academics and media makers based in Northampton, MA who produce educational documentaries on topics ranging from homophobia in hip hop culture to corporate greenwashing. Their documentary had warned of such marketing ploys.
This begs the question: if babies can’t learn from screen media, can the rest of us learn from documentaries?
For the last three years I’ve been working on a book about a daring documentary initiative that took place four decades ago at the National Film Board of Canada. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, co-edited by Thomas Waugh, Mike Baker and myself and introduced by Naomi Klein, is a 600-page collection of articles and essays about the Challenge for Change program, which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced over 200 documentaries in English and French (the French sister project was Société nouvelle).
Challenge for Change (CFC) became famous around the world for not only using documentary to tackle social problems but because it was a government-funded project that produced films highly critical of the government. From First Nations problems to housing, CFC documentaries didn’t hold back in their critical analysis of the things the Canadian government was doing wrong. In an era when Alberta’s Ministry of Culture attempts to censor would-be films critical of the tar sands and anti-Olympics signage in Vancouver were prohibited, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary version of the Challenge for Change project.
The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games have come to an end. Canada won more gold medals than any country ever in the history of the Winter Games. And yesterday, Canada took gold in men’s hockey in an electrifying game against the USA. A fitting end it seems to a two-week barn-burner of patriotism and national pride.
But the celebration has its darker side, one that few Olympic enthusiasts know about, or perhaps care to know about. For starters, in 2002 Vancouver residents voted in favour of a $3 billion Olympics that have subsequently mushroomed into a $7-8 billion bacchanalia of subsidies and debt. These “unexpected” costs have put unprecedented pressure on the provincial spending. Over the next two years, provincial funding for the arts will be cut by a staggering 88% – a devastating blow to cultural groups in British Columbia. School closures throughout the Lower Mainland reflect more of the pressure that has been brought to bare on provincial budgets. Add to these the ongoing crisis in homelessness and poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side and the ways that Olympic enforcement ran roughshod over Constitutional rights of expression and assembly, and you have substantive fodder for a critical conversation about the Olympic Games.
Tadamon, a Montreal-based collective that works in solidarity with struggles for self-determination, equality and justice in the Middle East, has spearheaded a call from Montreal artists to support the international campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israeli apartheid. The following is an open letter they released on February 25.
Today, a broad spectrum of Montreal artists are standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and supporting the growing international campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state. Last winter, the Israeli state launched a violent military assault on the Palestinian people of the Gaza Strip, leaving over 1400 Palestinians dead, including over 300 children. Despite the official end of military operations, the blockade continues to this day, with devastating consequences for Gaza’s residents.
If anything is making its slow way out of the Downtown East Side (DTES) and into mainstream Olympic news flows, it is the issue of homelessness. The Red Tent Campaign, the Tent City Squat on a VANOC parking lot, the homeless banner strung from the Cambie Bridge (for a VANOC sanctioned 20 minutes, and time immemorial photo-op), Saturday’s national housing rally …
This was the topic of conversation at last Sunday’s Safe Assembly Newscast at the VIVO studios. Safe Assembly is a gesture to protect the critical conversation about the Olympic games. Hosted by VIVO, a media arts collective who chose not to participate in the Cultural Olympiad, the Newscasts are opportunities for those critical of the Olympics to come together and reflect on the events of protest and dissent taking place in Vancouver.
What follows is a brief summary of the gathering — topics of discussion included the housing protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery last Saturday, update from the Tent City squat, a look at the growing phenomena of Olympic fans protesting against protesters, and the potential effects of university students as shock troops of gentrification in the DTES.
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